The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd (5 page)

Just 18 months after the execution of Jack Sheppard, a woman named Catherine Hayes was sentenced to death by burning after persuading her two lovers to kill her husband with an axe and then dispose of his body. Any appeals for clemency went unheeded after the trial and the date of Catherine’s execution was set for 9 May at Tyburn. No doubt horrified at the fate that awaited her, Catherine managed to procure some poison while incarcerated at Newgate. However, her plan was discovered by her cellmate and the poison taken away. The details of her execution were recorded by the Newgate Calendar, which reported, ‘On the day of her death she received the Sacrament, and was drawn on a sledge to the place of execution. When the wretched woman had finished her devotions, in pursuance of her sentence an iron chain was put round her body, with which she was fixed to a stake near the gallows.

‘On these occasions, when women were burned for Petty Treason, it was customary to strangle them, by means of a rope passed round the neck and pulled by the executioner, so that they were dead before the flames reached the body. But this woman was literally burned alive; for the executioner letting go the rope sooner than usual, in consequence of the flames reaching his hands, the fire burned fiercely round her, and the spectators beheld her pushing away the faggots, while she rent the air with her cries and lamentations. Other faggots were instantly thrown on her; but she survived amidst the flames for a considerable time, and her body was not perfectly reduced to ashes until three hours later.’

Men convicted of Treason could be sentenced to a different but just as terrible method of execution: that of being hanged, drawn and quartered. Most men who suffered this fate had been accused of conspiring against the monarch and therefore they became martyrs to those who shared their ideals. Perhaps sensitive to this, the Newgate Calendar’s reports of executions of this nature are generally composed with much more taste than the accounts of female murderers such as Catherine Hayes. This does not however negate the fact that this form of execution was ghastly. Before undertaking his final journey, the condemned man would be tied to a hurdle which was in turn attached to a horse. The prisoner was then drawn through the streets in full view of the thousands of onlookers who had turned out to see the macabre spectacle. On reaching the gallows, the man would be placed on the back of a horse-drawn cart and a noose put around his neck. The horses would then be scared into bolting forwards, thus dragging the body from the back of the cart and leaving it to swing in the air. At this point, those who had been sentenced only to hang would be left on the gallows until it was presumed that life was extinct.

A much worse fate met those convicted of Treason. The executioner watched carefully to decide when the prisoner was about to lose consciousness and at that point, the body was cut down and quickly disemboweled and castrated; the executioner making a point of showing the dying convict his own innards and amputated genitalia before he passed out. Once the prisoner had been disemboweled, the corpse was beheaded and the torso cut into quarters. Heads of traitors were often displayed publicly at the entrances to bridges or major thoroughfares as a warning to others, although many were ‘rescued’ by members of the deceased’s family so they could be buried with the rest of the corpse.

Given the sickening nature of all three forms of 18th century capital punishment, being sentenced to death must have devastated all but the most resilient of convicts. However, for those receiving this most awful of sentences, all was not lost. After sentence was passed, the prisoner’s family, friends and associates could petition for mercy via the Recorder of London who in turn, produced a report on each capital sentence and sent it to the reigning monarch for consideration. If the king felt that the prisoner had a good enough case, he could issue one of two types of pardon: a Free Pardon was issued when the monarch and his cabinet felt there was some doubt as to the prisoner’s guilt. Once issued, the accused was free to leave his or her place of incarceration without further ado. More common was the Conditional Pardon. This was issued when it was felt that the sentence delivered was too severe. Receivers of Conditional Pardons generally had their sentences commuted to a lesser punishment. During the 18th century, around half of all those sentenced to death were pardoned.

The death penalty could also be avoided altogether by using two methods, the first of which one involved a mechanism known as ‘Benefit of Clergy’. This ancient system was originally introduced in the Middle Ages to allow the Church to punish its members without going through a civil court. If a prisoner could prove he was a God-fearing Christian, the judge might be persuaded to hand sentencing over to the clergy, whose punishments were far less severe. In order to test the convict’s faith, judges generally asked them to read a passage from the Bible, and Psalm 51 was usually selected due to its theme of confession and repentance. As a result, the Psalm became commonly known as ‘neck verse’ because of the number of necks it had saved from the gallows.

