Category Archives: Hanged

1853: Nathaniel Mobbs

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On this date in 1853, Nathaniel Mobbs hanged for killing his wife.

Mobbs’s loutish drunken abuse was of Catherine Mobbs was audible to many neighbors at his Whitechapel tenement. On the night before he finally murdered her, he was so far gone that Catherine slept at a neighbor’s to stay clear of him. Nathaniel found her the next morning, and physically dragged her back home; that afternoon, an unusually violent row and the prisoner’s screams of “murder!” brought at least two guests scrambling up the stairs to their door, which Mobbs blockaded with a chest — until the “murder!” cries eerily stopped.

Then, the scuffing sound of furniture being moved.

And Catherine staggered out the door and down the steps, her dress and hair gorging on the horrid effluence of her slashed throat. She didn’t say a word before she dropped dead.

This nasty affair is covered by PlanetSlade.com’s murder ballads series, including a broadsheet (pdf) with testimony by the Mobbs’ neighbors, and the usual hanging ballad.

A U.S. band called South County YouTubed a haunting version of the ballad, although I believe they’ve taken some liberty with the lyrics.

This wasn’t Mr. Mobbs’s only brush with the literary. Charles Dickens, who could not but delight in the juxtaposition of pickpockets risking their own necks plying their craft on gallows-gawkers, fastened on just such an incident at the Mobbs execution. (Even if pickpocketing was no longer a capital crime by 1853.)

At Guildhall, on the 22nd, Charles Clark was charged before Alderman Humphery with Stealing a Watch the previous morning in the Old Bailey. Robert Pollard, the prosecutor, said: I was present yesterday morning at the Execution of the man Mobbs. I was in front of the scaffold, when I felt something at my pocket, and then missed my watch.

Alderman Humphery — I suppose you were there to see the man hung? Were there many persons there?

Witness: Yes, sir, a great man.

Alderman Humphery: Did you miss your watch before the execution or afterwards?

Witness: The condemned man was just coming on the scaffold, and before he was hung I saw the prisoner moving from my side. I followed him; but perceiving me behind him, he ran up St. Clement’s Inn-yards, in Old Bailey, and threw himself on some matting. The watch produced by the officer is mine. It is engraved with my own name.

Prisoner: I did not throw myself down, I fell down.

Alderman Humphery: There is one thing very clear. The awful sight of a man being hung has no fear for you. William Gardiner saw the prisoner, on reaching the top of Clement’s Inn yard, throw himself on some sacks and drop something down the iron grating. The witness went below and found the watch produced.

Prisoner: I never took the watch.

Alderman Humphery: You came out to witness the execution of a fellow creature, but it does not appear to have done you any good, for your intention in being there was to pick pockets evidently. It is quite clear that you committed a highway robbery, and that too under the gallows, an offence that was punished at one time with dath. It is too serious a case for me to deal with summarily, and I shall therefore commit you for trial.

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1784: Richard Barrick and John Sullivan

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(Thanks to Robert Elder of Last Words of the Executed — the blog, and the book — for the guest post. This post originally appeared on the Last Words blog. Fans of this here site are highly likely to enjoy following Elder’s own pithy, almanac-style collection of last words on the scaffold. -ed.)

For this last crime, I am to suffer death. These are the most capital crimes I have committed, and I sincerely wish that others may avoid the rocks on which I have split.

-John Sullivan, convicted of murder, hanging, Massachusetts executed November 18, 1784

Born in Ireland, he enlisted in the British service but deserted, robbed steadily and finally was an accomplice to the murder of an old man who was beaten to death for which he was convicted and sentenced to death. He was found guilty of many capital crimes such as desertion and robbery.

… I then went to Boston, and got in company with one John Sullivan…we went to Winter’s-Hill, and there robbed one Mr. Baldwin, for which crime Sullivan and myself are to suffer Death, as being the just reward of our demerits.

-Richard Barrick, convicted of highway robbery and murder, hanging, Massacusetts Executed November 18, 1784

Richard Barrick was born in Ireland in February 1763 and brought up in the Foundling Hospital. He was an apprentice to a silk-weaver and lived with him for three years. But during those years, he was treated poorly and so he eventually left the silk-weaver and joined a gang of thieves. When he was caught, the authorities agreed to pardon him if he entered on board one of his Majesty’s ships. After arriving in New York, Barrick and some others robbed many people and [he] became a notorious and wanted man. He was an accomplice to murder of a man they first robbed. He was eventually caught by a British Colonel and convicted.

