Category Archives: Capital Punishment

1848: Harris Bell

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From the New York Commercial Advertiser, Oct. 3, 1848:

Honesdale, Pa., Sept. 29, 1848.

I have just returned from the execution of Harris Bell. He was the murderer of Mrs. Williams, the wife of Rev. Gershom Williams, of Scott township. She was going from her house to the Sabbath school on Sabbath morning, when, in passing through a piece of woods, she was seized by Bell for a brutal purpose and died amid her struggles.

Bell was apprehended not long after the commission of the crime, and has lain in prison in this borough about a year and two months.

I visited him in prison and was officially, and by his own request, desired to attend him to the scaffold. Although an unpleasant duty, yet how could I decline the request of a poor man under such circumstances?

Bell was nurtured of vicious parents, and cast forth upon the world destitute of education and of any religious knowledge, and was left like a wild animal, to rove abroad and pick up his food as a vagabond. He commenced an abandoned life in early years, was instructed into vice by others, and always lived in its practice. His mind, or what mind he had, was weakened by his vicious courses, and his passions were inflamed so as, at times, to defy all self control.

Twice he was imprisoned for attempts to commit the crime for which he suffered, and he was shut up some five years in the penitentiary.

While in prison here, he exhibited a diversified character, sometimes making a shrewd observation, and then a foolish speech to excite a laugh. But he had sufficient intelligence and conscience to know right from wrong, as was evinced by his concealing the evidence of the murder, and by other irrefragable proofs.

Condemned by an intelligent jury, he was sentenced by Judge Jessup to die. An application was made for his reprieve, for the purpose of having his sentence commuted to imprisonment for life by the Legislature, as the Governor in this state cannot commute a sentence though he can pardon; but this was unavailing. Governor Johnson passed through our borough a few weeks since, and visited Bell incognito, at the request of the counsel for the defence, bur mercy could not be extended to him.

He freely confessed his guilt, acknowledged his dependence on the blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse him from guilt, and seemed to feel that he had truly repented and would be saved. He was executed in the prison yard, or rather in a building without a roof prepared for the occasion, and every thing was conducted with propriety.

He was attended by two clergymen, twelve witnesses, and the various officials which the law allows. Religious services were held on the scaffold, and Bell himself addressed the spectators in an appropriate manner. At the close of a prayer by one of the attending clergymen, the scaffold dropped and Bell was suspended for about twenty minutes; and when he was taken down, life was extinct.

His body goes to the surgeons for dissection.

At Bell’s request, the Rev. Mr. Rowland will preach a funeral sermon in the Presbyterian Church on Sabbath evening. I wonder what kind of sermon it will be. It is rather singular to preach a funeral sermon for one who has been hanged, but I imagine that the preacher knows what he is about, and will at least have a crowded house.

It makes me nervous to see a man strangled to death, even though it is according to law. Yet I fully believe in the justice and expediency of capital punishment, in some cases.

Yours &c.

A SPECTATOR

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1654: Hieronymus Duquesnoy the Younger, sculptor

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On this date in 1654, Flemish sculptor Hieronymus Duquesnoy the Younger was strangled and burned in Ghent for sodomy (sodomy in a church, no less).

As an artist, the man’s legacy is forever overshadowed by his father’s Brussels tourist essential Manneken Pis; Hieronymus (or Jerome) the Younger learned his craft from dad as a studio apprentice. (We here dismiss Hieronymus the Elder from our narrative; Hieronymus the Younger is meant by all subsequent references in this post.)

This was not to be the end of the story when it came to Hieronymus and naked young boys, but in 1621 he upped stakes for Italy and proceeded to spend the next two decades honing his craft in Mediterranean climes. Or at least, this is the necessary assumption, as very little direct evidence traces his movements in that period.

Returning to the Low Counties in the early 1640s, Duquesnoy earned a number of baroque commissions as “architecte, statuaire et sculpteur de la Cour.” (For a taste of his work: The Infant Hercules | Ganymede.)

The last of his projects was this tomb for Bishop Antonius Triest in Ghent; “he set himself up with his assistants in one of the cathedral‘s chapels, to lay out and prepare the sections of this tomb, which could have been for the master the finest jewel in a new sculptural crown, had he not come to a sad end,” according to Edmond de Busscher.


This monumental tomb would also prove the death of its sculptor. (cc) image by www.pmrmaeyaert.com — Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0.

