Atraditional responsibility of Britain’s rulers has been the control of crime, the enforcing of the rule of law and the provision of justice. In the early nineteenth century it was considered that the most effective deterrent to the commission of crime was execution, transportation to labour camps in the country’s nascent overseas colonies and corporal punishment. There was no concept of expensive long-term custodial sentences which while punishing might also rehabilitate the convicted criminal. Prisons were primarily for the housing of those about to be brought to trial, awaiting sentencing or due for execution or transportation. Execution itself was carried out publicly and was meant to have a deterrent effect on those who witnessed it. It was also intended to inflict pain before it brought about death.
A range of punishments short of death was introduced in the sixteenth century in an attempt to counteract a perceived explosion of crime. Those without obvious means of supporting themselves were seen as a pool of potential criminality and treated accordingly. Those described as ‘vagabonds’ of fourteen years of age or more rendered themselves liable to being whipped and branded on the gristle of the right ear unless they went into service for a year. Many offences were punished with ‘carting’ which involved men and women being stripped to the waist, tied to a cart’s tail and whipped through the streets. At the same time there was a remarkable growth in the number of capital offences, many of which were encapsulated in the infamous Waltham Black Act of 1722. This was ‘An Act for the more effectual punishing wicked and evil disposed Persons going armed in Disguise, and doing Injuries and Violences to the Persons and Properties of His Majesty’s subjects, and for the more speedy bringing the Offenders to Justice’, and no other piece of legislation has ever prescribed the death penalty for so many offences.
Hanging, drawing and quartering seems especially barbaric and was inflicted on those found guilty of treason. For this reason it is not a form of execution we associate with highwaymen but at least one died in this ignominious fashion. James Hind made a speciality of robbing those on the Parliamentary side in the English Civil War and was tried and executed for treason rather than simple robbery. He underwent the time-honoured procedure whereby the condemned man was dragged on a hurdle to the place of execution and hanged briefly for a few minutes before being taken down. Then, while still alive, he was castrated, eviscerated and forced to watch while his intestines were burned in front of him. He was then beheaded and his torso was cut up into four pieces, which were treated with a preservative substance before being displayed in a prominent public place as a fearful warning to others. This appalling form of execution was dreaded not just for the pain involved but because of the strong belief then that a dead person could not enter the afterlife if his or her body was incomplete.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only about 50 offences had carried the death penalty but in the following 150 years capital crimes rose to well over 200. This led to the British penal system being widely referred to as the ‘Bloody Code’. The increasing severity of the penal system was not accidental but was firmly rooted in the economic and social changes the country was undergoing. Britain was an advanced economy by the standards of the time and industry and commerce were growing very rapidly. Great wealth was being accumulated by many large landowners, merchants, bankers and industrialists and smaller amounts by the middle classes, and they all wanted their riches to be protected. At the same time an enormous increase in population in the eighteenth century created a host of problems pressing down on the poor, both in town and country, because of the absence of an infrastructure of social and other services to support them through a period of immense revolutionary change. This meant that society in the period 1700 to 1850 was essentially unstable, as governments attempted to handle a host of new and unforeseen problems with a legal and administrative apparatus that had evolved over centuries to serve the needs of a largely rural country.
The perception of the rich was that there was a threatening large-scale increase in crime and a decline in deference among the lower orders. The only way to meet rising criminality was by institutionalising further state brutality and violence and terrifying the population into observing the law. Public hangings were thought to provide an object lesson and a deterrent to those considering a career in crime. In the absence of effective policing, ‘exemplary punishment’ was used. This recognised that statistically the chances of an offender being apprehended were small and so it cruelly and callously made an example of those who were caught in an attempt to deter others. It did not work. In practice judges often used their discretion to mitigate the harshest provisions of the law, while juries found ways to reduce the gravity of the offences with which those who appeared in court were being charged. Execution for theft, despite it being a capital offence, was rare by the late eighteenth century, unless there were aggravating circumstances such as armed robbery or robbery by a gang.
