London: The Biography полностью

There are several contemporaneous prints displaying “The New Gallows in the Old Bailey” with those about to suffer praying or weeping with halters about their necks. Around them, hemmed in by soldiers, are the crowd, who stare up with fascination at the fatal stage. In fact a contributor to The Chronicles of Newgate wrote that “the change from Tyburn to the Old Bailey had worked no improvement upon the crowd or its demeanour. As many spectators as ever thronged to see the dreadful show, and they were packed into more limited space, displaying themselves as heretofore by brutal horseplay, coarse jests, and frantic yells.”

On one occasion, “A few minutes of most dreadful suspense” took place; “the culprits stood gazing at each other … at last the chime struck upon the ear, and the poor fellows seemed startled.” In Defoe’s account of Moll Flanders’s period in Newgate, the sound of the bell of Holy Sepulchre set up “a dismal groaning and crying … followed by a confused clamour in the house, among the several prisoners, expressing their awkward sorrows for the poor creatures that were to die … Some cried for them, some brutishly huzzaed, and wished them a good journey; some damned and cursed those that had brought them to it.”

The night before an execution, outside Newgate, all the paraphernalia of execution-the gallows, the barriers, the platforms-had to be set up. These preparations naturally attracted a crowd of idle or interested observers. The “low taverns and beer-houses about Newgate Street, Smithfield, and the Fleet district, are gorged with company, who sally out at intervals to see how the workmen get on” and “knots of queer-looking fellows form here and there” to discuss the following morning’s proceedings. The police moved them on, but they clustered elsewhere. Just after midnight on Sunday, when most of the night-revellers had been cleared, the gin shops and coffee houses opened their doors and hired out their rooms-“Comfortable room!,” “Excellent situation!,” “Beautiful prospects!,” “Splendid view!” Both roofs and windows in the vicinity were hired out; five pounds were “given for the attic storey of the Lamb’s Coffee House” and a first-floor front could command five times as much. The crowd began to assemble at four or five in the morning, and the whole area in front of Newgate was packed by seven o’clock. By the time of the ceremony itself some of the spectators, pressed up against the barriers for several hours, had “nearly fainted from exhaustion.”

When Governor Wall was marched from the press yard towards the place of execution, he was greeted with howls of abuse and execration from the other prisoners of Newgate. While the governor of Goree, in Africa, he had been responsible for the death of a soldier by excessive flogging-one of those abuses of authority which Londoners most detest. His appearance on the scaffold was then accompanied by three harsh and prolonged shouts from the crowd assembled in Newgate Street. After the hanging was over the yeoman of the halter offered portions of the rope for sale at one shilling per inch; a woman known as “Rosy Emma,” rumoured to be the yeoman’s wife, “exuberant in talk and hissing hot from Pie Corner, where she had taken her morning dose of gin-and-bitters,” was selling parts of the fatal cord at a cheaper rate.