Part 2

Two of Tyburn’s officials, the Ordinary and the Hangman, to wit, now claim our attention. The Ordinary, or prison chaplain of Newgate, said “Amen” to the death sentence, and ministered to the convict thence to the end. A terrible duty, to usher your fellow-man from this world into the next! I have heard that one such task near proved fatal to an honest divine; but the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense, and too often the Newgate Ordinary was a callous wretch, with a keen zeal for the profits of his post, and for the rest a mere praying machine. He needs must be good trencherman. It was one of his strange duties to say grace at City banquets. Major Griffiths, who collects so many curious facts in his _Chronicles of Newgate_, alleges him not seldom required to eat three consecutive dinners without quitting the table. In post-Tyburn days, when they hanged in front of the prison, the governor’s daughter used to prepare breakfast for those attending each execution (the _deid clack_, so they called such festivity in Old Scotland). Broiled kidneys were her masterpiece, and she noted that, whilst most of her pale-faced guests could stomach nought save brandy and water, his reverence attacked the dish as one appetised by a prosperous morning’s work. Most Ordinaries are clean gone from memory, unrecorded even by _The Dictionary of National Biography_. One (as fly in amber!) the chance reference of a classic now and again preserves.

E’en Guthrie spares half Newgate by a dash,

sneers Pope, referring to an alleged habit of merely giving initials. I have turned over a fair number of the Reverend James Guthrie’s accounts of criminals. In those he always writes the name in full. The witty though himself forgotten Tom Brown scribbles the epitaph of the Reverend Samuel Smith, another Ordinary:--

Whither he’s gone Is not certainly known, But a man may conclude, Without being rude, That orthodox Sam His flock would not shame. And to show himself to ’em a pastor most civil, As he led, so he followed ’em on to the d----l.

And there were the Reverend Thomas Purney, and the Reverend John Villette, but these be well-nigh empty names. We know most about the Reverend Paul Lorrain, who was appointed in 1698, and died in 1719, leaving the respectable fortune of £5000. A typical Ordinary of the baser sort this; a greedy, gross, sensual wretch, who thrived and grew fat on the perquisites of his office. Among these was a broadsheet, published at eight o’clock the morning after a hanging. It was headed, “The Ordinary of Newgate, his Account of the Behaviour, Confessions, and Last Speeches of the Malefactors who were executed at Tyburn, the--.” It gave the names and sentences of the convicts, copious notes of the sermons (of the most wooden type) he preached at them, biographies, and confessions, and finally the scenes at the gallows. Let the up-to-date journalist cherish Lorrain’s name. He was an early specimen of the personal interviewer: he had the same keen scent for unsavoury detail, the same total disregard for the feelings or wishes of his victim, the same readiness to betray confidence; and he had his subject at such an advantage! You imagine the sanctimonious air wherewith he produced his notebook and invited the wretch’s statement. With the scene at Tyburn variety in detail was impossible. “Afterwards the Cart drew away, and they were turn’d off,” is his formula. You had a good twopenn’orth, such was his usual modest charge! The first page top was embellished with two cuts: on the left Old Newgate Archway, on the right Tyburn Tree. (Gurney affected a quainter design, wherein he stood, in full canonicals in the centre pointing the way to Heaven, whilst on his left the Fiend, furnished with a trident, squirmed in a bed of flames.) The broadsheet was authenticated by his signature.

