Yet these measures had no effect on the rising crime rate. It could hardly be expected to when a large proportion of the population was permanently drunk. Henry Fielding reckoned that a hundred thousand people in London alone lived mainly on gin. Another observer stood outside a gin palace for three hours one evening and counted 1,411 people going in and out. These ‘palaces’ usually consisted of a shed, full of barrels of gin; the customers merely came to buy a pennyworth of gin, which explains the enormous number. Whole families, including, father, mother and children then sat on the pavement and drank themselves unconscious; with gin at a penny at quart, it was not difficult. The artist William Hogarth engraved two famous pictures, ‘Beer Street’ and ‘Gin Lane’, to expose the evil. In Beer Street, a lot of jolly-looking men and women are drinking outside a tavern and obviously engaging in intelligent political discussion (there is a copy of the king’s speech on the table). In Gin Lane, a drunken mother allows her baby to fall out of her arms into the area below, a madman impales a baby on a spit, and a man who has hanged himself can be seen through the window of a garret. Fielding remarked that the gin ‘disqualifies them from any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes sense of fear and shame and emboldens them to commit every wicked and dangerous enterprise.’ The result was that pickpockets who had once relied on skill and light fingers now knocked down their victims with bludgeons in broad daylight. The novelist Horace Walpole was shot in the face by a highwayman in Hyde Park in 1752.
Punishments, both in England and on the continent, had always been barbarous; now they became sadistic. The sentence of being hanged, drawn and quartered was usually reserved for political criminals, although it might be applied to some particularly violent robber. The victim was dragged to the place of execution behind a cart; he was then half-hanged, and his bowels were torn out while he was still alive and burned in front of him. After this the body was cut into four pieces. Female criminals were often burned alive, because it was regarded as more ‘decent’ than allowing them to risk exposing their private parts as they swung from a rope. (In this respect our ancestors were remarkably prudish.) But it was common for women – as well as men – to be stripped to the waist before being whipped through the streets to the pillory or gallows. After the 1699 act, thieves were branded on one cheek to make their offence public knowledge – this was probably regarded as an act of clemency, since most thieves were hanged. Prisoners accused of offences that involved speech – perhaps preaching false religious doctrines – would have a hole bored through the tongue as they were held in the pillory. A confidence man named Japhet Crook was sentenced to have both ears cut off and his nose slit open then seared with a red hot iron; the hangman, known as ‘Laughing Jack’ Hooper, cut off both ears from behind with a sharp knife and held them aloft for the crowd to see, then cut open Crook’s nostrils with scissors; however, when he applied the red hot iron to the bleeding nose, Crook leapt out of his chair so violently that Hooper – who was a kindly man – decided not to carry out the rest of the punishment. On the Continent, sentences were even crueller; red hot pincers were used to tear out the tongues of blasphemers. A madman called Damiens, who tried – rather half heartedly – to stab Louis XV of France in 1757, was executed by being literally ‘quartered’. He was carried to the execution because his legs had been smashed with sledgehammers. His chest was torn open with red hot pincers, and lead poured into the wounds. Then his hands and feet were tied to four dray horses, which were whipped off in opposite directions. They were not strong enough to tear off his arms and legs, so more horses were brought; even so, the executioner had to partly sever the arms and legs before they could be pulled off. Damiens remained conscious until he had only one arm left – during the early part of the proceedings he looked on with apparent curiosity – and his hair turned white during the course of the execution.
