Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (19 page)

The night before his execution, Wild tried to commit suicide with an overdose of laudanum. In the morning he was in a greatly weakened state and partly insensible to what was going on. The crowd along the route from Newgate to Tyburn gave him a terrible time. He was booed, verbally abused and pelted with a wide variety of missiles, including excrement and the festering corpses of long-dead cats and dogs. He himself was apparently in tears as well he might have been when hit in the face by a sharp stone which caused considerable bleeding. Tyburn that day attracted one of its largest-ever crowds. The people rejoiced to see the once omnipotent Wild brought down, humiliated and destroyed. They hated him for his bullying, for his mercilessness and for his hypocritical social pretensions.

Wild rode in the cart with two highwaymen and a coiner. The highwaymen were executed first. Wild, not totally
compos mentis
, listened bemused while the coiner, Robert Harpham, used the opportunity to tell the vast crowd about how he repented his life of sin and to urge them to eschew criminal ways. He then went calmly and with dignity to his death. By this time the onlookers were getting impatient. After all, it was Wild’s death they had come to see; the others were merely the supporting cast. Still confused by the drugs given to revive him the previous night, Wild died without making either a pathetic admission of guilt or execrating the fates which had put him where he was. In this sense, Wild provided poor value for money. His body was cut down and before the surgeons’ men could seize it, it was spirited away and buried in St Pancras Churchyard next to Elizabeth Mann, his favourite mistress. The grave was surreptitiously opened up a few days later and his body removed. The coffin was found at nearby Kentish Town. What exactly happened to his body has never been established. Some people believe that the surgeons got their hands on it. However, a few days later the
Daily Journal
reported that an unidentified body had been washed up on the bank of the Thames near Whitehall and had been consigned to the burial ground for the poor after examination by a coroner and jury. The extreme hairiness of the chest suggested that it might indeed be the body of Jonathan Wild. Little dignity in death!

Wild was a scoundrel and he paid the ultimate price for his multifarious criminal activities. But it has to be said that he lived in a period of the greatest venality in public life. Around the time of Wild’s trial and execution, the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Macclesfield, had been found guilty of taking £100,000 worth of bribes and of various other corrupt activities. His punishment was a substantial fine. Somewhat earlier Robert Walpole had not been brought to account for a massive unexplained deficit in Exchequer funds. This does not relieve Wild of guilt but calls into question the selective attitude of people in positions of power and influence towards crime and wrongdoing and their perpetrators. They looked after their own. Were Wild’s crimes really more dastardly than those committed by people mostly born to wealth and influence who had used their official positions corruptly to enrich themselves even further and at the public expense?

On 12 April 1726 Emanuel Dickenson was executed at Tyburn for murder. Like many other wretches who went to meet their Maker there, it is easy to conclude that he was every bit as much a victim as many of those on whom he preyed every day in London’s streets and alleys. The son of an army officer, his father had died early leaving his mother in dire poverty to care for him and his three sisters. The children all turned to robbery and Dickenson himself, caught stealing a gentleman’s hat in the Strand, was sentenced to transportation but pardoned when his mother’s privations were revealed. This experience did not, however, bring him back from the brink of a life of crime. He fell in with a gang of criminals who numbered street robbery, pickpocketing and house-breaking among their activities. They were violent and dangerous, prepared to use firearms and to murder informers. An associate of the gang informed on them and one by one they were picked off, tried for various felonies and sentenced to death. As with many of the more notorious criminals, Dickenson’s body was placed in a gibbet, in this case on Kennington Common, after he had been hanged at Tyburn. Curiously, his body was taken down and buried after just one day when it became known that his father had died in active service for his country. His early ill-fortune in losing the family breadwinner, his swift descent into crime and equally swift absorption into the underworld, his brief notoriety and squalid fate are undoubtedly replicated many times in the annals of London’s underworld and the biographies of those who died at Tyburn.

