At nine o’clock in the morning of September 8th, the first private execution in London took place in the interior of Newgate Prison. The culprit was Alexander Arthur Mackay, a youth of only eighteen years of age, who, on the 8th of May last murdered a woman Emma Grossmith in whose service he was, at 11, Artillery-passage, Norton Folgate. It now only remains to tell how he expiated his crime upon the scaffold in the presence not of a roaring, surging mob, but in the solitude of a prison, and before a few persons, whose number did not much exceed a score.
Inside the gaol the scene was solemn to the last degree. The representatives of the morning newspapers whose duty it was to witness the execution were admitted to Newgate at half-past eight, and after traversing several gloomy corridors found themselves in an inclosed yard near the prison chapel, in front of the scaffold. A few words will enable the reader to picture for himself the scene.
The yard is a square one, entered by a wicket gate at the south-east corner, and in the corner to the north-west stands the scaffold. In the south-west corner, near the grating through which prisoners undergoing punishment hold converse with their friends at periods arranged for by the prison rules, is a space railed off for the representatives of the press, and standing at invervals of a few yards apart are men of the City police, occupying the remainder of the yard. Behind the scaffold the prison buildings rear their massive walls, and from the roof peers down upon the solemn scene below a stolid warder stationed there in order that, so soon as the ghastly business is at an end, he may signal the man in whose hands are the ropes to hoist the black flag, as a witness to the outside world that justice is satisfied; on the opposite side of the yard are other prison buildings with grated windows, but no outward sign of the life within, while flanking the yard north and south are walls—the one is topped by a terrible cheveaux de frise, and over the other hangs suspended a large cloth, the sound of whose rustling as shaken by the wind—it beat against the prison wall,—was as the flapping wing of a huge bird of prey. The silent expectation of the twenty minutes spent in that dreadful yard was the most painful experience of the present writer’s life. Absence of sound when a man is alone in the heart of a trackless forest is said by travellers to be fearfully oppressive, but the involuntary silence of twenty men waiting the entrance of the messengers of death and their victim becomes painful to the last degree. Sometimes there is a slight murmur heard from the outside of the prison, with now and again the clanking of a latch or the grating of a bolt within the gaol itself, and occasionally a low hum of conversation in the yard—these are the only sounds heard, and they only serve to intensify the oppressiveness of the silent intervals that intervene. What was going on within the prison during this time was not known to the representatives of the press. Under the new Act of Parliament they are excluded from what was known as the pinioning room, and only see the very last scene of all, an alteration very agreeable to the feelings of gentlemen upon whom is imposed a most painful duty. They learned after the execution that Mackay had since his condemnation conducted himself with great decorum, had frequently expressed his great sorrow for the crime he had committed, and his perfect readiness to die. The poor youth, we were told, lost his own mother when he was about the same age as one of his victim’s children, and this deepened in his own mind the intense feelings of piognant regret he seemed to experience between his sentence being pronounced and carried into effect. He was most attentive to the ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Jones, ordinary of Newgate, and took the sacrament at his hands on Sunday, The condemned youth slept soundly until about six o’clock in the morning, when he rose and remained in communion with his spiritual adviser until the last. So much for the interior of the prison; outside the silence remained unbroken, save by the sounds of which we have spoken, until within a quarter of an hour of nine, when from the neighbouring church of St. Sepulchre a passing bell began to toll, and a slightly increased murmur from the outside world reached the ears of those who waited within the prison. At about this time Mr Sheriff M’Arthur, with his under sheriffs, Messrs Roche and Davidson Mr. Jonas, the governor; and Mr. Gibson, the surgeon of Newgate, entered the yard, and having satisfied themselves that all the arrangements were complete, retired, leaving the space again to the reporters and policemen, one of the latter body having some few minutes earlier turned sick and left the yard. This almost unbearable suspense lasted until the clocks in the neighbourhood were heard to strike the hour, and then the clanking of a latch behind the black screen surrounding the scaffold was followed by the appearance of the Rev. Mr. Jones, who supported the doomed man as he ascended the few steps leading from the ground to the drop. The chaplain, whose voice trembled with emotion, read the Litany from the Church of England Prayer-book, and Mackay joined with a loud, clear voiee in the responses, his voice being heard distinctly over the yard, even after he was capped and noosed. Just at this supreme moment the young man’s firmness seemed about to forsake him, and he tottered as though to fall, but the hand of the chaplain laid upon his arm sustained him, and in another second the trap on which the unhappy man was standing fell, and he hung suspended. The fall was a very short one, and signs of life were visible for a longer time after the bolt was drawn than we remember to have seen on any similar occasion. As soon as possible every one concerned in the ghastly business was glad to make his escape from this last act in a doleful drama. To the spectators, judging from our own experience, and the appearance of many persons present, nothing could have been more terrible than this sight of a man, calmly, methodically strangled under shadow of a prison wall, without any of the frothy excitement that has up to within a very short time formed part of an execution ceremony. Few things could be more impressive, so far as the outside spectators were concerned (by reason of its fearful suggestiveness) than the silent running up of a black flag from the gaol wall just as the murderer passed down into the valley of the shadow of death; and nothing we should say could have been more awful than the sight of those four high, hard, pitiless walls to the wretch brought forth to die. Such is an account of the first execution of a murderer in London that has taken place out of sight of such as chose to brave the horrore of an execution crowd in order to see a fellow-creature die a shameful death.
The body, after hanging an hour, was cut down, and a coroner’s inquest, as prescribed by the Act of Parliament, was held in the course of the afternoon, previous to burying it.
The last personage we shall record here as a fit companion to all the before-mentioned, is Sanson, the renowned HERO OF THE GUILLOTINE. On the outskirts of old Paris, in a small neat cottage overlooking the banks of the Seine, surrounded by palings at the front, and thick hawthorn hedges at the sides and back, lives secluded from vulgar gaze a descendant of three generations of the Sansons, who from father to son have inherited the office of public executioner. He is a grim-looking old man of strong build; and is complacent to all visitors whose curiosity leads them to see and converse with him, and view his curious cabinet of murderers’ relics and criminals’ curiosities; and who make their request with becoming civility. He is full of anecdotes about the exploits of his ancestors at chopping off the heads of Louis the XVI, Maria Antonette, Charlotte Corday, the authoress of the famous saying “O! liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name,” as she was about to put her neck under the guillotine knife. He will exhibit at the same time, models of guillotines, instruments of torture, amongst them spokes of the blood-stained breaking wheel of former days, locks of the hair of various nobles and their ladies, rings, brooches, and other trinkets of the victims of the bloody Robespierre, with pieces of the robes and surplices of the bishops and priests who were then brought out of dungeons and guillotined in multitudes early every morning for weeks together, till the ground where the scaffold stood ran with blood. A few skulls and finger-bones of remarkable persons he will also show, and tell how he obtained them. We will now spare our reader’s feelings, and conclude by hoping that the day is not far off, when the awful adventures of the heroes of the gallows and guillotine will be numbered among the things of the past.
THE END.
Elliot, Printer, “The West-End News” office, 475, Oxford Street, W.C.