(ii) Criminal Laws and their Administration
ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
of course, the patriotic reactions of the decent and law-abiding Briton to the barbarities and atrocities of the French Revolution, which, for a generation, were to impede all English reform.
But when Burke's patriotism overflowed into economics and he formulated the neat but diabolical slogan, '' the laws of commerce are the laws of nature and therefore the laws of God,'2 he not only showed himself a slave to the " philosophy" of his age, but invited the venom of Marx who later retorted:
'' No wonder, then, that, true to the laws of God and nature, Burke always sold himself in the best market.''?
On the accession of George ITI, Court life was sternly purged ; for whatever the failings of this enigmatic sovereign, the moral standards of his home and Court were unimpeachable.
This fact largely explains both the admiration of practical moralists, like Wesley, and the smouldering fury of " free-living" aristocrats, like Fox, who resented the introduction of what they styled a " puritanical Court."4
Then, too, it must be admitted that the Constitution, as interpreted after the "' Revolution Settlement "' of 1689, despite its many perversions, at least guaranteed to Parliament the right of reasoned criticism and debate, so that, as Walpole found in the case of his Excise Bill, and on other occasions, even a supreme oligarchy could not completely defy public opinion.
Moreover the ruling class of England, different from the lordling satellites who surrounded the French and certain other Continental Courts, were firmly attached to the country-side, and thus knew something of the Nation's lite'; while also, by heredity, tradition and experience, they were possessed of " political capacity ?> in no mean degree.
But all this admitted, the political and economic corruption of most of the century is undeniable ; and the more exhaustively it is probed, the more irresistibly does it point to a moral and spiritual source ; the bitter fruit sprang from a poisoned root.
(ii) Criminal Laws and Their Administration The penal code, together with its legal administration and the prison system, even more than the corruption of politics, reveals the thinness of the cultural veneer disguising the deep savagery
'See P. A. Brown, The French Revolution in English History (1918) ; Edmund Burke's Reflections and Thoughts on French Affairs.
2 Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1800), p. 31.
* Karl Marx, Capital (Everyman ed., 1932), Vol. II, p. 843.
The German original, Das Kapital (Vol. I), appeared in 1867.
* Jeudwine, op. cit., Pp. 192.
° Lecky, I, p. 451,
POM hGisi, bh NA Le COD Be OA ND PRES ONS ne) of much of the eighteenth century.
Even when Blackstone was elaborating the glories of our "' unmatched Constitution," not only adults but children of both sexes, enjoyed the liberty of being hanged for no less than 160 different violations of the law.
To pick a pocket for more than one shilling, to grab goods from any one's hand and run away with them, to shop-lift to the value of five shillings, to steal a horse or a sheep, to cut a hop-bind, to break a young tree, to snatch gathered fruit and make off with it, to snare a rabbit on a gentleman's estate, or even to appear on the high road with a blackened face : these are typical offences for which a free Briton could be hanged.
Charles Wesley's Journal records the fact that he preached in one jail to fifty-two felons waiting to be hanged, among them a child of ten.
In 1732 seventy persons received sentence of death in the Old Bailey alone,? while, throughout most of the century, at important quarters in cities and on highways, were to be seen gallows, often with their last corpses "left rotting in chains "'
—a gruesome warning to the populace.
Lecky describes this penal code as "' a mere sanguinary chaos," and Professor Rogers, in his Six Centuries of Work and Wages, depicts it as,
"' more sanguinary and brutal than any which a civilised nation had hitherto devised, or a high spirited one submitted to."
Moral and spiritual standards had largely broken down; crime was mounting at an alarming pace, and the police system, as Fielding and others have shown, was little more than a farce.
So the ruling castes turned to a ferocious penal code as a defence of their '' property rights' ; and the fact that juries often would perjure themselves rather than convict for minor offences, was about the only check upon the ferocity of the Law.
Not infrequently seven, ten or fifteen culprits were executed at the same time and place, and these occasions came popularly to be styled "' Hanging Shows."
The executions at Tyburn, West London, for instance, which recurred every six weeks, drew such crowds that spectators paid for grand stand seats, and other '' points of vantage' around the gallows, to see the "show"? ; while multitudes packed the streets for the processions in which the "' guests of honour" were the cart-loads of brandy-benumbed victims on their way to the Slaughter.
Many are the contemporary impressions of these gallows 1 See Sir Samuel Romilly, Observations on the Criminal Code (1810), also his Observations on the Late Publication entitled "' Thoughts on Executive
Justice," p. 6.
2 Andrews's Eighteenth Century, p. 271.
3 J. E. T. Rogers, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 490.
128 ENGLAND!
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
processions and hanging shows.
