The British Execution: 1500–1964 (Shire Library) by Banks Stephen

Author:Banks, Stephen [Banks, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: The British Execution
Publisher: Osprey Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-09-16T23:00:00+00:00

Two offenders pilloried at Charing Cross in 1809. A large crowd has gathered to enjoy the spectacle. (Aquatint by Thomas Rowlandson and A. C. Pugin for Ackermann’s Microcosm of London, 1808–10.)

Under The Scaffold, or The Hangman’s Pupils, a satire on the fascination with public executions. (Matt Morgan in The Tomahawk, 26 October 1867.)

THE CREATURES OF THE SCAFFOLD

IT IS SOMEWHAT to the defence of the criminal justice system of the time that it was not entirely partial in its application. Sometimes even wealthy and well-connected men were hanged. Most notable was Laurence Shirley, the 4th Earl Ferrers, executed in 1760 for the murder of a family steward. Most of the condemned, however, came from the lower and most desperate classes. Until 1836, defendants in felony (that is, capital) cases were not allowed defence counsel. While incarcerated they had great difficulty in summoning defence witnesses and trials were brief. In July 1832, a schoolmaster wrote to Frasers’ Magazine about his experiences at Newgate Prison.

Seeing their fellow prisoners return tried and found guilty in a minute or two after having been taken up, they become so alarmed and nervous … they lose all command over themselves, and are then, to use their own language, taken up to be knocked down like bullocks unheard … two-thirds of the prisoners, cannot tell of any thing which has passed in the court, not even, very frequently, whether they have been tried.

Some of these unfortunates were very young. John Dean was allegedly aged only eight or nine when he was hanged for arson in 1629. The absence of reliable records at that time makes it difficult to authenticate this and other claims, but Home Office records do show that Baron Hotham condemned a ten-year-old boy to death for stealing at Chelmsford Post Office in 1800. In court the boy looked ‘an absolute child’ and Hotham was forced by the jury and crowd to consider mercy. In the end the defendant was transported for fourteen years. A fourteen-year-old, John Bell, was actually hanged for murder at Maidstone Prison in 1831. The crime was indeed atrocious but the executioner himself was horrified and described the body swaying, ‘to and fro, dead as the feelings of an English judge.’ There are many authenticated accounts of teenagers of fifteen or sixteen being hanged.

John Bell at least died quickly on the ‘new drop’ at Maidstone. As previously mentioned, slow strangulation was the fate of many and, in London, this most famously occurred at Tyburn’s Triple Tree, located either near today’s Marble Arch or a little to the north-west at Connaught Square. Each of its three cross-beams was about 9 feet long and stood on legs 18 feet high. It was erected in 1571 and could accommodate up to twenty-four felons at a time – though only in 1649 was this tested. The tree was taken down in 1759 for the rather mundane planning reason that it was obstructing traffic. A mobile gallows was employed in its place. Until 1783, when the place

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