The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Such legislation was part of a general tendency in eighteenth-century England: the growth of the Rule of Law (as distinct from any particular statute) into a supreme ideology, a form of religion which, it has since been argued, began to replace the waning moral power of the Church of England.18

  Like the Church, Law had its own diction and rituals and its own priests—bewigged men in scarlet and ermine. At the assizes, the judge’s rolling sermons on vice and virtue, his reprobations, didactic asides and calls to repentance, were the secular equivalent of that pulpit eloquence which, in the seventeenth century, had shaken and fascinated those who thronged to hear the great preachers like John Donne or George Cokayne. Well into the nineteenth century, hanging verdicts continued to produce extremes of emotion, on both sides of the bench, that would be hard to match today. When two agricultural protestors named Peter Withers and James Lush were sentenced to death at the Salisbury assizes in 1831, a reporter from the Dorset County Chronicle described how

  there were … no dry eyes in the crowded court. The tears of pity, of compassion, of regret, at the necessity of such severity were to be seen flowing and chasing one another down the cheeks not merely of the spectators, but of those who had long been accustomed to hear the last dreadful sentence which a human being has the power of passing on a fellow-creature in this world. [The judges] were frequently obliged to rest their faces on their extended hands, and even then the large drops were to be seen falling in quick succession.… Every one [of the prisoners] was in a state of dreadful agitation—some sobbing aloud and others with a pallid cheek … [After the death sentence] their mothers, their sisters, and their children clasped them in their arms with an agonizing grasp—the convicts … gave way, they wept like children … Nature had begun to play with every force, and the heart was broken.19

  Why did the judges weep with the accused? Because both were bound—though not, of course, in equality of pain—to the law. This drama of immutable rules lay at the heart of the tremendous power that Law held over the English imagination. The judge simply surrendered to the imperative of the statutes, a course of action that absolved him of judicial murder, and that caused him to weep. His tears humbled him not before the men in the dock, which would have been unthinkable, but before the idea of Law itself. When the Royal Mercy intervened as it commonly did, transmuting the death penalty into exile on the other side of the world, the accused and their relatives could bless the intervening power of patronage while leaving the superior operations of Law unquestioned. The law was a disembodied entity, beyond class interest: the god in the codex. The judge was invested with its numen, as a priest was touched by sacerdotal power. But he could no more change the law than a clergyman could rewrite the Bible. All men were equal before the law, and none might evade its reach. It might demand the death of a poor ten-year-old boy, but noblemen could and did hang as well. The famous one was Lord Ferrers, who in a fit of paranoid suspicion blew his steward’s brains out in 1760. Convicted and sentenced to hang, the peer made his journey to Tyburn in a landau drawn by six horses, wearing a white wedding-suit sumptuously encrusted with silver embroidery; thousands of people cheered him over the drop. This, as upholders of the Law’s impartiality were given to stress, was equality indeed.

  iv

  NOTHING IN English criminal law seems more disgusting than public hanging. We are apt to think of it as the very saturnalia of death: a man or woman carted through the screaming mob that lined the road from Newgate to Tyburn, and then killed by a civil servant while more pockets were picked around the scaffold than the victim had picked in his life.20

  Yet the official view of hanging was the very opposite. The Georgian lawmakers believed that public execution would reform those who saw it. A writer in 1772 recounted how parents would bring their children to a hanging and flog them afterward “that they might remember the example they had seen.”21 The scaffold was the altar of a ritual whose aim was to fill society with moral awe. This expiatory theater, solemn and fatal, deserved the widest audience.

  To a well-anticipated hanging, if the victims were famous—a Jack Sheppard, a Lord Ferrers—twenty-five thousand people might come. Thirty thousand are said to have attended the execution of the twin brothers Perreau (for forgery) in 1776, and in 1767, eighty thousand people—or about one Londoner in ten—flocked to a hanging in Moorefields.22 Against this may be set the extreme unreliability of Georgian statistics. Nevertheless, hanging was clearly the most popular mass spectacle in England; nothing could match the drawing-power of the gallows or its grip as a secular image.

  Hence the importance of the ritual. On the eve of Tyburn Fair (one of the colloquial names for execution-day at Tyburn gallows), it began with a prayer intoned by the sexton of the parish church of Newgate prison, St. Sepulchre’s, addressed to the occupants of its condemned hold, the Stone Room:

  You prisoners that lie within, who for wickedness and sin, after many mercies shown you, are now appointed to die tomorrow in the forenoon, give ear and understand that tomorrow morning the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre’s shall toll for you in form and measure of a passing bell, as used to be tolled for those at the point of death, to the end that all godly people, hearing that bell and knowing that it is for your going and your deaths, may be stirred up heartily to pray to God …23

  With the morning came the minatory prayers, the hoarse clanging bells and the procession westward along the busiest streets of London, from Newgate to Tyburn, the present site of Marble Arch. Each condemned man sat in the cart facing the rising sun, with a noose bound to his chest. At the gallow’s foot, phrase by halting phrase, he had to recite Psalm 51, the “Hanging Psalm”:

  Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,

  and in sin did my mother conceive me.

  Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being,

  therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

  Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;

  wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

  Fill me with joy and gladness;

  let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.

  Hide thy face from my sins …

  Sometimes he would append a conventional speech of repentance, known as the “dismal ditty.” Then came the donning of the white shroud, an undignified and spectral garment like a coarse nightgown; the climb up the ladder; the choking drop.

  But what did the lower classes think of this spectacle staged for their benefit? There is much to suggest that the panoply of Tyburn was not taken in a proper spirit by the “mobbish class of Persons.” Hanging had two languages. The official one was elevated and abstract: A hanged man “paid the supreme penalty,” “suffered the ultimate exaction of the Law,” or was “launch’d into Eternity.” But there was also a vast gallows argot, for, next to those hardy perennials sex, money and crime, nothing on the social horizon of the English poor produced more slang and cant than hanging. Not a word of it reflects the official solemnities. Terse in its irony, bitter in its defiant concreteness, it rejected the values of the Law and its makers.

  A condemned man “died with cotton in his ears” because Cotton was the name of the praying sexton at Newgate. The hangman was Jack Ketch, the nubbing-cove, the crap merchant, the crapping cull, the switcher, the cramper, the sheriff’s journeyman, the gaggler, the topping-cove, the roper or the scragger. Tyburn being in the parish of Paddington, execution-day was also known as Paddington Fair, the hood drawn over one’s head on the scaffold was the Paddington spectacles, and in dying one danced the Paddington frisk.

  Some hangmen bequeathed their names to the rite. In the 1770s a man would be “dempstered,” and around 1785 the gallows briefly became the Gregorian tree, after a London hangman named Gregory Brandon. But its other names were legion. Being a construction of three posts linked by cross-bars, the gallows was the three-legged mare, and to ascend it was to “climb three trees with a ladder”; being made of oak, it was the wooden mare, and to die on it was to “ride a hor
se foaled by an acorn.” It was the morning drop, the trining-cheat, the nubbing-cheat, the scragging-post, or, in a laconic parody of the pastoral mode, “the deadly Nevergreen that bears the fruit all the year round.” The noose was a horse’s nightcap, a Tyburn tippet, a hempen casement or an anodyne necklace. Before the invention of the hinged trapdoor through which the victim dropped, he or she was “turned off” or “twisted” by the hangman who pulled the ladder away. To ascend it was “to go up the ladder to bed,” “to take a leap in the dark.” Some names for this death were bald: to stretch, to squeeze, to be jammed or frummagemed or haltered. Others referred to epidemic disease: “to die of a hempen quinsey or a hempen fever.” “To be in a deadly suspense” predicts the nudging humor of the music hall, as does another elaborate Cockney locution for hanging: “to have a hearty choke [artichoke] and caper sauce for breakfast.” The most chilling are the phrases that evoke the solitude and sterility of public death: “dance upon nothing,” “take the earth bath,” “shake a cloth in the wind,” “go off at the fall of a leaf.” Or, because of the noises and grimaces a strangling person makes: “to cry cockles,” “to piss when you can’t whistle,” “to loll your tongue out at the company.”24

  This is not the language of the penitent thief. Its brusque, canting defiance reminds one that hanging meant one thing to the judges but another to the poor and the “mob.” Samuel Johnson objected to the “fury of innovation” in the movement to abolish public hanging. “Executions are intended to draw spectators,” the Rambler grumbled. “If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer to their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it.”25

  The idea that condemned men could draw solace and support from the crowd at their hanging offends our deepest sense of propriety about death. It seems unspeakably grotesque. Nevertheless, they did. There are many accounts of young men setting forth in the Tyburn coach dressed like bridegrooms in new white suits emblematic of innocence, ribbons fluttering from their hats, posies in their white-gloved hands, cockily saluting a crowd that showered them, not with dead rats and cabbages, but with fruit and flowers in tribute to their passing. This was a common enough sight for Swift to take for granted:

  As clever Tom Clinch, while the Rabble was bawling,

  Rode stately through Holbourn to die in his Calling;

  He stopt at the George for a bottle of Sack,

  And Promis’d to pay for it when he came back.

  His Waiscoat and Stockings, and Breeches were white,

  His cap had a new Cherry Ribbon tied to it.

  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 a Box, he bow’d low on each Side.26

  As early as 1701 a pamphleteer was complaining that the condemned rode to Tyburn in bright clothes “like Men that triumph,” as though the journey of shame were the parade of a Caesar.27 A man’s bearing on the cart and at Tyburn was discussed like the form of a boxer at a prizefight. The phlegm of English malefactors was renowned in Europe, whose criminals tended to beg and blubber or become reduced to bovine passivity when confronted by their executioners. One admiring Italian felt that the English faced the gallows come se andasse a Nozze … colla più soave indifferenza nel Mondo, “as if going to be married, with the calmest indifference in the world.”28 The crowd wanted to see this and supported those who showed it. A “Tyburn blossom” must be an exemplary dandy, trim, gay and uncaring.