He was arrested when 8- and 11-year-old boys accused him of molestation in the church during his work on the bishop’s shrine. Duquesnoy vigorously denied the charges and tried to call in favors from his patrons to squelch the case, but Ghent’s council decided otherwise and had him executed in the city’s Koornmarkt (Grain Market).

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1517: Konrad Breuning, Tübingen Vogt

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On this date in 1517, aged magistrate Konrad Breuning was beheaded as a traitor for helping negotiate a landmark limitation of the Duke of Württemberg’s powers.

Fruit of a wealthy Tübingen family — one can still see in the church there the donative Breuning Bell — Konrad Breuning was a Vogt, one of the Holy Roman Empire’s important municipal administrators.

In 1514, crushed by taxation and written out of political power, commoners both urban and rural mounted a rebellion known as “Poor Konrad”. (Its title had nothing to do with our post’s star character; “Konrad” was just a common name that had come to denote the everyman.)

Wealthy elites were able to leverage the rebellion’s pressure,* and Duke Ulrich‘s increasingly desperate need for revenues that only they could authorize, into a sort of Magna Carta for the duchy: the Treaty of Tübingen. As the name implies, it was negotiated right in Konrad Breuning’s stomping-ground; the site was his own suggestion.

This great coup was attained at a great cost, for Duke Ulrich was a mercurial fellow who would eventually be run out of Württemberg altogether after he outright murdered a guy. That murder, in 1515, perhaps drove Ulrich to an attempted (and backfiring) show of authority with the 1516 arrest of Bruening, his brother Sebastian (who was Vogt of a different town), and Konrad Vaut (yet another Vogt, and see what we mean about the popularity of the name?). Their rank did not protect them from the torture necessary to extract confessions.

All three were condemned to death for treason in a stacked trial in December 1516. For reasons that are not self-evident to me from the mostly-German sources that I have found, the other two Vogts lost their heads more or less promptly after their conviction but Konrad Bruening was maintained as Ulrich’s most unwilling guest for most of a year before he finally followed them. Maybe it was the duke protracting the savor of his revenge upon Tübingen’s bourgeoisie for that treaty.

* Despite the role of Poor Konrad in catalyzing the Treaty of Tübingen, the urban lower orders got much less out of the deal than the 1% types, and the peasantry was shut out altogether. It would not be long before the frustration of the latter class again conjured an insurrection: the devastating 1524-1525 Peasants War.

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1946: Hong Sa-ik, a Korean general in the Japanese army

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Hong Sa-ik, an ethnic Korean officer of the Imperial Japanese Army, was hanged in Manila on this date in 1946 for war crimes against captured prisoners in the Philippines.

Korea surrendered her diplomatic sovereignty to Japan in 1905 when our man Hong was just 16; five years later, Japan annexed Korea outright. These were events that would move many years of violent hostility on the peninsula and shape the progress of Hong’s life and death.

However many and well-remembered are martyrs in resistance, there are always many who would sooner go along with events. Hong was in this agreeable latter camp; when Japan shuttered the Korean military academy he was attending, he simply transferred to the Japanese one. When Japan took over his homeland, he declined his Korean classmates’ entreaties to put his combat training at the service of an underground resistance.

Instead, Hong rose through Japan’s ranks to the position (late in World War II) of lieutenant general and supervisor of all the POW camps in the Philippines — whose conduct rated a sore Allied grievance as the war came to a close.

Hong was prosecuted by the United States as a Class B war criminal, and was the highest-ranking Korean officer to be executed for war crimes in the postwar period.

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1863: Spencer Kellogg Brown, Union spy

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Spencer Kellogg Brown, a young Union spy during the U.S. Civil War, was hanged on this date in 1863 in the rebel capital of Richmond, Virginia.

Brown would come by the latter years of his short life to commonly drop his surname and simply go by Spencer Kellogg: this was fruit of the same cause for his enthusiasm for the northern cause, to wit, his growing to manhood in Osawatomie, the antislavery epicenter of the dirty frontier war known as “Bleeding Kansas”. But the thing about the name was, notwithstanding Kellogg’s/Brown’s enthusiasm for the Free State side, the surname he chanced to share with the ferocious abolitionist warrior John Brown was liable to get a body killed when uttered in the wrong company. (There was no blood relationship between Spencer Brown and John Brown.)