Now, two things made the Reverend Paul exceeding wroth. One was the issue of pirated confessions, which were “a great Cheat and Imposture upon the World,” and they would not merely forge his name but mis-spell it to boot! His is “the only true _Account_ of the Dying Criminals,” he urgently, and no doubt truly, asserts. All this touched his pocket, hence his ire, which blazed no less against the unrepentant malefactor, who--a scarce less grievous offence--touched his professional pride. He did not mince words:--“he was a Notorious and Hard-hearted Criminal,” or afflicted with brutish ignorance or of an obstinate and hardened disposition. “There is,” he would pointedly remark, “_a Lake of Brimstone, a Worm that dies not, and a Fire which shall never be quenched_. And this I must plainly tell you, that will be your dismal portion there for ever, unless you truly Repent here in time.” And after “Behaviour” in the title of his broadsheets, he would insert, in parentheses, “or rather Misbehaviour.” Most of his flock, stupid with terror, passively acquiesced in everything he said. These “Lorrain saints,” as Steele called them, received ready absolution at his hands and their reported end was most edifying. But in James Sheppard (the Jacobite), who suffered March 17, 1718, for treason, Lorrain had a most vexatious subject. A non-juring divine, “that Priest or Jesuit, or Wolf in Sheep’s clothing,” as the Rev. Paul describes him, attended the convict, and the Ordinary’s services were quite despised. The intruder, “e’en at the _Gallows_, had the Presumption to give him Publick Absolution, tho’ he visibly dy’d without Repentance.” Dr. Doran assures us that, on the way to Tyburn, Paul and his supplanter came to fisticuffs, and our Ordinary was unceremoniously kicked from the cart. One would like to believe this entertaining legend, for “the great historiographer,” as Pope and Bolingbroke sarcastically dub him, grows less in your favour the more you scan his sheets. His account of Sheppard concludes with the most fulsome professions of loyalty to the King and the Protestant Succession, for which he is ready to sacrifice his life. You note that he was charged with administering the sacrament for temporal ends, some scandal apparently of shamful traffic in the elements. There is no proof--indeed, we have nothing to go on but his own denial; but it shows the gossip whereof he was the centre. He had ingenious methods of spreading his sale. Thus he tells his readers that a fuller account of a special case will be published along with that of prisoners that go for execution to-morrow. In the case of Nathaniel Parkhurst, hanged May 20, 1715, for the murder of Count Lewis Pleuro, he actually reports the convict on the eve of his execution cracking up in advance the report which his ghostly comforter will presently publish! Strange advertisements fill up the odd corners of his broadsheets. Here he puffs a manual of devotion by himself; there the virtue of a quack medicine, some sovran remedy for colic, gout, toothache, “The Itch or any Itching Humour.” Again, you have “The works of Petronius Arbiter, with Cuts and a Key,” or “Apuleius’s Golden Ass,” or some lewd publication of the day. Even if the advertisements were Paul’s publishers’, how strange the man and the time that suffered so incongruous a mixture! Our Ordinary petitioned parliament that his precious broadsheets might go free of the paper tax, by reason of their edifying nature!

Turn we now to the Hangman. No rare figure _his_ in Old England! Only in later years was he individualised. In James I.’s time a certain Derrick filled the office. The playwrights keep his memory green, and the crane so called is said to take its name from him. Then there came Gregory Brandon, who had “a fair coat of arms,” and the title of esquire in virtue of his office. This was through a mad practical joke of York Herald, who, perceiving a solemn ass in Garter King-at-Arms, sent him in the papers somewhat ambiguously worded, and got the grant in due form. York and Garter were presently laid by the heels in the Marshalsea, “one for foolery, the other for knavery.”

