ith Richard Arnet, known also as Dick Arnold, we enter the realms of the real survivor in the trade, because he lasted probably a little over ten years in the job. For many years he was one of the most famous, largely because he was the man who hanged two of the most celebrated villains of Georgian England - Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. He supervised a multiple hanging in 1719, something that was always a rare test of a man’s nerves of course. He had proved his mettle by the time he executed Wild in 1725.
Arnet’s name percolated into the popular literature of the time, but as usual with this profession, the facts of his biography are few. We only really learn any details of the hangmen from this period from their appearances in high-profile events, and Arnet is no exception; in his whipping duties for instance, he was given the task of punishing a man called Moor who had insulted royalty, in 1719. Naturally, such a thing was reported by the press, and it is on record that Arnet had the necessary skill and strength for the job, as his lashes forced the victim to cry out, ‘God bless King George!’
But Arnet’s name will be forever linked to his despatching of the criminal celebrities of his time. Jonathan Wild was a ‘fence’ and on a grand scale. He received stolen goods and then sold them, and had a particular skill in selling back goods to the rightful owners. To try to suppress this common practice, the government passed a law to threaten such offenders with the prospect of fourteen years’ transportation when convicted, but Wild had a plan of his own. He gathered a large number of known petty thieves, and this is how the Newgate Calendar relates it: ‘He informed them that he had devised a plan for removing the inconveniences under which they laboured . . . He proposed that when they had gained any booty they should deliver it to him instead of to the pawnbroker, and he would restore things to the owners, thereby greater sums would be raised . . .’ Of course, any villain who crossed him would then be ‘grassed’ to the law, and Wild saw many petty thieves go to the gallows on his information. He even used to advertise his recovery services, as in this announcement from the Daily Courant in 1714: ‘Lost on 17 March last, out of a compting house in Durham Court, a day book, of no use to anyone except the owner. Whoever will bring them to Mr Jonathan Wild over against Cripplegate Church shall have a guinea reward and no questions asked.’
But eventually the law caught up with him, and he was in fact in Newgate when an indictment against him was opened by the Crown. He had been found out. The theft of a box of lace was his downfall; he was in the process of extorting as much money as he could from the owner (who had come to him for help in retrieving the lace) and she later gave a deposition against Wild. He had maintained a secret correspondence with felons, and he was soon in court, being sentenced to hang on 24 May 1725.
Wild tried to pre-empt the due process of law by trying to take his own life with a quantity of laudanum. But some men worked on him, with exercise and efforts to revive his spirits, and he survived in order to keep the date with Arnet. He ‘begged earnestly to be given transportation to the most extreme foot of His Majesty’s dominions’ but to no avail. When he sat in the cart at Tyburn, Arnet told him that he had a little time to prepare for his fate. But the rowdy, bloodthirsty mob shouted for the hanging to take place. Wild had been stoned on his way to Tyburn. Two robbers were going to die with him and they too were attacked. Arnet had to hang them quickly and curtail the time for the ritualistic speeches and prayers or he, too, would have been attacked.
In 1724 Arnet hanged the notorious Jack Sheppard. This was a man who had escaped from Newgate twice and who had a considerable public following, some of them an adoring group who were to see him to the gallows with some style and noise. Such was Sheppard’s popularity that there was almost a very serious riot on his day of death; in the time before his hanging, the ordinary and others had seen the potential in writing about the life of this glamorous character. So we know, for instance, that when the notion of saying prayers was mooted, he said that one file’s ‘worth all the bibles in the world’.
On 16 November 1724, he was to hang, and he was searched before leaving the Newgate Press Yard, something that did not normally happen. But the officers involved were glad they did so: Sheppard had a knife and he had been planning an escape. Arnet took some time to strangle the life out of the man, and the worst scene in the execution was the trouble over the dead man’s corpse. It was the usual habit to give the bodies of felons to the anatomists for dissection. Arnet in fact was paid a retainer by the Company of Barber-Surgeons to supply them with cadavers; he was given a Christmas gift every year, in cash, as a favour for this service as well. But in Sheppard’s case, a gang of his friends were at Tyburn to ensure that his body was properly buried. There was a confrontation between the friends and the surgeons, but finally the crowd allowed the body to be taken to Long Acre and, after a wake, it was interred at the St Martin-in-the-Fields’ churchyard.
Arnet’s tasks in his profession were not limited to the use of the rope. He once had to apply pressing - loading weights on the chest - of a highwayman called Spiggott who would not speak in court. After the torture, he spoke and was duly hanged. But arguably the most horrendous case he had was that of Catherine Hayes. She had murdered her husband, and at the time this was the offence of petty treason, not murder. That meant that she would be burned at the stake. She had bludgeoned her husband to death, with the help of two accomplices, and now she had to die. The usual practice was that a degree of mercy was applied when the woman in question would be strangled before the flames had any effect. The hangman would pull on a rope just as the faggots were lit. When Arnet did this, he was shocked when his hand was burned and he lost the rope. Poor Hayes was indeed burned alive.
But Arnet was generally quite competent. At one time he conducted a multiple hanging at the Execution Dock in Wapping. Offences at sea were usually punished there, hangings being on the off shore at low tide. All these duties Richard Arnet performed capably, unlike so many of his peers. He died in August 1728, and was buried at Deptford Green, at the church of St Nicholas. His obituary reads: ‘On Tuesday night the body of Mr Richard Arnold the hangman was conveyed to his house in Deptford . . . The Chief mourners were little Tom, his truly lamenting servant, and his wife . . . and Captain John Hooper is made hangman . . .’