On the morning of Friday, the seventh of November, the three miserable men, heavily ironed, were jolted round the prison yard on a horse-drawn hurdle or sledge, prepared, like the block, by Finney, the town joiner. On mounting the scaffold in front of the county jail, Brandreth and his fellows briefly testified that they had been brought to this plight by the tempting of Oliver, the degraded Government spy. They hung from the gallows for half an hour. Brandreth’s body was the first taken down and placed on the block. The greatest difficulty had been experienced in finding an executioner, but at last the high fee of twenty-five guineas secured several applicants. The chosen headsman was a Derbyshire collier; he was masked, and his identity was never disclosed. The mutilation was bungled; but when accomplished, the executioner seized the head by the hair, and holding it at arm’s length in three different directions over the crowd, thrice proclaimed, “Behold the head of the traitor Jeremiah Brandreth.” The other two were served in like manner. The scaffold was surrounded by a strong force of cavalry with drawn swords, and several companies of infantry were also present. The dense crowd was quite over-awed, and could utter no other protest than “terrifying shrieks.” In that crowd was the poet Shelley. The day before the execution, the Princess Charlotte died in childbirth, and Shelley seized the opportunity to write a vigorous and now most rare pamphlet drawing a contrast between the two deaths. The block on which these three men were beheaded is still preserved in the new county gaol at Derby. It consists of two 2½ in. planks fastened together, and measures 6 ft. 6 in. by 2 ft. Six inches from one end a piece of wood 3 in. high is nailed across. The whole is tarred over, but the wood, strangely enough, remains damp in places. A tradition used to be current that the block sweated every seventh of November, on the anniversary of the execution; the writer visited it on that day in 1888, and found no difference in the sweating to what he had noticed in the previous week.