Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree Read online

  No sir; they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory for all parties: the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why has all this to be swept away?

  In large part, this chapter has focused on some of Tyburn’s best-known victims and curious or notorious cases. It is important, however, to dispel any impression that Tyburn was the destination only of those whose lifestyles and activities marked them out from the crowd. The felons themselves and the crimes they had committed were usually nothing other than mundane. Many were thieves and robbers. The items they stole were often of little value. They were life’s losers and London’s forgotten criminals.

  NINE

  Newgate to Tyburn in the Eighteenth Century

  The three miles from Newgate to Tyburn was the last journey on earth for the condemned felons. Although most are unlikely to have been noting their surroundings with any great interest – other than perhaps to look for a way of escaping – they travelled a route imbued with many interesting features. What were some of the major historical and topographical features along or close to the route from Newgate to Tyburn which could have been seen around 1783, the last year in which felons made this dismal one-way journey?

  Newgate was an ancient gaol that took its name from the adjacent building of the same name, erected around AD 200. This was the nearest of London’s six landward gates to the powerful fort that the Romans had constructed in the northwestern corner of their settlement, Londinium, in about AD 120. Close by was Ludgate and the area between the two gates came to be known as ‘The Bailey’, a bailey denoting a ward or court within an enclosed space. The name ‘Old Bailey’ was applied for the first time about 1760 to a new street that resulted from the demolition of several small alleys in this area. Newgate had a turbulent history but survived until 1777, being the last of the City’s gates to be demolished. It looked rather odd in its last years because it was topped with a curious ventilating device invented by a Dr Hales.

  Newgate, the prison, stood some distance to the east of the Fleet River which flowed close to the west wall of the City. Although its origins may have been earlier, it was certainly used as a prison around 1130 for housing people thought to be dangerous to the Crown. It was also the prison for the County of Middlesex and the City of London and was supervised by their respective sheriffs, they in turn appointing the keeper. It gained a fearful reputation both for the horrors of its accommodation and the corrupt and cruel behaviour of its keepers. It is therefore no coincidence that Wat Tyler’s rebels attacked and partly demolished it in 1381. Attacks aside, the fabric was frequently neglected and it had to be extensively rebuilt several times. In 1770 a massive reconstruction programme was embarked upon which was not completed before large parts of it were demolished during the Gordon Riots of 1780 when the mob let the prisoners go free. It was quickly rebuilt but with little improvement to its facilities.

  Emerging from Newgate into Old Bailey, the procession turned westwards at the junction with Newgate Street and Giltspur Street. Newgate Street was once known as Blow Bladder Lane because of the butcher’s shambles in that area and the common practice of inserting the bladders of sheep into carcases in order to make them swell. They therefore looked bigger and prices could quite literally be inflated. Giltspur Street had previously been known as Knightrider Street because knights probably used this thoroughfare on their way to do mock battle at the Smithfield tournaments. At a later stage it is likely that gilt spurs were actually made there. The procession then passed through the site of the Newgate itself and stopped outside the church of St Sepulchre on the north side. The full name of this building was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre without Newgate, the name referring to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and probably adopted at about the time of the Crusades. The Great Fire burnt itself out almost exactly on this spot and the church was severely damaged. At midnight before an execution, the sexton of St Sepulchre’s traversed an underground passage from the church to Newgate, rang his handbell outside the prisoner’s cell and offered some salutary advice in verse form. What the other inmates thought about being woken up by this performance has unfortunately not been recorded.

  The procession now entered Snow Hill, which wound sharply down to ‘Oldbourne’ or Holborn Bridge over the Fleet. In the eighteenth century Snow Hill gained some notoriety as one of the places where vicious gangs of young rakes congregated. At this point the Fleet was alternatively known as the ‘Holebourne’ or ‘stream in the hollow’, meaning the significant valley that the Fleet had carved for itself at this point shortly before joining the Thames. St Andrews Church, Holborn, situated at the top of Holborn Hill, would have looked down on the passing procession. While resembling many other Wren churches, it had escaped the Great Fire but was so decayed that it was largely rebuilt by the great man himself between 1684 and 1687.