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1787: Margaret Savage, repeat offender

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

On this date in 1787, Margaret Savage was publicly hanged in front of Newgate Prison in Dublin, Ireland for armed robbery.

Savage’s first brush with the law came in 1781, when she was convicted of stealing 18 yards of black calico, the value of which was £2. Three years in prison seems a harsh punishment for what was essentially shoplifting, but Savage was lucky — in those days, even minor thefts were capital offenses.

In August 1782, Savage and 31 other prisoners petitioned George Nugent-Temple Grenville, 1st Marquess of Buckingham, the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, for clemency. The petitioners, 29 of them female and most of them convicted of theft, pointed to their “signs of reformation and contrition,” successfully: the Lord Lieutenant pardoned Savage and released her from custody, less than a year into her sentence. She had been doubly fortunate.

Five years later, however, Savage got into trouble again after she and a fifteen-year-old male accomplice were convicted of robbing a woman at gunpoint, stealing 18 shillings. Aware of her previous record, this time the Dublin Recorder sentenced her to death.

Brian Henry notes in his book Dublin Hanged: Crime, Law Enforcement and Punishment in Late Eighteenth-Century Dublin,

Her hanging conflicted with the state funeral procession of the Duke of Rutland [another Lord Lieutenant of Ireland]. This prompted the Hibernian Journal to report that Savage’s “wretched situation seemed to have less effect upon her than the neglect of the populace, in not gracing her exit with their appearance on so deplorable an occasion.”

The fate of Savage’s young accomplice was not recorded.

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1880: Alexander Kvyatkovsky and Andrei Presnyakov, Narodnaya Volya terrorists

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On this date in 1880,* Russian revolutionaries Alexander Kvyatkovsky and Andrei Presnyakov were hanged at St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress.


Kvyatkovsky (left) and Presnyakov.

Kvyatkovsky, 28, and Presnyakov, 24, had each spent the whole of their brief adulthoods agitating, police ever at their heels. As Russia’s “season of terror” opened in the late 1870s, both immediately cast their lot with the violent Narodnaya Volya movement. They were found by police at their respective arrests to have each had more than a passing interest in Narodnaya Volya’s ongoing project to assassinate Tsar Alexander II — an objective that it would indeed achieve a few months later.

Their fellow-traveler Mikhail Frolenko would remember the mass trial they featured at not for any glorious martyr-making but as a propaganda debacle for his movement.

The Trial of the Sixteen** in October 1880 was a model of judicial procedure — the government had learned, planned carefully and conducted the trial with absolute decorum. The sixteen accused included three of the most important figures in the Movement: Shiraev, who had been arrested in Moscow a year before with two suitcases of dynamite, Presnyakov and Kvyatkovsky. The last two were old friends of Andrei Zhelyabov. The evidence against the accused was provided by Grigory Goldenberg; the prosecution’s case was unanswerable. The sixteen were allowed to address the court and their speeches were reported. The prosecutors questioned them with a mix of deliberate courtesy and provocation: the sixteen were given enough rope to hang themselves. They followed no clear line and contradicted each other on endless details. They improvised counter-accusations, became mired in irrelevancies, and exploded in fits of petulance. They made a miserable impression, highlighted at every stage by the correctness of the proceedings. In its sentence the court was lenient, another propaganda victory: fourteen were sentenced to hard labor; two, Presnyakov and Kvyatkovsky, were sentenced to be hanged. We lost sixteen good people, which was bad enough. But worse was our irreparable loss of public esteem. One small sign of this was the fate of the word terror. Hitherto we had freely called ourselves terrorists; it had much the same ring as revolutionary. Terror was simply the first phase of the revolution. Overnight the word became a term of abuse and the exclusive property of the government. That alone might have told us we were following the wrong path. (Excerpted from Saturn’s Daughters: The Birth of Terrorism

Kvyatkovsky’s son, also named Alexander, was a Bolshevik close to Lenin in the early Soviet years.

* November 16 by the Gregorian calendar; it was still November 4 by the archaic Julian calendar still then in use in the Russian Empire.

** Not to be confused with at least two distinct Soviet-era mass trials also respectively designated the “Trial of the Sixteen”.

