CHAPTER VI.
EXECUTIONS.
Reasons for legal punishments—Early forms: branding, mutilation, whipping, the pillory, and stocks—Penalties for females: the ducking-stool, branks, and scourge—Capital punishment universal—Methods of inflicting death—Awful cruelties—The English custom—Pressing to death—Major Strangways—Spiggot and Burnworth—Abolition of this punishment—Decapitation and strangulation—The guillotine and gallows—Places of execution in London: Smithfield, St. Giles, Tower Hill, Tyburn—Derivation of Tyburn—Site of Tyburn gallows—Tyburn a generic title—An execution in 1662: that of Colonel Turner—Crowds at executions—Fashionable folk attend—George Selwyn—Breakfast party at Newgate—Ribald conduct of the mob at executions—That of Earl Ferrers and of Sheppard—Demeanour of condemned: effrontery, or abject terror—Improper customs long retained—St. Giles’ Bowl—Saddler of Bawtry—Smoking at Tyburn—Spiritual attentions of Ordinary not always devoted—Amateur preachers and others assist—Richard Dove’s bequest—The hangman and his office—Resuscitation—Early cases—Sir William Petty’s operation—Tyburn procession continues—Supported by Dr. Johnson—Sheriffs suggest discontinuance—Their reasons—The front of Newgate substituted as the scene of execution.
THE universal instinct of self-preservation underlies the whole theory of legal punishments. Society, since men congregated together, has claimed through its rulers to inflict penalties upon those who have broken the laws framed for the protection of all. These penalties have varied greatly in all ages and in all times. They have been based on different principles. Many, especially in ruder and earlier times, have been conceived in a vindictive spirit; others, notably those of the Mosaic law, were retaliatory, or aimed at restitution. All, more or less, were intended also to deter from crime. The criminal had generally to pay in his person or his goods. He was either subjected to physical pain applied in degrading, often ferociously cruel ways, and endured mutilation, or was branded, tortured, put to death; he was mulcted in fines, deprived of liberty, or adjudged as a slave to indemnify by manual labour those whom he had wronged. Imprisonment as practised in modern times has followed from the last-named class of punishments. Although affecting the individual, and in many of its phases with brutal and reckless disregard for human suffering, it can hardly be styled a purely personal punishment, upon which I propose now more particularly to treat, and the present chapter will deal only with penalties corporeal.
Taking first the punishments which fell short of death, those most common in this country until comparatively recent times, were branding, mutilation, dismemberment, whipping, and degrading public exposure. Branding was often carried out with circumstances of atrocious barbarity. Vagabonds were marked with the letter V, idlers and masterless men with the letter S, betokening a condemnation to slavery; any church brawler lost his ears, and for a second offence might be branded with the letter F, as a fraymaker and fighter. Sometimes the penalty was to bore a hole of the compass of an inch through the gristle of the right ear. Branding was the commutation of a capital sentence on clerk convicts, or persons allowed benefit of clergy, and it was inflicted upon the brawn of the left thumb, the letter M being used in murder cases, the letter T in others. In the reign of William and Mary, when the privilege of benefit of clergy was found to be greatly abused, an Act was passed, by which the culprit was branded or “burnt in the most visible part of the left cheek nearest the nose.” Mutilation was an ancient Saxon punishment, no doubt perpetuating the Mosaic law of retaliation which claimed an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a limb for a limb. William the Conqueror adopted it in his penal code. It was long put in force against those who broke the forestry laws, coiners, thieves, and such as failed to prove their innocence by ordeal. Although almost abandoned by the end of the sixteenth century, the penalty of mutilation, extending to the loss of the right hand, still continued to be punishment for murder and bloodshed within the limits of a royal residence. The most elaborate ceremonial was observed. All the hierarchy of court officials attended; there was the sergeant of the woodyard, the master cook to hand the dressing-knife, the sergeant of the poultry, the yeoman of the scullery with a fire of coals, the sergeant farrier who heated and delivered the searing irons, which were applied by the chief surgeon after the dismemberment had been effected. Vinegar, basin, and cloths were handed to the operator by the groom of the salcery, the sergeant of the ewry, and the yeoman of the chandrey. “After the hand had been struck off and the stump seared, the sergeant of the pantry offered bread, and the sergeant of the cellar a pot of red wine, of which the sufferer was to partake with what appetite he might.”[104] Readers of Sir Walter Scott will remember how Nigel Olifaunt, in the ‘Fortunes of Nigel,’ was threatened with the loss of his hand for having committed a breach of privilege in the palace of Greenwich and its precincts. Pistols are found on his person when he accidentally meets and accosts James I. For the offence he may be prosecuted; so Sir Mungo Malagrowther complacently informs him, usque ad mutilationem even to dismemberation. The occasion serves the garrulous knight to refer to a recent performance, “a pretty pageant when Stubbs the Puritan was sentenced to mutilation for writing and publishing a seditious pamphlet against Elizabeth. With Stubbs, Page the publisher also suffered. They lost their right hands,” the wrist being divided by a cleaver driven through the joint by the force of a mallet. “I remember,” says the historian Camden,[105] “being then present,
Robert Ockam in the Pillory
that Stubbs, when his right hand was cut off, plucked off his hat with his left, and said with a loud voice, ‘God save the Queen.’ The multitude standing about was deeply silent, either out of horror of this new and unwonted kind of punishment, or out of commiseration towards the man. …” The process of mutilation was at times left to the agonized action of the culprit: as in the brutal case of one Penedo, who in 1570, for counterfeiting the seal of the Court of Queen’s Bench, was twice put in the pillory on market-day in Cheapside. The first day one of his ears was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner that he should be compelled “by his own proper motion” to tear it away; and on the second day he was to lose his other ear in the same cruel fashion. William Prynne, it will be remembered, also lost his ears on the pillory, but at the hands of the executioner. The Earl of Dorset, in giving the sentence of the Star Chamber Court, asked his fellow-judges “whether he should burn him in the forehead, or slit him in the nose? … I should be loth he should escape with his ears; … therefore I would have him branded in the forehead, slit in the nose, and his ears cropt too.” Having suffered all this on the pillory, he was again punished three years later, when he lost the remainder of his ears, and was branded with the letters S. L. (seditious libeller) on each cheek. Dr. Bastwick and others were similarly treated.[106] Prynne was a voluminous writer, and is said to have produced some two hundred volumes in all. A contemporary, who saw him in the pillory at Cheapside, says “they burnt his huge volumes under his nose, which almost suffocated him.”
Although mutilations and floggings were frequently carried out at the pillory, that well-known