The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 1/2Griffiths, Arthur
History
The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 1/2
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
that Stubbs, when his right hand was cut off, plucked off his hat with
his left, and said with a loud voice, ‘God save the Queen.’ The
multitude standing about was deeply silent, either out of horror of this
new and unwonted kind of punishment, or out of commiseration towards the
man....” The process of mutilation was at times left to the agonized
action of the culprit: as in the brutal case of one Penedo, who in 1570,
for counterfeiting the seal of the Court of Queen’s Bench, was twice put
in the pillory on market-day in Cheapside. The first day one of his
ears was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner that he should be
compelled “by his own proper motion” to tear it away; and on the second
day he was to lose his other ear in the same cruel fashion. William
Prynne, it will be remembered, also lost his ears on the pillory, but at
the hands of the executioner. The Earl of Dorset, in giving the sentence
of the Star Chamber Court, asked his fellow-judges “whether he should
burn him in the forehead, or slit him in the nose?... I should be loth
he should escape with his ears; ... therefore I would have him branded
in the forehead, slit in the nose, and his ears cropt too.” Having
suffered all this on the pillory, he was again punished three years
later, when he lost the remainder of his ears, and was branded with the
letters S. L. (seditious libeller) on each cheek. Dr. Bastwick and
others were similarly treated.[106] Prynne was a voluminous writer, and
is said to have produced some two hundred volumes in all. A
contemporary, who saw him in the pillory at Cheapside, says “they burnt
his huge volumes under his nose, which almost suffocated him.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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