The Manchester and Glasgow Road, Volume 1 (of 2): This Way to Gretna GreenHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Manchester and Glasgow Road, Volume 1 (of 2): This Way to Gretna Green
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; Scotland -- Description and travel
fled in panic, throwing away their weapons, such as they were. The
Hussars captured some thirty of them, between Kimberley and Longley
Mill, and lodged them in Nottingham Gaol. Brandreth himself escaped,
and lay in hiding for awhile, but was betrayed by “a friend,” for sake
of the £50 reward offered.
[Illustration: STAGE-COACH TRAVELLING, 1828 (DERBY AND SHEFFIELD).
[_After J. Pollard._
]
[Sidenote: _END OF THE TRAITORS_]
The chief figures in this affair were, to the number of twenty-three,
arraigned before a special Assize held at Derby on October 15th, with
the result that Brandreth, William Turner, and Isaac Ludlam, senior,
were condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Eleven others
were “pardoned,” as the quaint phrase ran, “upon condition of being
transported for life”; three were similarly “pardoned” by being awarded
fourteen years’ transportation; while one had two years’, two a term of
one year, and three a mere six months’.
The three principal offenders were executed at Nuns Green, on November
7th, and were hanged, having merely their heads cut off afterwards; the
Prince Regent “graciously remitting the rest of their sentence.” How
kind!
The unfortunate men took affecting leave of one another, anticipating
being presently in heaven. The hangman, duly masked—he was said to be
one of the Denby colliers—then performed his office, and afterwards cut
off the heads: making so ill a job over Brandreth that his assistant
was fain to complete the work with knives. Thereupon, the executioner,
in the gory old formula, held up the head before the huge assembled
crowd, and, turning right and left, exclaimed, “Behold the head of the
traitor, Jeremiah Brandreth!”
The bodies of the three men were unceremoniously flung into a pit dug
in the churchyard of St. Werburgh, in Friar Gate. A sportive barber,
Pegg by name, then took to masquerading in the churchyard as a ghost,
robed in a sheet, and, scared the inhabitants for some time, until a
bold spirit, throwing a stone at him, hit him with such violence in the
eye that he went half blind for the rest of his life.
XXVIII
There are picturesque corners in this town of Derby, so contemned by
most writers, sufficient to make the fortune, in the pictorial way,
of many another town. Derby, to an artist, at any rate, is a likeable
place, and such an one is in sympathy with Boswell, who wrote in 1777:
“I felt a pleasure in walking about Derby. There is an immediate
sensation of novelty, and one speculates on the way in which life is
passed in it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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