  Hanging crowds were unruly. Hogarth’s engraving The Idle Prentice Executed at Tyburn gives a powerful sense of them: the crush of jostling voyeurs, a trampled child, squabbling fruit-sellers, pamphleteers hawking the just-printed “Last Dying Speech and Confession”—a turgid mass of drunks, whores, cripples, gospellers, pikemen and building-workers from the new West End squares nearby, parting to make way for the fatal cart. Beside the scaffold rises a grandstand that belonged to a famous scalper, the Widow Proctor, who made £500 in one day selling seats for Lord Ferrers’s hanging.

  People also went to Tyburn to mourn, to reclaim the body of their friend or relative, to give the corpse its due dignity. They waited below the gallows to retrieve it in order to give it a proper burial and did not hesitate to fight the sheriff’s officers for it. The law did not recognize the relatives’ rights to a hanged corpse. It gave the body to the Royal College of Physicians for dissection, which heaped further ignominy on the dead. Thus there was a continuous record of brawls and riots at Tyburn and other English places of execution, as the “mob” battled with the surgeons’ corpse-takers for possession of bodies. And, as Peter Linebaugh remarked,

  When brickmakers came out to defend the bodies of two felons with several years’ good standing in the trade against the surgeons, when bargemen came down from Reading to guard one of their own at a hanging, when the hackney coachmen rallied to keep the body of a fellow coachman “from being carried off with Violence,” or when the small cottagers and market people of Shoreditch surrounded the tumbril of Thomas Pinks their neighbour in the village, “declaring that they had no other Intention, but to take care of the Body for Christian burial,” the evidence … shows the depth of the mutuality of the poor, their solidarity in the face of personal disaster.29

  This solidarity, as Dr. Johnson perceived, gave support to the condemned. Public execution, meant to terrify the populace, enabled the “mob” to show its defiance of authority. How mulish, the scientific onlooker might say, to deny the science of medicine its rights of progress by way of the bodies of the poor! What anatomical Luddism! What counted, however, was that the laboring poor of England gave the rituals their own meaning, quite at odds with its official one.

  At this distance, one cannot say whether public hanging did terrify people away from crime. Nor can anyone do so, until we can count crimes that were never committed. Probably some people in the Tyburn crowds did fear hanging more for having seen it. Despite (or, from another point of view, because of) the intimidating ferocity of the statutes, there were more than twice as many capital convictions in the London and Middlesex courts in the 1780s as there had been in the 1750s. This does not prove, however, that capital punishment failed to deter anyone. Population had grown, poverty was worse, and there might have been even more crime if some people were not frightened by the gallows.

  But one fact is certain. As the eighteenth century went on, fewer people were actually hanged for capital crimes that they had been convicted of. In ten-year periods, the figures for London and Middlesex (the area of highest crime) are:30

  Why did the English write their fatal laws and then not use them to the full? One answer is squeamishness: Judges and juries simply frustrated the hanging statutes out of decency. A judge would commute the death sentence on a suitably penitent felon, while juries (and sometimes even prosecutors) cheated the gallows by deliberately undervaluing stolen goods. Thus, hundreds of convictions were handed down every year for thefts of goods that juries valued at 39 shillings, not because that was their actual value, but because the law said that anyone who stole above 40 shillings in a house or on a highway must hang. However, there would not have been so many remissions if they had not been encouraged by an active intent to exercise mercy.31

  George III took the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (the King’s power to override his courts and remit a sentence at will) very seriously. The Royal Mercy showed his subjects that their monarch cared about them. One besought it by letter, through the home secretary, enclosing whatever references and sub-petitions could be raised from clergymen and other respectable people, and it was quite often given. The laws were the stick, mercy the carrot. There was subtlety in maintaining the hanging laws but not automatically using them. If they had merely been repealed, the effect would not have been the same. For mercy to evoke gratitude, the ruler must be seen to choose
mercy, so that each reprieve is a special case, to be paid for in gratitude and obedience, never taken as a right.32

  Moreover, the Royal Mercy and judicial commutation of sentences kept the crossroads of England from being decorated with scores and scores of corpses—a sight that could have provoked general riots. But what could the courts do with the convicts? The less rope was used, the more jails were needed. Yet eighteenth-century England was short of jails.

  v

  THE ONES it had were old. They had changed little since the Middle Ages. Their archetype in London was Newgate, which began its career in the twelfth century as a city gatehouse strengthened to hold prisoners and ended after almost eight hundred years of service and four rebuildings, with demolition in 1903. Newgate’s walls were of a Piranesian thickness, and there was virtually no way past its labyrinth of dark cells, subterranean corridors and iron bars as thick as a navvy’s wrist. To escape from this accursed place—especially from its condemned cell, the Stone Room—was to achieve immediate celebrity in the London underworld. Newgate was called the “whit” or “wit,” and all flash lads drank to its destruction. “The Wit be burnt,” ran a common criminal toast, “the Flogging Cull [flogger] be damned, the Nubbing Chit [gallows] be curs’d.” The debtor’s section of Newgate was called “Tangier,” because of the miseries suffered by English prisoners of Arab pirates on the Barbary Coast; its inmates, some abandoned by the outside world for ten years over a matter of a few shillings, were “tangerines.”