Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (15 page)

Anti-Catholicism was still very much an issue at this time and was reflected in the execution for treason at Tyburn on 30 April 1684 of James Holloway. A dissident Bristol merchant and manufacturer, he was enraged by the election of Catholic Tory sheriffs in London and became involved in a planned uprising in the city in the summer of 1682. The plan was discovered in May 1683 and Holloway went on the run, firstly in disguise in the West Country and then, with the aid of his wife, he got away to France and later the West Indies. He was betrayed and brought back to England in chains and delivered a confession which was not believed. Holloway was convinced that he would be pardoned but the case went before Chief Justice Jeffreys who peremptorily ordered his execution for treason.

A last-minute reprieve was the desperate hope of many who took the route to Tyburn, there to have the noose placed around their necks. Visiting an execution in 1664, Pepys recorded that the condemned frequently delayed the fatal moment by engaging in long discourses and prayers in the hope of a reprieve or pardon. Thomas Laqueur has commented on the significance of pardons suggesting that they were part of an elaborate system of patronage and control and were a reminder of the King’s power and his gratuitous gift of life (Laqueur 1989).

There were cases of a reprieve arriving quite literally at the last minute. Jonathan Simpson was an apprentice to a linen draper in Bristol. He moved to London where he set up a business but his marriage broke up, the business failed and he took to highway robbery. Within a short time he was caught but rich relations came to his rescue and managed to get him a reprieve just as he was about to hang at Tyburn. On his return to Newgate the gaoler refused to let him back because he was discharged, a free man unless a fresh warrant for his committal could be produced. Simpson pushed his luck and went back to his life of crime on the road, carrying out around forty robberies in Middlesex within six weeks of his discharge. His career came to its inevitable conclusion at Tyburn on 8 September 1686 when he was aged thirty-two. Simpson, incidentally, had earlier carved out a little niche for himself in the history of robbery by being the only recorded highwayman on skates! The winter of 1683–4 was exceptionally cold and pickings on the roads were poor because few people were travelling. The River Thames in London, however, was frozen for about two months and thousands thronged to the ‘Frost Fair’ and enjoyed the novel experience of standing on the river and seeing familiar landmarks from a different angle. Simpson equipped himself with skates and enjoyed rich pickings by simply bumping into people, knocking them over and robbing them in the ensuing confusion.

Changes in the power of granting pardons took place after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. As the old structures of religion and monarchy began to loosen their grip, the cabinet took greater responsibility for managing capital punishment at Tyburn by making pardons less a matter of arbitrary decision-making by the monarch. This reflected a style of governance more suited to the constitutional monarchy after 1688 as well as a change in the way power was exercised and managed (Beattie 1992: 218–33). Crime statistics for London and Middlesex between 1701 and 1785 show that out of 3,617 people condemned to death, 1,243 were actually executed; the rest were either pardoned, transported or died in gaol (Gatrell 1994: 616).

Deterring sexual immorality became the object of many seventeenth-century initiatives and was reflected in Acts attempting to regulate adultery and bastardy as well as campaigns for the reforming of manners. The Reformation of Manners campaigns witnessed the prosecution of thousands of people found guilty of ‘lewd and disorderly conduct’. Homosexual practices carried the death sentence but records show that they were only rarely punished. It was crimes against property that took on a new dimension during this period. As property grew so did concerns about its preservation with a resulting proliferation in property-related offences.

Society was undergoing a process of secularisation and this is reflected in the last speeches made by condemned prisoners. These now made less reference to regret for having disobeyed divine law. By the eighteenth century those executed at Tyburn were expected to make a speech which involved commenting on a ‘just end’ for sins committed rather than showing religious penitence. The issue of repentance is seen in illustrations in the earlier popular ballads where images of Death and Judgment Day feature in a terrifying form. In the Elizabethan ballad ‘The Doleful Dance and Song of Death’, Death is personified as a skeleton with trumpet and spade beckoning the lover, lawyer and merchant. Another ballad, ‘The Great Assize’, which is about Judgment Day, describes Satan waiting in the flames of Hell (Reay 1988: 219). Satan would also be described encouraging people to commit crimes in order to hasten their journey to the gallows or avenging angels would be portrayed sitting in judgment on those who had committed an offence.

