John Turner, _alias_ Civil John--John Johnson--James Sherwood, George Weldon and John Hughs--Martin Bellamy--William Russell, Robert Crough and William Holden--Christopher Rawlins, etc.--Richard Hughes and Bryan MacGuire--James How--Griffith Owen, Samuel Harris and Thomas Medline--Peter Levee, etc.--Thomas Neeves--Henry Gahogan and Robert Blake--Peter Kelley--William Marple and Timothy Cotton--John Upton--Jephthah Bigg--Thomas James Grundy--Joseph Kemp--Benjamin Wileman--James Cluff--John Dyer--William Rogers, William Simpson and Robert Oliver--James Drummond--William Caustin and Geoffrey Younger--Henry Knowland and Thomas Westwood--John Everett--Robert Drummond and Ferdinando Shrimpton--William Newcomb--Stephen Dowdale--Abraham Israel--Ebenezer Ellison--James Dalton--Hugh Houghton--John Doyle--John Young--Thomas Polson--Samuel Armstrong--Nicholas Gilburn--James O'Bryan, Hugh Morris and Robert Johnson--Captain John Gow Appendix Index LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Murder on Hounslow Heath Matthew Clark cutting the throat of Sarah Goldington A Prisoner Under Pressure in Newgate The Hangman arrested when attending John Meff to Tyburn Stephen Gardiner making his dying speech at Tyburn Jack Sheppard in the Stone Room in Newgate Trial of a Highwayman at the Old Bailey Jonathan Wild pelted by the mob on his way to Tyburn A Condemned Man drawn on a Sledge to Tyburn The Murder of John Hayes: Catherine Hayes, Wood and Billings cutting off the head John Hayes's Head exhibited at St. Margaret's, Westminster Catherine Hayes burnt for the murder of her husband Joseph Blake attempting the life of Jonathan Wild An Execution in Smithfield Market Highway Robbery of His Majesty's Mail A Gang of Men and Women Transports being marched from Newgate to Blackfriars INTRODUCTION _To close the scene of all his actions he Was brought from Newgate to the fatal tree; And there his life resigned, his race is run, And Tyburn ends what wickedness begun._ If there be a haunted spot in London it must surely be a few square yards that lie a little west of the Marble Arch, for in the long course of some six centuries over fifty thousand felons, traitors and martyrs took there a last farewell of a world they were too bad or too good to live in. From remote antiquity, when the seditious were taken _ad furcas Tyburnam_, until that November day in 1783 when John Austin closed the long list, the gallows were kept ever busy, and during the first half of the eighteenth century, with which this book deals, every Newgate sessions sent thither its thieves, highwaymen and coiners by the score.