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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.

On this day..