Prosecuting Homicide in Eighteenth-Century Law and Practice

“And Must They All Be Hanged?”

Drew D. Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367460099
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000047929
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This volume uses four case studies, all with strong London connections, to analyze homicide law and the pardoning process in eighteenth-century England. Each reveals evidence of how attempts were made to negotiate a path through the justice system to avoid conviction, and so avoid a sentence of hanging. This approach allows a deep examination of the workings of the justice system using social and cultural history methodologies. The cases explore wider areas of social and cultural history in the period, such as the role of policing agents, attitudes towards sexuality and prostitution, press reporting, and popular conceptions of "honorable" behavior. They also allow an engagement with what has been identified as the gradual erosion of individual agency within the law, and the concomitant rise of the state. Investigating the nature of the pardoning process shows how important it was to have "friends in high places," and also uncovers ways in which the legal system was susceptible to accusations of corruption. Readers will find an illuminating view of eighteenth-century London through a legal lens.

1 Introduction and Themes

‘A historical phenomenon can become comprehensible only by reconstructing the activities of all the persons who participated in it’.¹

Images of Execution in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century London

From 1783 onwards most executions in England’s capital took place outside the debtor’s door at Newgate Prison. While capitally convicted felons were also hanged at Horsemonger prison (sometimes referred to as the ‘New gaol’), Newgate, on Old Bailey, was the preferred site for this ritual of controlled state terror. Prior to 1783, those sentenced to death were transported on a cart from Newgate to Tyburn; when the cart was drawn away, they were left hanging on the ‘triple tree’ in front of thousands of spectators. In the decades following the removal of the ritual to the more constrained (and arguably more easily controlled) confines of Old Bailey, the crowds, while still huge, were not as extensive as they once were.² It is debatable what effect this would have had on the person being executed; they were spared the discomfort and humiliation of a ride in the ‘rattling cart’ along the furrowed thoroughfare of Oxford Street to modern Marble Arch, but the shock they had when the door of the prison opened onto the gathered throng of witnesses must have been considerable. Just moments earlier the condemned would have been taken from a dark cell to the pressroom to have their shackles removed and their arms pinioned. They would then have processed to the door that opened onto the gallows. It is hard to understand how the condemned felt at this point, but clearly for some this was the moment that they finally realized the enormity of their situation. For one female in 1829 it was all too much:

‘A little before 8 o’clock the unfortunate woman was led from the condemned cell to the Press-room; she exhibited a dreadful appearance. The sad procession then set forward, the miserable woman being carried by two men, as she absolutely refused to walk’, reported The Times on April 14, 1829.³

If they managed to steel themselves for the walk to the door, the condemned still had to endure the scene that awaited them, as one eyewitness account recalls:

The undefined confused murmur of the thousands collected was now heard – an unutterable din, multifarious but not loud, and the movements that the executioner and his attendants made on the scaffold, as soon as the clergyman’s voice was heard, was, of course, recognized by the vast assembly, and a cry was heard of – hat’s off, stand back, etc.⁴

‘Hat’s off’, of course, should not always (or ever) be read as a sign of the crowd’s respect for the gravity of the occasion. As Randall McGowen noted, ‘ “hats off”, far from showing respect for the condemned, only indicated a desire to see better’.⁵ In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries those sentenced to hang would have stood on the gallows platform for some minutes while a priest encouraged them to pray and recited the catechism for the dead. As they waited to die they could look down and see and hear the crowd below looking up at them. There might have been familiar and friendly faces there, come to offer support. But equally they would have seen and heard those who came to gloat, sneer, or simply to amuse themselves by watching others die in public. As one historian of American executions has written: ‘The stars of the execution ceremony could look forward to pain and death under the close inspection of thousands. Many were understandably frightened’.⁶ The fear had been built up over a period of time, of course, with a series of stages leading to the final hanging day. From conviction to sentence at the end of the sessions, the long wait for the Recorder’s Report to be actioned and the ‘dead warrant’ to arrive at Newgate, appeal, petition, possible respites, and frantic attempts to gain a conditional pardon. All this might take days, weeks, or even months, all while the condemned man or woman was held in the dark confines of London’s most feared prison. As one observer wrote in 1864, having witnessed the execution of a prisoner outside Newgate, the effect on the individual was hardly less than torture:

The condemned has been kept a fortnight within hearing of the very footsteps of Death, daily coming nearer and nearer to him. The man is here aware of the intention to kill him. He is brought out alive and well, and conscious, upon the scaffold. Twenty thousand strange eyes glare upon him with hungry, terror-striking warning. He is shown to the excited mob before his face is covered. The spectators see the last spark of hope die out in his soul. No reprieve has come – no shout of pardon is heard – no impossible rescue, which always lingers in the mind of the doomed, occurs. The wretch stands face to face with inevitable, pitiless, premeditated death. Not the scythe, but the strange, cold, cord of death strikes against his ear, and the crowd know that he knows it. They see the frame quiver and the blood rush to the neck. A thrill passes through the congregated scoundrels whom the Government have thus undertaken to entertain. The noose is adjusted, the click of the drop is heard by the hushed throng, and the wretch descends still in sight; and then the long tramp, the weary hours of standing, the rain, the cold, the damp, the struggling of the hateful night’s watching, is all forgotten in the coveted gratification of that horrible minute.⁷

The public nature of executions not only added to the fear of those being hanged; it must have affected those that viewed them. This was not lost on contemporaries either, who, especially from the 1830s onwards, campaigned to remove hangings from public view to behind the confines of prison walls. It was important for justice to be ‘seen to be done’ but equally the negative effect on the viewer of seeing a ritualized state killing was considered by a growing number of middle-class commentators to be both dangerous and counterproductive.⁸ Later observers (particularly those opposed to public execution) were quick to ascribe a lack of humanity to those viewing hanging – even if this was generally assumed to affect the working class audience and not the better educated who also attended. Writing in 1864, having witnessed a number of executions in different parts of the country, George Holyoake wrote: ‘He who has feasted his eyes on deliberate strangulation has advanced a step in ferocity. Next time the wife-beater strikes his companion he adds torture to brutality’.⁹

Executions, as Dwight Conquergood has described them, were a form of ‘lethal theatre’ where spectators were ‘encouraged’ to ‘gaze intently at the body on display and granted extraordinary license for the condemned, especially if they were women, to make spectacles out of their bodies’.¹⁰ Thomas Laqueur was skeptical as to whether public executions really worked, in the way the state must have wanted them to, as palpable demonstrations of power and authority. They were too diverse and unpredictable, he argues, and they drew ‘holiday crowds’, who were ‘boisterous women, men, and children of all ages and classes engaged in festival’.¹¹ The prevailing emotion at public executions seems to have been curiosity. One observer who recorded his experience of passing near an execution in 1791 was appalled by the crowd, as many middling sort commentators were. As he testified before a parliamentary committee: ‘The crowd exhibited a variety of “equally revolting emotions which might be traced in the countenances of all who surrounded me”. Some showed an “impatient curiosity”, others a “brutal apathy”, and still others a “thoughtless levity”. He was appalled by the “eager struggles” to get a better view’.¹² Although the crowd reacted in a variety of ways at hangings, as McGowen has written, what the crowd ‘did not display was an embarrassment at seeing the event’.¹³ This might make modern readers uncomfortable, just as it made reformers in the 1830s uncomfortable. They argued that it was much better to remove the spectacle inside (if it could not be abandoned altogether) because otherwise ‘public execution threatened to expose death on the gallows for the ambiguous and compromised solution that it was’.¹⁴

Accounts of executions in late Georgian and Regency London exist in considerable numbers. Execution broadsides and newspaper accounts are rich in detailed and sensational description of the crimes that the condemned men and women had committed, in the trials that had convicted them, and often of the crowds that came to watch them be ‘turned off’.¹⁵ But descriptions of the deaths themselves are minimal and often euphemistic: as well as being ‘turned off’, convicts were ‘launched into eternity’ or simply ‘fell’ as the trap opened beneath them. They usually ‘struggled little’ and, after being left hanging for the ‘the usual time’ (an hour in most cases) they were cut down and taken away for burial or (as was the fate of murderers) to be dissected by the surgeons.¹⁶ There were sometimes hints that the death was painful and this was used by abolitionists in their arguments that capital punishment was a barbaric ritual unsuited to a civilized society. ‘It was a long time before the body of the poor female seemed to have gone through its last suffering’, reported a witness to the execution of Elizabeth Godfrey in 1807.¹⁷ ‘Broughton and Francis struggled violently for some moments after all the rest were without motion. The executioner pulled their legs to put an end to their pain more speed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and Themes
• 2 ‘Mercy Without Justice’? Press Criticism of the Pardoning Process in Late Eighteenth-Century London: The Kennedy Case of 1770
• 3 ‘There Goes Clarke, That Blood-Selling Rascal’: Murder, Revenge, and the Crowd in Early 1770s Spitalfields
• 4 The Royal Duchess and the Apothecary’s Son: Homicide, Communal Prejudice, and Pleading for Pardon in Provincial England
• 5 Sex, Scandal, and Strangulation: The Strange Case of Francis Kotzwara and Susannah Hill
• 6 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index