A Reckless Indifference to Life
Yet even this number of executions was ghastly. Every six weeks there was a procession of criminals through the streets of London for the long distance between Newgate and Tyburn, and noisy and ribald crowds flocked to see the last grim spectacle as an amusement. Sometimes the executions were horrible. The drop was not invented until late in the century, and the friends of the man who was hanging by the neck sometimes clung to his feet in order to hasten strangling.*
Until 1790 the law required that the execution of female criminals should be by burning.* By selling convicts for a limited period, and sometimes for life, to work on the plantations in America, a punishment hardly less terrible than death was inflicted. The price was about £20 for each convict, and the slavery was as real as that of the negro. After the American Revolution [1776-83] criminals were transported to Australia.
Travellers entering London by the Edgeware Eoad passed rows of rotting corpses hung on gibbets, and often arrayed in full dress and wig. Grinning skulls of executed offenders lined the top of Temple Bar. In other ways crime was made to seem odious. Men and women were flogged through the London streets, or fastened helpless in the public pillory, to be pelted sometimes to death by cruel and mischievous idlers.
Abridged
From ‘History of the British Nation’ (1903). ‘England in the Eighteenth Century’ Volume VII (edition of 1892). Additional information from the Account of the Ordinary of Newgate for May 9th, 1726, reproduced at ‘The Proceedings of the Old Bailey’.
* The death penalty for murder was suspended in 1965 and abolished in 1969. In theory at any rate, death remained the penalty for treason until 1998. The public campaign to end the death penalty was led by the rich, determined but decidedly eccentric Violet van der Elst.
* The Treason Act 1790 (30 Geo. 3. c. 48) abolished drawing and burning at the stake as the penalty for women convicted of high treason, petty treason and abetting, procuring or counselling petty treason. The sentence was changed to drawing and hanging; the last woman to be burnt was murderer Catherine Hayes, on May 9th, 1726. In 1828, petty treason (causing the death of a social superior) was redefined as simple murder, but the death penalty remained. For some years, the custom has been to strangle the victim before lighting the pyre, but the executioner bungled Catherine’s case. She was spared the flames when a bystander flung a plank of wood and crushed her skull, killing her instantly.