We have said that far fewer women than men ended their days at Tyburn but Catherine Hayes, ‘Jenny Diver’ and Elizabeth Brownrigg stand among the pantheon of English criminals on an equal footing with any of their male counterparts. Catherine Hayes was executed at Tyburn in 1726 for what nowadays seems the curious crime of ‘petit treason’. This offence dated back to the reign of Edward III (1327–77) and involved the killing by a servant of his master, by a wife of her husband or by a lay person or junior cleric of a prelate. Catherine killed her husband and the law saw this as treason because she was, in effect, killing her lord and master. Born near Birmingham, Catherine had left home at about the age of fifteen after arguing with her parents. She had winsome looks and some soldiers who met her on the road asked her to go back to their quarters in Worcestershire. Quite what role she played there can only be guessed at but eventually she moved on and became a servant working for a Warwickshire farmer by the name of Hayes. His son promptly fell head over heels in love with her and proposed that they marry secretly because his parents would not approve. The wedding was celebrated at Worcester where the couple’s connubial bliss was disturbed by the same group of soldiers who had befriended Catherine previously. They threatened the young man with forced enlistment. Swallowing his pride, he contacted his father who spoke to the magistrates. They in turn persuaded the soldiers to surrender the errant son. Hayes Senior may not have approved of the marriage but he gave his son money with which to start up in business. The young man seems to have been an honest, willing drudge. Catherine, however, quickly and very publicly started denouncing him for being parsimonious. She became increasingly ill-tempered and offensive but he seems to have been patient and when she demanded that they move to London, he complied willingly enough.

Hayes Junior prospered greatly from his various business interests in London. Catherine was curiously inconsistent in her attitude towards her husband. Sometimes she lambasted him when talking with neighbours but on other occasions she spoke of him with the greatest affection. Her reputation spread, neighbours taking offence at her quick temper and apparent capriciousness. The couple moved to what was then Tyburn Road which eventually became Oxford Street. They took a lodger by the name of Billings who quickly became Catherine’s lover, the couple making sport when Hayes was away on business. They were not particularly discreet and neighbours told Hayes what was happening in his absence. He had a flaming row with Catherine who probably by now intended to kill him. Another lodger, named Wood, took up residence in the Hayes household. All four of them indulged in a massive drinking bout during which Hayes became insensible and his wife prevailed on the others to help her murder him. Billings and Wood killed Hayes with a hatchet and then chopped off his head, which was carried in a pail to the Thames and thrown into the river near the Horseferry at Westminster. It was found the next morning. The conspirators dismembered the body, parcelled it up and threw it into a pond in the Marylebone area.

Meanwhile the local magistrates had cleaned up Hayes’s head and placed it on a pole in St Margaret’s churchyard at Westminster in the hope that someone would identify it. This gory trophy predictably attracted a large crowd and was recognised by one Bennet, an apprentice organ-builder who hurried off to tell Mrs Hayes that he had just seen her husband’s disembodied head on public display. Seemingly unconcerned by this revelation, she told Bennet that her husband had looked healthy enough last time she had seen him. When Bennet repeated that he didn’t look too healthy now, Catherine’s response was to threaten him not to take the matter further. She then moved to new lodgings with a female acquaintance and Billings and Wood. As more people claimed to recognise the head which by now had been treated with a preservative, she concocted the rather unconvincing story that Hayes had murdered a man to whom he owed money and had gone on the run, to Portugal. She told others that he had gone to Hertfordshire. Two neighbours apprised a magistrate of their growing suspicions that Hayes was the victim of foul play. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Catherine, Wood and Billings.