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1892: Thomas Neill Cream, “I am Jack the …”

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On this date in 1892, globetrotting murderer Thomas Neill Cream hanged.

Act I

Glasgow-born, Cream grew up in Canada and did his parents proud by becoming a doctor with a big black moustache.

He manifested an early knack for being in the vicinity of patients who died unexpectedly: Cream’s wife Flora died of consumption in 1877 while on a medicine regimen he had prescribed her (granted, Cream himself was away in London at this time), and a patient and possible mistress turned up dead outside the good doctor’s offices overdosed on chloroform. As suspicion burgeoned, Cream legged it for the United States.

Cream set up as a red light district abortionist in Chicago, and it didn’t take long for his special gift to manifest again. He beat one murder charge when a patient’s rotting corpse was found stashed in his midwife’s apartment; but, in 1881, epilepsy pills he provided another mistress for her husband turned out to be spiked with strychnine in a botched attempt to stitch up the druggist for blackmail. Daniel Stott ended up dead; Thomas Cream, in Joliet — 31 years old with a life sentence.

So ended the homicidal career of Thomas Cream … until 1891, when Gov. Joseph Fifer yielded to the entreaties and bribes of Thomas’s brother and commuted the sentence.

Act II

Cream sailed for England that October and a fresh start … in the same line of work. He’d be back in custody by the following June, with at least four more murders under his belt, sloppy and incontinent now like the late-career Ted Bundy.

Cream took lodgings in Lambeth and dove right into London’s seedy underbelly. Barely two weeks after his arrival, a 19-year-old prostitute he’d plied with drinks was dead of strychnine and Cream was using his old ploy of blackmailing a random bourgeois for her murder. A few days later, he did the same thing with yet another streetwalker and another extortion target.

The nigh-industrial rapidity of these maneuvers speaks to Cream’s self-destructive impulsiveness; one can picture such a high-risk caper working (maybe Cream had even made it work sometimes back in Chicago) but only if the murder was executed with great care and the shakedown target very deliberately selected and framed. The “Lambeth Poisoner” (as the press came to call the writer of these anonymous blackmail letters) had done neither; his hamfisted money grabs only drew the attention of Scotland Yard.

Cream so ached for exposure that he gave a visiting New Yorker whom he met an impromptu tour of the sites associated with the Lambeth Poisoner — whose number had by then been augmented with yet two additional prostitutes, again offed with strychnine. Creeped out at the fellow’s suspicious expertise, the Yank tipped off the police; pieces fell into place quickly from that point.

His whole career, including that bit on the far side of the Atlantic, was exposed now and Cream (who here referred to himself as “Dr. Thomas Neill”, as reflected by the carton above) was convicted in a short trial in October 1892 — just a few weeks before the court’s sure sentence was imposed.

Act III?

Cream murdered a minimum of five people. Beyond those five, he’s worth a cocked eyebrow or more in the death of his wife and several women under his care in his medical (mostly abortionist) guise.

Chris Scott’s historical novel Jack imagines Cream as the Whitechapel killer.

But hangman James Billington put Cream into a whole different coffee when he claimed that the Lambeth Poisoner had gone through the trap uttering the aborted sentence “I am Jack the–” … meaning, Billington means you to understand, Jack the Ripper. As a result, Dr. Cream has a ledger in every Ripperology suspects table but there are at least a couple of major problems with the hypothesis:

  1. Nobody else present for the execution reported hearing any such suggestion from the condemned man; and
  2. The Ripper was an elusive criminal with a whole different m.o.; and
  3. Cream was still serving his Illinois prison term when the Ripper murders toook place back in 1888.

You might think that being clad in irons on a different continent makes for an ironclad alibi, but bars are no bar to a criminal as nimble as Jack. The Cream dossier makes the incredible claim that Cream chanced to have a lookalike double in the criminal underworld, and that the two routinely passed as one another — so Cream could have been serving his sentence while his double committed the Whitechapel murders, or vice versa.

If this twist strikes the reader as a little bit too Scooby Doo for reality, well, the man’s verifiable body count more than qualified the doctor for his place in the criminal annals … and his place on the gallows.

A few books about Thomas Neill Cream

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1879: Charles Drews and Frank Stichler, graveyard insurance

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On this date in 1879, a third of a conspiracy known as the “Blue-Eyed Six” — guess why — hanged for murder.

