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:

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:—

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):

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.

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:—

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

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—

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:

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.