The Rule of Law attempted to legitimate the ‘Bloody Code’ as a form of social control by developing the concept that all were equal before the law, that the law was an impartial arbiter operating without favour for the benefit of all citizens. This was the response of the ruling class in a now largely secular society to the loss of the social cement once provided by religion and the hierarchy of authority and control that went with it. It is unlikely that the common folk were fooled by such a stratagem. Anatole France, the French writer, summed it up succinctly in 1894: ‘The majestic egalitarianism of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’
Highwaymen offended against the laws of property and the prison most associated with them is undoubtedly Newgate. This was a very old establishment and certainly in existence in 1189 because it is mentioned in a Pipe Roll of that date. It was the prison for the county of Middlesex as well as the City of London and jointly controlled by the sheriffs of those areas, who appointed its keeper. It acquired an evil reputation and in 1334 an official enquiry found that: ‘Prisoners detained on minor charges were cast into deep dungeons, and there associated with the worst criminals. All were alike threatened, many tortured, till they yielded to the keeper’s extortions . . .’ In 1381 Newgate was extensively damaged by Wat Tyler’s forces in the Peasants’ Revolt but continued to be a focus of fear and repulsion. Damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666, it was repaired and went on to house a number of highwaymen and other robbers before their execution at Tyburn.
In 1770 a programme of rebuilding commenced at Newgate which involved demolition of much of the existing structure, but the work was not completed before there was another attack on this hated edifice during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780. The Suffolk poet George Crabbe (1754–1832) described this assault in his journal: ‘I went close to it, and never saw anything so dreadful. The prison was a remarkably strong building; but determined to force it, they broke the gates with crows and other instruments . . . They broke the roof and tore away the rafters, and having got ladders, descended. Not Orpheus himself had more courage or better luck. Flames all around them . . . The prisoners escaped. I stood and saw about twelve women and eight men ascend from their confinement to the open air, and they were conducted through the streets in their chains. Three of these were to be hanged on Friday.’ The ravening mob broke into Langdale’s gin distillery close to Newgate at the junction of Fetter Lane and Holborn and witnesses described men, women and children lying face downwards and literally lapping up raw gin that had poured out of broken stills on to the street. Later, the mob ignited a vat of gin containing about 120,000 gallons and this disappeared in a column of fire that could be seen 30 miles away. The damage was quickly repaired and by 1783 Newgate was again open for business. Its first celebrity prisoner was the notorious Lord George Gordon who, despite having earlier orchestrated the anti-Catholic riots, subsequently converted to the Jewish faith. He was a prisoner at Newgate from 1787 to 1793, when he died within the precincts.
Newgate remained dark, ill ventilated and pestilential until well after the last highwaymen had passed through its portals. The stench of Newgate was such that pedestrians passing the prison often held their noses. Male prisoners often showed their contempt by urinating on them from the top floors of the building. Gin and beer were produced on the premises. In 1813, on the debtors’ side, which was built to house 100 inmates, there were no fewer than 340 prisoners. In the female felons’ ward, designed to house just 60 prisoners, 120 poor souls whiled away their miserable time. The women who were awaiting execution in Newgate were placed in a garret on the top floor into which they were allowed to lure as many men as possible for the purpose of sexual intercourse. If they became pregnant they could ‘plead their bellies’ and obtain a reprieve from the gallows. In 1902 Newgate was demolished and the Central Criminal Court or ‘Old Bailey’ was erected on the site soon after.
A prominent figure at Newgate was the Ordinary or chaplain. Superficially, his job appeared highly unrewarding and was sometimes hazardous. Apart from the fact that Newgate housed the dregs of society, it stank and was often ravaged by lethal fevers. Also, he personally had much to put up with from the inmates. However, there was never any difficulty in filling the position as there were many perks that went with it. As well as the salary and a rent-free house and various legacies, the Ordinary enjoyed a lucrative unofficial income from publishing and selling the condemned prisoners’ last confessions. Sales of these were proportionate to the notoriety of the condemned prisoner and the sensationalism and graphic details provided. The Ordinary knew this and when necessary simply invented suitably lurid material. Actually, ‘invention’ is precisely the word that comes to mind because it was necessary to write up the ‘last confession’ and get it printed and distributed several days before to ensure that it would be available on the day of the execution. This meant that what was sold to the prurient crowds who flocked to watch the execution was extremely unlikely to be the actual last confession. Many of those who were condemned to be executed resolutely refused to make any confession at all, but this did not prevent the Ordinary from going ahead and producing the expected broadsheet, complete with a ‘confession’.