But then, punishment was intended as a public spectacle. The underlying notion was to deter; in fact, it seems to have had the effect of making the spectators sadistic. This was perhaps an extreme example of the ‘xenophobic’ reaction discussed in an earlier chapter. The English had always been inclined to treat foreigners as an object of mirth – in 1592 the duke of Wiirtemburg noted that London crowds ‘scoff and laugh’ at foreigners and are likely to turn nasty if the foreigner shows any sign of being offended. At public spectacles, the criminal became the despised ‘foreigner’. When placed in the stocks or pillory, he was likely to be pelted with stones and dead cats until he died. A woman named Barbara Spencer was sentenced to be burnt alive for coining in 1721; at the stake she wanted to say her prayers, but the mob wanted to get on with the entertainment and booed and threw things at her as she tried to pray; she had still not succeeded in saying her prayers when the hangman applied a torch to the faggots. Days when notable public executions were held at London’s main gallows – Tyburn, at Hyde Park corner – were usually public holidays. They became known as ‘gallows days’, which in turn became ‘gala days’. On the day when James Whitney – the highwayman who resisted capture for an hour – was taken to Tyburn, he was one of eight men who were sentenced to hang simultaneously on the triangular shaped scaffold that had been erected in the time of Queen Elizabeth. (The older type, consisting of two uprights and a cross bar, was less efficient in that it would only hang one or two at a time.) Only seven men were hanged on that occasion; Whitney was reprieved at the last moment for offering to betray his accomplices. Whitney was lucky enough to be popular; he was driven back through a cheering crowd with the rope still round his neck. But he was hanged a week later, having told all he knew.
In 1735, it struck a bookseller named John Osborn that the lively interest excited by criminals could be turned to his advantage, and he issued three volumes of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals. Pamphlets about famous criminals had been popular since the time of the Elizabethans; but they usually concerned people in the upper ranks of society and dealt with only one case at a time. By the time of Osborn, most criminals were ordinary highwaymen, footpads, housebreakers and pirates. But he recognised that the public had an insatiable appetite for the details of the lives of the people they loved to see hanged. Almost every one of the Lives, two hundred or so cases, begins with a moral preamble: ‘It is an observation that must be obvious to all my readers, that few who addict themselves to robbing and stealing ever continue long in the practice of those crimes before they are overtaken by Justice…’, and so on. And this was not because Osborn felt the need to justify himself in publishing tales of crime. It was because he recognised that his readers enjoyed congratulating themselves that they were not in the hands of the law. The pleasure of watching an execution was based on the feeling that you were in the crowd, not on the gallows. The public of Henry Fielding’s day had very little imagination, very little capacity to identify itself with another person’s suffering. This is why one of the popular entertainments was going to ‘Bedlam’ to laugh and jeer at the mad people. It would take another century before novelists like Dickens could persuade people to enjoy putting themselves in the place of the ‘unfortunates’ of society.
The most striking thing about Osborn’s Lives of the Criminals is the utterly commonplace nature of most of the crimes, and their curious lack of personal interest. We live in an age of personalities, of gossip columns, of ‘people in the news’. It is true that ninety-five per cent of the crimes that now take place in London or New York are commonplace and ‘impersonal’. But the remaining five per cent help to fill scandal sheets with titillating details. We are accustomed to crimes having a strong ‘individual’ interest, the element that makes them suitable for film or television treatment. In Osborn, not even one per cent of the crimes would be suitable for dramatic treatment.
One of the few possible exceptions is the case of Catherine Hayes, a housewife who conspired with her two lovers to murder her husband, a retired moneylender. They lived in lodgings not far from the Tyburn gallows, and Catherine’s relations with her husband were poor – she declared that he was pathologically mean, which is probably true. A young tailor named Thomas Billings came to the house and became her lover while her husband was away on business. Soon afterwards, a man named Thomas Wood moved in and also became her lover. She offered to share her husband’s fortune of fifteen hundred pounds – a vast sum for those days – with her lovers if they would help her get rid of John Hayes. They did this one evening in 1725, after all four of them had drunk bottle after bottle of wine between them. (They were rich enough to drink wine, not gin.) One of the lovers hit Hayes with a hatchet and fractured his skull. The next problem was to get the body to the river. Catherine suggested that they cut off the head, so that if they were forced to abandon the corpse en route, it would be unrecognisable. With a great deal of retching, the two men sawed off the head with a carving knife, leaving the headless body to bleed into a pail. Then the two men walked down to the river and tossed the head in. It landed on mud — the tide was out. The following day, they dismembered the corpse, put it into a trunk, and threw it into a nearby pond under cover of darkness.