Something must be said about that useful public servant, the executioner. Selected by the State to carry out its decrees, it would seem that he should have been invested with a dignity but little inferior to that of the judges who pronounced the sentence carried out by him in co-partnership. Without the practical assistance of the executioner, the solemn sentence of the robed, ermined, and full-bottom-wigged judge would be of no effect. Nevertheless, this officer of the State, practically inculcating on the scaffold the great truths of morality impressed on the public from the bench, this great public officer has never received the homage due to him. In France the executioner is—or was—“the executor of high works,” with us he has always been merely “the common hangman.” Of the many instances of public ingratitude, this is perhaps the most scandalous. Nor have posthumous honours in the smallest degree compensated for want of respect during life. The statues of London are, with few exceptions, and these recent, almost wholly devoted to royal personages, to soldiers, and to ground landlords. Among them we seek in vain monuments to the executive officer, without whose aid law and order would have been mere empty names. That great work, the Dictionary of National Biography, has done something to redeem this neglect by recording such rare facts as may be discovered in the biographies of hangmen. For this we may be grateful: it is at least a beginning. Cunningham, in his “Handbook of London,” a compilation displaying marvellous industry, says that “the earliest hangman whose name is known was called Derrick.” This is a mistake. There are two, or perhaps three, predecessors whose names have been recorded. Of these predecessors of Derrick, the first is Cratwell, whose execution was witnessed by the chronicler Hall in 1538. Then comes an officer whose name a careless country has omitted to preserve, “the hangman with the stump-leg,” who, alas! was also hanged, reaching this end to his career in 1556.[65] A third possible predecessor of Derrick is known only by name. At the trial of Garnet, in 1606, the Earl of Northampton made a speech of which he thought so highly that he afterwards amplified and enlarged it for publication. Here is a specimen of what he would have liked to say had he been permitted:— “The bulls which by the practice of you and your Catiline, the lively image of your heart, should by loud lowing, have called all his calves together with a preparation to band against our sovereign, at the first break of day, and to have cropped those sweet olive-buds that environ the regal seat, did more good than hurt, as it happened, by calling in a third bull, which was Bull the hangman, to make a speedy riddance and dispatch of this forlorn fellowship.”[66] Bull is also mentioned in “Tarlton’s Jests.”