Sometimes a prisoner ‘stood mute’, as the law tersely put it. This meant refusing to plead and could only be for two reasons: either the prisoner was dumb or he was awkward. If it were ascertained that the prisoner could not speak, he would be considered to be pleading not guilty. However, few things irked the authorities more than a prisoner they thought was wilfully unco-operative and who would not enter a plea when charged. If such a prisoner was in Newgate he was likely to be taken to the sinister Press Yard. Here he would make the acquaintance of the dreaded ‘peine forte et dure’, more usually known as ‘the Press’. It involved the prisoner being stripped naked and laid flat upon his back. A board was placed on his chest and weights put on it. Frequently the weights amounted initially to 350 lb and with such a weight on their chests most prisoners quickly found their voices and hastened to enter a plea.
William Spiggot, arrested for highway robbery in 1720, adamantly refused to enter a plea. He was a fairly nondescript highwayman but his fortitude at this late stage of his career has to be admired. He most vociferously declared that he was going to stand mute and the authorities consigned him to the Press Yard. Spiggot knew the law but he was a brave man and he was prepared to die under the Press. The law decreed that if he pleaded guilty and was found guilty then all his property would be forfeited to the Crown. If he actually pleaded not guilty and was found guilty, the result would be the same. If he did not plead at all, his property could not be confiscated. Spiggot knew perfectly well that if he entered a plea, the court would find him guilty. It was his family that he was concerned about; he did not want them left destitute. Unfortunately for Spiggot, while he coped with 350 lb on his chest, after half an hour they added another 50 lb and his endurance gave way. He pleaded guilty. ‘Peine forte et dure’ was abolished in 1772, by which time less credence was being given to confessions extracted under coercion and more to gathering and presenting convincing evidence.
A particularly notorious prisoner awaiting execution could prove a money-spinner for the gaolers. They unashamedly charged visitors either to view the prisoner from a distance or for a higher fee to approach and chat with him or her. Valentine Carrick got rather fed up with gaping voyeurs during his last few days in the condemned cell and he called out to them, ‘Good folks, you pay for seeing me now, but if you had suspended your curiosity till I went to Tyburn, you might have seen me for nothing.’ Well-liked rogues often found that they hardly had a moment to themselves during their last few days. Those who were of a sociable nature seem to have enjoyed the attention. The highwayman ‘Sixteen String Jack’ revelled in the limelight and entertained numbers of women for ‘dinner’ on the last few evenings before his execution. Not all prisoners were able to maintain their composure to the last. While William Hawke, also known as the ‘Flying Highwayman’, spent his last night rather incongruously praying and singing psalms, a companion due to hang with him was trembling like an aspen leaf and had to be helped up into the cart. The highwayman John Ashton totally lost his reason under the pressure of awaiting his execution and once on the scaffold at Newgate began telling the crowd that he was Lord Wellington.
