Category Archives: Why

1766: John Clark and James Felton

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We resort to a footnote in a Newgate Calendar edition for today’s interesting anecdote:

John Clarke was a watch-case maker, of good repute, in London. He had long been in the habit of occasionally working by himself in a closet; and his apprentice, jealous of the master’s being there employed on some work in which he would not instruct him, secretly bored a hole in the wainscot, through which he saw him filling guineas. He gave information, convicted, and brought his master to the gallows.

Clarke, for this offence, suffered at Tyburn, along with James Felton, an apprentice, on the 26th of November, 1766, who was the first offender convicted on the act which makes stealing bank-notes, &c. out of letters, a felony. It was proved that he stole a bank post-bill out of a letter at Mr. Eaton’s receiving-house, in Chancery Lane.

(There is no Ordinary’s Account for this date: installments of this venerable series were very sparse during the term of Joseph Moore, in the late 1760s. -ed.)

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1857: Two members of the Aiken Party

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The first “executions” meted out by Mormon captors to the Aiken or Aikin Party men who were attempting to cross the war-footing territory eastward from California took place on November 25, 1857, and were as clumsy as they were brutal.

Under the pretext of escorting them out of the state, Thomas Aiken, John Aiken, John “Colonel” Eichard, and Andrew Jackson “Honesty” Jones reached the small settlement of Salt Creek, Utah, on November 24. They had their least peaceful sleep there that night while their guides, acting on orders from the top of the state’s hierarchy, planned their murders.

Four toughs dispatched by Bishop Jacob Bigler slipped out of Nephi before dawn the next day. They’d ride on ahead, and later that evening “accidentally” meet the southbound Aiken men and their escorts, presenting themselves as a chance encounter on the trails to share a camp that night. These toughs plus the escorts gave the Mormons an 8-to-4 advantage on their prisoners, which was still only good enough to kill 2-of-4 when the time came:

David Bigler’s 2007 Western Historical Quarterly article, “The Aiken Party Executions and the Utah War, 1857-1858.”

After supper, the newcomers sat around the fire singing. “Each assassin had selected his man. At a signal from [Porter] Rockwell, [the] four men drew a bar of iron each from his sleeve and struck his victim on the head. Collett did not stun his man and was getting worsted. Rockwell fired across the camp fire and wounded the man in the back. Two escaped and got back to Salt Creek.”

We don’t actually know which two died at the camp and which two made it back to Salt Creek. Bigler suspects Thomas Aiken and John Eichard were the victims to die on the 25th; the editors of Mormon assassin Bill Hickman‘s confessional autobiography make it Thomas Aiken and Honesty Jones.

The doomed men were stopping at T. B. Foote’s, and some persons in the family afterwards testified to having heard the council that condemned them. The selected murderers, at 11 p.m., started from the Tithing House and got ahead of the Aikins, who did not start till dayhght. The latter reached the Sevier River, when Rockwell informed them they could find no other camp that day; they halted, when the other party approached and asked to camp with them, for which permission was granted. The weary men removed their arms and heavy clothing, and were soon lost in sleep — that sleep which for two of them was to have no waking on earth. All seemed fit for their damnable purpose, and yet the murderers hesitated. As near as can be determined, they still feared that all could not be done with perfect secrecy, and determined to use no firearms. With this view the escort and the party from Nephi attacked the sleeping men with clubs and the kingbolts of the wagons. Two died without a struggle.

As for the two survivors … that’s a tale for another day.

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1793: Francois de Laverdy, former Controller-General

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On this date in 1793, Clément Charles François de Laverdy, Marquis of Gambais and the ancien regime‘s former Controller-General of Finances, was guillotined in Paris.

“Un financier erudit,” Laverdy (English Wikipedia entry | French) was a member of the Paris Parlement and a scholar who at one point unearthed previously unknown manuscripts about the trial of Joan of Arc — but became a bit overmatched when political machinations situated him at Louis XV’s treasury.

A physiocrat, Laverdy made a go in the 1760s at liberalizing the grain trade by authorizing via a July 1764 edict the free export of grain, then reaped the whirlwind when grain prices spiked. In the 1760s, the whirlwind just meant losing his job: by the 1790s, the loss was very much more dear.