Gregory was succeeded by his son, also called Gregory, though his real name was Richard. His infantile amusement was the heading of cats and dogs, his baby fingers seemed ever adjusting imaginary halters on invisible necks; he was “the destined heir, From his soft cradle, to his father’s chair”--or rather cart and ladder. The younger Brandon was, it seems quite certain, the executioner of Charles I. Then followed Edward, commonly known as Esquire Dun, and then the renowned Jack Ketch, who went to his ghastly work with so callous a disregard for human suffering, or, as some fancied, with such monstrous glee, that his name, becoming the very synonym for hangman, clave to all his successors. He “flourished” 1663-1686. Dryden calls him an “excellent physician,” and commemorates him more than once in his full-resounding line. Some held Catch his true patronymic and Ketch a corruption of Jacquet, the family name of those who held the Manor of Tyburn during a great part of the seventeenth century, but this, however ingenious, seems too far-fetched. The original Jack was ungracious and surly even beyond the manner of his kind. In January 1686, for insolence to the sheriffs, “he was deposed and committed to Bridewell.” Pascha Rose, a butcher, succeeded but getting himself hanged in May Ketch was reinstated. It is recorded that he struck for higher pay--and got it too. You might fancy that any one could adjust the “Tyburn Tippet,” or “the riding knot an inch below the ear.” But the business called for its own special knack. In the _History of the Press-yard_ the Hangman is represented, after the suppression of the 1715 Rising, as cheerfully expectant, “provided the king does not unseasonably spoil my market by reprieves and pardons.” He will receive ample douceurs “for civility-money in placing their halters’ knot right under their left ear, and separating their quarters with all imaginable decency.” Ketch’s fancy hovered between a noble and a highwayman. My Lord was never stingy with tips; ’twere unseasonable and quite against the traditions of his order. And the foppery of the other made him a bird worth plucking. I do not pretend to give a complete catalogue of these rascals, yet two others I must mention: John Price (1718) was arrested for murder as he was escorting, it is said, a felon to Tyburn. It was a brutal business, and he richly deserved the halter. He got it too! John Dennis led the attack on Newgate in the Lord George Gordon No-Popery Riots (_temp._ 1780, but of course you remember your _Barnaby Rudge_). He was like to have swung himself, but was continued in his old occupation on condition of stringing up his fellow-rioters. Of old time the Hangman was (we are assured) sworn on the Book to dispatch every criminal without favour to father or relative or friend; and he was then dismissed with this formula:--“Get thee hence, wretch.” I have noted the unwillingness to admit him into Newgate--his wages were paid over the gate--and the sorry condition of his equipage. This last gave a grotesque touch to his progress, readily seized on by the jeering mob, which had ever a curse or a missile for the scowling wretch.

In the centuries of its horrible virility, the Tree at Tyburn slew its tens of thousands. A record of famous cases would fill volumes. I can but note a very few. The earliest recorded, though they cannot have been the first, were those of Judge Tressilian and Nicholas Brembre, in February 1388. Their offence was high treason, which meant in that primitive time little more than a political difference with the authorities. This Brembre had been four times Mayor of London. He proposed some startling innovations in the city, one being to change its name to New Troy (Geoffrey of Monmouth perchance had turned his head). Here ended Perkin Warbeck, that “little cockatrice of a king” on whom Bacon lavishes such wealth of vituperative rhetoric, after abusing Henry VII.’s generosity more than once. The savagery of Henry VIII. kept the executioner busy, and he of Tyburn had his full share. On May 4, 1535, in open defiance to every past tradition, the King caused hang and quarter Haughton, the last prior of the Charterhouse, in his sacerdotal robes, without any previous ceremony of degradation, after which “his arm was hung as a bloody sign over the archway of the Charterhouse.” In 1581, under Elizabeth, Campion and Harte continued the long line of catholic martyrs. Campion had been so cruelly racked that he could not hold up his hand to plead without assistance, yet he maintained his courage through the raw December morning whereon he suffered. At Tyburn they vexed him with long discussions; but at last, while he was yet praying for Elizabeth, the cart drove away. Many of his disciples stood round. They fought for relics which the authorities were determined they should not have, so that a young man having dipped his handkerchief in the blood was forthwith arrested. In the confusion some one cut off a finger and conveyed it away. Some one else offered twenty pounds for a finger-joint, but the hangman dared not let it go. The fevered imagination of Campion’s adorers saw wondrous signs. Some pause in the flow of the Thames was noted on that day, and was ascribed thereto. The river

Awhile astonished stood To count the drops of Campion’s sacred blood.

Campion himself had long a presentiment of his fate, which, considering the desperate nature of his mission, was not wonderful; and when occasion took him past the Triple Tree he was moved to uncover his head. Southwell, the “sweet singer” of the Catholic reaction, told the end of his friend in a little work printed at Douay, but in English, and of course for English circulation; and in 1595 Southwell followed his brother priest. His followers noted that, when his heart was torn out, “it leaped from the dissector’s hand and, by its thrilling, seemed to repel the flames.” A strange legend--not quite baseless, Mr. Gardner thinks--shows the effect of such scenes on the Catholic mind. Henrietta Maria, Charles I.’s queen, walked barefoot to Tyburn, as to a shrine, at dead of night, and did penance under the gallows for the sins of her adopted country. A felon of a very different order was Mrs. Turner, who suffered (November 14, 1615) for complicity in Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder. She had invented yellow starch, and my Lord Coke with a fine sense of the picturesque ordained her to hang “in her yellow Tinny Ruff and Cuff.” She dressed the part gallantly; “her face was highly rouged, and she wore a cobweb lawn ruff, yellow starched.” The Hangman had also yellow bands and cuffs, he tied her hands with a black silk ribbon herself had provided, as well as a black veil for her face. Being turned off, she seemed to die quietly. But yellow starch went hopelessly out of fashion!