On the morning of the execution, the condemned prisoner was unshackled and had his elbows pinned back leaving his hands free. Those prisoners thought to be a particular security risk were handcuffed. A noose was hung about the neck. The condemned prisoner left Newgate on a horse-drawn cart at 10 in the morning to travel the 3 miles to Tyburn, the route being Snow Hill, High Holborn, St Giles’s and along what was then called Oxford Road. Well-off prisoners sometimes rode in their own conveyances. Soon after leaving Newgate the cart stopped outside St Sepulchre’s so that the condemned prisoner could have the benefit of hearing the bellman’s final proclamation and receiving a floral wreath. On the ride to Tyburn the prisoner had the company of the hangman and the Ordinary and usually sat on his personal coffin. They were preceded by the City Marshal on his horse and the Under-Sheriff with several mounted peace officers. Bringing up the rear were men on foot with pikes and halberds. When there were multiple executions there was a rule of precedence. The first two rows in the cart, the place of honour, went to those who had robbed the mail and to highwaymen. Those who were determined to make an impression often dressed in their best and carried themselves with a studied air of nonchalance. Others preferred a show of defiance. The spectators warmed to such prisoners but could not stand a cringing, cravenly display of fear when they would howl derisively and make the prisoner’s last moments even more painful. They loved bravado and enjoyed the highwayman Jerry Abershaw who swaggered up to the scaffold with a red rose between his teeth after hastily discarding his boots. He did this because he suddenly recalled that his mother had warned him that if he did not give up his criminal ways, he would die with his boots on.
It was common practice for the entourage to stop at one or more alehouses on the way to Tyburn where the prisoner alighted with the Ordinary and guards to enjoy a complementary drink. This represented sound business sense by the publican because the prisoner would be followed in by a crowd eager to make his acquaintance or to wish him well personally. It was not unknown for a condemned prisoner to be totally drunk by the time he arrived at Tyburn. This custom certainly seems strange to us today but it gave rise to Dean Swift’s famous piece of satirical verse:
As clever Tom Clinch, while the rabble was bawling,
Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling,
He stopt at the George for a bottle of sack,
And promised to pay for it when he came back.
His waistcoat and stockings and breeches were white;
His cap had a new cherry ribbon to tie’t
The maids to the doors and the balconies ran,
And said, ‘Lack-a-day, he’s a proper young man!’
But, as from the windows the ladies he spied,
Like a beau in the box, he bow’d low on each side!
And when his last speech the loud hawkers did cry,
He swore from the cart, ‘It’s all a damn’d lie!’
The hangman for pardon fell down on his knee;
Tom gave him a kick in the guts for his fee;
Then said, ‘I must speak to the people a little,
But I’ll see you all damned before I will whittle! . . .’
The site of Tyburn was close to the present Marble Arch. The first recorded execution was as early as 1196. For many centuries other locations in London used for hanging included Cornhill and Smithfield, where the highwayman John Cottington was hanged in 1656. The original gallows at Tyburn consisted simply of two poles with a crossbeam but by the sixteenth century this accommodation had become insufficient to meet the demand and a more substantial apparatus was erected. This allowed for the hanging of no fewer than twenty-four miscreants simultaneously. It lasted until 1759 when the ‘Triple Tree’, as it was known, was removed because it was an obstacle to traffic. After that a moveable gallows was used, which was kept at Newgate and erected at Tyburn every time it was needed. This gallows contained a trapdoor through which the victim dropped. The first to experience the new device was the hated Earl Ferrers who chose this method rather than the beheading that was more normal for peers of the realm. The gallows at Tyburn was known as the ‘Tyburn Tree’ or ‘Jack Ketch’s Tree’ after the singularly incompetent public hangman who served there from 1663 to 1686. After his death, ‘Jack Ketch’ became the generic name for all hangmen. The popularity of public hangings with everyone except the condemned prisoner and perhaps his closest relatives and friends meant that a grandstand was erected in 1729. Seats in the grandstands that became known as ‘Mother Proctor’s Pew’ were expensive, but gave those who could pay a particularly fine view of the proceedings. Mother Proctor was its owner and she never made a wiser investment.
Occasionally a hangman would turn up for work clearly the worse for drink. In 1738 the hangman at Tyburn was so confused that, to roars of approval from the crowd, he not only slipped nooses over the heads of the two robbers scheduled to be turned off that day, but also did the same for the Ordinary. Only with some difficulty was he persuaded not to hang him.