Having taken out insurance policies on an aged recluse named Joseph Raber, four other men grew tired of waiting for their prospective windfall to shuffle off and hired our date’s principals, Charles Drew and Frank Stichler, to accelerate his actuarial table.

Around dusk on Saturday, December 7, 1878 Drews went into the tavern at Brandt’s hotel and told the people there that Joe Raber was dead. That afternoon he and Stichler had paid a call on Joseph Raber and offered him some tobacco if he would accompany them to Kreiser’s Store. Raber agreed to go with them. The trip to the store had required crossing Indiantown Creek on a crude bridge made of two twelve inch planks. Drews said Raber had a dizzy spell part way across, fell into the water and drowned.

That’s from the account of the sensational case by our friends at Murder By Gaslight. Read on to discover the fate of the four insurance investors …

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1752: William Montgomery, small enough to fail

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In the absence of a modern bankruptcy framework, underwater debtors could be clapped into prisons like the notorious Fleet. As this had the effect of overcrowding the dungeons with otherwise productive persons who were little likely to meet the theoretical obligation to repay their bondsmen, the British Parliament passed Insolvency Acts intermittently throughout the 18th century as bankruptcy holidays that would permit orderly mass discharges of debt. Given the chaotic state of record keeping there must also have been a wide swath of grey-area debtors who for the benefit of resuming economic life would bend whatever facts needed bending to slide themselves into the Acts’ safe harbors.

Our William Montgomery was one of these, who told a white lie about being abroad on the date necessary to wipe the slate clean — but found that his creditors were not so easy to forgive either invoices or prevarications, to the extent of revenging their balance sheet at Tyburn.

This Newgate Calendar entry gives us a heavy dose of editorializing and also misstates the date of Montgomery’s execution because of course it does. For the rentiers’ side of the moral preening, compare to the Ordinary’s Account.*

WILLIAM MONTGOMERY
Executed at Tyburn, December 2, 1752 [sic], for defrauding his creditors

In a country like England, and more especially when we view the overgrown capital, though productive of crimes in fraudulent debtors, we must advocate acts of insolvency.

The good of many must be pre-eminent to the villainy of a few; and, where we find one punished for the abuse of the lenity of the legislative body, we happily find thousands of unfortunate beings rescued from the horrors of a prison, where they had long been immured without the means of support, much less were they able to satisfy the demands of inexorable creditors.

The necessity of good faith in contracts, and the support of commerce, oblige the legislature to secure for the creditors the person of the bankrupts; and in this point of view may the subject of this case, and all others who take the benefit of an act of insolvency, be considered.

The fraudulent bankrupt should be punished in the same manner with him who adulterates the coin of the realm; for to falsify a piece of coin, which is a pledge of mutual obligations between men, is not a greater crime than to violate the obligations themselves.

But the bankrupt who, after a strict examination, has proved before the commissioners that either the fraud or losses of others, or misfortunes unavoidable by human prudence, have stripped him of his substance, on what barbarous pretence is he thrown into prison, and thus deprived of the only remaining good, the melancholy enjoyment of mere liberty? Still more hard is the case of an unfortunate trader, who, disclosing his whole transactions, and offering to assign over to his creditors the remains of his stock, is cast into prison by a single hard-hearted unrelenting claimant. Yet this is constantly done in Britain.

Why is such a man cast into a loathsome prison, ranked with criminals, and, in despair, compelled to repent of his honesty? Conscious of his innocence, he lived easy and happy under the protection of those laws, which, it is true, he violated, but not intentionally. Laws are dictated by the avarice of the rich, and tacitly accepted by the poor, seduced by that flattering and universal hope, which makes men believe that all unlucky accidents are the lot of others, and the most fortunate only their share.

Mankind, when influenced by the first impressions, love cruel laws, although, being subject to them themselves, it is in the interest of every person that they should be as mild as possible; but the fear of being injured is always far more prevalent that the intention of injuring others.

But, to return to the innocent bankrupt. Let his debt, if you will, not be considered as cancelled till payment of the whole; let him be refused the liberty of leaving the country with out leave of his creditors, or of carrying into another nation that industry, which, under a penalty, he should be obliged to employ for their benefit; but what pretence can justify the depriving of an innocent, though unfortunate, man of his liberty, without the least utility to his creditors?

Then it may be in answer be said, that the hardships of confinement will induce him to discover his fraudulent transactions: an event that can hardly be supposed, after a rigorous examination into his conduct and affairs.