  Having crossed the bridge over the Fleet, the procession then made its way up the steep western bank past the junction with Saffron Hill coming from the north. This name commemorates an estate in the vicinity where the Bishops of Ely once had a palace and which became famous for the cultivation of saffron (Crocus sativus). This spice has long been valued as an aromatic flavouring for cakes, sauces and rice dishes, as a colouring agent and for a variety of medicinal purposes. The Bishops’ Palace had been demolished in about 1772 and by the second half of the seventeenth century large amounts of the land on which it had stood had been built upon. It soon became notorious for its ramshackle housing and the criminal tendencies and practices of its inhabitants.

  Soon after gaining Holborn itself, Fetter Lane was passed on the left. The origins of this name may have been from the Old French faitor, a lawyer, because of the numbers of those practising law in the area. However, it appears that members of the legal profession were not always held in high esteem and that ‘faitor’ eventually came to mean idler or vagabond and the lane and its vicinity became a notorious criminal rookery. Another explanation is that the name originates with the fetters worn on the cuirasses of fighting men in the Middle Ages which were made by armourers in workshops in this area. Close to the Holborn end of Fetter Lane had lived Nathaniel Tomkins, the brother-in-law of Edmund Waller who was implicated in Waller’s Plot of 1643 for which he was hanged outside the front door of his residence, no. 5. Other punishments and executions took place in Fetter Lane from time to time. From the middle of the eighteenth century, Fetter Lane became known for its conventicles or clandestine religious meetings and meeting places. The Fetter Lane Independent Chapel was established in 1660 and over the years the voices of many famous preachers, including John Wesley, echoed through its halls. True to the heterodox religious traditions of the area, the first Moravian Chapel in London was erected there. Others who lived in Fetter Lane included Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the political philosopher, the poet John Dryden (1631–1700) and Tom Paine (1737–1809), the maverick polemicist.

  Leather Lane met Holborn on the north side. A famous thoroughfare with a street market even then, its name was probably derived from leveroun, an old French word for greyhound which possibly referred to an inn that once stood in the area. Another explanation is that leather-sellers who obtained their raw material from Smithfield Market nearby had established businesses in the area. Shortly after Leather Lane, Gray’s Inn Lane (as it was known until 1862) joined Holborn from the north. This was the main route from the north to the various city markets and therefore always a thoroughfare of considerable importance. Gray’s Inn itself on the north side of Holborn recalled the name of the de Greys who resided in the vicinity in the thirteenth century. This important family numbered among its members Walter de Grey who was Chancellor to King John between 1206 and 1214 and Reginald, the Chief Justice of Chester under Edward I at the time he was trying to subdue the Welsh. In the early fourteenth century the family moved away and Gray’s Inn began its
long association with the legal profession although its records of this date back only to 1569. The route through the Holborn area passed innumerable hostelries including on the north side the Black Bull, the Bell, the Three Cups and on the south the Black Swan and the George. These did a roaring trade on Tyburn Fair days.

  The Inns of Court were, and indeed still are, training institutions and professional associations for barristers. They began to have a corporate existence in the fifteenth century and played a vital role in the development of a secular legal profession. In this sense the word ‘inn’ means a hostel for barristers and students of the law. The latter lived in and studied a curriculum on aspects of law as well as taking classes in history, music and dancing to round them out and prepare them for a prestigious role in society. The Inns of Chancery were in effect institutions that housed and prepared those aspiring to enter the Inns of Court. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the educational function of the Inns of Chancery was just about defunct. Several of these Inns would have acted as mute witnesses to the procession to Tyburn. Barnard’s Inn was established in 1435 close to Fetter Lane on the south side of Holborn and nearby was Furnival’s Inn (1383), close to Lincoln’s Inn on the north side of Holborn. Staple Inn at the junction of Holborn and Gray’s Inn Lane had been founded in 1378 and had perhaps gained its name because it was at one time a wool warehouse. This point was known as Holborn Bars and marked the western extremity of the City of London. Here tolls and commercial duties were exacted and measures taken to prevent undesirables from entering the City. A gallows once existed at this point.

