1747: Serjeant Smith, deserter

Posted on by

By this time in 1747, England’s season of crowd-pleasing spectacular punishments for the Jacobite rising of 1745 had all but run its course; indeed, the very previous day, one of the last of the rebels had been disappointingly disposed of via exile instead of scaffold.

But, reports London in the Jacobite Times,

there was an exulting crowd the next day [December 11, 1747], lining the road from the barracks and military prison, in the Savoy, to the parade, St. James’s Park, and from the latter place to Hyde Park, where savages had come ‘in their thousands,’ and assembled round a gibbet in the centre of the Park.

From the Savoy was brought a stalwart sergeant, in gyves, marching, without music, and eagerly gazed at as he passed on his way to the Parade. He was a good soldier, something of a scholar, knew several languages, and was utterly averse from serving any other sovereign than King James or his friend King Louis.

Sergeant Smith had deserted, had been caught, and was now to suffer, not a soldier’s death by shooting, but the ignominious one of a felon. On the Parade, he was received by his own regiment, in the centre of which he was placed, and so guarded went slowly on to Hyde Park, to a dead roll of the drums.

He was dressed in a scarlet coat, all else white. In token of his Jacobite allegiance, he wore, and was allowed to wear, a rosette of tartan ribbons on his bosom, and similar bunches of ribbons on each knee. The sergeant went on with a smile. His self-possession made the hangman nervous, and Smith bade his executioner pluck up a spirit and do his duty. And so he died; what remains of him may perhaps still lie in the Park, for the Jacobite sergeant was buried beneath the gibbet.

The quality of the newspaper reporting at this time is illustrated by the fact that, in some of the journals, Jacobite Smith is said to have been shot.

In December 1747, a new paper was started, called the ‘Jacobite’s Journal.’ It was eminently anti-Jacobite, and was adorned with a head-piece representing a shouting Highlander and his wife on a donkey, to whose tail is tied the shield and arms of France; and from whose mouth hangs a label ‘Daily Post;’ the animal is led by a monk with one finger significantly laid to the side of his nose. The journal joked savagely at the idea of the above-named Sergeant Smith, being compelled to listen to his own funeral sermon in the Savoy Chapel, and hoped there was no flattery in it. As to the gay rosettes of tartan ribbons which he wore, the journal was disgusted with such a display on the part of a traitor.

Smith seems to have been a restless soul whose desertion to rebel colors in ’45 had followed a career of flexible loyalty in German service. The Newgate Calendar says of Smith that he “was a man of extraordinary abilities, and as vicious in his principles,” who had by his wandering life acquired several languages and thereby earned a lucrative appointment as an interpreter for officers and the rank of paymaster-serjeant. “A man thus caressed must be truly a villain who could be base enough to desert his duty; but Smith was of a roving turn, and could not keep long in a place, the excuse he gave for his crimes.”

On this day..

Possibly related executions: