Part 1

The Law’s Lumber Room

The rusty curb of old father antic--the law

FALSTAFF

The Law’s Lumber Room

By Francis Watt

Second Series

John Lane, The Bodley Head London and New York mdcccxcviii

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. At the Ballantyne Press

Prefatory

_This is an entirely distinct book from the first series of the Law’s Lumber Room. The subjects are of more general interest, they are treated with greater fulness of detail, most are as much literary as legal; but I have thought it best to retain the old name. No other seemed so briefly and so truly descriptive of papers which tell what the law and its ways once were, and what they have ceased, one may reasonably suppose, for ever to be._

_I make two remarks. There is a great deal of hanging in this book; that is only because those were hanging times. The law had no thought of mending the criminal; it ended him in the most summary fashion. The death of the chief actors was as inevitably the finish of the story as it is in a modern French novel._

_Again, in pondering those memories of the past, one realises how much, in other things than mechanical invention, our time is unlike all that went before. This is not the commonplace it seems, for not easily do we realise how far the change has gone._

_Under the sway Of Death, the past’s enormous disarray Lies hushed and dark._

_Details such as make up this volume have this merit: they bring the antique world before us, and the net result seems to be this: we lead better lives, we are more just and charitable, perhaps less selfish than our forefathers, but how to deny that something is lost? for life is not so exciting, and our annals are anything but picturesque._

_These papers were originally published in_ The New Review, The Yellow Book, _and_ The Ludgate. _I have made very considerable additions to most of them, and all have been carefully revised._

Contents

PAGE

TYBURN TREE 1

PILLORY AND CART’S TAIL 45

STATE TRIALS FOR WITCHCRAFT 68

A PAIR OF PARRICIDES 88

SOME DISUSED ROADS TO MATRIMONY 116

THE BORDER LAW 152

THE SERJEANT-AT-LAW 185

Tyburn Tree

Its Exact Position not known--Near the Marble Arch--Fanciful Etymologies--The Last Days of the Old-Time Criminal--Robert Dowe’s Bequest--Execution Eve--St. Sepulchre’s Bell--The Procession--St. Giles’s Bowl--At Tyburn--Ketch’s Perquisites--The Newgate Ordinary--The Executioner--Tyburn’s Roll of Fame--Catholic Martyrs--Cromwell’s Head--The Highwaymen--Lord Ferrers--Dr. Dodd--James Hackman--Tyburn in English Letters.

To-day you cannot fix the exact spot where Tyburn Tree raised its uncanny form. To the many it was the most noteworthy thing about Old London, yet while thousands who had gazed thereon in fascinated horror were still in life, a certain vagueness was evident in men’s thoughts, and, albeit antiquaries have keenly debated the _locus_, all the mind is clouded with a doubt, and your carefully worked out conclusion is but guesswork. There is reason manifold for this. Of old time the populous district known as Tyburnia was wild heath intersected by the Tyburn Brook, which, rising near Hampstead, crossed what is now Oxford Street, hard by the Marble Arch, and so on to Chelsea and the Thames. Somewhere on its banks was the Middlesex gallows. It may be that as the tide set westward the site was changed. Again, the wild heath is now thick with houses; new streets and squares have confused the ancient landmarks; those who dwelt therein preferred that there should not be a too nice identification of localities. How startling the reflection that in the very place of your dining-room, thousands of fellow-creatures had dangled in their last agonies! How rest at ease in such a chamber of horrors? The weight of evidence favours (or disfavours) No. 49 Connaught Square. The Bishop of London is ground landlord here; and it is said that in the lease of that house granted by him the fact is recorded that there stood the “Deadly Never-Green.” Such a record were purely gratuitous, but the draftsman may have made it to fix the identity of the dwelling. But to-day the Square runs but to No. 47. Some shuffling of numerals has, you fancy, taken place to baffle indiscreet research. However, you may be informed (in confidence) that you have but to stand at the south-east corner of the Square to be “warm,” as children say in their games.

Let these minutiæ go. Tyburn Tree stood within a gunshot to the north-west of the Marble Arch. Its pictured shape is known from contemporary prints. There were three tall uprights, joined at the top by three cross-beams, the whole forming a triangle. It could accommodate many patients at once, and there is some authority for supposing that the beam towards Paddington was specially used for Roman Catholics. In the last century the nicer age objected to it as an eyesore; and it was replaced by a movable structure, fashioned of two uprights and a cross-beam, which was set up in the Edgware Road at the corner of Bryanston Street, and which, the grim work done, was stored in the corner house, from whose windows the sheriffs superintended executions. To accommodate genteel spectators there were just such stands as you find on a racecourse, the seats whereof were let at divers prices, according to the interest excited. In 1758, for Dr. Henesey’s execution as arch-traitor, the rate rose to two shillings and two and sixpence a seat. The Doctor was “most provokingly reprieved,” whereat the mob in righteous indignation arose and wrecked the stands. Mammy Douglas, a woman who kept the key of one of these stands, was popularly known as “the Tyburn pew-opener.”

Fanciful etymologists played mad pranks with the name. In Fuller’s _Worthies, Tieburne_ is derived on vague authority from “Tie” and “Burne,” because the “poor Lollards” there “had their necks _tied_ to the beame and their lower parts _burnt_ in the fire. Others” (he goes on more sensibly) “will have it called from _Twa_ and _Burne_, that is two rivulets, which it seems meet near the place.” And then it was plainly a _Bourn_ whence no traveller returned! Most probably it is a shortened form of _The_, or _At the Aye Bourne_ (= _’t Aye-bourne_ = _Tyburn_) or Brook already denoted. Tyburn was not always London’s sole or even principal place of execution. In early times people were hanged as well as burned at Smithfield. The elms at St. Giles’s were far too handy a provision to stay idle. At Tower Green was the chosen spot for beheading your high-class criminal, and it was common to put off a malefactor on the very theatre of his malefaction. There are few spots in Old London which have not carried a gallows at one or other time. Some think that certain elm-trees suggested the choice of Tyburn. In the end it proved the most convenient of all, being neither too near nor too far; and in the end its name came to have (as is common with such words) a general application, and was applied at York, Liverpool, Dublin, and elsewhere, to the place of execution.

To-day the criminal’s progress from cell to gallows is an affair of a few minutes. To an earlier time this had savoured of indecent haste. Then, the way to Tyburn, long in itself, was lengthened out by the observance of a complicated ritual, some of it of ancient origin. Let us follow “the poor inhabitant below” from the dock to the rope. To understand what follows one must remember that two distinct sets of forces acted on his mind:--on the one hand, the gloom of the prison, the priest’s advice, the memory of mis-spent days, the horror of doom; on the other, the reaction of a lawless nature against a cruel code, the resolve to die game, the flattering belief that he was the observed of all observers, and perhaps a secret conviction that the unknown could be no worse than the known. According as the one set or other prevailed he was penitent or brazen, the Ordinary’s darling or the people’s joy. Well, his Lordship having assumed the black cap and pronounced sentence of death, the convict was forthwith removed to the condemned hold in Newgate. There he was heavily fettered, and, if of any renown as a prison-breaker, chained to a ring in the ground. Escape was not hopeless. Friends were allowed to visit and supply him with money, wherewith he might bribe his keepers; and the prison discipline, though cruel, was incredibly lax (Jack Sheppard’s two escapes from the condemned hold, carefully described by Ainsworth, are cases in point). To resume, our felon was now frequently visited by the Ordinary, who zealously inquired (from the most interested motives) into his past life, and admonished him of his approaching doom. At chapel o’ Sundays he sat with his fellows in the condemned pew, a large dock-like erection painted black, which stood in the centre, right in front of and close to the ordinary’s desk and pulpit. For his last church-going the condemned sermon was preached, the burial service was read, and prayers were put up “especially for those awaiting the awful execution of the law.” The reprieved also were present, and the chapel was packed with as many spectators as could squeeze their way in.