It will be necessary to distinguish fraud, attended with aggravating circumstances, from simple fraud, and that from perfect innocence. For the first, let there be ordained the same punishment as for forgery. For the second, a punishment with the loss of liberty; and if perfectly innocent, let the bankrupt himself choose the method of re-establishing himself, and satisfying his creditors.

With what ease might a sagacious legislator prevent the greatest part of fraudulent bankruptcies, and remedy the misfortunes that befall the innocent and industrious! A public register of all contracts, with the liberty of consulting it allowed to each tradesman — a public fund, formed by the contribution of fortunate merchants, for the timely assistance of unfortunate industry — would be the establishments that could produce no real inconveniences, but would be attended with numberless advantages.

Many eminent bankers, in the history of the trade of London, by an unexpected run upon their house, must have become bankrupts, and thereby embarrassed thousands, had not the Bank of England come to their assistance; but alas! The unfortunate tradesman has no one to prevent his fall. Unhappily, the most simple, the easiest regulations, await only the nod of the legislator to diffuse through nations wealth, power and felicity; laws, which would be regarded by future generations with eternal gratitude, are either unknown or rejected. A restless and trifling spirit, the timid prudence of the present moment, and a distrust and aversion to the most useful motives, possess the minds of those who are empowered to regulate the actions of mankind.

It must at the same time, be acknowledged, that the baseness of a few failures often tends to render callous the feelings of creditors.

No act of insolvency has been carried into effect without the detection of fraud. Eager to embrace its benefits, and thus rid themselves of debt, men will wade through perjury, and employ every means to accomplish their purpose.

After the destruction of the prisons in London, during the riots of the year 1780, an act was passed for the purpose of absolving all who had been confined. Of this every rascal in London was ready to take the advantage. A mere form was only necessary, to enter their names; but the signatures, that Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, to his infinite honour, ordered the lists to be printed and published, which put to rout whole hives of impostors. Names were herein found that might as well have expected to appear in the list of Gazette promotions.

A man of this description was the subject who led to this enquiry.

William Montgomery was a native of Elphinstone, in Scotland, and educated in the Presbyterian form of religion.

His father dying when he was about thirteen years old, his mother sent him to sea in a ship belonging to Alloa. Having continued in the naval line of business some years, he at length married, and opened a public house in Bishopsgate-street; and dealing largely as a smuggler, he frequently went to Holland, to bring home prohibited goods.

Quitting Bishopsgate-street, he lived some years at the sign of the Highlander, in Shadwell; but, on the death of his wife, he resolved to decline business as a publican; and having saved some money, he entered again into the matrimonial state, and taking a lodging in Nightingale-lane, he let lodgings to seafaring men.

Meeting with success, he took a shop as a seller of seamen’s clothes; but left the care of it chiefly to his wife, while he employed his own time in frequent trips to Holland, in pursuit of his former illicit practice of smuggling.

An act of insolvency passing in the year 1748, favourable to such persons as had been in foreign parts fugitives for debt, Montgomery took the benefit of it, swearing that he was at Rotterdam on the last day of the preceding year: in consequence of which, he was cleared of his debts, to the injury of his creditors.

No notice was taken of this affair till the expiration of four years, when, Montgomery having arrested a neighbour, the man gave notice of his former transactions to one of his creditors, who laying an information before the lord mayor, Montgomery was lodged in Newgate on suspicion.

Being brought to trial at the next sessions at the Old Bailey, several persons deposed that they spent the evening with him at his own house at the time he alleged that he was in Holland, in order to take the benefit of the act: so that he was convicted, and received sentence to die.

For some time after conviction he behaved with apparent signs of devotion; but asserted his innocence, and said that the witnesses against him were perjured; and in this tale he continued till the arrival of the warrant for his execution.

Being pressed by the divine who attended him to tell the truth, he persisted in the former story until the Friday before his death; but in the afternoon of that day he acknowledged, that after having been on board a Dutch vessel; in order to take his passage for Holland, he had come on shore, owing to the contrary winds.

On the following day he insisted that, “as he had been sworn according to the methods used in Scotland, without kissing the book, his crime could not come within the meaning of the act”. In reply to this he was told that the mode of administering could make no difference to the nature of an oath.