  Innumerable famous men were associated with Gray’s Inn including Archbishops Whitgift and Laud; Sir Nicholas Bacon and Francis Bacon; Thomas Cromwell; Sir Thomas Gresham; William Cecil; Lord Burghley and William Camden, the eminent antiquarian. On the south side of Holborn, the procession would have passed Lincoln’s Inn. Founded in the mid-fourteenth century, it took its name either from Henry de Lacy, 3rd Earl of Lincoln, a close adviser of Edward I, or from one Thomas de Lyncoln described as the King’s Serjeant of Holborn. Lincoln’s Inn is likely to have been on this site since around 1420, when the land on which it now stands was leased from the Bishops of Chichester. The playwright Ben Jonson may have worked as a bricklayer when the Chapel was being built in the 1620s. Leading alumni of Lincoln’s Inn by 1783 included Sir Thomas More; Jeremy Bentham; Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister; John Donne, the metaphysical poet, and David Garrick.

  Lincoln’s Inn Fields had long been a popular place of resort and recreation for the citizenry of London. In 1586 Anthony Babington and some of his fellow conspirators were executed there in a fashion so barbaric as to cause even Queen Elizabeth qualms of conscience. Sentenced to death for conspiring to assassinate her and to place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne, they were hanged, drawn and quartered. However, Babington and the first batch of conspirators were still fully conscious when taken down and then eviscerated. Lincoln’s Inn Fields was chosen for this brutal demonstration of the power of the state because a figure of Elizabeth made of wax and stuck with pins was said to have been found there. The area certainly had something of a reputation for harbouring Catholic recusants in the dark days of religious persecution. Close by in Sardinia Street were buildings occupied by the Franciscan Order which were attacked and set on fire by an anti-Catholic mob in 1688 at the time that James II was making his ill-judged attempts to reimpose Roman Catholicism on his subjects. Although the Franciscans had abandoned this building, it was once again wrecked during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.

  In 1683 the execution of Lord William Russell had taken place in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He had been implicated in the Rye House Plot, a hare-brained scheme to block the road close to Rye House outside Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire and assassinate Charles II and the Duke of York when they were forced to stop at the obstacle. These plans were rendered meaningless when the intended victims passed by considerably earlier than expected. In 1711 Newcastle House at the corner of Great Queen Street became the home of Thomas Pelham-Holles, later better known as the Duke of Newcastle and a Whig Prime Minister. As Prime Minister he was obviously in a position to dispense favours. One man, by the name of Sir Thomas Robinson, frequently called round to curry favour and the Duke tired of having to receive him. He instructed his servants to tell Robinson whenever he called that their master was out. This did not deter him and he coolly invited himself into the kitchen to wait for the moment when the Duke might become available. While he was waiting, he apparently kept glancing at the clock and playing with a pet monkey. This behaviour irritated the Duke and so the household servants were eventually instructed to send Robinson away with a flea in his ear after reciting this neat little epigram: ‘Sir, his Grace has gone out, the clock has stopped and the monkey is dead’.

  Continuing along Holborn, the procession now approached the dominant bulk of St Giles-in-the-Fields which originated as the chapel of a leper hospital founded in 1101 by Matilda, the Queen of Henry I. The chapel only became a parish church in 1547 after the hospital was dissolved by Henry VIII. In a ruinous state in the early 1620s, the church was rebuilt only to deteriorate again to the extent that money had to be raised for its total rebuilding. This was carried out by the comparatively obscure Henry Flitcroft between 1730 and 1734. Flitcroft was better known as a gardener than as an architect but he drew extensively on what might be called the ‘Wren and Gibbs’ tradition which had provided the City with so many handsome rebuilt churches after the Great Fire. St Giles was only subsumed within the encroaching urban spread of London in the earlier part of the eighteenth century and indeed some areas of the parish especially in the north were still not fully developed by the 1780s. The church and the small rural settlement around it were therefore something of a landmark on the road to Tyburn.