The rituals leading up to and including the execution itself continued, as did the presence of large crowds around the gallows and along the route to Tyburn. Dying speeches, ballads and broadsides were hawked from Newgate to Tyburn and often contained lurid biographies of the condemned prisoners and a warning to those who bought them, not that they would incur the wrath of God but that they would die in the same painful and wretched fashion. Death on the scaffold at Tyburn was the price to pay not for irreligion but for the criminal acts which so often followed on a life of fecklessness, of drink and depravity. These doom-laden exhortations, however, did not lessen the festive mood of the crowds on execution days as the song Tyburn Fair makes clear:

To Tyburn Fair
I used to go,
To watch the just procession,
And eat the oranges
The dead would throw,
And hear their last confession.

The attempts of the state to stage-manage public executions to provide a warning of the awfulness of the law and the fate awaiting those who committed serious offences all too often foundered on the reality that the crowds who attended did so in an atmosphere sometimes resembling that of carnival. Some of the condemned turned the event into a special occasion by dressing for it. John Hall, the robber, said of some of the condemned ‘that one would take them for bridegrooms going to espouse old Mrs Tyburn’. Henri Misson, a contemporary French observer, wrote:

He that is to be hanged or otherwise executed first takes care to get himself … handsomely dressed… . When his suit of clothes, or night gown, his gloves, hat, periwig, nosegay, coffin, flannel dress for his corpse, and all those things are brought and prepared, the main point is taken care of, his mind is at peace and then he thinks of his conscience.

(Waller 2000: 320–1)

Flamboyant and defiant displays on the way to and at the gallows provided just the kind of entertainment the crowds craved, but for all those who were able to carry off such bravado, there were far more who went to their deaths with numbed resignation or in a state of abject terror. Hypocrisy and pomposity on the gallows met with complete derision from the watching masses; prisoners who cursed the fates and lambasted the authorities were cheered and those who quipped humorously with the crowd drew forth approving laughter and good wishes. On occasions, however, the sight of a young prisoner sentenced to death for some trivial offence and totally, abjectly, convulsed with fear, might evoke a rough-andready but compassionate response from the onlookers. They wanted to provide some support for the last moments of those whom they considered the unjustified victims of a flawed judicial system. No sarcastic wisecracks were offered, no acerbic gibes were uttered. The gallows crowds on these occasions were hushed. Their demeanour was dignified and humane. A quiet gasp might be all that was heard when the awful deed was done.

In the seventeenth century, London’s growing population added to the size of the crowds that turned out at Tyburn. It also meant a much larger pool of social deprivation and distress, new forms of crime, especially those related to property, and a heightened fear of criminality among the well-to-do. The government’s response was to increase the number of capital offences. However, execution days took on an increasingly holiday spirit. They were in the strong tradition of festivity and misrule associated with carnivals and were the occasion for ribald humour, bawdy language and the subversion of authority through mockery and festive symbols such as wakes, dances, costumes, masks, processions and the composing of commemorative ballads. Mr Punch, the hunchbacked and bullying puppet of traditional English entertainment, represented one form of the carnival tradition. Punch expressed the mocking voice of the world turned upside down and an association with the scaffold in his subverting of the law by making the hangman, Jack Ketch, hang himself. The gallows crowd would also have been familiar with Mr Punch who, like some of the condemned prisoners on the scaffold, refused to accept the rules or to behave in a socially acceptable manner. His triumph over the hangman is expressed when he declares:

I’ve done the trick!
Jack Ketch is dead – I’m free.
I do not care now, if Old Nick
Himself should come for me.

