“I do not wish to be pulled by the heels.”
The priest deftly draws the cap over the gleaming, shrivelled face, and mumbles from his book. No clanging bell disturbs the peace of the sufferer, for he is a murderer, and this blessed torture is not for those of his class. The bareheaded crowd gazes with rapture upon the wooden scaffold, shorn of its appalling garb of black—another mercy vouchsafed to him who dies guilty of a brother’s blood. Suddenly there is a second mighty shout of triumph. The rope hangs plump between the two posts, and the tall, gaunt form is swaying in empty air. In another moment there are cries of horror, but of horror mingled with applause. The noose has formed an even collar around the giant’s neck, while the knot has slipped to the back of his head, which is still upright and unbent. Horrible convulsions seize the huge, struggling frame. It is a terrific scene—most glorious spectacle of suffering that a delighted crowd has ever gazed upon—Jack Ketch has bungled! Minutes pass, and still the hanging man battles fiercely for breath. Minutes pass, and not a hand is stretched forth to give him relief. Sheriff’s eyes meet eyes of Ordinary in mutual horror. Sheriff’s watch is dragged from its fob, and when the little steel hands have stretched to a right angle, at last a hasty signal is made to the expectant hangman. Two butchers beneath the scaffold seize upon the sufferer’s legs, and soon his agony of more than a fourth of an hour is brought to a close. A fierce shock, indeed, to reason and the balance of justice argument—a fiercer shock still to those that cling lovingly to the tenets of Hebrew mythology.
With a sigh of relief Sheriff and Ordinary hurry away to coffee and grilled kidneys in Mr Kirby’s breakfast-room, leaving the crowd to watch the victim hanging—which crowd does with gusto, scrambling fiercely a little later for a bit of the rope, which Rosy Emma, worthy helpmate of Jack Ketch, retails at twelvepence an inch, and, furthermore, gloating with delight upon the cart that presently takes the wasted form of the dead giant to the saws and cleavers of Surgeons’ Hall dissecting-room, Saffron Hill. Tight hands at a bargain, these bloodletting, clyster-loving old leeches! They demand fifty, some say a hundred, guineas from the giant’s friends, and they pocket the ransom before they surrender their corpse. Devoted old leeches: sic vos non vobis—we are the learned legatees of your dabblings in anatomy. A few days later—it is a Thursday morning, numbered the 4th of February in the calendar—a few merciful friends bear the giant’s coffin to a resting-place in St Pancras Churchyard. Epitaph does not appear, for cant refuses to superscribe the true one—“England did not expect him to do his duty!”
As we look back upon the glowing perspective of our history, there are few scenes that stand out in fiercer grandeur than the flogging of Goree. Foul-smelling, Lilliputian picture, it shines, nevertheless, with the same unconquerable spirit of genius that clapped a telescope to the blind eye at Copenhagen. One untamable hero, armed merely with a crimson rope, faces a hundred cut-throats, and, within view of the ramparts of the enemy, cows them into licking his shoes, declaring that an insult to himself is an insult to his King. Truly a David and Goliath picture.
“Wrong,” cry Farmer George and Doctor Henry, glancing timidly, as with mystical prescience, down the vista of ages to Board School days, and quaking at swish of cat and clank of triangles, guilty of as deep anachronism as he who hurled a shell at the tomb of the Mahdi, to the great disturbance of bread-and-milk nerves. For birch twigs and cat—essential forerunners of Standards Six—had much Peninsular and Waterloo work in front of them, and it was just as easy to chain red giants as to hang them.
“Wrong,” cry Farmer Merciful and Doctor Justice, busy with knife and steel, getting ready a keen edge for the grey, gallant head of poor crazy Despard, and eager to paste the town with balance of justice placards—“‘Téméraire’ insubordinates, and red giant of Goree—both hanged. Let foreign nations please copy.” And, doubtless, a burst of inordinate Gallic laughter hailed this jeu d’esprit, for Gallic neighbours had other things for the encouragement of red giants—a field-marshal’s baton and the like.
