Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (28 page)

The Act was not a great success. To start with it provided more, if still insufficient, corpses to meet the needs of the surgeons. It was hated by the members of the criminal fraternity, their relations and friends. This was not just because of the fear, little more than superstition in a criminal world not known for the strength of its religious beliefs and practices, that if they were dismembered they would not be able to rise again at the Day of Judgment. More immediate was the fear that because death by strangulation was usually less than instantaneous, those who were hanged might be taken down while still having some life in them. They then might be whisked away to some medical school only to come round to experience the agony of a surgeon’s knife making an incision into their vitals, something which actually happened to a convicted rapist by the name of William Duell.

Possibly the first person to be claimed by the 1752 Act was a one-armed, seventeen-year-old youth by the name of Thomas Wilford. His marriage lasted just three days and ended with him murdering his wife in a fit of jealousy. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
records that Wilford was executed at Tyburn on 1 July 1752 and that his body was to be ‘dissected and anatomised according to the late Act’. The same periodical was concerned with the same Act some months later when it recorded that on 22 September 1752 ‘Randolph Branch and William Descent … were executed at Tyburn, after which their bodies were delivered to the surgeons, pursuant to the late Act of Parliament’. Despite this legislation, conflicts at the scaffold still occurred from time to time. On 18 December 1758, for example, a riot broke out and several people were injured as the surgeons’ men attempted to remove the body of a man executed at Tyburn. On this occasion the crowd won and the body was carried away in triumph.

Surgeons’ Hall near Newgate had a lecture theatre and this is depicted by William Hogarth in the fourth and last of the series of engravings he produced in 1751 as
The Four Stages of Cruelty
. As with many other of Hogarth’s works there is a heavily didactic and moralistic tone to this saga. It follows the brief and dismal life of Tom Nero, born in the notorious rookery of St Giles where all kinds of repulsive cruelties were perpetrated on animals. When little more than a child, he joins in this sadism while refusing a bribe from a horrified passer-by to desist. He is evidently hardened and brutalised by his upbringing in these surroundings. These factors come together to bring about his inevitable fate when he is found guilty of murdering a servant girl whom he had first made pregnant and then persuaded to rob her mistress on his behalf. In the final scene, Hogarth shows Nero’s corpse on the dissecting table at Surgeons’ Hall. A hangman’s rope still around its neck, the corpse is being worked on by three men with aprons under the close scrutiny of a crowd of students and voyeurs. Presiding over this unedifying spectacle is the lecturer who, as in so many of Hogarth’s works, can be recognised as one of his contemporaries. In this case it is the famous surgeon John Freke, who had been a close friend until Hogarth had quarrelled with him some time before. In the niches around the walls can be descried the skeletons of two anatomised criminals. They are James Field, a well-known prizefighter, and James Maclaine, the notorious highwayman who was hanged at Tyburn in 1750. Tom Nero has truly received the reward for his cruelty.

Criminals appeared on the scene prepared to obtain corpses illicitly to meet the demands of the surgeons. The courts dealt very harshly with those taking bodies from graves but turned a blind eye towards the surgeons and doctors who bought the cadavers. The general public execrated both parties in this trade. There were some, however, who contemptuously dismissed superstitious fears of dissection. It was not unknown for condemned prisoners to sell their bodies to the surgeons for their use after they were executed. They then spent the money buying the best services that could be had in Newgate or a suit of fine clothes for an eye-catching valedictory appearance at Tyburn.

Ruth Richardson states that corpses began to acquire market value and become commodities during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Richardson 1989: 52), but limited trading in cadavers had been going on much earlier. Henry Machyn records that in February 1561, eighteen men and two women were executed at Tyburn and the Barber-Surgeons claimed one of the felons. In December 1561 after an execution it was recorded that ‘one of the surgeons took [the body] for anatomy into their hall’ (Nichols 1848: 273). The month of December is significant because anatomical studies were more a winter than a summer occupation given the lack of an effective preservative agent for dead bodies. Surgeons frequently complained that the effluvia from corpses made the demonstration theatre offensive. Public anatomy sessions took place over three days and the procedure was first for the Clerk of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company to be informed that a body would be available after an execution. The Beadle and his assistants then had the unenviable task of facing the hostile crowd and securing possession of the body. Other trades also played their part in the arrangements for disposing of a dead felon from Tyburn. In 1731 a Mr Osmond was paid £6 for doing ‘plumbers work on the trough for the dead body’ and a Mr Ashfield was paid £114
s
for ‘carpenters work for the said trough’. This was payment for a wooden coffin lined with lead in which the subjects were placed on their arrival from Tyburn.