The second method of avoiding the death penalty was to secure a ‘partial verdict’ from the jury. As the accounts above show, the death penalty could be issued for all manner of relatively minor crimes. In fact, theft of goods to the value of just ten shillings or more could carry the penalty of death if the judge was so inclined. However, many jurors felt that this punishment was far too severe and so allowed the defendant to escape the risk of a death sentence by valuing the goods stolen at under ten shillings, which carried a much more lenient sentence. A good example of the partial verdict in action occurred at the trial of Ann Brown, who went on trial at the Old Bailey on 17 January 1724 accused of shoplifting. Ann had been caught red handed stealing stockings from two shops a month previously. At the trial, she had very little to say in her defence bar the fact that she had been cajoled into committing the crimes by another (anonymous) woman. However, despite having no reasonable excuse for her actions, the jury decided to spare her the prospect of a death sentence by valuing the items at four shillings and ten pence. Ann was spared the noose, but did not escape another, almost equally feared punishment: transportation.

By the beginning of the 18th century, the number of defendants using the ‘Benefit of Clergy’ device to escape the death penalty was at an all time high. This meant that numerous miscreants were released into the community after trial, where they were soon up to their old tricks again.

The authorities addressed this problem by legislating that men and women convicted of ‘Clergyable’ offences could be transported to serve their sentence working in Britain’s colonies. Those found guilty of capital offences could also be transported if the monarch upheld their appeal. In 1718, the Transportation Act was passed through Parliament and proved to be an immediate hit with British judges, who saw it as a way of offering clemency to convicted prisoners while at the same time removing them from British society. A pamphlet from 1731 neatly described the process as ‘Draining the nation of its offensive rubbish, without taking away their lives’. Between 1718 and 1775, two thirds of all convicted criminals at the Old Bailey were sentenced to transportation.

Once committed, convicts were held in the cells of a local gaol before being handed over to a ‘convict merchant’ who would transport his human cargo to the colonies in return for a fee paid by the Government. When the ship docked at its destination, the convicts were sold on contract as servants to local colonists, who in turn sold produce from their tobacco plantations and arable farms to the convict merchant who would then sail back to Britain with a ship full of a very different sort of cargo.

During the early years of criminal transportation the majority of convicts were sent to either the West Indies or the east coast of America (usually Maryland or Virginia). The journey to these far-flung destinations was both arduous and treacherous. Many of the convicts were not in the best of health when they embarked and consequently, outbreaks of disease were rife. Others found the prospect of servitude in a foreign land too much to bear and, sadly, suicides were not uncommon. According to contemporary landing certificates, mortality rates for convicts during the early years of transportation ran at between 11% and 16%. However, conditions gradually improved and by the 1770s, transporting agents were reporting just 2-3% fatalities per voyage.

The length of sentence received by transported convicts largely depended on the seriousness of the crime. Prisoners convicted of Clergyable offences were sent away for seven years while felons who had secured conditional pardons for capital crimes were transported for a period of anything from 14 years to life.

The vast majority of transported convicts were male. Women were generally considered to be less of a threat to the public and therefore were often given corporal punishment for non-capital offences rather than being sentenced to transportation. Historian A. Roger Ekirch studied the Maryland census return for 1755 and found that 79.5% of all transported convicts living there were either men or boys, most of whom were between the ages of 15 and 29 years. Their social status and professional backgrounds were surprisingly diverse. Ekirch noted that the prisoners ranged ‘from soldiers to silversmiths to coopers and chimney sweeps, including a former cook for the Duke of Northumberland. One Irish convict styled himself a metal refiner, chemist and doctor while another jack-of-all-trades was reputedly “handy at any business”’. Other felons found by Ekirch include a former barrister who supplemented his income by smuggling rare books out of university libraries to be sold on the black market and a gentleman who despite being independently wealthy got his kicks from stealing silver cutlery.