After the Restoration, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were dug up at Westminster, removed at night to the Red Lion Inn, Holborn, drawn next morning (January 30, 1661), the anniversary of Charles’s death, to Tyburn, and there hanged in their shrouds on the three wooden posts of the gallows. At nightfall they were taken down and beheaded; the bodies being there buried, whilst the heads adorned Westminster Hall. Noll had his picturesque historians before Carlyle. A wild tale arose that his original funeral at the Abbey had been but a mock ceremonial; for his body, according to his own instructions, had been secretly removed to Naseby, and buried at nightfall on the scene of that victory. Even if we disregard this legend, the subsequent adventures of Cromwell’s head have been a matter of as much concern to antiquaries as ever the Royal Martyr’s was to Mr. Dick.

Time would fail to narrate the picturesque and even jovial exits of those “curled darlings” of the _Tyburn Calendar or Malefactors’ Bloody Register_ (or any other form of the _Newgate Chronicle_), those idols of the popular imagination, the Caroline and Georgian highwaymen. Swift pictures the very ideal in _Clever Tom Clinch_, who--

... while the rabble was bawling, Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling; He stopped at the George for a bottle of sack, And promised to pay for it--when he came back. His waistcoat and stockings and breeches were white. His cap had a new cherry-ribbon to tie’t; And the maids to the doors and the balconies ran, And cried “Lack-a-day! he’s a proper young man!”

But how to summarise the infinite variety of detail? To tell how, when Claude Duval swung (January 21, 1670) Ladies of Quality looked on in tears and masks; how he lay in more than royal state in Tangier Tavern, St. Giles’s; and how they carved on his stone “in the centre aisle of Covent Garden Church,” the pattern of a highwayman’s epitaph:

Here lies Du Vall: reader, if male thou art, Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart.

How the mob bolted with Jack Sheppard’s body (November 16, 1724) to save the “bonny corp” from the surgeon’s knife! How Jonathan Wild, “the Great” (May 24, 1725), during the finishing touches picked the Ordinary’s pocket of his corkscrew, and was turned off with it still in his hand (thus Fielding: Purney was the ordinary. _His_ account is quite different), to the unspeakable delight of that enormous body of spectators, to which Sheppard’s two hundred thousand onlookers were (Defoe assures us) no more to be compared than is a regiment to an army. How Sixteen-string Jack (November 30, 1774), his “bright pea-green coat” and “immense nosegay” were almost _too_ magnificent even for so noble an occasion. Alas! not ours to dwell on such details; let the brave rogues go!

I cull one instance from the peerage. Earl Ferrers suffered at Tyburn (May 5, 1760) for the death of Johnson, his land steward. He dressed in his wedding clothes, “a suit of white and silver”: “as good an occasion,” he observed, “for putting them on, as that for which they were first made” (his treatment of his wife had indirectly brought about the murder). Every consideration was paid to my Lord’s feelings: “A landau with six horses” was _his_ Tyburn cart, and a silk rope _his_ “anodyne necklace”; and yet things did not go smoothly. The mob was so enormous that the journey took three hours. It was far worse than hanging, he protested to the sheriffs. His very handsome tip of five guineas was handed by mistake to the Hangman’s man, and an unseemly altercation ensued. My Lord toed the line with anxious care. “Am I right?” were his last words. The accurate fall of the drop must have satisfied him that he was.