Carnival or what might be called aspects of carnival – the carnivalesque – provided an opportunity to break away for a short time from the everyday demands and drudgery of ordinary life. Because of this, Tyburn Fair was an event deeply etched into the popular culture of London’s citizens.

Public executions attracted the largest crowds of any public event and many people saw a hanging as a major social occasion to be attended in the company of friends and relations. The authorities intended the hanging to be a visible and spectacular warning, a deterrent, but it could be said that the public appropriated it and used it for their own purposes. During the early modern period a national and local calendar of events and festivals was still celebrated. These occasions can be found in almanacs of the period and most English county towns had days set aside for public executions which often coincided with fairs and festivities of various sorts. By the eighteenth century centralising forces were attempting to develop a sense of nationhood and a national political consensus. Carnivals, fairs, popular games and festivals were seen as undesirable throwbacks to earlier times and were ‘politicised’. They became more closely controlled in an attempt to reduce their demotic and anarchic elements. Over the next century and a half, many of them were done away with altogether. Tyburn’s removal in 1783 and the relocation of its functions outside Newgate on a more easily controlled site were part of that process as was the eventual ending of public executions altogether. The removal of the Tyburn spectacle represents the view that the ‘history of political struggle has been the history of the attempts made to control significant sites of assembly’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 80). So the festive calendar was seen in official circles as too disruptive, too frivolous and also too likely to degenerate into a riot. The London middle class found alternatives to the Tyburn spectacle in the more rational enjoyments offered by the coffee houses and the spas.

However, as Alexander Pope (1688–1744) observed, hanging days still attracted crowds of both the ‘high’ and the ‘low’:

A motley mixture in long wigs, in bags,
In silks, crepes, in Garters and in rags,
From drawing rooms, from colleges, from garrets,
On horse, on foot, in hacks and gilded chariots.

The gallows crowd was traditionally cosmopolitan but in the eighteenth century there was an increasing tendency for those who considered themselves refined to stay away from Tyburn, whose gruesome spectacle did not accord with the evolving sophisticated culture of Augustan London. While writers such as Boswell wrote despairingly of the ‘most prodigious crowd of spectators’ at Tyburn and of how he was ‘most terribly shocked and thrown into a very deep melancholy’ by the whole scene, similar comments could as easily have been made about other places used for public pleasure. An eighteenth-century writer describes the disgusting environment of an alehouse: ‘The vile obscene talk, noise and ribaldry discourses together with … belchings and breakings of wind … are enough to make any rational creature amongst them ashamed of his being’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 94).

The theatre came in for similar criticisms. In the 1690s, Jeremy Collier’s
Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage
attacked both the plays and the audiences for their blasphemy, impiety, indecency and riotous behaviour. The ancient annual Bartholomew Fair was greatly cut down in duration in the mid-eighteenth century but not before an observer had written about the ‘fools, the drunkards, the madmen, the monsters, the pickpockets’ and the various examples of ‘lewdness and impurity’ that were its presiding characteristics (Stallybrass and White 1986: 118).

The seventeenth century witnessed the last official hanging of a witch and the last burning of a heretic. It also saw what has been described as the ‘emergence of the poor as an institutionalised presence’ (Sharpe 1984: 183). It was a century of paradox. Many aspects of pre-industrial England were excised and new orthodoxies relevant to a different society were put into place, one of which was the absolute sanctity of private property. A start was made on creating an extensive raft of new laws designed to inflict severe penalties on thieves and robbers – those who attacked private property. A superficially more rational and enlightened attitude towards crime and methods of punishment contrasted with the development of what at first looks like a draconian penal code which threatened to overawe the masses by publicly hanging substantial numbers of its poorest, most desperate citizens simply for the crime of stealing. The so-called ‘Bloody Code’ however, as we shall see, was not always applied according to the letter of the law. Certainly Tyburn continued to be the place where many of London’s miscreants ended their often miserable lives. In practice, the courts employed some compassion and humanity to try to ensure that not all those who committed capital offences paid the ultimate price on the ‘Deadly Nevergreen’.