Laverdy labored in a pre-industrial kingdom, at a time when the field of economics still lay in its infancy. Nevertheless, he is a recognizably modern character, both in his principles and his disposition, as Steven L. Kaplan describes him in Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV:

Laverdy correctly believed that traditional attitudes toward subsistence constituted the single greatest barrier to change. But, like many self-consciously enlightened ministers and reformers, he neither understood nor sympathized with it. Diffusing light, to be sure, was no easy matter; since all men were not equally equipped to seize the truth, often it was necessary to force them to accept it. To re-educate the public, Laverdy saw no alternative to brutal and relentless reconditioning.

Impetuously, the people believed that their right to subsist took precedence over all the rights prescribed by natural law as the basis of social organization. They assumed that it was the solemn duty of the state to intervene when necessary to guarantee their subsistence without regard for so-called natural rights. Such views, in Laverdy’s estimation, were erroneous and pernicious; they misconceived the role of the government and its relation to the citizenry and did violence to the soundest principles of political economy. In a word, they were irrational; the Controller-General refused a dialogue with unreason. “The people,” he lamented, “hardly used their reason in matters of subsistence.” …

To combat and discredit this mentality, Laverdy chose to belittle and insult it with all the sophistry of progressive thinking. It consisted of nothing more than a crazy quilt of “prejudices.” “Prejudice” was one of the harshest epithets in the political vocabulary of the Enlightenment; it acquired added force when accompanied by Laverdy’s favorite metaphors, light and sight. Their prejudices “blinded the people,” not only to the “veritable principles of things,” but also to “their true interests.” (A decade later, in similar fashion, Turgot explained popular resistance to his liberal program on the grounds that the people are “too little enlightened on their real interests.”) In letter after letter, the Controller-General railed against the “old prejudices which still subsist against liberty of the grain trade.” He hated “ignorance” and “prejudice” en philosophe for the “obstacles … always contrary to all sorts of good [which they] opposed to progress.” …

Only a tough, unbending stance would produce results. “By stiffening against the prejudices of the people,” he predicted, “they will gradually weaken and we will succeed in accustoming them to a bien,” though, he conceded, “they will continue to misjudge [it] for still some time to come.” Misjudging it, however, was one thing, and actively opposing it, quite another. The threat of bludgeoning them into submission was the only real incentive the Controller-General offered the people to embrace the liberal program.

The bread riots that afflicted the remainder of his term he could not but ascribe to this unreason; proceeding from the certainty that his policies were objectively correct, “Laverdy claimed that grain was abundant and prices moderate” and riots “could only have resulted from ‘the prejudice which exists against the liberty of the grain trade.'”

Or, as a liberal journal serenely put it, the riots “are not and cannot be the effect of real need” because in a regime of liberty, “the dearth that the enraged minds fear, or feign to fear, is manifestly impossible.” …

Two assumptions, in Laverdy’s view, seemed to have emboldened the people. First, that they could riot with “impunity,” an expectation encouraged by many police authorities — those at Rouen, for example — who fail to put down popular movements swiftly and mercilessly and who in some instances even seem to sympathize with the insurgents. Second, “the persuasion which the populace of the cities ordinarily shares that the fear of the riots which it might excite will force the King to modify the laws which established liberty.” Nothing was “more essential,” according to the Controller-General, than to “destroy” these aberrant opinions.

To dispel the idea that consumers could riot without risk, Laverdy instructed and exhorted the police after every episode to repress with dispatch and pitilessness. Repeatedly, he asked for “a few examples of severity,” which would serve not only to “contain the people,” but also to “destroy those prejudices” which motivated them, presumably by revealing the futility of following their lead. If the repression were to be delayed, the didactic advantages would be lost. “Nothing is more important,” Laverdy wrote Joly de Fleury in reference to a riot which took place in the fall of 1766, “than to accelerate the procedures instituted against the principal authors … examples in such circumstances are of the greatest necessity and when they are deferred, they do not produce nearly the same effect.” … Impatient with “the slowness of the official inquiries, the appeals, the forms to which the [ordinary] tribunals are subjected,” the Controller-General considered resuscitating a draconian repressive law which had been used before to bypass local jurisdictions …