Spencer Kellogg Brown was just a teenager when he joined the Union army but the pell-mell ramp-up to war footing opened opportunities for able people. Brown rose out of the enlisted ranks to an officer’s commission and was detailed for risky scouting assignments into rebel territory down the Mississippi River, even feigning desertion so that he could enlist in the Confederate ranks and then escape back to his own lines with intelligence. Execution was an occupational hazard of this daring profession; eventually, young Brown was captured one too many times.

This public domain volume summarizes the man’s short biography, including many affectionate letters that Brown exchanged with family in the course of his adventures and his subsequent year-long imprisonment. If you like, you can imagine them in that Ken Burns documentary portentous voice-over reading.

Castle Thunder, Richmond, Virginia, Sept. 18, 1863.

Dear Kitty, my Sister: After lying in prison over a year, my time has come at last. To-day I went out for trial, but got it deferred until to-morrow. The witnesses are there, and there can be but one result, death. So I have written to you for all, to bid you a last good-bye, God bless you, I have tried to write often to cheer all, and it seemed very hopeful for a while, but within a few days all hope has left me. But don’t mourn, Kitty, as for one without hope. These only take away the mortal life, but God, I trust, has given me one that is immortal. Dear Kitty, I hope there is a ‘shining shore’ for us all, and another world where, free from guilt, we’ll no more sorrow, or part. I do not look forward with fear to death — not nearly as much as when it was farther off. God has been very kind to me, and for the past twelve months I have tried earnestly to please Him. I fear the embarrassment of the trial, to-morrow, the worst, but He will help me, I trust.

I have some little trinkets; you must divide them. The ring is for my wife; if she be not found, for yourself. Take comfort now, dear ones, God is good, and naught shall separate us from Him. I have hoped and longed, indeed, to see you all; but I know His wisdom chooses better; let us be content. Thank Him that all this time He has given me life and health and a heart to love Him, and to trust in Christ. Much as I long to see you all, I know ’tis best as it is, for He doeth all things well. So do not mourn, but hope — and think of heaven, where I hope, by God’s mercy, to await you all.

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1831: Slaves of Sussex County, for Nat Turner’s rebellion

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Four slaves allegedly concerned in Nat Turner‘s Virginia rebellion were hanged on this date in 1831.

Turner’s rising had spanned only a couple of days in August but would haunt Virginia and the South all the way to the Civil War. (At least.) And one of the first, frightening questions that white slaveowners had was — was the rebellion in Southampton County an isolated event, or was it part of a wider servile conspiracy that might augur a general insurrection? Would there be two, three, many Nat Turners? The Southampton Spartacus was himself pressed on this point before his execution; the published confessions of his interrogations note that “If Nat’s statements can be relied on, the insurrection in this county was entirely local, and his designs confided but to a few, and these in his immediate vicinity.”

Little but suspicion supported this proposition but the search was intense and in the time-honored investigative tradition eventually generated its own evidence, from the lips of “a negro girl of about 16 or 17 years of age” named Beck(y) when pressed by her mistress.

We can only guess at the particular circumstances inducing this young house slave to issue her denunciations,* but their substance was that she had heard the denizens of the slave quarters discussing the insurrection and planning to join it — not in Southampton County but in neighboring Sussex County. Slaveholders all knew that they dwelt in the shadow of a smoldering Vesuvius; if Becky’s claims were true, then the mountain was already spewing fire.

Becky’s accusations got three slaves put on trial in Southampton County on September 8, but all were acquitted. (There were many acquittals in the Nat Turner bust-up.) But Sussex County convened its own court and here Becky’s allegations were better received. Her testimony in the cases of “Solomon a negro man slave the property of Nancy Sorrly, Booker a negro man slave the property of Samuel A. Raines and Nicholas a negro man slave the property of Hannah Williamson here became favorably received — perhaps Sussex County feared that declaring itself insurrection-free would suggest a want of diligence?

Beck a negro slave the property of Solomon D. Parker a witness for the Commonwealth says that at the last May meeting at the Raccoon Meeting House, she heard the prisoners Nicholas and Booker say that they would join the negroes to murder the white people and heard the prisoner Solomon say that he would join too for God damn the white people they had been reigning long enough. Captain Peters’ two negroes Boson and Frank were also present and Mr. Parker’s Bob who told her if she told the white people would shot her like a squirrel and would not bury her, and she has since been told the same thing by all the others. There were several other negroes present whom she did not know. The Saturday night before and the Monday night of the last Southampton election she heard conversations among the negroes about ? On both these nights she was called in by her mistress and slept in the house. On Friday night she went out and stayed so late that she was not permitted to go in.