Hereupon he made a full confession of his crime, and owned that, having come on shore, he concealed himself for some weeks in his own house; then appeared publicly, saying he had been at Rotterdam: after which he surrendered himself to the warden of the Fleet prison, and obtained the benefit of the act of insolvency.

On the Sunday following, when he was pressed to declare the whole truth, he exclaimed, “What would you have me say? I have told you all the truth, and can say no otherwise than what I have done. If I did, I should belie myself, and my own knowledge.”

This malefactor appeared dreadfully shocked on the morning of execution, and wished for time for repentance, which he now considered highly necessary. At the place of execution he warned the spectators to beware of covetousness, which had been the cause of his destruction.

* Sample of the Ordinary’s take on the gravity of disappointing your creditors:

That he suffered justly, as an Example, and for a Terror to such an Undertaking again, I believe no one can gain-say …

for which Atonement can scarce, but if ever, not without the utmost Difficulty, be made: And, through this Filth, and Mire of Wickedness, must he pass, who resolves to make an intentional, a real Fraud.

What can the Man think that shall be guilty of such high Offence? ‘Tis publickly known that human Laws are determined to punish it with Death, and what is to come afterwards, God only knows.

Let this then the Fate of poor Montgomery deter all others for the future from attempting a Breach of such an Indulgence, if ever it should please the Legislature to grant one again. And tho’, in a former Part of these Sheets, he did not scruple to say, he was not the only one who feloniously laid hold of the Benefit of the last Insolvent Act, yet Charity engages to think better Things, and to hope there is not an Instance of the like Kind to be met with in England.

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1735: Elizabeth Armstrong, oyster knifer

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On this date in 1735, Elizabeth Armstrong* was executed at Tyburn for winning a drunken brawl.

The account of the events that brought Armstrong to the gallows underscore 18th century Londoners’ everyday proximity to casual violence — where “tempers flared quickly and … it was not unusual for men to think of using physical force to get their way.”

In this case, the man would get the worst of the flaring.

In a brandy shop on Petticoat Lane, Patrick Darling — he’s our victim — and Mary Price fell into an argument that in the trial record reads almost comically for the sudden resort to fisticuffs.

the Deceased was a mighty joaking Man, and he told her she curried a clean Heel, G – D – ye, says she, what is that like? Why, says he, It is like an Irish Leg, as thick at bottom as it is at top. With that she up with her Leg and kicked him on the Parts, and he hit her a Box on the Ear. She reel’d against the Door

Price cried out for her niece, Elizabeth Armstrong, who was next door swilling gin, and the latter dashed over with an oyster knife to put everything to order: she “swore she’d cut his Nose off. He laughed, and said, sure you won’t serve me so? She swore yes but she would, and called him an Irish thief.”

This is the point where everyone can decide they don’t want any more trouble and stagger off to points unknown to nurse their various injuries. Not Patrick Darling.

When Elizabeth Armstrong left the brandy shop, he followed her out, closely enough that Armstrong tried to push him away. Darling snatched her wrist, but his would-be victim was strong — “stronger than he,” according to one witness — and she wrenched her hand free and stuck the little blade into Darling’s chest, drawing blood but doing no real damage. Now enraged, Darling tackled her into a kennel where they grappled, Armstrong slicing again into Darling’s right calf** while Darling “twice put his Hands up my Coats” — the fight ending when

A Sailor coming by, said to him, D – ye! what Son of a B – are you, to beat a Woman? Upon which, the Deceased quitted the Woman, and two or three Blows past between him and the Sailor, but it was over in a Minute, for I called out and said, For God’s sake do not let him beat a wounded Man.

Covered in muck, Armstrong went right back to drinking, little thinking that she had committed a murder.

Bloodied and trounced, Darling was eventually ushered by a friend to a surgeon who dressed his injuries and would testify — maybe protesting a little too much? — that “they were both trivial, but for want of due care, the Hemorrhage of Blood from the Calf of his Leg contributed to his Death, for he was harassed about for two or three Hours, and no body would take him in. And his Animal Spirits being exhausted, he might be suffocated for want of having his Head laid in a proper position. Besides, I heard that after he was wounded he fought with a Sailor, which might hasten his Death.”

Both of the women involved were tried for murder, but Price’s contribution to the fight having extended only to inciting her kinswoman (“her Aunt Price called out, Kill him Betty, kill him”), she was acquitted. Elizabeth Armstrong was not so lucky.

