Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (12 page)

From time to time, especially in the years immediately after the Restoration of 1660, substantial numbers of criminals were transported to the American colonies where there was a desperate shortage of labour. When they got there, they were sold to the highest bidder for whom they had to work while serving out their sentences under conditions virtually indistinguishable from those of slaves. Transportation suited the English authorities because it enabled them to be seen as exercising clemency while getting rid of some of the country’s most anti-social elements, at least temporarily. Transportation to America ceased for a while because it was decided that England was already underpopulated and could not afford to lose so many able-bodied people, especially young men. However the practice was resumed after the Transportation Act of 1718 when it became very common to despatch convicted felons to the colonies for terms of seven or fourteen years. Many of these had been found guilty of capital offences but, on receiving a royal pardon, had had their sentences ‘commuted’ to transportation. Given the appalling conditions in the ships that carried them to the penal colonies and the living and working conditions when they arrived, the pardon was often tantamount to a death sentence anyway. The fact that this alternative to the capital sanction became available was one reason for a fall in the number of hangings over the following period.

American colonies ceased to be a destination for British criminals when they gained their independence in the 1770s and the authorities then started using superannuated wooden men o’ war with their armament, rigging and other fittings removed, as floating prisons. These ‘hulks’ were moored on the River Thames and elsewhere and the convicts used as forced labour locally. The hulks were soon filled to bursting point and the authorities forced to look elsewhere. In 1786 they came up with the idea of transporting convicts to Australia, the first cargo of woebegone criminals arriving there in January 1788, near Botany Bay in New South Wales.

Whipping remained a common punishment for petty larceny into the eighteenth century. Petty larceny was the only form of theft for which the perpetrators were not liable for capital punishment. It was not uncommon for juries to reduce the crime of grand larceny before them to one of petty larceny, for which whipping was seen as an appropriate punishment, where goods of low value were concerned. Whipping involved physical pain and public humiliation. The victim was stripped to the waist and then whipped through the streets behind a horse-drawn cart. This was another piece of public theatre like the ride from Newgate to Tyburn and the hangings there and it attracted large and unruly crowds who often disrupted business activity in the City.

In the City of London the Lord Mayor headed the administration of justice and enforcement of the law. After 1741 all City aldermen were also magistrates. They had jurisdiction over Newgate Prison and over the courts at the Old Bailey, where the cases that were considered were from the City and from Middlesex, which constituted most of the metropolis north of the Thames that was not part of the City. The sessions over which the City and the Middlesex magistrates had jurisdiction took place eight times a year. More serious offences were heard before High Court judges also presiding at the Old Bailey. Although its population was declining as a proportion of the capital’s overall numbers, the City was still immensely important because of historical precedent and its enormous wealth. While there was still much small-scale manufacturing in the City, it was now developing as the hub of a complicated web of overseas and colonial trading relations and as a major international centre of financial services. Because of its affluence and its attraction for those wanting fame and fortune, the City was plagued by crimes such as highway robbery and burglary, against which its citizens felt they had little protection and which they perceived as growing at an alarming rate.

High levels of crime were seen as evidence that the moral fabric of society was breaking down. As J.M. Beattie has commented:

a great chain of immorality and illegality – a linking commonly conceptualized as a slippery slope that began with apparently minor acts of wilfulness and disobedience that were to be taken seriously because they gave rein to the passions and, if not checked, would lead to the erosion of moral sense and of the principles of right behaviour that derived from religious beliefs and practice.

(Beattie 2001: 51)

Minor misdeeds such as Sabbath-breaking had to be taken seriously because they showed susceptibility to a downward spiral of moral depravity. Large numbers of artless young people flocked to London in search of wealth and fame. These vulnerable youngsters could so easily move from Sabbath-breaking to the manifold immoral and criminal attractions to be found in London’s brothels, taverns, coffee houses, theatres, gaming houses and fairs. This analysis of the causes of crime highlighted the insidious role allegedly played by ‘lewd women’. To enable them to enjoy the salacious pleasures they offered, men went on to commit robbery and all sorts of other offences. This attitude was part of a continuum which had long demonised women as evil sirens employing their lubricious charms in order to captivate and control the male sex. Dorothy George provides a corrective by explaining that:

there is little doubt that the hardships of the age bore with especial weight upon them [women]. Social conditions tended to produce a high proportion of widows, deserted wives, and unmarried mothers, while women’s occupations were over-stocked, ill-paid and irregular.

(George 1966: 174)

Large numbers of young women did indeed come to London in search of employment but what they managed to obtain was likely to be ill-paid, unskilled or at best semi-skilled work that was vulnerable to economic and seasonal fluctuations. The justification for paying women low wages was that their employment was considered nothing more than a supplement to the earnings of the male breadwinner on whom they depended and that it was often spent on mere frivolities. The harsh reality is that for very many women, with or without male partners, the low wages and irregular employment left them largely destitute. When they had no work, poverty stared them in the face and it was all too easy for them to slip into illegal ways of making money. J.M. Beattie takes up this theme:

For single women especially, the capital offered a greater degree of independence and privacy – a certain freedom from the surveillance and controls of patriarchal and paternalistic social relationships. At the same time, however, and as an inevitable consequence, the urban world forced on them a greater need for self-reliance. This must have been true of single women and widows in particular, and it is hardly surprising that not only were larger numbers of women drawn into theft in London, but that fully eighty per cent of the women before the Old Bailey on property charges in this period were unmarried.