The Company of Barber-Surgeons went to great length and considerable expense to obtain the corpses of the condemned. Gifts were made to the hangmen at Christmas for allowing agents to secure the body from the scaffold (Sawday 1995: 60). In 1743 it was recorded that the hangman signed with an ‘X’ for receipt of his Christmas box and that the clerk styled him ‘John Thrift Esq. Hangman’. The accounts of the Barber-Surgeons from 1717 provide evidence of the growing contention around the scaffold as conflicting claims were made for the bodies of the condemned. The Barbers’ Company often prosecuted rioters and was continually compensating the beadles who were injured in the fights around the scaffold at Tyburn and other places of execution in London. The following examples from the Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London give some idea of the conflicts at Tyburn:

1717
Paid my Lord Chief Justice Parker’s Tipstaffe for taking four Dead Bodies from Tyburn this year – expenses £2.8.0.
1719–20
Paid the Beadles for going to Tyburn for a Body for the Muscular lecture when they could not get one by reasons of a Great Mobb of Soldiers and others. £0.13.0.
1720
Paid the hangman for the dead man’s clothes which were lost in the scuffle and for his Christmas Box. £0.15.0.
1739 Paid the Beadles for their being beaten and wounded at the late execution. £4.4.0.
1740
Paid for mending the windows broke upon bringing the last body from Tyburn. £0.6.0.

(Young 1890)

There was a great deal of hostility from the gallows crowd to the presence of the men working for the surgeons. For this reason they often found it wise to disguise themselves while they waited around the gallows for the body of the condemned. Bernard de Mandeville writing in 1725 commented on the scene following an execution:

the next entertainment is a squabble between the surgeons and the Mob, about the dead bodies … They have suffered the Law (cries the rabble) and shall have no other barbarities put upon them … If the others are numerous and resolute enough to persist in this Enterprise, a Fray ensues.

(Sawday 1995: 59)

The scenes around the scaffold and the conflicting, often violent, claims made by various people over the bodies of executed felons greatly worried the state, which was anxious to control this kind of behaviour. Most of the condemned were deeply concerned about their impending agony on the gallows and about what would happen to their bodies after death, a fear that was shared by their friends and relatives. Many families intervened to claim a body. For example, John Casey rode with his brother in the cart from Newgate to Tyburn in 1721 and managed to protect his brother’s corpse from the unwelcome attentions of the surgeons’ men. Sometimes relations made long journeys for the same purpose as in the case of the wife of William Seston who travelled from Lancashire to safeguard her husband’s body at Tyburn in 1721. A few years later, Oliver White’s father journeyed from Carlisle to London to keep watch over his son’s freshly buried remains, a long, difficult and expensive journey and an indication of the concern he felt that his son should rest in peace.

When hangings at Tyburn ceased in 1783 this ammounted to an informal re-evaluation of the purposes and utility of public hanging. Indeed, a sea change in attitudes is indicated in the writings of Daniel Defoe and Bernard de Mandeville earlier in the century. Defoe advocated solitary confinement and an austere regime for the prisoner in his last few days while de Mandeville suggested a much larger force of guards for the procession and the execution as a way of reducing the disorder and moral laxity he considered the inevitable accompaniment to Tyburn Fair. Henry Fielding’s work as a magistrate convinced him that the drunken and unruly crowds attending hangings made a mockery of the law. He expands on the matter:

The day appointed by law for the thief’s shame is the day of glory in his opinion. His procession to Tyburn and his last moments there, are all triumphant; attended with the compassion of the meek and tender-hearted, and with the applause, admiration and envy of all the bold and hardened… . The executions of criminals … serve, I apprehend, a purpose diametrically opposite to that for which they are designed; and tend rather to inspire the vulgar with a contempt for the gallows rather than a fear of it.

