Alfred Marks

“ THE EXECUTION OF EARL FERRERS AT TYBURN ON THE NEW MOVABLE GALLOWS, 1760.
The experience gained by the State during six centuries of hanging enabled it to make two immense advances in the art. To the great Elizabethan era we owe the invention of a machine on which a number of victims, up to at least twenty-four, could be simultaneously choked out of life. This enabled the spectators to concentrate their attention on one spot, and therefore to lose not one jot of the moral lesson inculcated with so great pains. ”

“ Looking back down the long vista of six hundred years, we see an innumerable crowd faring to their death from the Tower of London or from the prison of Newgate to the chief of English Aceldamas, the field of blood known as Tyburn. ”

“ And when the criminal saw that an irrevocable sentence threatened him, he said: “Death threatens me, nor can Sir John save me. Now will I tell the truth to all of you. Almost all the Jews of England consented to the boy’s death of which they are accused. And from almost every city of England in which Jews dwell, certain men, chosen for the purpose, came to the immolation of the child, as to a sacrifice of Passover.”
When he had said other hateful things, he was made fast to the tail of a horse and drawn to the gallows, and given over body and soul to the evil demons of the air. ”

“ Only in 1759, after an existence of near six hundred and fifty years, did the permanent gallows of Tyburn give place to a movable gallows, put up on the day of an execution and afterwards taken down. It is not a little strange that a monument of great antiquity, so well known, recalling so many tragedies, so intimately connected with the history and life of the people, should have been allowed to disappear without a word or a curse. ”

“ For hundreds of years only a single figure emerges here and there from the throng. During a few decades only of the history of Tyburn do we see clearly and in detail the figures in these dismal processions. They go, in batches of ten, fifteen, twenty, laughing boys, women with children at the breast, highwaymen decked out in gay clothes for this last scene of glory; men and women drunk, cursing, praying. ”

“ James Gibson, attorney-at-law, convicted of forgery, and Benjamin Payne, footpad, were executed at Tyburn. For a long time, as has been shown, the “respectability” of criminals had been recognised by permitting them to be carried to their doom in a mourning coach, instead of in the ordinary cart. To Gibson, as the erring member of an honoured profession, this indulgence was granted. Gibson desired that the footpad might be allowed to accompany him in the coach. There is something pathetic in this practical recognition of the truth that death makes all men equal. ”

“ Of old time Dunning, operating in the forests of Ciltria, too often took the life as well as the money of his victims. There is to-day no need of violence, and as all that a man has will he give for his life, the improvement of method is beneficial to the community generally. Thus all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Little could the pioneers foresee of the triumphs of their successors. “William the Sacrist,” if William it was who planned the robbery of the King’s treasury in 1303, perhaps the greatest burglary ever attempted, must have been a man of the highest genius. ”

“ The politicians, Lord Shaftesbury at their head, were not slow to see the advantage to be gained by playing upon the credulity of the people.
The word went round that the plot must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or not. It soon became dangerous to express doubt. To do this was to incur the certain danger of being reckoned a papist, a concealed papist, one inclined to popery; and the prison or the gallows was the fate of the doubter. The courts sat merely to condemn men denounced by Oates and his gang. Three men were hanged at Tyburn as guilty of the murder of Godfrey. ”

“ Less than a hundred years ago, ministers stoutly defended their privilege of tearing out a man’s bowels and burning them before his eyes. The State devised and executed hideous punishments, sometimes made still more hideous by the ferocity of its instruments, the judges. All mitigation of these punishments has been forced on the State by “idealists.” [vi] The State dragged its victims, almost naked, three miles over a rough road. The hands of compassionate friars placed the sufferer on a hurdle—not without threats of punishment for so doing. In the end, the State adopted the hurdle. ”

“ For this century and down to the year 1535, I have, I think, given all the Tyburn tragedies recorded by the old chroniclers. The explanation of this meagreness is, that the chroniclers noted only executions arising out of political incidents or out of social incidents of extraordinary interest: only in times comparatively late do we get glimpses of the work done by the gallows on small offenders. All through the long era of religious persecutions we hear little of ordinary criminals: only now and again some number is mentioned of those executed or tumbled into a pit together with a priest. ”

“ Hanging was not greatly in favour with those whom we must, in spite of objections, call the Anglo-Saxons. Various fanciful definitions of Time have been given. According to Goethe, it is on the roaring loom of Time that the Earth-Spirit weaves the living garments of God. According to Carlyle, Time is the outer veil of Eternity. These poetical definitions seem to have little or no practical value. They would convey nothing, for instance, to the time-keeper of a wharf or great warehouse. It has been reserved for our race to give a definition of real solid value: “Time is money.” ”