Soft sentences annoyed Laverdy as much as dilatory ones. Even as he urged the police to show rigor in the streets and marketplaces, so he goaded prosecutors to demand heavy penalties and judges to pronounce them. He followed cases eagerly in all their details, made his expectations clearly known, and bristled with indignation when the results displeased him. In the wake of a massive riot at Troyes, for example, in which the police had failed to deal harshly with the insurgents, Laverdy pressed for a stern judicial reckoning. He was satisfied to learn that the royal procurator and the rapporteur would ask the death penalty for three of the putative leaders and stringent punishment for the others. In anticipation of such a verdict and a hostile popular reaction, extra brigades were sent to reinforce the constabulary. To virtually everyone’s surprise, the presidial rendered a stunningly mild provisional sentence which could lead to the release of all the prisoners in three months. The Controller-General angrily denounced the verdict and demanded an explanation; “the excesses to which the people have given themselves in this circumstance,” he wrote, “require a much more severe punishment.”

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1763: Charles Brown, security consultant

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This primer appeared in Lloyd’s Evening Post (Dec. 21, 1763) and is also to be found in a 1764 compendium called The polite miscellany: containing variety of food for the mind ; being an elegant collection of moral, humourous, and improving essays, &c. both in prose and verse:

Some Hints, by way of Caution to the Public, to prevent or detect the designs of Thieves and Sharpers.

Left in a manuscript, by Charles Speckman, alias Brown, executed at Tyburn the 23rd of November, for robbing Mrs. Dixon, in Broad-street, Carnaby-market, in September last, of some lace.

  1. Never place many different articles on the counter at one time; nor turn your back on the customers, but let some other person put the different articles up, whilst you are intent upon the business before you.
  2. It is in general to be suspected if a person pulls out a handkerchief, lays it down, and takes it up often, that some ill is intended. This was my constant practice with Milliners and others, with regard to what lay in a small compass. It never failed of success. The following is one instance of my manner of using it: At Reading, in Berkshire, I went to a Milliner’s shop, under pretence of buying some lace, to go round a cap and handkerchief, for my sister. The Milliner asked if I was not too young a man to be a judge of lace? I replied, being young, I should hope for better usage, and left it entirely to her generosity to serve me of that which was best of the kind. At this moment I fixed my eye on a particular piece. Pretending to have a bad cold, I took my handkerchief out to wipe my nose, laid it down on this piece of lace, which repeating again, I took the lace up with my handkerchief, and put it in my pocket, and then told the Milliner I would stay till I was grown older; though it is clear I was too old for her now. I took my leave, and marched gravely off, without the least suspicion; and went directly to the Crown Inn, hired a horse for Maidenhead, but pushed on for London.
  3. The shopkeeper, on seeing such methods as this made use of, should remove the handkerchief from off the goods; which will make the Sharper suspect his design is seen through.
  4. It is common at Haberdashers and other shops, which deal in small articles, that for every article which is wanted to be paid for, the Tradesman applies to his till for change; his eyes being fixed thereon, then is the time something the nearest at hand on the counter is moved off.
  5. Watchmakers and Silversmiths are imposed on principally thus: In a morning or evening the Sharper, well dressed, as a Sea-officer, will go to their shops, look at watches, buckles, rings, &c. when a variety of these are laid on the counter, if opportunity offers, the handkerchief is made use of; should this fail, then the goods are ordered to a tavern, coffee-house, or private house, as best suits for elegance or honesty; then the person is instantly sent back for something omitted, whilst the prize is secured, and the Sharper moved off another way. Though this is an old and stale trick, it is amazing how successful the Practitioners in it still are.