Eight ‘hanging days’ were set aside each year for executions at Tyburn and these were made into public holidays and referred to as Tyburn Fair. London was en fête and huge crowds lined the route from Newgate especially if one or more of the condemned prisoners was popular and likely to provide good entertainment. They would be bombarded with flowers and nosegays. The crowds would also turn out in large numbers to hurl missiles such as mud, stones, excrement and dead cats and dogs and to jeer at someone whose crimes they disapproved of. Jack Sheppard proved to be a major attraction and an estimated 100,000 spectators wished him well as he made his way to Tyburn on his last triumphal progress. Others that drew large crowds included ‘Sixteen String Jack’ and James Maclaine in 1774 and 1750 respectively, although, as mentioned elsewhere, Maclaine gave poor value for money. On one unforgettable occasion, the procession was nearing Tyburn when the hangman, William Marvell, was arrested and carried away under escort. The crowd loved this but their elation turned to a sense of anti-climax and then anger when the three men due to be hanged were taken back to Newgate.
In early days the condemned prisoner had to mount a ladder with a rope tied around his neck and then jump off the ladder into space. This system was superseded by the prisoner being placed on a horse-drawn cart that was suddenly drawn forward leaving him dangling in midair. His friends and relations might then rush forward to pull on his legs to speed his despatch. The dead prisoner was supposed to be left to hang for half an hour. The crowd seemed inured to the indignity of hanging, as a contemporary observer said, ‘. . . there is nothing in being hanged but a Wry neck, and a wet pair of Breeches’.1 What they watched was horrible and many criminals took minutes to die. For every one who died bravely, there were far more who died expelling faeces and urine. The penis might become erect and ejaculate, so it is said, and the uterus would bleed. Sometimes the rope snapped or the scaffold collapsed.
Mysterious powers were credited to the corpse of a hanged convict. Even before the executed felon had stopped twitching, women would rush forward to place his hand on their cheeks, necks or breasts. Probably few things would be more likely to restore a male prisoner to instant life than the last of these. However, the women were not doing it for the man’s benefit but for their own. A hanged man’s touch was supposed to cure warts and other skin blemishes.
One of the perks of the hangman was to keep the clothes of his victims, which would often sell for a very good price especially if the deceased was notable. Therefore, it was bursting with an understandable sense of righteous indignation that the hangman argued with a female prisoner in the cart on her way to Tyburn. Her name was Hannah Dagoe and she proposed to take all her clothes off and throw them into the crowd. She started with her gloves and bonnet when the hangman tried to restrain her. However, Hannah was big and strong and holding him off with one hand she continued to divest herself of her garments, throwing them into the highly appreciative crowd. She almost managed to knock the hangman off the cart before she was restrained by the guards. When she mounted the scaffold she was absolutely naked. An even more unsavoury episode accompanied the hanging of the rapist John Briant in 1797. Here a brutal struggle took place between one group of his female relatives consisting of those who wanted to take the body away for burial and another band of women who wanted to strip the corpse to remove its clothing for its imagined therapeutic properties. It is difficult to say who won this heated fracas but it certainly was not the dignity of the deceased. His legs, arms and head were all ripped off.
It was common for relatives to claim the body of a hanged convict and to take it away after the prescribed half an hour. It was not unusual for attempts to be made to resuscitate the deceased. A bellows might be used to pump air and other vital substances into the lungs, the air passages and the spine might be pressed and massaged while hot vapours might be forced up the anus. Being restored to life in this way must have been a highly unpleasant experience.
Aversion to the idea of large crowds turning out to witness executions is a comparatively recent development. Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84) can be regarded as a cultured intellectual and was aghast when in 1783 it was proposed to abolish public executions at Tyburn. He wrote to a friend that the whole purpose of a public hanging was precisely to draw the maximum possible number of spectators: ‘The public liked it and the condemned man felt encouraged by it,’ he declared. Johnson just lived to see the end of hangings at Tyburn on 7 November 1783 after which time the place of execution was switched to outside Newgate Prison itself. The scaffold was not a permanent one and was erected during the night before an execution and then taken down. At least one condemned prisoner due to hang in the morning complained most bitterly that the banging, hammering and merry banter of the workmen had kept him awake all night at the very time when he felt he had never had greater need of a good night’s undisturbed sleep.