Similar evidence also helped to condemn several other accused slaves, all of whom were slated to hang on September 23. On September 16, the Virginia governor noted in his diary, “I had a Council of State, transacted business and received the record of nine slaves condemned to be hanged by the Court of Sussex. One I have reprieved. No news from any other part of the State.” Several others were set instead for convict transportation out of Virginia Commonwealth, and two slaves died in a desperate jailbreak attempt.

Solomon, Booker and Nicholas all hanged on September 23, 1831, along with a fourth slave called Ned who had been accused not by Becky but by a different house slave named Lizzy.

* In Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, Mary Kemp Davis calls Becky “nothing if not wily. Her incriminating testimony was a masterful ‘hidden polemic’ against anyone who would try to implicate her in the insurrection.”

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1397: Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel

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“Torment me not long, strike off my head in one blow”

-supposed last words of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, to his executioner

On this date in 1397, the Earl of Arundel was condemned and immediately beheaded in London’s Cheapside.

Not to be confused with his grandfather, the Earl of Arundel* beheaded 71 years earlier for loyalty to his deposed king, our man Richard FitzAlan earned the chop for being a thorn in his king’s backside.

As one of England’s great magnates, Arundel had played a principal role for many years in the bloody struggle with King Richard II over power and prerogatives; he was one of the three original Lords Appellant whose rebellion against Richard brought about their “Merciless Parliament” in 1388, and its cruel purge of royal loyalists.

Powerless at that time to impede the Lords Appellant, then-21-year-old King Richard quietly nurtured hatred of his foes for many years until he was in a position to really strike them. This was a delicate and a long-term business, but Richard’s bitterness proved equal to the revenge. In 1397, Richard finally — per Froissart — “decided upon a bold and daring move. He had reflected that it was better to destroy than to be destroyed and that speedy action could prevent his uncle from ever being a threat to him again.”

Said uncle was the Duke of Gloucester, another one (the senior one) of those difficult Lords Appellant. To conquer Gloucester required daring indeed: Richard lured him away from the considerable protection of his own retinue on the pretext of a hunting trip, and led him into an ambush where the Earl Marshal could arrest him undefended.

Needing now to stay ahead of the news, Richard flew for London to complete his counter-coup and the next day had Arundel arrested along with the other of the three original Lords Appellant, the Earl of Warwick. Mighty Gloucester had been spirited secretly to Calais to be murdered in prison; a more formal version of the same fate awaited Arundel.**

It may be said that the Duchess of Gloucester, with her son Humphrey and her two daughters, were naturally deeply distressed when their husband and father was brought home dead, and the Duchess had to suffer another blow when the King had her uncle. Earl Richard of Arundel, publicly beheaded in Cheapside, London. None of the great barons dared to thwart the King or dissuade him from doing this. King Richard was present at the execution and it was carried out by the Earl Marshal, who was married to Lord Arundel’s daughter and who himself blindfolded him. (Froissart, again)

* The Earl of Arundel rank still exists today as a courtesy title held by the Duke of Norfolk’s heir; it has existed nearly continuously since it was created in 1138 for a Norman nobleman.

** Warwick got enough political pull on his behalf to survive in captivity; he’d eventually be released when one of his Lords Appellant allies deposed Richard II and made himself King Henry IV … a feat that he accomplished with the aid of our Arundel’s younger brother, who also happened to be the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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1917: Herbet Morris, British West Indies Regiment deserter

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At dawn on this date in 1917, 17-year-old Jamaican soldier Herbert Morris was shot in a courtyard behind the town hall in the Flemish town of Poperinge.

He’d volunteered the year before, 8,000 kilometers away from the terrible trenches, to cross the Atlantic and stake his life for the 6th Battalion of the British West Indies Regiment but in the end it was the guns of his own countrymen who would fell him.

Like numerous front-line troops, Morris became disordered by shellshock, and despite a generally commendable service record, routed during a bombardment to be discovered days later wandering at Boulogne. With that (non-capital) precedent already to his name, Morris’s second desertion on August 20 met a very much harsher response.

When on active service deserting His Majesty’s Services, in that he, in the Field on the 20th of August 1917, when warned for duty, in the neighbourhood of the front line absented himself from his detachment until apprehended by the Military Police at Boulogne on the 21st of August 1917.