The following is part of the affecting account which this unhappy young man gives of himself:

“During my long course in wickendess, I never was addicted to common or profane swearing, to excess in eating, or to drunkenness, and but little to women. I never was fond of even conversing with thieves and robbers, tho’ at accidental meetings I have met with several, who, guessing I was of their profession, would set forth the advantages of associates, or appearing in company to rob and plunder the honest and unwary. Pallister and Duplex, lately executed at Coventry, who called themselves the heads of a great gang, pressed me to go on the highway with them and their companions, but all they could say was in vain. I never would make use of, or indeed knew, the flash or cant language, in which these two men were very expert. My father, who lived in good reputation in London, where I was born, put me to a boarding-school, and bestowed more money on my education than on all the rest of my brothers and sisters (I was the eldest of 18) for all which I never made any grateful return, which gives me now great affliction, and the most pungent remorse. The misfortunes I have undergone have been, I am certain, entirely owing to the continual state of rebellion that I lived in with my parents; and God, for such unnatural practices, has been pleased to bring me to the most just and deserved punishment I am now shortly to suffer. If children did but properly consider, the very fear of bringing their innocent parents to disgrace and shame, would prevent them from pursuing those wicked practices which end in being publickly exposed to a censorious world, and suffering an ignominious death.”

This youth finished his career at the age of 29: he was about five feet nine inches high, thin and genteel in his person, and affable in his behaviour, with much seeming innocence in his countenance.

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1635: The village of Mattau

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On this date in 1635, Dutch soldiers occupying Formosa (Taiwan) massacred 26 people of the holdout aboriginal village of Mattau.

The Dutch had established themselves in southern Formosa from 1624 but their authority there was at first tenuous, and violently contested by some of the island’s natives. The Dutch spent the 1620s shoring up their Fort Zeelandia outpost and carefully noting the grudges to avenge.

Come 1635 the Europeans felt ready to deal out a little payback. First in line was a village some two or three thousand strong known as Mattau — today, the Madou District in the Tainan metropolis — whose people had bloodied the Dutch back in 1629 by repelling an expedition to the tune of 63 casualties.


Taiwanese aborigines, from Olfert Dapper, Gedenkwaerdig bedryf (1670)

The missionary Robert Junius left an account of how revenge was served:

It is well known to you all how some years ago the inhabitants of the village of Mattau most treacherously and shamefully killed sixty of your servants. On account of their great cunning they were most successful in their treachery, so that all of our people were killed without one of our enemies being even wounded. This was looked upon by them as a great unheard-of victory, and it filled them with pride. Not only Mattau but other villages, as Soulang and Bakloan, began to rebel against us, and matters took so serious a turn that we hardly ventured to set foot on Formosa. They even went so far as to hint that they would chase us from Tayouan. All this perplexed the Governor to such a degree that he scarcely ventured to leave the precincts of the Fort at night …

as long as Mattau remained unchastised the inhabitants showed a bold face, imagining that we had not the power, and did not dare to avenge the frightful crime that had been committed against us, by attacking their village. Consequently, we were regarded with very much contempt by all the people, especially by those of Mattau, who often showed how very little they were afraid of us, venturing not only to ill-treat the Chinese provided with our licences, but even tearing up Your Excellencies’ own passports and treating them with contempt. Governor Putmans, seeing how insolent these people had become, and that such conduct was no longer to be borne, very earnestly begged Governor-general Brouwer to send hither a sufficient military force to humble them and adequately defend the settlement. This enforcement of law and order was also very desirable on account of the Chinese residing here; because the security and prosperity of their sugar plantations required our protection against the natives, who were continually damaging them, as appeared from the many complaints that were made to us. Again, we who were occupied in the spiritual cultivation, with the conversion of these people of Sinkan — from time immemorial enemies of Mattau — foresaw that, if the people of Mattau were not humiliated, it was probable that one day this village would be fired by them and the inhabitants chased away; we then being left as shepherds without their flocks. In order that the foundation of our building might be rendered firmer in the future, the Governor-general was also requested by us to send a sufficient military force, and in the month of August 1635 the troops happily arrived.

After some deliberation about the place which should be first attacked, Governor Putmans decided to assault Mattau first and foremost; because the people there had done us most injury, and because victory could more easily be obtained by attacking a village in our neighbourhood than one village situated at a distance. Hence, on 22 November 1635 we received a communication from the Governor in which he desired us to meet him with some men of Sinkan. We resolved to do so next morning. We also told the Sinkandians what our plan was, and urged them to join us, so that the friendly relationship between us might thereby be rendered closer. To this they agreed.