She hanged alongside a 40-year-old crook William Blackwell who had been in the game long enough to garner a nickname (“Long Will”) and a reward for his capture (£40). Blackwell had been part of a gang that committed a harrowing all-night home invasion robbery in Paddington two years prior — and, although it’s practically a footnote in the trial, raping the home’s young maid. One of Blackwell’s confederates who saved his own life by giving evidence against him described

Coming into the Entry, we saw the Maid lying with her Coats up, and the Prisoner on his Knees putting up his Breeches. D – ye you Rogue, says I, You ought to think of other things at such a time as this. And turning to the Maid, I said, my Dear, has he hurt ye? She made no answer, but cryed.

Unfortunately the Ordinary’s Account for this hanging is partially lost, although the fragment surviving does intimate that both Armstrong and Blackwell did the usual sincere-repentance thing that the clergyman was pushing.

* This little girl has nothing to do with the case at hand but having accidentally found the case in the course of ransacking the invaluable Old Bailey Online database I would be remiss not to relay the fate of a different Elizabeth Armstrong a few years prior … sentenced to convict transportation at the age of 9 or 10 because she climbed in an open window and snatched a couple of silver spoon. Here’s the trial record in its entirety:

Elizabeth Armstrong, alias Little Bess, of St. Michael’s Cornhill , was indicted for feloniously stealing two Silver Spoons, the Property of Rose Merriweather , the 3d of this Instant July .
It appear’d by the Evidence, That the Prisoner (who was a little Girl of about 9 or 10 Years of Age) having gotten in at the Prosecutor’s Kitchen Window, which had been opened, and left so till about Six o’Clock in the Morning, had handed out two Spoons to her Accomplices, and was surprized by the Apprentice coming out at the Window. The Fact being fully proved, the Jury found her Guilty to the Value of 10 d.

Transportation.

** An apt injury, considering the insult that started the fracas.

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1717: Three spared en route to Tyburn, thanks to Jack Ketch’s debts

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From the London Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post, Nov. 9, 1717:

On Wednesday we had a very odd Accident happen’d upon Occasion of the ordinary Execution of Criminals; the Number to be hang’d was five, according to the Dead Warrant, but two of these had obtain’d a respite of Execution, the other three were put into the Cart and carry’d to the Place of Execution.

The Person they call the Finisher of the Law, alias the Hangman, and who, for the common Understanding inherits the Name of Jack Ketch, going before the Cart on Foot, in order to be ready at the Place, was arrested in Holborn by three Bayliffs or Officers, on a Sheriffs Warrant for Debts, and was carry’d away.

However, after some Time he got out of their Hands, but soon fell into worse Company; for the Mob got him into their Clutches, and whether he had given them Occasion or no, we know not, but no Pick-Pocket was ever used worse by them; for if all we hear is true, they left him with little Life in him.

In the mean Time the Prisoners came to the Place of Execution; but no Hangman could be found to do them the usual last Offices of Kindness. The Under-Sheriff, it is said, offered very generously to several Persons to officiate, but none could be found. Mr. Ordinary, we hear, might have had the Compliment, but did not think fit to say he would accept it if it had been offer’d.

One bold Fellow, being half inclin’d, his Comrade prompted him earnestly, Do Jack, says his Brother Tom, thou hast not earn’d a Penny in an honest Way a great While.

No, says Jack; da___e, not I, for I deserve it as much as any of them; but do you do it your self, Tom, you know it will be your Turn quickly, and Jack Ketch shall use you the better for it.

But in short, neither Jack nor Tom would do it, and the poor Wretches, tho’ they waited in the Cold a great While, were not willing to do it for themselves; and so the Sheriff’s Officers were fain to bring them back again to Newgate, where it is said they must lie till Jack Ketch recovers of his Suffocation in the Horse-Pond, and is in Condition for his honest Employment.

The prisoners in question all had their sentences commuted.

The hangman, William Marvell — who had obtained the position because his predecessor was also clapped in debtors’ prison — likewise lost the executioner’s gig thanks to the embarrassing arrest. Too reviled thereafter to find honest work he wound up being sentenced to convict transportation for shoplifting in 1719.

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1865: Samuel Clarke, Jamaican radical

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On this date in 1865, the creole politician Samuel Clarke was condemned and immediately executed under martial law in the crackdown following Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion.