(Beattie, 2001: 71)

What then was the rationale that underpinned the penal system in the period up to the 1780s? Three main principles can be identified. One was the concept of deterrence. It was believed that the very public ceremonies involving the condemned prisoner’s last journey to the place of execution and the rituals on the gallows including their confession and subsequent agonising death, were effective deterrents which would instil into those who witnessed them a sense of the omnipotence of the law and the terrible fate awaiting those who committed serious offences. Retribution was another principle. The suffering attached to the punishment should be proportional to the heinousness of the crime. Laws were made by the wealthy and powerful. For this reason the seriousness with which offences were regarded and punished reflected, although not absolutely, the values and mores of those in power and these could change in different circumstances. The third principle was that the offender, even one guilty of a minor crime, had shown his disregard, even his contempt, for the values around which society operated. Therefore when the punishment fell short of death, he had to undertake a ritual penance involving shame and humiliation in public.

By the middle of the eighteenth century it seems evident that there was concern that the carnivalesque nature of the journey from Newgate to Tyburn and the rituals that were enacted there were detracting from rather than enhancing the awfulness of the law. Reformers like John Howard were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and argued that existing forms of punishment were arbitrary, barbaric and largely ineffective in countering crime. Reforms were needed which, by letting potential offenders know that they were much more likely to be caught and punished, actually deterred people from committing crime. The punishment for each crime should be consistent. It should act as a deterrent and should suit the crime committed and where custodial sentences were concerned, should try to limit future offending through a regime aimed at reforming the offender’s character. Ideas along these lines were adopted in the century after hangings ceased at Tyburn.

The ultimate punishment for City of London and Middlesex criminals was public hanging at Tyburn. This provided an unequivocal statement of the state’s legal monopoly of violence within civil society. The hanging of a malefactor was a carefully stage-managed affair. Since the vast majority of those hanged had offended against laws protecting property, each hanging was intended to send out a clear message that property and the law should be respected. Only few people possessed any significant wealth and so the use of this deterrent was evidence of the conflict of interests between the rich and powerful and the poor and disenfranchised. Additionally the very existence of judicial hanging staged in this fashion is evidence of the potency of myths. Was hanging really a deterrent when pickpockets employed their skills to profitable effect in the crowds around the gallows at Tyburn?

It could be argued that the use of punishment by the state is about maintaining power and social control. The form it takes depends not on abstract concepts such as mercy or compassion but on the strength of the forces of government and authority at any particular time and their ability to maintain control over society in the easiest and most economical way. The barbaric physical punishments that were a feature of England in earlier times were replaced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because the state was confident that it no longer needed to use such openly ferocious ways in order to maintain its power and to safeguard property and the status quo.

Hangings at Tyburn ended not on account of increasing humanity or compassion on the part of those, rich and poor, who had previously thronged to watch and enjoy the dying agonies of London’s convicted felons. They ceased because the well-heeled and influential occupants of the new and extremely prestigious residential areas adjacent to Tyburn objected to the noise, the revelry and the frequently drunken and violent behaviour of the huge crowds drawn to Tyburn Fair. In today’s language, this was a case of ‘Not in my back yard’. Tyburn attracted the riff-raff on hanging days and the rich folk of London’s emerging West End did not want to be reminded of their existence. More than that, these crowds and the festivities associated with Tyburn Fair disrupted the business life of London as many as eight times a year. Additionally, these crowds always posed the threat of running riot and getting out of control. The transfer of hangings to the more confined surroundings of Newgate assisted the authorities to manage a public spectacle which, at this time, they presumably still thought deterred potential criminals.

T
he Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 inaugurated a very different period from the preceding decade. It saw, for example, the reopening of the theatres, the granting of a charter to establish the Royal Society in 1660 dedicated to the propagation of scientific experimentation and knowledge and the return to the throne of the ‘Merry Monarch’ from over the waters. There was a conscious repudiation of what was seen as the joyless austerity of the recent past. However, the initial heady euphoria soon gave way to business as usual. Tyburn would witness more criminal executions in addition to the execution of some of the regicides. Moreover, an increasing number of commentators would visit, write about and illustrate the gallows at Tyburn.

After 1660 there was a marked desire to break with the memory of the two previous decades of civil war, revolution and republicanism. To symbolise that break the regicides who had been responsible for the trial and execution of Charles I had to be brought to account. Of the fifty-nine men who had signed Charles’s death warrant, forty-one were still alive and of these fifteen had fled the country. Those who had ended up in Europe were believed to hold an annual celebration at a tavern in Charing Cross and were known as the ‘Calves’ Head Club’: on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, members of this club toasted the regicides and banqueted on calves’ heads.

Three of the regicides who escaped at this late stage were John Okey, a London chandler, Miles Corbet who had reached Holland, and John Barkstead, son of a London goldsmith, who was living in Hanau near Frankfurt. All three were tracked down after being betrayed by a collaborator, George Downing, who had been chaplain in Okey’s regiment. Downing turned Royalist when he deemed it the best way of serving his interests and subsequently pursued a career in the Foreign Office as well as serving as the King’s representative in Holland. He went on to be knighted and in 1680 to build a cul-de-sac of rather plain brick terraced houses which became famous as Downing Street. Downing’s star may have risen but Okey, Corbet and Barkstead were not so fortunate and all three were executed at Tyburn in April 1662. Okey displayed much penitence on the gallows and his severed quarters were allowed a decent burial. Corbet’s head, however, was displayed over one of the City’s gates and Barkstead’s was spiked above Traitor’s Gate at the Tower. Barkstead’s death generated more interest than most because it was believed that he had hidden treasure in the form of gold packed into barrels somewhere within the precincts of the Tower. Many people, including Samuel Pepys, searched for this in vain.