“ A person so convicted is executed by the common hangman in the simple manner invented long ago by some one who discovered that a rope tied about a man’s neck is held in position by the projecting mass of the head.
In old times the country swarmed with courts of inferior jurisdiction, each, however, with the power of hanging thieves. There is a satirical story telling how a man who had suffered shipwreck scrambled up a cliff, and, seeing a gallows, fell on his knees, and thanked God [7] that he found himself in a Christian country. ”

“ In a case recorded in the Year Book of Henry IV. (1406) the court ordered that, in addition to the punishment of being fed on the worst bread and stagnant water, two thieves condemned to penance for standing mute should have put upon them as great a weight as they could bear and more, and should so remain till they were dead. But as Chief Justice Gascoigne, who passed the sentence, afterwards said that the prisoners might live for many years, the words “more than they can bear” cannot be supposed to mean that the prisoners were to be pressed to death. ”

“ And Sir John carefully heartened him and pressed him. Then said the Jew: “What the Christians say is true. The Jews nearly every year crucify a boy in derision and contempt of Jesus Christ. But this is not found out every year, because it is done secretly and in remote and hidden places. But our Jews have most pitilessly crucified this boy, named Hugh, and when he was dead and they wished to conceal his death they knew not how either to bury or to hide him. For they had no further need of the body of the innocent for augury: for that purpose they had taken out the bowels. ”

“ The execution of Dr. John Story is one of the horrors of Tyburn: it is further memorable from the fact that, as we have seen (p. 64) , the triangular gallows, destined to become famous as the Triple Tree, first came into use on this occasion.
Dr. Story was a bitter persecutor under Mary.
There is no more difficult question than that of determining how far we must condemn, how far we may absolve those, on either side, who used their power to inflict punishments on men who differed from them in religion. In his “Prince” Machiavelli divides men of the ruling class into three categories. ”

“ But it was not alone a passion for justice which animated those who insisted on the illegality of the sentence. Oates was [204] by many regarded as one who had rendered inestimable services to the cause of liberty and religion.
Paul may plant, Apollos may water: the labour of each supposes that of the other. Shaftesbury, Burnet, Oates—to which of the three are we to award the palm? It is certain that but for Oates there would have been no Popish Plot; it is arguable that but for the Popish Plot there would have been no Glorious Revolution. ”

“ Henry was furious. He gave orders to “run upon the insurgents with your forces, and with all extremity destroy, burn, and kill man, woman and child, to the terrible example of all others.” The chief monks were to be hanged on long pieces of timber out of the steeples. Later, when the revolt had spread to Yorkshire, he wrote: “You must cause such dreadful execution upon a good number of the inhabitants, hanging them on trees, quartering them, and setting their heads and quarters in every town, as shall be a fearful warning.” ”

“ But this page in the early history of Tyburn is almost a blank. The subjects on which it is most difficult to find information are precisely those of occurrence so common that it has not entered the head of contemporaries to notice them. That gibbets, as distinct from gallows, did exist in early times, there is no doubt; their use continued down to the eighteenth century or later. The old writers do not clearly distinguish between gibbet and gallows, but there is a passage in which Matthew Paris certainly means to speak of a gibbet. ”

“ The transference of executions to Newgate involved the suppression of the processions which for six hundred years had been a feature of the city’s life. The change did not receive the approval of Dr. Johnson. “The age,” he said, “is running mad after innovation: all the business of the world is to be done in a new way: Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation!” It having been argued that this was an improvement—“No, Sir (said he eagerly) , it is not an improvement: they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. ”

“ It is distressing to think that Chaucer’s tender-hearted prioress, who “wolde weepe if that sche sawe a mous caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde,” had a gallows on which—by the hands of her bailiff—she hanged thieves. There is little doubt that she had her gallows.
But one’s first surprise at the enormous number of gallows subsides when we consider the conditions of life in early times. The country was thickly wooded: immense forests gave shelter to robbers, thieves, to all under the ban of the law. ”

“ A man was arraigned in 1340, before Justice Shard, on an indictment charging him with the murder of “his master.” It was found that murder had indeed been done by the man, who, however, had for a year ceased to be the murdered man’s servant. Shard inquired whether the servant had not a grudge against his master, and did he watch him? The questions were answered affirmatively, and Shard sentenced the man to death as guilty of petty treason—the punishment due to a servant who killed his master. ”

“ A bigamist, it must be remembered, was not what we of to-day mean when we use the word. A bigamist was one who had married two wives, the second after the decease of the first, or who had married a widow. We will return presently to this question of bigamy, after noting what Sir Thomas Smith, writing fifty years later, says as to clergy. Let us, however, premise that benefit of clergy means, as indeed the name imports, a privilege of the clergy consisting originally in the right of the clergy to be free from the jurisdiction of lay courts, and to be subject to the ecclesiastical courts only. ”