This analysis was supported by a Scottish clergyman who was clearly appalled by a hanging scene he witnessed:

Among the immense multitude of spectators, some at windows, some upon carts, thousands standing and jostling one another in the surrounding fields – my conviction is that, in a moral view, a great number were made worse, instead of better, by the awful spectacle. Of the ragamuffin class a large proportion were gratified by the sight; and within my hearing expressed their admiration of the fortitude, as they termed the harshness and stupidity, of one of the sufferers. ‘Well done, little coiner’, ‘What a brave fellow he is!’.

(Fielding 1751)

Francis Place, the radical, provided the most incisive criticism of the public hanging ritual. He argued that the support which the crowd gave to the criminals, the felon appearing as hero and the general atmosphere of revelry, failed to deter serious crime and indeed undermined the whole process of the law. In what he said there is little sense of humanity or of the needless humiliation inflicted on the condemned felon. Instead public hanging is being subjected to cold and critical scrutiny. It led to social disorder; it disrupted everyday life including trade and commerce; it subverted the law and was ineffective.

It could certainly be extremely inefficient. Until the ‘drop’ form of hanging was introduced which broke the neck, death was from asphyxia. However, this more primitive form of hanging could be influenced by the executioner. He could be bribed to tie the knot in such a fashion that the prisoner would become unconscious for quite some time and might survive being taken down and be revived by friends. This is almost certainly what was intended to happen in the case of Dr Dodd at Tyburn in 1777, although in his case the incompetence of the hangman meant that Dodd was hanged anyway.

Although hangings without extinction of life were never common, they were frequent enough to keep hope of resuscitation by relatives and well-wishers alive and examples have gone on record. In 1709 John Smith was hanged at Tyburn and left for some time before being cut down and taken to a nearby house where he was bled and given other treatment from which he made a complete recovery. For the rest of his life he rejoiced in the nickname ‘Half-Hanged Smith’.

In 1736 Thomas Reynolds was hanged at Tyburn and on being cut down and placed in his coffin, pushed back the lid and made an effort to get out. The hangman then descended on his victim with the intention of stringing him up once more but the onlookers intervened and carried him off. Although they made attempts to save his life, he died shortly afterwards.

There were many who even in the earlier part of the eighteenth century denounced Tyburn Fair as an unedifying spectacle and one such was Bernard de Mandeville writing in 1725. In
An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn
, he fulminates against the whole ritual:

All the way, from Newgate to Tyburn, is one continual Fair, for Whores and Rogues of the meaner Sort. Here the most abandoned Rakehells … here trollops … And there are none so less lewd, so vile or so indigent, of either sex but … may find a Paramour … . No modern Rabble can long subsist without their darling Cordial, the grand Preservative of Sloth, Jeneva, that infallible Antidote against care and frugal Reflexion …

Hangings on the gallows at Tyburn and elsewhere were more than simply a public display of the carrying out of justice. They were events that were deeply etched into the collective consciousness and the culture of the urban masses throughout the assize towns in the provinces but most of all in London. In spite of the utterances of isolated individuals like de Mandeville in 1725 and a growing undercurrent of criticism through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, hanging remained central to the popular culture. The progress of some felons to Tyburn acquired the attributes of burlesque, a ridiculing of the law which cemented popular derision for authority. In this way, the procession to Tyburn came to have the opposite effect to that intended by the authorities. As Frank McLynn said, ‘There can be little question but that Tyburn hangings had become, not an awestruck acceptance of the remorseless majesty of the law, but a ritual of defiance of that very law.’ (McLynn 1991: 276).

Tyburn Fair played a central role in the popular culture of London, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This culture was largely enacted on the streets; it was voyeuristic, vulgar and vicarious. It was escapist. Its attractions were built up through the idea of celebrity. Even before developing technology and increasing literacy cheapened the price and thereby widened the potential readership of reading material, there were writers whose efforts were aimed at selling copy through the production of celebrities. These were not moralistic or didactic texts drawing their readers’ attention to the awful fate of sinners, rather, they were unashamedly picaresque, glorifying and romanticising a carefully chosen gallery of rogues and villains. Certain types of criminal were deliberately excluded but others were presented in an uncritically favourable light. Examples of this genre are
A General History of the Robbers and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates
published in 1724 and
A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers, etc.
which was published in 1734. These works appeared under the name of Captain Charles Johnson which may have been a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe. Similarly, John Gay (1685–1732) popularised criminals and the criminal world in his immensely popular
Beggar’s Opera
.