The magistrate and his attendants then hurried round to Catherine’s lodgings and broke the door down. Catherine was hastily putting on her clothes while Billings was sitting, barelegged on the side of her bed. When asked whether they had been making love, Catherine replied that Billings had been mending his stockings. Responding to this rather feeble explanation, the magistrate commented dryly that her companion’s eyesight must be quite exceptional since he was doing the darning in the dark. All the suspects except Wood were taken away and examined. Wood himself was out of town but arrested soon afterwards. The next day Catherine requested to see the head in question and on doing so gave vent to a histrionic display of grief. At about the same time two men reported that that they had found what seemed to be a dismembered body near Marylebone. It had no head. Wood and Billings made full confessions. Catherine could not be induced to confess and went to court where she was found guilty although only after blaming Wood and Billings for the whole thing. Wood rather conveniently died and Billings, who expressed the deepest remorse, was hanged in Upper Wimpole Street near where Hayes’s remains were found. Catherine was made of sterner stuff. Not for her a cringing admission of guilt and contrition. Somehow she got hold of a phial of poison but was unable to swallow it. For her particular offence of petit treason, she was drawn uncomfortably on a hurdle to Tyburn. She was then burnt. The usual procedure was for the executioner to strangle the victim with a rope around the neck so that she was dead before having to endure the unspeakable agony of dying in the flames. On this occasion, however, the executioner bungled things and let the rope go too quickly. Catherine therefore was still alive when she became engulfed in the flames. Her screams of agony rent the air as the crowd watched, at once both appalled and fascinated by the sight and sound of Catherine’s death agonies. The date was 9 May 1726.

Hayes’s crime was particularly heinous but this did not mean that these events escaped the attention of the humorists. These verses provide a flavour:

In Tyburn road, a man there liv’d
A just and honest life;
And there he might have lived still,
If it had pleased his wife.

But she to vicious ways inclin’d,
A life most wicked led;
With tailors and with tinkers too,
She oft defiled his bed …

Mary Young, also known as ‘Jenny Diver’, was one of London’s most gifted pickpockets. A native of Northern Ireland, at the age of fifteen she attracted the amorous attentions of a young man and having decided that London was the place of opportunity, she let him know that she would confer her favours on him if he took her there. Overjoyed at the prospect, he made the necessary sailing arrangements. He also stole a gold watch and 80 guineas from his master. They got to Liverpool and took temporary lodgings but he was apprehended for the robbery. Mary was not implicated and showed her true feelings for her swain by proceeding to London while he was taken back to Northern Ireland to stand trial and eventually to be transported. She found lodgings in Covent Garden and tried to get honest employment as a seamstress but like so many before and since, she found herself destitute and desperate. Another woman lodger took her under her wing and introduced her to a gang of pickpockets operating out of the nearby St Giles Rookery. These thieves were well organised and highly skilled and Mary quickly won their respect, being naturally adept at pickpocketing. A genius in her own way, she invented a pair of false arms and hands. Equipped with these she would take her place in a pew for divine service and sit during the sermon with her false arms and hands crossed in her lap, gazing demurely at the parson. Meanwhile with her real hands she dextrously removed the valuables from her unsuspecting neighbours. Caught and transported to the Virginian colonies, she managed to serve her time and to make her way back, by which time the gang had dispersed. She returned to picking pockets, was caught, transported yet again and once more managed to return to England. Reverting to her wicked ways, she was caught again and this time condemned to death. She was hanged at Tyburn on 18 March 1740, having greatly irritated the crowd by the lengthy time she spent on the gallows engaged in prayer. She was interred in St Pancras churchyard.

In 1748 John Lancaster met his end at Tyburn. A Londoner, born in 1726 in the East End, he became apprenticed to a velvet-maker and combined that work with part-time education at a Methodist charity school and gambling with dissolute companions in disreputable alehouses. He stole some material from his master, sold it and ran away to sea. Eventually he returned and went back to the velvet-making trade. He carried out a second theft but was caught, convicted and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, his teacher at the Methodist school appeared and persuaded him of the error of his ways and converted him to Christianity. Lancaster took to his new, if brief, way of life with great zeal. He is reputed to have ridden with ten other condemned prisoners from Newgate and led them in an impromptu recital of prayers and hymns. According to reports, this had a sobering effect on the spectators around the gallows at Tyburn. His body was being taken away for the use of the surgeons when a group of men described as ‘mariners’ elbowed their way through the crowd. They seized Lancaster’s corpse and delivered it with great reverence to his mother, several miles away. She gave him a decent burial some days later. Lancaster’s case is interesting not only because of his late conversion to evangelical Christianity but because his rescuers were believed to be sailors. Seafarers were known to have a strong aversion to surgeons at sea – they were widely regarded as the most dissipated, drunken and incompetent representatives of their profession. Did they seize the dead Lancaster in some kind of protest against the surgeons or simply because they were old shipmates of his?