Now, our old law was not so bad as it seemed. True, the death-penalty was affixed to small offences; but it was comparatively rarely exacted. In looking over Old Bailey sessions-papers of from one to two centuries ago, I am struck with the number of acquittals--brought about, I fancy, by the triviality of the crime, not the innocence of the prisoner--and jurors constantly appraised the articles at twelve pence or under to reduce the offence to petty larceny, which was not capital, and after sentence each case was carefully considered on its merits by the King in Council (the extraordinary care which George III. gave to this matter is well known: he was often found pondering sentences late into the night). Only when the offender was inveterate or his crime atrocious was the death-penalty exacted. In effect, cases now punished by long terms of penal servitude were then ordered for execution. I don’t pretend to say whether or no to-day’s plan may be the more merciful. We have, on the authority of the Newgate Ordinary, a list between 1700 and 1711. Of forty-nine condemned in one year, thirty-six were reprieved and thirteen executed, in another year thirty-eight were condemned, twenty were reprieved, and eighteen were executed; the highest annual return of executions during that period was sixty-six, the lowest five. An Act of 1753 (25 Geo. II., c. 37) provided for the speedy exit and dissection of murderers; but the fate of other felons might hang dubious, as weeks often elapsed without a Privy Council meeting. The Recorder of London brought up the report from Windsor. When it reached Newgate, usually late at night, the condemned prisoners were assembled in one ward. The Ordinary entered in full canonicals and spoke his fateful message to each kneeling wretch. “I am sorry to tell you it is all against you,” would fall on one man’s trembling ears; while “Your case has been taken into consideration by the King and Council and His Majesty has been mercifully pleased to spare your life,” was the comfortable word for another. The reprieved now returned thanks to God and the King; the others, all hope gone, must return to the condemned hold.

There broke in on them here, during the midnight hours on the eve of their execution, the sound of twelve strokes of a hand-bell, the while a doleful voice in doleful rhyme addressed them:

You prisoners that are within, Who for wickedness and sin....

Here the rhyme failed; but in not less dismal prose the voice admonished them that on the morrow “the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre will toll for you in the form and manner of a passing bell”; wherefore it behoved them to repent. In later years the songster procured himself this rigmarole:--

Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die. Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near When you before th’ Almighty must appear. Examine well yourselves; in time repent, That you may not th’ eternal flames be sent. And when St. ’Pulcre’s bell to-morrow tolls, The Lord have mercy on your souls! Past twelve o’clock.

Now this iron nightingale was the sexton or his deputy of St. Sepulchre’s, hard by Newgate; and his chant originated thus. In the early seventeenth century there flourished a certain Robert Dowe, “citizen and merchant taylor of London”; he disbursed much of his estate to various charities, and in especial gave one pound six shillings and eight pence yearly to the sexton of St. Sepulchre’s to approach as near as might be to the condemned hold on execution eve, and admonish malefactors of their approaching end, as if they were likely to forget it, or as if “Men in their Condition cou’d have any stomach to Unseasonable Poetry,” so pertinently observes John Hall (executed about 1708), “the late famous and notorious robber,” or rather the Grub Street hack who compiled his _Memoirs_. The rhymes were, so the same veracious authority assures us, “set to the Tune of the Bar-Bell at the Black Dog,” and their reception varied. Hall and his companions (but again you suspect Grub Street) paid in kind with verse equally edifying, and, if possible, still more atrocious. Most, you fancy, turned again to their uneasy slumbers with muttered curses. Not so Sarah Malcolm, condemned in 1733 for the cruel murder of old Mrs. Duncombe, her mistress. An unseasonable pity for the sexton croaking his platitudes in the raw midnight possessed her mad soul. “D’ye hear, Mr. Bellman?” she bawled, “call for a Pint of Wine, and I’ll throw you a Shilling to pay for it.” How instant his changed note as the coin clinked on the pavement! Alas! no record reports him thus again refreshed.

