By the 1670s, suitably salacious and brutal trials were being reported within days of a verdict. Eager readers in 1698 might have chosen to consider the depravity of Captain Edward Rigby, pilloried for attempted sodomy after picking up William Minton at a firework display in St James’s Park. Rigby pleaded guilty in the hope of a quiet life, but the court itself ordered that its proceedings be published. All literate England could soon pay to recoil from the news that he had ‘put his Privy Member Erected into Minton’s Hand; kist him, and put his Tongue into Minton’s Mouth’ before expounding on the antiquity of anal intercourse and placing a ‘Finger to [his] Fundament’. There were salutary lessons to suit every taste. Someone disinclined to weigh the wages of sin might, for example, have preferred to contemplate the quality of mercy – perhaps by pondering the luck of Mary Price, acquitted of bestiality in 1704 notwithstanding her housemate’s claims to have watched through the floorboards as she copulated with a dog.
But although jury trials were offering much to mull over by the eighteenth century, another aspect of criminal justice was still far more visible: the punishments that followed them. Tattooed and maimed convicts stalked the streets of every city, while lesser deviants sat in stocks and dangled from pillories, braving rotting animals and vegetables if they were lucky and storms of rocks if they were not. The displays were a feature of the landscape from Nuremberg to New York, but they were becoming especially impressive in England. Although a 1718 statute providing for transportation to the colonies removed plenty of convicts from the public gaze, public mutilations continued apace and the number of capital offences also soared – from about fifty in 1688 to well over two hundred in 1810. Few villages lacked for a whipping post, while executions could turn the humblest provincial town into a fairground, drawing thousands of visitors and pumping a fortune into the local economy.
London hosted the grandest spectacle of all, spewing out capital offenders from Newgate every six weeks for transportation across the capital to the Tyburn gallows. The procession had grown increasingly animated during the seventeenth century, and by the 1720s it was tumultuous indeed. The condemned travelled in open carts, noosed and astride their own coffins, as church bells tolled and crowds cheered them on their way. They wore anything they chose – perhaps velvet, scarlet, and silk with a white cockade to protest their innocence, perhaps a simple burial shroud to acknowledge their guilt – while high-spirited onlookers handed up tankards of ale, asking only that the prisoners buy a round on the way back. The jollity reached a climax under the triangular beams of Tyburn. Convicts who spoke with grace or humour received roars of approbation, while the surly and the sullen were booed and pelted. When the bodies were finally ‘turned off’ and the souls ‘launched into eternity’, to use the clichés of the day, chaos would erupt. While acquaintances of the dying tried to shorten their agonies by leaping for the dribbling, jerking legs, hangmen auctioned their clothes and emissaries from London’s surgeons’ colleges hopped from rope to rope in the hope of scavenging an unwanted cadaver.
The commotion, macabre even by the standards of the time, regularly attracted tens of thousands of spectators and exercised a fascination that spanned class and nationality. César de Saussure, a young Swiss gentleman who whiled away several months in London during the 1720s, was impressed enough to describe it at length in a letter to his mother. ‘You see most amusing scenes between the people who do not like the bodies to be cut up and the messengers the surgeons have sent for the bodies,’ he enthused. ‘Blows are given and returned before they can be got away, and sometimes in the turmoil the bodies are quickly removed and buried.’
Amusing it may have been, but the increasing frequency and intensifying violence of executions, at a time when juries were being sanctified and courtrooms were formulating rigid rules to guarantee fairness, had a peculiarly paradoxical effect. Trials became almost perverse rituals of cruelty and mercy, at which the dignity afforded the defendant resembled nothing so much as the head start given a fox. Whether a suspect lived or died was in many ways less important than that the chase proceeded by the rules. The responsibility for punishment was meanwhile shuffled around court until it belonged to everyone and no one, and all were free to lament the fate of the person they were killing. At a time when English and American juries were becoming celebrated for their ‘pious perjury’ – undervaluing stolen goods so as to spare petty thieves the gallows – they continued to convict most capital offenders (a full two-thirds in England, of whom 90 per cent in London were under twenty-one). The role played by judges was no more coherent. While they typically warned juries of the awful consequences of leniency, they simultaneously repaired the damage behind the scenes – recommending so many pardons that three out of four English death sentences were being commuted by the end of the eighteenth century.
It all made for emotional tensions aplenty. After Chief Justice Ryder had to deal with a young woman charged with killing her 6-month-old baby in 1754, he confided to his diary that he had been so affected by his own speech to the jurors ‘that the tears were gushing out several times against my will. It was discerned by all the company – which was large – and a lady gave me her handkerchief dipped in lavender water to help me.’ He nevertheless encouraged the jury to put aside any doubts about the defendant’s sanity, and remained sufficiently stoical to sentence her to death, with an instruction that her body be dissected for the benefit of medical science. Even more lachrymose was the 1777 forgery trial of Dr William Dodd. ‘The judges, the jury, the counsel, the spectators, all the world was bathed in tears,’ observed a bemused German visitor. Horrid though it sounds, the jury convicted after ten minutes and Dodd also hanged without a pardon.
For much of the eighteenth century, courtroom and gallows seemed to complement each other. Foreign visitors to England were repeatedly struck by the contrast between the safeguards of its trials and the brutality of its punishments, but in an era of Georgian gentility, when sentimentality and rigour were different sides of the same moral coin, the English rarely seemed to perceive a contradiction. Just as the pamphleteers began their accounts with the foul deed and ended with its just deserts, courtroom spectators were generally no less eager to see the deadly denouements. But towards the century’s end, the balance finally began to tilt away from executions, and would continue to tip for several more decades. The reason was not that the courtroom contest became even more thrilling. It was that punishments began literally to disappear.
Eighteenth-century thinkers, convinced that sufficiently rational laws could facilitate progress and possibly even perfection, were always fascinated by crime and punishment, and as each escalated in tandem they could not but wonder what was going wrong. Some argued that the brutality was counter-productive – pointing out, for example, that marking convicts by clipping their ears and slitting their nostrils was not likely to assist their employment prospects. Equally common, if more abstruse, was the belief that penalties had become decoupled from the crimes for which they were imposed, and that the symbolic links needed tightening. Thomas Jefferson was among those who took such a view, and in 1778 he drafted a law for Virginia that would have poisoned poisoners and castrated rapists. The American also believed, for reasons which are sadly not recorded, that it was appropriate to drill half-inch holes through the noses of female polygamists. His attempt to rationalize Virginia law was never enacted.
Capital punishment, which almost everyone agreed was not doing enough to deter crime, inspired particular concern. Some argued that its imposition was so capricious as to be useless, and gazed admiringly towards the proverbially enlightened despotisms of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where it had just been abolished. More common was the belief that executions were inherently sound, and that a tad more terror would repair such defects as the system might possess. Britain’s Parliament in 1752 accordingly authorized judges to order the posthumous tarring and chaining of criminals’ corpses, as and when they thought that that would frighten more people for longer. Others envisaged even more