Hangings outside Newgate continued to attract large crowds of the morbid, the curious, the criminal and the sadistic. Several large houses offered an excellent view of proceedings around the scaffold. These windows were rented by the rich who fortified themselves from hampers replete with delicacies such as cooked tongue, smoked hams, sandwiches and sherry, champagne and cigars. Less expensive titbits were hawked on the street below. These included pies of dubious provenance, sticky cakes, ginger beer and a variety of sweetmeats.
Hangings at Tyburn or Newgate were for crimes perpetrated in the City of London and the county of Middlesex and they have been covered at some length because there is more evidence about crime and punishment in London than anywhere else in the eighteenth century. Many other locations, such as county towns like York and Maidstone, which housed the assizes and were near busy roads, saw executions including those of highwaymen. In fact, over 70 per cent of executions in the early nineteenth century took place outside of London in the provinces.
From the middle of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of people began to question the morality and efficacy of England’s Draconian penal system. The feeling was growing that public executions, a brutal example of institutionalised violence, no longer provided any deterrent. The whole event had assumed the nature of a carnival with condemned felons frequently basking in the adulation of the crowd while every opportunity was taken to mock the law and its officials. Charles Dickens when attending the execution of the murderer Courvoisier in 1840 described the event and said that in the audience he saw no emotion suitable to the occasion, ‘. . . No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes’.2 Various enquiries and committees investigated the issue and they began to compile evidence. This is an excerpt from the proceedings of one such committee:
What effects are produced by such executions? – They merely come to see an execution of that kind as a spectacle; they go away again and waste their time; and many of the spectators commit crimes, as I have reason to suppose, before the night closes, after witnessing such a scene: nay, we had a boy brought in some time ago, who had only a few days before been out of Newgate; he was brought in for picking pockets under the gallows; and when I spoke to him upon the subject, and said, ‘How could you do such a thing at such an awful moment?’ He said, ‘Sir, that was the best moment in the world, for everybody’s eyes were up when the drop was falling’.3
Between 1756 and 1765 there were 329 persons convicted of criminal offences of whom 183 were executed, that is, about 50 per cent. Between 1795 and 1804 the ratio of those hanged to those convicted fell to about 17 per cent. The number capitally convicted continued to fall, as did the percentage actually executed.
Catastrophes such as that which accompanied the hanging in 1807 of the convicted murderers Haggerty and Holloway helped to strengthen opinion against public executions. They were to be executed outside Newgate and a huge crowd, estimated at 40,000, gathered and the sheer weight of numbers was such that panic broke out in the crowd. People at the front were being squashed by those behind straining to get a good view. One or two desperately trying to escape from the confusion may have slipped and fallen and others tumbled over them. It took an hour to secure some semblance of order from the ensuing chaos but by that time twenty-eight were dead and nearly seventy injured. Horrors of this sort were by no means restricted to London, and in August 1844 at least a dozen people were trampled or crushed to death at a hanging in Nottingham. The Mayor of Nottingham wrote to the Home Office: ‘It is right that I should immediately inform you of a most calamitous occurrence which has taken place today . . . The case has excited extreme interest, and a vast crowd was assembled early in the morning to see the execution . . . It was no sooner over than a tremendous rush of the multitude was made from the Scaffold down the High Pavement Street. A confusion excited by mischievous persons throwing hats and shoes about originated the general desire to escape from the overpowering pressure. Numbers of persons were thrown down, run over and trodden upon. The shrieks and cries of the sufferers are beyond description.’4
By the middle of the nineteenth century it was felt that the didactic and deterrent effects of hangings had more or less evaporated. They were now little more than a form of popular entertainment, degrading to the spectators and debasing the gravity of the law. Additionally, they attracted large crowds of unruly people who were seen as posing a threat to law and order. It came as no surprise that the last public hanging in Britain was staged in 1868, outside Newgate on 26 May.