-Morris’s death sentence, endorsed by Douglas Haig, 15 September 1917

“I am troubled with my head and cannot stand the sound of guns,” Morris explained to his very brief court-martial, unavailingly. “I reported to the Dr. [sic] and he gave me no medicine or anything. It was on the Sunday that I saw the doctor. He gave me no satisfaction.” Two character witnesses from his unit comprised the entirety of his defense.

During the week between Morris’s hearing and his Field Marshal Haig-confirmed sentence, a violent mutiny by British Empire troops in Etaples, France shook the high command. Nobody can say if it was determinative for Morris’s fate, but it cannot have weighed in favor of leniency.

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2008: Kedisaletse Tsobane

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 2008, 49-year-old Kedisaletse Tsobane was executed in the southern African nation of Botswana for the murder of his ten-year-old daughter, Kgotso Macfallen. He was the first person to be executed under the administration of President Ian Khama.

Tsobane approached Kgotso as she was walking to school in Francistown on the morning of January 20, 2004, and offered her a lift. She hopped into his car. Later that day, passersby found the little girl’s body in the bush. She was kneeling on the ground, hanging from a tree by an electric cable.

Arrested the next day, Tsobane quickly confessed to the crime. He pleaded guilty to murder, saying,

I killed the child in an attempt to avoid liability in order to do away with my indebtedness. I was trying to do away with maintenance arrears. I killed the child by strangling it with a rope.

He was supposed to pay 40 Botswana pula, or a little less than $4 a month, but he hadn’t parted with so much as a single thebe since Kgotso’s birth. He was deep in debt and his wife had begun to complain.

Tsobane claimed that a week before the murder, Kgotso’s mother had taunted him about the debt, telling him he had to pay support for a child that wasn’t his. He said he got drunk and high on marijuana and committed the murder impulsively. Upon these mitigating circumstances Tsobane founded his case for commuting the sentence to life in prison.

The prosecution, however, produced a death certificate for Kgotso’s mother: she’d died in 2002 and couldn’t have been teasing him like he said. And the court didn’t buy Tsobane’s plea that he was too intoxicated to realize the nature and consequences of his actions. His own statement that he’d strangled Kgotso and then hanged her from a tree to make her death look like a suicide probably didn’t help his case.

The judge that sentenced Tsobane to death remarked, “In the circumstances, it is not clear why he was driven to commit the offense.” The Botswana Court of Appeal was equally puzzled by Tsobane’s motives. He could have sold his car to alleviate his financial worries, the court noted, but

He did not do so. He had, apparently, never paid any maintenance for the deceased, so even that had nothing in reality to do with her. Why then kill her, in order to get rid of his liabilities?

Whatever his reasons, Tsobane took them with him to his grave.

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1727: Three at Tyburn

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Daniel Defoe* once summarized early 18th century England’s class strata as

  1. The great, who live profusely
  2. The rich, who live plentifully
  3. The middle sort, who live well
  4. The working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want
  5. The country people, farmers, etc. who fare indifferently
  6. The poor, who fare hard
  7. The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.

These ranks of “poor” and “miserably poor” were quite enormous in the 18th century, with something like a tenth of the population subsisting below the “breadline” even when the harvests were good.

It is arguably the struggle to control this lot that brings us that era’s notoriously aggressive “Bloody Code” of hanging laws; certainly the law flaunts its class character openly in many particular capital statutes such as the Black Acts to enforce rural enclosure and harsh laws against labor organizing.

The heaving of these great swells could not but drown a great many already struggling to keep their heads above the waves. And our visit this week to the Ordinary of Newgate brings a sad quartet of Tyburn hangings culled from that fringe of disposable young men “that really pinch and suffer want.”

Thomas Johnson, alias “Handy”

Handy’s nickname tells us something about the progress of his life, for (according to the Ordinary) in his infancy “his Right Arm and Hand had been bruis’d, so that being distorted, they decay’d and were only of the bigness of a Child’s Arm and Hand, neither had he the Use of them, having no strength and scarce any Motion in them.”

Abandoned to be succored by the Stepney parish poor relief around the age of three, Handy was considered able-bodied enough to be dropped from the rolls once he hit adolescence — and maybe the gentlemen of Stepney had a point, for Handy once set to shift for himself “turn[ed] Thief and Housebreaker … [and] made considerable proficiency, and turn’d dexterous in his Profession.” But he had a near-impossible task of finding honest work: city and country were everywhere awash in working poor ready to hire who had two good hands.

