London: The Biography полностью

Some forms of punishment, however, were more secret. In Newgate was a “press” reserved for those who refused to plead to their indictments. Here they were stripped “and put in low dark chambers, with as much weight of iron placed upon them as they could bear, and more, there to lie until they were dead.” There is an eighteenth-century engraving of a felon, one William Spiggot, “under pressure” in Newgate; he lies naked upon a bare floor, his arms and legs stretched and pinioned to hooks against the walls. Upon his naked chest is a wooden board loaded down with great weights. One gaoler, bearing keys, stands over him while another moves forward with a lighted candle to observe his sufferings. This quasi-medieval torture, known as “pressing to death,” continued until 1734-an apt indication of the barbarity of city justice.

In that spirit, too, the number of hanged rose in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In one month of 1763, for example, “near one hundred and fifty persons have been committed to New Prison and Clerkenwell for robberies and other criminal offences.” It was said in The Annual Register that the “reckless wretches seem almost to have crowded in, crying, ‘You cannot hang us all.’” But they could try.

Soon enough, however, the venue of slaughter had changed. The gradual spread of gentility to the west meant that the old tribal route from Newgate to Tyburn began to impinge upon the fashionable quarters close to Oxford Street. So in 1783 the authorities removed the gallows to Newgate itself, thus cutting off the procession at its source. The populace at large felt deprived of the spectacle of “the cheat,” to use the cant term for the gallows, and the more scholarly Londoners felt that an habitual aspect of the city was being removed in an untimely fashion. “The age is running mad after innovation,” Samuel Johnson told Boswell, and “Tyburn is not safe from the fury of innovation … No, Sir, it is not an improvement: they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they don’t draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties: the public was gratified by a procession: the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?” Boswell might have had his own answer. He himself was addicted to the watching of executions-“I had a sort of horrid eagerness to be there,” he once wrote of Tyburn-and through the good offices of Richard Ackerman, the Keeper of Newgate, was able to witness many hangings outside that prison.

The first Newgate hanging was conducted on 9 December 1783, but its revolutionary system of “the new drop” soon claimed more victims. A few days after the sentence of death had been pronounced in the courtroom, the malefactor was “cast” and the “dead warrant” sent down to his cell. The Newgate Chronicles themselves detail the hours leading up to his appearance on the “stage.” On the first night in the condemned cell “the solemn notification of the impending blow keeps nearly all awake,” but soon they slept more easily. “All too have a fairly good appetite,” the same chronicler reports, “and eat with relish up to the last moment.” The “Italian boy” condemned for murdering a French woman in the Haymarket ate “constantly and voraciously,” as if to stuff himself before the final exit. One Jeffreys, who hanged his child in a cellar in Seven Dials, called for roast duck as soon as he entered the condemned cell.

In the hour before execution the condemned man was led from his cell into a “stone-cold room” which was the place where he was pinioned by the “yeoman of the halter” before being taken to “the new drop.” The engine of death, which was transportable, was dragged by horses into grooves marked upon Newgate Street itself. It consisted of a stage upon which were constructed three parallel beams. The part of the stage next to the gaol had a covered platform; here were the sheriffs’ seats, while around it stood the interested spectators. In the middle of the stage was a trap-door, ten feet long by eight feet wide, above which the beams were placed. The hour of execution was always eight o’clock in the morning and, a few minutes before that time, the sheriffs brought out the prisoners. Upon the dropping of a flag, the bolts holding up the trap were pulled and the convicted men or women fell or “dropped” to their deaths.