Although the majority of transported convicts were not dangerous and many provided useful, cheap labour for the local plantation owners and farmers, many colonists found the concept of transportation insulting in the extreme. This is unsurprising considering it was patently obvious that the courts on the British mainland viewed their North American and West Indian colonies as perfect dumping grounds for the members of society they had rejected. Some colonies attempted to halt the process of transportation by levying taxes on the convict ships but the British Government soon stopped this practice. It was only at the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1775 that transportation to America finally ground to a halt. In total, around 30,000 prisoners were transported to America between 1718 and 1775 representing up to a quarter of all British immigrants to America during the 18th century.

When America declared independence from Britain in 1776, the courts were left with the dilemma of what to do with felons sentenced to transportation. Although the practice had proved unpopular in the colonies receiving the prisoners, transportation had proved to be hugely successful as a means of disposing of criminals on the British mainland and the courts were reluctant to dispense with the punishment. Various proposals were discussed and ultimately dismissed until the authorities finally realised that the answer to their problem lay many thousands of miles away in a land that had only been visited by a handful of Englishmen.

Earlier in the decade, Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook had returned to Britain after a long expedition to the South Pacific announcing that he had claimed a new territory for the Crown named New South Wales. Cook and his crew reported that despite its remote location, the land and climate were very favourable for settlement. The courts reviewed Cook’s reports of the land, came to the conclusion that New South Wales would be a perfect destination for transported criminals and on 26 January 1788, the ‘First Fleet’ of ships docked at Port Jackson, Sydney, with a human cargo of around 700 convicts. British colonisation of Australia had begun.

Life was exceptionally hard for Australia’s first colonists. Due to the sheer number of convicts on board the first fleet, the ships could only be loaded with a relatively small amount of provisions, meaning that on arrival at Sydney, the convicts and accompanying marines had to become self-sufficient very quickly. The voyage itself was far longer than any previous convict transportations and by the time the ships reached port, many of the passengers were in very poor physical health and unable to work. The absence of any established farms or plantations exacerbated the problem and many people, convicts and free settlers alike, starved to death. The arrival of a second fleet in 1790 only made the situation worse as the starving colonists had to deal with an influx of yet more people who had to be fed.

At this point, the successful establishment of a penal colony in New South Wales seemed an almost impossible task and the venture may have failed completely were it not for the vision and enthusiasm of the colony’s first Governor, Arthur Philip. On accepting the post, Philip envisaged the development of a colony that comprised a mix of convicts and free settlers. British citizens looking to begin a new life overseas were to be encouraged to come to New South Wales by the offer of a generous financial relocation package from the Government.

Once they had arrived, they would be given assistance in setting up their chosen business and would have a large workforce at their disposal in the form of convicts. In reality, the Government showed little interest in developing the fortunes of its new colony. Financial incentives for those wishing to emigrate were much lower than Philip had hoped and to cap it all, stories of the appalling conditions in New South Wales began to filter through to the homeland. Between 1788 and 1792, just 13 people decided to emigrate to Australia. In contrast, over 4,000 convicts arrived.

The almost total absence of new, free settlers combined with the arrival of a never-ending stream of convicts presented Philip with a problem that seemed almost insurmountable. He had to find a way to deal with an ever-expanding population of convicts, many of whom were either unable or unwilling to work. In addition to this, a sizeable proportion of the convicts were professional criminals who were constantly looking for ways to abscond or cause trouble. Some were dangerously violent; others suffered from mental illness. None of them wanted to be in Australia. Philip met the challenge with a mixture of prudence and authority. Provisions were constantly in short supply and so he took great care to ensure that they were shared amongst the population equally, regardless of status. The condition in which prisoners were received in New South Wales was significantly improved by the introduction of hygiene and care standards on the convict ships. Convicts that displayed exemplary behaviour were rewarded with better-paid, more responsible jobs and any crimes committed were dealt with in a fair but firm manner.