But _Venit summa dies et ineluctabile fatum_ (a tag you may be sure the Ordinary rolled off to any broken-down scholar he had in hand); and our felon’s last day dawns. He is taken to the Stone Hall, where his irons are struck off; then he is pinioned by the yeoman of the halter, who performs that service for the moderate fee of five shillings (rope thrown in). At the gate he is delivered over to the Hangman (who is not free of the prison), and by him he is set in the cart (a sorry vehicle drawn by a sorry nag in sorry harness), his coffin oft at his feet, and the Ordinary at his side, and so, amidst the yells of a huge mob and to the sad accompaniment of St. Sepulchre’s bell, the cart moves westward. Almost immediately a halt is called. The road is bounded by the wall of St. Sepulchre’s Churchyard, over the which there peers our vocalist of yester-eve, who takes up his lugubrious whine anew:--“All good people pray heartily with God for the poor sinners who are now going to their death,” with more to the same effect, for all which the poor passenger must once more bless or curse the name of the inconsiderately considerate Dowe. He gave his endowment in 1605, seven years before his death: had some mad turn of fate made him an object of his own charity you had scarce grieved. But now the sexton has done his office to the satisfaction of the beadle of Merchant Tailors’ Hall, who “hath an honest stipend allowed him to see that this is duly done,” and the cart is again under weigh, when, if the principal subject be popular, a lady (you assume her beauty, and you need not rake the rubbish of two centuries for witness against her character) trips down the steps of St. Sepulchre’s Church and presents him with a huge nosegay. If nosegays be not in season, “why, then,” as the conjuror assured Timothy Crabshaw, squire to Sir Launcelot Greaves, “an orange will do as well.” And now the cart rumbles down steep and strait Snow Hill, crosses the Fleet Ditch by narrow Holborn Bridge, creaks up Holborn Hill (the “Heavy Hill,” men named it with sinister twin-meaning), and so through Holborn Bars, whilst the bells, first of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and then of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, knell sadly as it passes. In the High Street of the ancient village of that name, Halt! is again the word. Of old time a famous Lazar-House stood here, and hard by those elms of St. Giles, already noted as a place of execution. The simple piety of mediæval times would dispatch no wretch on so long a journey without sustenance. Hence at the Lazar-House gate he was given a huge bowl of ale, his “last refreshing in this life,” whereof he might drink at will. The most gallant of the Elizabethans has phrased for us the felon’s thoughts as he quaffed the strange draught. On that chill October morning when Raleigh went to his doom at Westminster, some one handed him “a cup of excellent sack,” courteously inquiring how he liked it? “As the fellow,” he answered with a last touch of Elizabethan wit, “that drinking of St. Giles’s bowl as he went to Tyburn, said:--‘That were good drink if a man might tarry by it.’” The Lazar went, but the St. Giles’s bowl lingered, only no longer a shaven monk, but the landlord of the Bowl or the Crown, or what not, handed up the liquor.

Bowl Yard, which vanished into Endell Street, long preserved the memory of this “last refreshing.” At York a like custom prevailed, whereof local tradition recorded a quaint apologue. The saddler of Bawtry needs must hang--why and wherefore no man knoweth. To the amazement and horror of all he most churlishly refused the proffered bowl. Pity was but wasted (so our forefathers thought) on such a fellow. Before a dry-eyed crowd he was strung up with the utmost dispatch, but a reprieve arriving, was cut down just as quickly. All too late, however! He was done with this world. Had he but reasonably tarried, as others did, for his draught, he had died in his bed like many a better man. Hence the rustic moralist taught how the saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving of his ale. The compilers of the Sunday school treatises have scandalously neglected this leading case of lost opportunities. Nay, though a pearl “richer than all his tribe,” you shall search the works of Dr. Smiles for it in vain.

But the day wears on, and our procession must farther westward along Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street). It is soon quit of houses; yet the crowd grows ever denser, and, though Tyburn Tree stands out grim and gaunt in our view, it is some time ere the cart pulls up under the beam. Soon the halter is fixed, and the parson says his last words to the trembling wretch. And now it is proper for him to address the crowd, confessing his crimes, and warning others to amend their ways. If a broken-down cleric or the like, his last devotions and dying speech are apt to be prosy and inordinate; so that the mob jeers or even pelts him and his trusty Ketch himself. Or “some of the Sheriff’s officers discovering impatience to have the execution dispatched” (thus Samuel Smith, the Ordinary of a case in 1684), Jack cuts things short by whipping up his horses and leaves his victim dangling and agape. More decorously the cap is drawn over his face, and he himself gives the signal to turn off. The Hangman, if in genial mood, now stretches the felon’s legs for him, or thumps his breast with the benevolent design of expelling the last breath; but the brute is usually too lazy or too careless, and these pious offices are performed by friends.