  In much earlier times there had been a gallows standing at the north-western end of St Giles High Street. This location had been chosen as suitably distant from London and Westminster but as the built-up districts spread northwards and westwards, hangings were moved to Tyburn, which was still a rural spot. It was entirely appropriate that the church was dedicated to St Giles because he was the patron saint of the indigent, of cripples, outcasts and social pariahs and there were many of these among the wretched felons who passed this way while travelling to Tyburn. At the gate of the former hospital the procession would stop briefly while the condemned criminals were presented with a bowl of ale. When St Giles itself had been the end of the journey from Newgate this had been literally their last refreshment but when executions were moved to Tyburn an enterprising publican set up a tavern called the Bowl. According to some accounts the present Angel in St Giles High Street is a reincarnation of the Bowl. The landlord and his successors provided ale free to the felons and did a brisk trade with the crowds on the days of Tyburn Fair. Jack Sheppard is said to have partaken of a drink at this point. He was unable to finish it and is reputed to have quipped with those around him, ‘Give the remainder to Jonathan Wild’. The Crown was another inn said to have dispensed drinks at St Giles. A sense of solemnity suitable for the processions was lent by the tolling of its great bell. Money to pay for this custom had been provided through the munificence of Alice Dudley, the saintly daughter-in-law of Robert Dudley, the less-thansaintly Earl of Leicester, in the 1640s.

  Eventually the procession got on its way once more, passing out of St Giles to the junction with the Tottenham Court Road. This led north to what had once been the manor of Tothele or Tottenheale. By the 1780s the open countryside there was being threatened by the new east to west road that had been built around the northern extremities of London from Islington and the Battle Bridge area towards Marylebone and Paddington. The procession continued westwards along what had become known as Oxford Street. This was a very ancient road, long used for commerce and by armies marching westwards. On old maps it is sometimes indicated as the ‘Road to Oxford’, as ‘Tyburn Road’, ‘Tyburn Way’ or ‘Tyburn Lane’
and indeed various other names. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the eastern portion had acquired the name ‘Oxford Street’ because land on the north side of the road had been bought by Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford. Residential property for the rich was spreading along both sides of Oxford Street but it was fronted by high quality shops catering for the affluent inhabitants of this growing residential quarter. One conspicuous building roughly half way between Tottenham Court Road and Tyburn was the Oxford Market built in the early eighteenth century to serve these new residential districts. It was now possible to see the countryside ahead and the procession began to pass through a quarter of London which was either recently constructed or still being developed. Completely open country, however, was only reached when the procession arrived at Tyburn. As recently as the 1700s, the way to Tyburn passing through this area was described as ‘a deep hollow road and full of sloughs; with here and there a ragged house, the lurking place of cutthroats’.

  On leaving the junction with Tottenham Court Road, the procession had skirted the northern extremity of the Soho area. The word ‘Soho’ was a hunting cry and indeed this area had been used for hunting purposes until building development started in the seventeenth century. A number of mansions with large grounds such as Monmouth House and Leicester House had been a feature of the area but by the 1670s and 1680s the district was changing and a mix of humble housing and small industrial workshops had appeared. The area attracted foreign immigrants in large numbers, especially French Huguenots, who bestowed on it the cosmopolitan character that had already become one of its distinguishing characteristics by the middle of the eighteenth century. It had also become a somewhat bohemian quarter, attracting considerable numbers of artists, some on their way to fame and glory but most going nowhere at all. Parts of Soho such as Dean Street, Wardour Street and Poland Street were slowly losing their exclusive cachet by the 1780s. Dean Street had been built in the 1680s and at first had numbered many titled families among its inhabitants before Huguenots began moving in, while Wardour Street was becoming the haunt of antique dealers and furniture-makers, but Poland Street managed to maintain its relative exclusivity rather longer. The street took its name from the King of Poland tavern which stood at its junction with Oxford Street and which the procession would have passed on its way to Tyburn. Berwick Street to the west, built slightly later, was probably named after the Duke of Berwick, an illegitimate son of James II, and seems to have attracted French immigrants from the start – so much so, in fact, that there were two French churches in the street.