A detailed account has been preserved of the execution of Colonel John Turner in 1662, which presents a strange picture of the way in which the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in those days. The scene of the execution was not Tyburn, however, but a place in Leadenhall Street at Lime Street end, a spot near where the deed for which Turner suffered was perpetrated. An immense crowd had gathered, as usual, to witness the convict’s death. Pepys was there of course--“up,” he tells us; “and after sending my wife to my Aunt Wright’s, to get a place to see Turner hanged, I to Change.” On his way he met people flocking to the place of execution, and mingling with the crowd, “got,” somewhere about St. Mary Axe, “to stand upon the wheel of a cart for a shilling in great pain above an hour before the execution was done. He delaying the time by long discourses and prayers one after another in hopes of a reprieve, but none came.” Turner was drawn in a cart from Newgate at eleven in the morning, accompanied by the ordinary and another minister, with the sheriffs, keeper of the gaol, and other officials in attendance. On coming to the gibbet he called the executioner to him, and presented him with money in lieu of his clothes, which his friends desired to keep. Then standing in the cart, he addressed the crowd with great prolixity. He dwelt on the cardinal sins; he gave a circumstantial account of his birth, parentage, family history; he detailed his war services as a loyal cavalier, with his promotions and various military rewards. With much proper feeling he sought to lessen the blame attached to his accomplices in the murder, and to exonerate the innocent accused. At intervals in this long discourse he was interrupted now by the sheriffs with broad hints to despatch, now by the ordinary as to the irrelevance and impropriety of such remarks from a man about to die. Again the keeper of Newgate taxed him with other crimes, saying, for example, “Pray, Colonel Turner, do you know nothing of a glass jewel delivered to the Countess of Devonshire in room of another?” or “How about the fire in Lothbury, or the mysterious death of your namesake Turner, who died in your house?”