Scaffolding had been put up for the hanging, and an amphitheatre was formed around the gallows. It was known that a fashionable throng would assemble, and therefore everything was done to make them happy and comfortable, and to give them an opportunity of thoroughly enjoying the show. On these benches the wealthier spectators stood, row above row. When expectation was at its height, it was announced that the hanging was deferred. Rough words passed, and rougher actions followed. The mob broke up in bad humour, and not without many fights and broken noses between those who had given money for their places, and those who refused to return it.
“The cause of this severe disappointment was a resolution passed in the Commons ... that a Committee should be sent to the Tower to examine the prisoners, holding out the hope that if they gave full and frank confession the House would intercede for them.
“Friend and Parkyns were again interrogated, but to no purpose. They had, after sentence had been passed on them, shown instances of weakness, and Parkyns’ daughter exhorted him not to give way.
“In a few hours the crowd again assembled at Tyburn; and this time the sightseers were not defrauded of their amusement. They saw, indeed, one sight which they had not expected, and which produced a greater sensation than the execution itself. Jeremy Collier and two other non-juring divines of less celebrity, named Cook and Snatt, had attended the prisoners in Newgate, and were with them in the cart under the gallows. When the prayers were said, and just before the hangman did his office, the three schismatical priests stood up and laid their hands on the heads of the dying men, who continued to kneel. Collier pronounced a form of absolution taken from the Service for the Visitation of the Sick, and his brethren exclaimed “Amen!” Collier was outlawed for this action, and his two colleagues suffered imprisonment.”
So in the closing years of the seventeenth century the love of witnessing a gruesome spectacle was more rife than ever, and a public hanging still formed quite a fashionable entertainment; in fact, it became more and more so, until in Horace Walpole’s time it was the smart thing to visit the prisoners in Newgate and to be present at executions.
Newgate, which ultimately replaced Tyburn, and within whose walls the last hanging in the actual City of London took place, was only demolished in 1904. I well remember, not long before that, going over this gruesome and historical old pile. Many of the cells were just as they had been for centuries, but the most terrible of all were the dungeons. Our modern coal cellars are far preferable, for at least their walls are whitewashed and they are drained to frustrate the damp. These terrible dungeons at Newgate, with slanting floors, slanting walls, and slanting roofs, and almost without light and ventilation, had contained dozens of human beings, who were literally herded together, to live or die as chance might ordain. Plague and pestilence swept through those loathsome dens, and after seeing them on the eve of their destruction, one realised how easy it was to start the great plague of London from them alone.
The prisoners in Newgate in the eighteenth century were allowed to spend the money given them as they liked; and they often rigged themselves out in the height of fashion, in which practice their distinguished visitors encouraged them.
On the Sunday before their execution, the victims were permitted to receive visits from all their friends, who brought special gifts for the journey to Tyburn: a white cap with black ribbons, a prayer-book, a nosegay; and always an orange to hold in the hand as they sat on their own coffin, trundling along in the cart to the scaffold.