There is no place for the musings of modern milksop. The deeds of the parents of his grandfather are for him merely a tale that is told, and as he closes the family record his bread-and-milk soul must only give thanks that his lot is cast in more pleasant places. Modern eye can but discern the red giants of a bygone world through a glass darkly. Cruel, crimson, unscrupulous—they were all that: children of murkiness even as we are children of light, and thus let comparison end. One hundred years—as great a barrier as a million miles of ether—has divided our ages, et nos mutamur. A thousand pencils—Saxon and Caledonian—have banished with Dunciad scorn the birchen wand that used to betwig merrily the tender fifteen-year-old flesh of ribald lad and saucy maiden. Triangle and cat, rope’s-end and grating, ceased years ago to terrify the hearts of rolling Jack and swaggering Tommy. Good Mr Fairchild no longer takes little Harry and little Emily to view the carrion of the gibbet, exempli gratiâ, for the modern Mr Fairchild does not remember that such instruments ever had their proper places in the land. Red giants, too—only to be let loose when occasion required—had their proper places in the good old times of birch-rod and gibbet, of Farmer George and Doctor Henry, who found much use for them in the taming of the Corsican ogre. Modern milksop, however, will scarcely concede that such times were good, or, at least, most wrong when inconsistent! Be that as it may, the cat and rope’s-end of the crimson giant were a portion of Britain’s bulwarks, in spite of inconsistent headshakings of Farmer George and Doctor Henry, of Brother Bragge and Brother Hiley—all of which, fortunately, is as repulsive to the soul of modern milksop as the dice and women of Charles Fox, or the two-bottle thirst of the Pilot who weathered the Storm. Lucky, perhaps, for bread-and-milk gentleman that he had fathers before him.
No other case bears the same resemblance to that of Joseph Wall as the incident of Kenneth Mackenzie and his cannon-ball execution. Some, indeed, have a certain affinity, and exhibit the national conscience overwhelmed by periodical fits of morality—a hysterical turning-over of new leaves. A few days before the red giant of Goree passed through the debtor’s door, Sir Edward Hamilton of the ‘Trent’ frigate was dismissed from the navy for an act of cruel tyranny, only to be reinstated in a few months. Thomas Picton, England’s “bravest of the brave,” was shaken by the same wave of humanity. Yet, after all, the guilt of the Admiral or the innocence of the hero of Waterloo were of little moment to a nation that continued to mutilate its enemies in the fashion of a dervish of the desert, under the sacred name of high treason. For, years later, the bloody heads of Brandreth and Thistlewood stained an English scaffold. Luckily for their oppressors, the victims of Hamilton and Picton—officers who did not stand in the desperate position of the Governor of Goree—survived their punishments, not having a leech-Ferrick to reckon with, else Farmer George and Doctor Henry, in the face of those dangling ‘Téméraire’ seamen, would have been in an awkward dilemma.
The case of George Robert Fitzgerald, often held forth as a parallel by contemporary pressmen, has little similarity to that of Wall. Both belonged to the 69th Foot, they were antagonists in a Galway duel in ’69, and both ended their days on the scaffold; but here comparison ends. The retribution that overtook ‘Fighting Fitzgerald’ at Castlebar was the fitting penalty of a vendetta murder, brutal and premeditated, and wrought without a semblance of authority.
Fifty years before the death of Joseph Wall, the London mob was able to indulge its fury in like fashion against another black-beast of its own choosing, one James Lowry, skipper of the merchant ship ‘Molly’ compared to whom the Governor of Goree appears to have been a mild and merciful commander. At different times, three sailors expired beneath the terrible floggings of Captain Lowry, who was wont to salute his dying victim with the cry, “He is only shamming Abraham.” And as the cruel seaman was carried in the cart to Execution Dock, the furious mob howled forth this ghastly catchword, just as they saluted Wall with the echo of the phrase which they supposed he had uttered while Benjamim Armstrong was being flogged to death, “Cut him to the heart—cut him to the liver.”