9 The Times (24 June 1788 emphases in original).«It is, perhaps, as well to state», he added, «that there were some fifteen to twenty persons standing around the smouldering embers at the time I passed» 8. Yet it is hard even now, in our post-enlightenment, post-Holocaust age, not to shudder at the idea that the man’s carriage may actually have passed through Margaret Sullivan’s still-flickering remains. «Passing in a hackney-coach up the Old Bailey to West Smithfield», he wrote, «I saw the unquenched embers of a fire opposite Newgate on my alighting I asked the coachman ‘What was the fire in the Old Bailey, over which the wheel of your coach passed?’ ‘Oh, sir,’ he replied, ‘they have been burning a woman for murdering her husband.’» In the latter particular at least, this aged Victorian witness was in error. Sixty years later, one man recalled happening upon the scene. As soon as she came to the stake she was placed upon the stool, which after some time was taken from under her, when the faggots were placed round her, and being set fire to, she was consumed to ashes» 7. «After the men had been hanging about a quarter of an hour», London’s leading daily newspaper reported, a woman named Margaret Sullivan «was brought out, dressed in black, attended by a priest of the Romish persuasion. 165).ģWhatever view one takes of that matter, however, what followed on the particular morning in question seemed to many contemporaries to defy any claims to enlightenment that the English criminal law might entertain. 8 Notes and Queries (1850, 1st ser., II, p.Followers of Michel Foucault – who detect a darker exercise of «power» in the enlightenment-era transition from punishments publicly imposed on the criminal’s body to those directed at his or her mind and scrupulously hidden away behind prison walls – might see in this adoption of a more rapid and effective execution ritual outside Newgate a particular attempt to inflict more secretive torments on the minds of its inmates 6. Indeed the case could be made that the abolition only five years earlier of the Tyburn execution ritual, distinguished in the eyes of many principally for the rowdy disorder it provoked in its otherwise unmoved spectators, signalled the beginnings of a more civilized approach to the way in which the law’s ultimate sanction was applied in the nation’s capital 5. In fact, the three men hanged this day constituted a display of relative restraint on the part of officialdom by comparison with the groups of ten- to fifteen-odd convicts at a time who had been executed on individual Newgate hanging days during the 1780s 4. England’s «bloody code», after all, prescribed the death sentence for more than two hundred distinctly-defined criminal offenses, and it would still be nearly half a century before the law would decisively abandon its insistence upon maintaining the option of executing people convicted of crimes other than murder 3. The rowdiness of the crowd at executions was little changed, however ( ibi (.)ĢSuch execution scenes were not unusual in late eighteenth-century London. 3 The most comprehensive account of the substance and ultimate repeal of «the bloody code» remains Ra (.).They were dead before 8 a.m., and if the usual form in such cases was followed on this occasion, their bodies would have been cut down within an hour and the gallows on which they died cleared away soon afterwards 2.
#CHIVALRY CODE OF CONDUCT IN THE 1800S FULL#
Newspaper accounts of what followed passed over in silence (as most at this time usually did) the full details of the next three-quarters of an hour, during which time these men presumably received what spiritual comfort could be afforded them by prayer as the nooses were placed about their necks and their feet positioned above the trapdoor of the scaffold. Three men, one convicted of burglary and the other two of coining, were brought out the Debtors’ Door of the prison onto a temporary platform erected for the occasion. For the silence in most newspapers as to the details of execution (.)ġSoon after seven o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 25 June 1788, a scene familiar to many Londoners was enacted outside Newgate Prison in the Old Bailey.
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