We had not proceeded far on our march when the Sinkandians joined us, armed in their usual manner, thus proving their allegiance. They reported that one of the chief men of Mattau had been captured and put in irons in Sinkan. Soon after, we approached the village of Bakloan, very near which we had to pass. In order to prevent its inhabitants from taking flight, we endeavoured to calm their fears, assuring them that no harm would be done to them. Not far from Bakloan, we received tidings that the Sinkan men had already cut off a head, which they came to show while the blood was still flowing from it.

The sun was beginning to set when we reached the river near Mattau, and as the locality was quite unknown to us, many considered that it would be more prudent to pass the night on the bank of the river. But on His Honour receiving further information about the place, and hearing from the Sinkan men that the inhabitants of Mattau were preparing to flee, so as to leave us nothing but an empty village in the morning, he resolved to make victory all the greater by attacking Mattau that very night. Animated by the greatest courage, and heeding no obstacle whatever, we suddenly, to the great dismay of the inhabitants, appeared in the village, and the enemy did not venture to offer any resistance. Having passed along some of the streets, a rest was given to the men, a suitable place for passing the night was chosen, and the Sinkandians were securely placed in the midst of us. Next day the village was set on fire; and we found that in all twenty-six men of Mattau had been killed.

This demonstrative massacre, combined with the Lamey Island massacre a few months later, did vigorous work for the pacification campaign; not only the Mattau but other natives who heard news of the slaughter soon sued for peaceful submission to the Dutch hegemony — which in turn permitted the peaceable cultivation of Chinese sugar plantations most profitable to the Dutch East India Company.

That is, until a Chinese warlord chased the Dutch off Formosa in 1662.

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1859: Yoshida Shoin, samurai sage

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The name at the head of this page is probably unknown to the English reader, and yet I think it should become a household word like that of Garibaldi or John Brown. Some day soon, we may expect to hear more fully the details of Yoshida’s history, and the degree of his influence in the transformation of Japan …

–Robert Louis Stevenson

On this date in 1859,* Japan’s fading Tokugawa Shogunate beheaded samurai sage Yoshida Shoin as an enemy of the state.

Inheriting leadership of an unprosperous samurai house by the untimely death of his adoptive father, Yoshida (English Wikipedia entry | the much more detailed Japanese) studied war and philosophy from the age of five but understood right away that the classics he knew backward and forward were no match for the American gunships that steamed into Edo Bay in 1853.

Keen to learn the barbarian’s secrets, Yoshida and a friend named Sakuma Shozan* surreptitiously presented the American flotilla with an illicit request to come aboard. The American Commodore Perry never knew their identities, but he remembered the two “men of some position and rank, as each wore the two swords characteristic of distinction, and were dressed in the wide but short trowsers of rich silk brocade. Their manner showed the usual courtly refinement of the better classes, but they exhibited the embarrassment of men who evidently were not perfectly at their ease, and were about doing something of dubious propriety. They cast their eyes stealthily about as if to assure themselves that none of their countrymen were at hand to observe their proceedings, and then approaching one of the officers and pretending to admire his watch-chain, slipped within the breast of his coat a folded paper.” That paper, in courtly Mandarin, implored the visitor that the authors

have been for many years desirous of going over the ‘five great continents,’ but the laws of our country in all maritime points are very strict; for foreigners to come into the country, and for natives to go abroad, are both immutably forbidden … we now secretly send you this private request, that you will take us on board your ships as they go out to sea.

Instead, the shogunate clapped them in cages.

Would that iron bars could contain the shock Commodore Perry’s ships had given to Japan. Those islands had long closed themselves against the West save for narrow apertures on Dutch Learning. The evident superiority of American arms and the consequent necessity of accepting unequal treaties proved a fatal blow to the shogunate. Anger at the shogun manifested in a movement to restore the rights of the emperor — a position that the shogunate had centuries before reduced to a mere figurehead.

Our man Yoshida Shoin emerged from prison as a teacher whose loyalty hewed to the emperor. In vain did the shogunate attempt to purge such characters, for their cause far outstripped this or that man. Several of Yoshida’s students would be important players in the coming Meiji Restoration that did indeed reanimate the imperial office and topple the shogunate by the late 1860s.