A carpenter from the parish of St. David, Clarke was a political activist — the kind of gadfly whom like Tony Moilin in the Paris Commune “a prudent and wise Government must rid itself when it finds a legitimate occasion to do so.” And the post-rebellion British crackdown was just such a “legitimate occasion” … well, sort of.

“Persons were tried and put to death under martial law for acts done, and even for words spoken, before the proclamation of martial law,” complained John Stuart Mill. “A peasant, named Samuel Clarke, was hanged some days after the proclamation of amnesty, for words spoken two months before the proclamation of martial law, his only specified offence being that he had, at that time, declared with an oath that a letter signed by the Secretary of State for the Colonies was a lie.”

Like the more celebrated white politician George William Gordon, Clarke was seized from outside the martial law zone and brought into it so that he could be prosecuted for “subversion” that consisted of merely having liberal opinions.

According to Swithin Wilmot (“The Politics of Samuel Clarke: Black Creole Politician in Free Jamaica, 1851-1865,” Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1/2 (March-June, 1998), a key source for this post), Clarke first became obnoxious to elite planters in the early 1850s when he mobilized black ex-slaves to capture one of the parish seats in the colonial assembly. Clarke would serve a month in prison for an election day riot that claimed the life of a poll clerk. But a few months after his release, “the small settler voters … pronounced their own verdict on the conduct of their black political leaders” by giving Clarke and his party a clean sweep at the 1853 elections and a stranglehold on local politics in St. David.

Clarke himself did not meet the property qualifications to contest a seat in the colonial assembly, but his faction had the votes to control these seats — and Clarke himself became a militant levelling voice whom white elites regarded as a demagogue, forever inciting “the people to be rude and insolent to their employers.”

The bloody year of 1865 finds Jamaica facing an economic crisis thanks to trade liberalization and Clarke provocatively denouncing the “Queen’s Advice” directed at the restive lower orders (“The prosperity of the Labouring Classes … depends … upon their working for Wages, not uncertainly, or capriciously, but steadily and continuously, at the times when their labour is wanted”) as “a lie, a damned red lie” and complaining of a regressive levy that “The taxes were only made for the Black man and not the White, there was one law for the Black man and one for the White man.”

In the wake of October’s Morant Bay black rising, these statements would be read in a most incendiary light by Governor Edward John Eyre — but they were made before that rising, and Clarke did not take part in the rebellion. As with Gordon, his standing political commitments simply became retroactively seditious.

A few days after the riot at Morant Bay … [Clarke] was told a warrant was out for his arrest. He at once gave himself up to the authorities, and was handed over to the military at Uppark Camp. While there, he was told by an officer of superior rank he would be hanged, although he had not been engaged in the riot, because he was one of the “ringleaders” of the people … Mr. Eyre personally directed that Clarke, with a number of other prisoners who had been arrested in Kingston, out of the martial law district, for the same crime of having attended the Underhill meetings, should be sent to Morant Bay for trial; and he was so sent, on or about the 1st of November, many days after Mr. Eyre had himself declared the rebellion to be subdued, and had issued a so-called proclamation of amnesty.

Clarke was put upon his trial on the 3rd of November at Morant Bay before a Court-martial, of which Lieutenant Brand was president, and it is unnecessary to say more than that the sentence was death. The only witnesses examined were the Custos Georges, McLean the Vestry Clerk, and a reporter called Fouche, who gave evidence as to Clarke’s speech at the Underhill meeting in Kingston. The evidence disclosed no circumstances of participation in the riot by word or deed, and related solely to Clarke’s words weeks even months before martial law was proclaimed.

Within an hour of the trial Samuel Clarke was on the gallows, the proceedings of the Court-martial and the sentence having been “approved and confirmed” by General Nelson. At this very time General Nelson had himself apparently begun to sicken at the work, he having already hung upwards of 170 persons, including seven women. He accordingly represented to General O’Connor that he had doubts about trying the remainder of the Kingston prisoners by Court-martial for words spoken before the proclamation of martial law. The General agreed with him, but although the same doubt applied most conspicuously to the case of Samuel Clarke, it did not save him from his doom …

Before his trial Mr. Clarke was flogged by order of Provost-Marshal Ramsay, and among the prisoners forced to witness the execution were his brother, Mr. G[eorge] Clarke.* (Source, which also has a full transcript of the trial)

* George Clarke was the son-in-law of another prominent martyr of these days, the Baptist deacon Paul Bogle.

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