Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth centuryGriffiths, Arthur
History
Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth century
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
the whole thing was a trick devised by a bailiff in the pay of the
surgeons, and that the body had been forcibly taken from a person who
really intended to bury it. The mob was now excited to frenzy, and a
serious riot followed. The police being quite inadequate to quell it,
the military were called in, and with the aid of several detachments
of Guards the ringleaders were secured. The body was given over to a
friend of Sheppard's to bury, the mob dispersed to attend it to St.
Martin's Fields, where it was deposited under a guard of soldiers and
eventually buried.
While these wild revels were kept up both before and after the
execution the demeanour of the doomed partook too often of the
general recklessness. The calendars are full of particulars of the
manner in which condemned convicts met their fate. Many awaited the
extreme penalty and endured it with callous indifference or flippant
effrontery. Only now and again did their courage break down at the
eleventh hour, and so prove that it was assumed. A few notable examples
may be cited as exhibiting their various moods. Paul Lewis, once a
lieutenant in the royal navy, but an irreclaimable scoundrel, who
took eventually to the road, and was sentenced to death for highway
robbery, was boldly unconcerned after sentence. In Newgate he was
the leader of the revels: they dubbed him captain, like Macheath; he
sat at the head of the table, swore at the parson, and sang obscene
songs. It was not until the warrant of execution arrived at the prison,
that all bravado evaporated, and he became as abject as he had before
appeared hardened. John Rann the highwayman, better known as Sixteen
String Jack, had a farewell dinner-party after he was convicted, and
while awaiting execution: the company included seven girls; "all were
remarkable cheerful, nor was Rann less joyous than his companions."
Dick Turpin made elaborate preparations for his execution; purchased
a new suit of fustian and a pair of pumps to wear at the gallows,
and hired five poor men at ten shillings per head, to follow his
cart as mourners, providing them with hat-bands and mourning-bands.
Nathaniel Parkhurst, who, when in the Fleet for debtors, murdered a
fellow prisoner, demolished a roast fowl at breakfast on the morning
of his execution, and drank a pint of liquor with it. Jerry Abershaw
was persistently callous from first to last. Returning from court
across Kennington Common, he asked his conductors whether that was the
spot on which he was to be twisted? His last days in the condemned
cell he spent in drawing upon the walls with the juice of black
cherries designs of the various robberies he had committed on the
road. Abershaw's _sang-froid_ did not desert him on the last day.
He appeared with his shirt thrown open, a flower in his mouth, and
all the way to the gallows carried on an incessant conversation with
friends who rode by his side, nodding to others he recognized in the
crowd, which was immense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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