But always there is depicted a roaring sale of "'sots' comfort'
(gin) from street barrows ; always a drunken brawl; always a number of women with infants trampled down by the ruffian throng ; always a troop of hawkers, pickpockets, fakirs and prostitutes ; always a rabble of leary-eyed and tattered urchins, looking for pelf; always a bevy bawling out the sale of "' Dying Speeches" : and always these "' speech-vendors '' used the "' same words, and the same tone"' in chanting them.
'' Here's all the right and true last dying speech and confession," they droned, " birth, parentage, education, life, character and behaviour"
. of the three, six, ten or fifteen "' unfortunate malefactors'? about to be executed.t The march from Newgate to Tyburn took about three-quarters of an hour.
For a " good show " all the route partook of an extended carnival or fair.
Hats, sticks, clubs, cloaks and kerchiefs were waved high in air ; dogs barked and yelped ; the half-inebriated roared and sang ; swaggering men and women pushed around the death-carts to grasp the culprits' hands and commend their high spirits.
Sometimes the victims themselves actually fought with one another concerning their
"order of precedence' in the carts.
And always there were present—lurking, sinister characters 'in mourning "'—the " resurrection women," paid by surgeons to procure bodies for dissection ; for '' gallows birds"? were easy and coveted prey.
One contemporary, concluding a long description, says: 'It is incredible what a scene of confusion all this makes, which yet grows worse near the gallows; .
. the terrible blows that are struck, the heads that are broke, the pieces of swinging sticks and blood that fly about, the men that are knocked down and trampled upon, are beyond imagination.'?
Muralt, too, a Swiss traveller in England, in the third decade of the century, has left an illuminating impression.
' The criminals pass through the streets in carts," he says, "' dressed in their best clothes, with white gloves and nosegays, if it be the season.
Those that die merrily, or that don't at least show any great fear of death, are said to die like gentlemen ; and to merit this encomium most of them die like beasts, without any concern, or like fools, having no other view than to divert the crowd."
Such, too, were the applauses of spectators and the general levity of these occasions, that Muralt confesses :
"A man cannot well forbear laughing to see these rogues set themselves off as heroes, by an affectation of despising death." 3
1 See Sir Walter Besant, op. cit., p. 548.
* A Trip Through the Town, pp. 26-31.
Quoted by Besant .
550— * Muralt's Letters on the English Nation, p. 426.
Oe ee
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY "SPORT"
(From old prints by courtesy of the R.S.P.C.A.) 1. Bull-baiting (top) 2. Bear-baiting (bottom)
POLITICS,
PENAL CODE AND PRISONS
Henry Fielding, the novelist, who in 1749 became chief magistrate of Westminster, speaks of these wretches as being
"attended with the compassion of the meek and tender-hearted, and with the applause, admiration and envy of all the bold and hardened."
He also says of the hanging spectacles:
' We sacrifice the lives of men, not for the reformation but for the diversion of the populace."?
Yet Dr. Johnson, who, on the whole, was more compassionate towards criminals than F ielding,?® was thoroughly upset when finally, in 1783, public executions were suppressed.
Boswell faithfully records the Doctor's wrath :
'" The age is running mad after innovations .
. Tyburn itself is not safe from innovation.
. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators.
If they don't draw spectators, they don't answer their purpose.
The old method was satisfactory to all parties ; the public was gratified by a procession ; the criminal was supported by it ; why is all this swept away?"
The hanging shows, however, were but symbolic of the spirit behind the penal code.
After the Rebellion of 1745, Temple ,, Bar, London, was long decorated with a row of heads betokening the fate of the Pretender's captured leaders; and Horace Walpole points out that a flourishing business was there being conducted in renting spy glasses at a half-penny a look.
Till the fifth decade of the century, persons found guilty of high treason were cut down from the gallows when only half-hanged, disembowelled, and their entrails burned before the howling mob.# Tull the middle of the century, too, women, for different crimes, including arson and husband murder, were, after semistrangulation, publicly burned.*
And not till 1771 was the law repealed condemning prisoners refusing to plead on capital. charges, to have iron weights placed on their bare chests, and slowly be " pressed to death"? : though not for three decades preceding, had this barbarous law been enforced.
But well into the second half of the century, and even after its close, certain brutalising legal punishments lingered on.
The pillory long remained an established institution wherein unpopular victims sometimes perished from mob assaults; branding on the hand continued ; whipping at the tail of a cart was still a familiar sight in many communities ; while the transportation of both sexes, and the flogging of women, survived the century.
1 Fohnson's England, Vol. 1, p. 321.
* Dr. George, op. cit., p. 7.
3 Fohnson's England, 1., p. 316.
Andrews, op. cit., p. 281. d ® See Blackstone's Commentaries, IV, Chap. vi.
The law read, " burnt alive.''
It was not actually repealed till 1790.