The accessories of such a last scene are preserved in Hogarth’s _Apprentice_ Series. One of the crowd is picking a pocket, and you foresee him ending here some day soon. (Is it not told of one rascal, that he urged on the attendants his right to a near view, since, sure of hanging some day, he naturally wished to see how it was done?) Another in the crowd is bawling, a trifle prematurely, the last speech and dying confession of Thomas Idle. Verses commemorative of the occasion were sold broadcast. “Tyburn’s elegiac lines,” as you may suppose, were sad doggerel. Here is the concluding portion of a specimen (_temp. circa_ 1720):

Fifteen of us you soon will see Ending our days with misery At the Tree, at the Tree.

Even at Tyburn, how hard to renounce all hope! There was ever the chance of a reprieve. There is at least one well-authenticated case of a man making a sudden bolt from the cart, and almost escaping; and, as the _modus_ was simple strangulation, and the Hangman careless or corrupt, it was just possible that heroic remedies might restore to animation. On December 12, 1705, John Smith was turned off, and hung for a quarter of an hour. A reprieve arriving, he was cut down, and coaxed back to life. More remarkable was the case of William Duell, in 1740. To all appearance thoroughly well hanged, he was carried off for dissection to Surgeons’ Hall, where he presently recovered himself. He was, somewhat cruelly, restored to Newgate, but was let off with transportation. The law was not always so merciful. In another case, the sheriff’s officers, having heard that their prey was again alive and kicking, hunted the wretch out, haled him back to Tyburn, and hanged him beyond the possibility of doubt. The rumour of such marvels inspired many attempts at resuscitation. I fancy about one per cent. were successful, but how to tell, since the instance just quoted shows that such triumphs were better concealed?

Now, the _corpus_ is essential to the _experimentum_, so half an hour after the turning off, the friends bring up a deal coffin, borne across an unhinged coach door or any such make-shift bier. But Ketch is still in possession: the clothes are Hangman’s perquisites, and must be purchased. How the greedy rascal appreciates the value of each button, dwells on the splendour of each sorry ornament, watching the while and gauging the impatience of the buyers! Never went second-hand duds at such a figure! Sometimes he overreaches himself, or no one comes forward to bid. Then the corpse is rudely stripped, “and the Miscellany of Rags are all crushed into a sack which the Valet de Chambre carries on purpose, and being digested into Monmouth Street, Chick Lane, &c., are comfortably worn by many an industrious fellow.” And sometimes the law claims the body to be removed and hung in chains.

In cases of treason, the felon was drawn to Tyburn in a sledge tied to a horse’s tail; he was hanged from the cart; but was cut down and dismembered alive. His head went to the adornment of Temple Bar or London Bridge; while his quarters, having been boiled in oil and tar in a cauldron in Jack Ketch’s Kitchen, as the room above the central gateway at Newgate was called, were scattered here and there as the authorities fancied. The complete ritual of disgrace was reserved for political offenders. After rebellions Ketch had his hands full. He would tumble out of his sack good store of heads wherewith he and the Newgate felons made hideous sport, preliminary to parboiling them with bay salt and cummin seed: the one for preservation, the other sovereign against the fowls of the air. If the traitor were a woman, she was burned (till 1790); but usually strangled first. Cases are on record where, with a fire too quick or a Hangman too clumsy, the choking proved abortive and----! The sledge so often supplanted the less ignominious cart, that I ought to explain that a traitor need not be a political offender. Certain coining offences, the murder of a husband by his wife, and of a master by his servant, were all ranked a form of treason, and the criminal was drawn and quartered or burnt accordingly.