I must not neglect the clergy. Here the leading case is obviously that of Dr. Dodd, hanged for forgery (June 27, 1777). The strange ups and down of his life (“he descended so low as to become the editor of a newspaper”) are not for this page. The maudlin piety of his last days is no pleasant spectacle. Dr. Newton, Bishop of Bristol, thought him deserving of pity “because hanged for the least crime he had committed.” Dr. Samuel Johnson did all he could to save him; also wrote his address to the judge (sentence had been respited) in reply to the usual question, as well as the sermon he delivered in Newgate Chapel three weeks before the end. The King sternly refused a reprieve. No doubt he was right. The very manner of the deed seems to argue not a first, only a first discovered, offence. His doggerel _Thoughts in Prison_ is his chief literary crime. He went in a coach. His “considerable time in praying,” and “several showers of rain,” rendered the mob somewhat impatient. He was assisted by two clergymen. One was very much affected; “the other, I suppose, was the Ordinary, as he was perfectly indifferent and unfeeling in everything he said and did.” Villette was then Ordinary. He wrote an account (after the most approved pattern) of Dodd’s unhappy end. The pair had spent much time together in Newgate, and one hopes the report of Villette’s behaviour is mistaken or inaccurate, though it is that of an eye-witness, a correspondent of George Selwyn himself an enthusiastic amateur of executions, who, when he had a tooth drawn, let fall his handkerchief _à la Tyburn_, as a signal for the operation. James Boswell had a like craze. He went in a mourning coach with the Rev. James Hackman when that divine was hanged (April 19, 1779) for the murder of Miss Reay. When Hackman let fall the handkerchief for signal it fell _outside_ the cart, and Ketch with an eye to small perquisites jumped down to secure it _before_ he whipped up the horse. These are all names more or less known. There are hundreds of curious incidents connected with obscure deaths. Here are a few samples:--In 1598 “some mad knaves took tobacco all the way as they went to be hanged at Tyburn.” In 1677, a woman and “a little dog ten inches high” were hanged side by side as accomplices--“a hideous prospect,” comments our chronicler. In 1684 Francis Kirk, having murdered his wife, must end at Tyburn. Shortly before he had seen a fellow hanged there for making away with _his_ spouse; and this, he confessed, had inspired him!

One John Austin had the distinction of being the last person executed at Tyburn (November 7, 1783). Reformers had long denounced the procession as a public scandal. The sheriffs had some doubts as to their powers; but the judges, being consulted, assured them they could end it an they would. A month after (December 9, 1783) the gallows was at work in front of Newgate, and Old London lost its most exciting spectacle. Dr. Johnson frankly regretted the change:--“Executions are intended to draw spectators, if they do not draw spectators they lose their reason. The old method was more satisfactory to all parties. The public was gratified by a procession, the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?” In truth, the change of scene was an illogical compromise: the picturesque effect was gone--save for an occasional touch, as after Holling’s execution, when the dead hand was thrust into a woman’s bosom, to remove a mark or wen--the disorderly mob remained, nay, was a greater scandal at the centre than in the suburbs. Dickens is but one of many writers who knowing their London well described the unedifying walk and talk of the crowd before Newgate; and in 1868 private was substituted for public execution throughout the land. I do not criticise any system: I do but point out that of the two sets of opposing forces noted as working on the criminal’s mind, the latter, in a private execution, is entirely suppressed.

Tyburn and its memories, its criminals, its Hangmen, its Ordinaries, filled a great space in popular imagination, and have frequent mention in our great writers. Shakespeare himself has “The shape of Love’s Tyburn”; and Dryden’s “Like thief and parson in a Tyburn cart” is a stock quotation. But I cannot string a chaplet of these pearls. Yet two phrases I must explain. A felon who “prayed his clergy” was during some centuries branded on the crown of his thumb with the letter T, ere he was released, to prevent a second use of the plea. This was called, in popular slang, the Tyburn T. Ben Jonson was so branded (October, 1598) for killing Gabriel Spencer, the actor, in a duel. Again a statute of 1698 (10 Will. III. c. 12), provided for those who prosecuted a felon to conviction a certificate freeing them from certain parochial duties. This was known as a “Tyburn ticket.” It had a certain money value, because if unused it could be assigned once. The privilege was abolished in 1827 (7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 27), but it was allowed as late as 1856 to a certain Mr. Pratt, of Bond Street, who by showing his ticket (which must have been thirty years old) escaped service on an Old Bailey jury.

Pillory and Cart’s-Tail