By that time, Yoshida was rated a martyr and spiritual forerunner, for the dying shogunate had indeed seen fit to destroy him: “the old story of a power upon its last legs,” as Stevenson’s biography figures it: “learning to the bastille, and courage to the block … He failed in each particular enterprise that he attempted; and yet we have only to look at his country to see how complete has been his general success.”

* The Gregorian date. By the Japanese calendar it occurred in the tenth month, and some sites erroneously place it in October for that reason.

** Shozan was destined to be assassinated in 1864 by Kawakami Gensai.

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1928: William Charles Benson

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William Charles Benson hanged at Wandsworth prison on this date in 1928, the murderer of his ice cream factory co-worker’s wife.

Benson in 1925 had moved in with his mate Sidney Harbor in Kentish Town where the quarters were so close that everybody shared the same bedroom.

The savings in rent were drawn from the heart’s account, once Sidney’s wife Charlotte — the couple had two children together — took a shine to the boarder in the other bed. Benson in 1927 lost job and side piece alike when he was fired from Wall’s and also kicked out of the house by the suspicious Sidney; Charlotte, however, continued the affair and eventually even took an apartment nearby Benson’s new place to facilitate assignations.

Early on the morning of September 6, 1928, Benson hailed a constable with the words, “I want an ambulance, I have just killed my girl.” Apparently, she had proposed putting the adultery to an end and returning to Sidney.

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1840: Zachariah Freeman

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(Thanks for the guest post to American newsman and reformer John L. O’Sullivan. Best-known as the fellow who coined that potent brand for American empire, “manifest destiny,” O’Sullivan was also a vigorous advocate for abolishing capital punishment as a New York legislator in the 1840s, and made several proposals to that effect. The summary here is one of many reported in O’Sullivan’s appendix to his Report in favor of the abolition of punishment of death, by law, made to the legislature of the state of New York, April 14, 1841. The report did not achieve its objective. -ed.)

Tried in September, 1840, for the murder of Sarah Boyd, his quasiwife, in the town of Lysander, Onondaga county, on the 18th of May, 1840.

Both were negroes. They lived in the same house with his father, 80 years of age, his brother Elihu, and a woman who lived with his brother as his wife. Zachariah was much attached to Sarah, and had taken some steps toward making arrangements for a legal marriage with her.

Jealousy was the motive to the murder — or a combination of jealousy and insanity. They had some trifling dispute, in which she refused to comply with some domestic order of her husband, when he raised a chair, and struck her across the arm, knocking her down. On recovering herself, she declared she would never live with him again. He thereupon went to some woods at a short distance, and made an attempt to hang himself — whether in earnest, or to frighten them, does not appear clear. He was stopped with the rope round his neck, and brought back to the house.

While he was away she expressed great dread of his returning, saying, that if he did, she should be a corpse before morning — that though he had not threatened her, she saw it in his eye. While he was out, before returning to the house, he was praying and singing hymns. He entreated a reconciliation with her, which she refused; — he was willing to go down on his knees to her. She consented to leave it to the rest to decide the next morning, if he would now behave himself.

On this arrangement the rest went to bed — he remained up, smoking a pipe. He had insisted on smoking her pipe, refusing any other. According to his confession of what followed, he after a time leaned his head on the bed, and she kicked him. He then got the knife with which he committed the act, and went to some distance from the house for the purpose of killing himself; but while whetting it, determined to go back to see her once more. She was sitting up in bed. He placed his left hand on her shoulder, and attempted to kiss her. He had no thought of injuring her — “she was young, handsome, and everything that was nice, and it had not occurred to his mind to damage her at all.”

She refused to receive him, and slapped him on the face. He then gave her a stab, which was in a few moments fatal, immediately cutting his own throat also. Though a severe wound, this did not prove fatal.

The family were immediately roused, and eventually he was cured of his wound. He expressed much grief and repentance. He was jealous of his brother Elihu, whom he believed to have criminal intercourse with her. Zachariah had wished her to remove with him to another house, but she had refused. He said, after the affair, that “if she would not lie any more with him, he would not let her with any other man” — “he thought she should never sleep with another man, and he never with another woman.”