Eventually one of Handy’s misadventures caught him a sentence to convict transportation — which was yet another juridical innovation of the Hanoverian age for managing the mother country’s vast underclass. But transportation, a sort of mercantile slavery in the colonies, depended for its part on a market for the human cargo and our man’s crippled arm again militated against him. Handy would lament this again at the very gallows, where he

exclaim’d against one who Transported Felons, saying that after he had caused them to Work for him in these foreign Countries; he brought them Home to England in the same Ship which he had carried them off; and that the Reason of his returning was, because No body would Buy him, and that he must have starv’d there and that when at Home he had no way to get his Bread because he wanted his Right Hand to enable him for Work.

This act — returning from convict transportation — itself constituted a capital crime. And when arrested again, Handy confessed it, almost whimsically. He would tell the Ordinary that he was wearying of life and anticipated additional indictments, but the record of the trial suggests that he sent himself to the gallows to revenge himself on the informers who would have made evidence against him in hopes of pocketing a reward: “the Prosecutors thought to hang him for the sake of the 40 Pounds allowed by the Government, but he would baulk their Expectations, for he would be hanged for returning from Transportation according to Law.”

Samuel Hammond

In comparison to Handy, Samuel Hammond had it made.

Apprenticed to a man named Thomas Barker, Hammond had a path to Defoe’s “working trades” class (“who labour hard, but feel no want”), undone by a youth’s impulsiveness. One day when Barker chastised him — “You Blockhead you’ll break the Drill, why don’t you use the Pliers” — Barker grabbed a sword and stabbed him through the ribcage. Barker’s son arrived to find the apprentice brandishing the weapon over his fallen father, “saying to the Decesed [sic], D – n your B – d you Son of a B – h I’ll kill you; upon which then Deceased said, you have done it already.”

The Ordinary reported that Hammond was tearfully repentant and insisted even before his conviction on joining chapel services for the condemned. The only grievance he could point to against his master besides that “blockhead” burn was that he was sweet on a maid in the house whom Barker had also “corrected … for a Fault” months before. We hear this frightened young man through the Ordinary here, so one can only guess whether our surviving account elides a longer litany of domestic cruelty for the boy or the maid.

“Luckily” Samuel Hammond did not suffer the ignominy of hanging for all that: he fell grievously ill in the pestilential Newgate cells, and “after that Sentence of Death was pronounc’d upon him, he was never able to rise and go to Chappel, but lay in a high Fever, to Thursday, the 7th of September, when about 11 o’Clock at Night he expir’d.”

Henry Chaplin and Peter Boother

These housebreakers each blamed the other as well as several other confederates (one of them still at large, plus two others who had given evidence against them) as the principal authors of the robbery that did them in. Oh, sure, they were there, invading Daniel Lyver’s house — where the gang “in a violent Manner broke the Windows, burst open the Window-Shutters and the Door, took the Goods mentioned in the Indictment, and beat him [Lyver] at the same Time with much Barbarity” — but (each said) he’d been there urging all his accomplices to come away and not steal all the pewter. Each carried that eye-rolling story from trial to gallows.

Chaplin was about 27; his father had tried to teach him his trade of “Ribband-weaving” which suggests (as does his surname) that his family might have been among the Huguenot weavers who escaped France’s religious crackdown decades before. He must have been a restless sort, for instead of sweltering over a loom he joined the army around age 15, perhaps about the right timing to put down the Jacobites, and afterwards basically went adrift in London’s criminal substratum. There he led “a very vicious Life … much addicted to Drinking, Swearing, and Whoring.”

His companion in the Lyver home and at the triple tree was Peter Boother, “about 21 Years of Age, descended of honest but very poor Parents, about 14 Miles from this Town his Father having been a mean Labourer in the Country.” The Ordinary does not give us a clear picture of Boother’s path into the felonious way of life, merely that he was young, penniless, and completely uneducated; combined with Boother’s tearful susceptibility to the Ordinary’s preaching, it suggests an impressionable youth, malleable to the forces around him which happened to be those of vicious want. (Chaplin, the Ordinary noticed, “appear’d to be a Man of more Resolution than his Companion, being more compos’d and settled in his Behaviour.”)

* Defoe had a few thoughts on the death penalty, too.

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