He said, he expected to be hanged, but added: “I shall go to the gallows in as good a cause as ever a man went.” His previous general character was good. He was hung November 19th, 1840.

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1541: Claude Le Painctre, giving himself willingly to be burned

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A French evangelical named Claude Le Painctre — on mission evangelizing back in his dangerous homeland after previously escaping to exile in Geneva — was burned at the stake in Paris on this date in 1541, after having his tongue torn out.

A Prussian-born student resident in Paris in those years, named Eustache Knobelsdorf, witnessed this execution and recorded the event in his memoir.

His striking impression of a joyous martyrdom captures not only the agonies of a 16th century heretic’s execution, but the ecstasies by which those same heretics turned the whole spectacle to evangelizing effect.

This translation of Knobelsdorf comes via
Bruce Gordon’s 2009 biography Calvin

I saw two burnt there. Their death inspired in me differing sentiments. If you had been there, you would have hoped for a less severe punishment for these poor unfortunates … The first [Claude Le Painctre] was a very young man, not yet with a beard … he was the son of a cobbler. He was brought in front of the judges and condemned to have his tongue cut out and burned straight afterward. Without changing the expression of his face, the young man presented his tongue to the executioner’s knife, sticking it out as far as he could. The executioner pulled it out even further with pincers, cut it off, and hit the sufferer several times on the tongue and threw it in the young man’s face. Then he was put into a tipcart, which was driven to the place of execution, but, to see him, one would think that he was going to a feast … When the chain had been placed around his body, I could not describe to you with what equanimity of soul and with what expression in his features he endured the cries of elation and the insults of the crowd that were directed towards him. He did not make a sound, but from time to time he spat out the blood that was filling his mouth, and he lifted his eyes to heaven, as if he was waiting for some miraculous rescue. When his head was covered in sulphur, the executioner showed him the fire with a menacing air; but the young man, without being scared, let it be known, by a movement of his body, that he was giving himself willingly to be burned.

Such spectacles had palpable effect for snowballing the evangelical project. Another onlooker in the crowd was a 21-year-old just out of university named Jean Crespin … present with some “several who had a stirring sense of truth.” We can’t draw anything so dramatic as a direct causal line to Claude Le Painctre, but sometime during Crespin’s stay in Paris in the early 1540s he converted to the reformed faith — and in this guise he would in time become a notable Protestant publisher. (Of interest to these grim annals, he Le Livre des Martyrs.)

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1888: Not Sarah J. Robinson

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On this date in 1888, Massachusetts almost hanged Sarah J. Robinson.

The reader will easily infer from press appellations such as the “Massachusetts Borgia” or “Sommerville Borgia” that Mrs. Robinson was a prolific poisoner.

The true toll of Robinson’s career remains uncertain to this day but they monstrously included her own son and daughter — the victims that brought her within the shadow of the gallows.

An Irish immigrant, she had discovered the capacity of arsenic for relieving the financial burdens that, then as now, weighed upon the poor. In 1881, her landlord suspiciously died in her care, abating a debt of rent; a few years later, her husband did likewise, leaving her an insurance windfall, and then her sister too.

Still the maintenance of five children — four of her own, plus a nephew — harried her. To keep the wolves at bay she moved frequently, sold off furniture. And last, she enrolled two children in a working-class insurance fraternal and collected so speedily to attract the wrong attention. Her many murders afforded multiple bites at the legal apple, so when a jury hung on a charge of murdering her kids, they just turned around and got her for a nephew instead.

Mrs. Robinson was escorted to the court room … A large rocking chair was provided for her comfort in the rear of the court room outside the prisoner’s iron cage. She languidly sank into it, and as soon as seated requested a drink of water, which was brought her by Sheriff Tidd. Her hands trembled like leaves as she eagerly held the tumbler to her lips. (Boston Journal, June 29, 1888)

Notwithstanding her many victims, the prospect of noosing this trembling-hand, rocking-chair mother discomfited the public. The governor commuted her sentence to solitary imprisonment four days before her scheduled November 16, 1888 hanging.

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