‘You’re going to ask for a loan,’ Berrigan said, ‘in those boots?’
Sandman looked down to see that both boot soles were gaping away from the uppers. ‘I’m going to ask for a loan,’ he said, ‘and for his daughter’s hand in marriage as well, and though I’m not a betting man, I’ll wager you the price of a new pair of boots that he’ll say yes to both. He’s not getting a rich son-in-law, Sam, he’s just getting me.’
‘Lucky him,’ Berrigan said.
‘Lucky you,’ Sandman said, ‘and Sally, too.’ He smiled and they walked on down Old Bailey. Behind them Venables slowly choked as, above him, Corday blinked in the new day’s sunlight. Sandman looked back once from the corner of Ludgate Hill and he saw the gallows black as any devil’s heart, and then he turned the corner and was gone.
Historical Note
I have tried to keep the facts of the tale as accurate as may be. There was, indeed, an occasional Investigator appointed to enquire into the circumstances of capital cases, and he was selected by the Home Secretary who, in 1817, was Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth.
This was one of the busiest periods for the gallows of England and Wales (Scottish law was, and remains, different). There was a belief that savage and extreme punishment would curb crime and so ‘the bloody code’ was forged and, by 1820, there were over 200 capital crimes on the statute books. Most of these were property crimes (theft, arson or forgery), but murder, attempted murder and rape were also punishable by death as, indeed, was sodomy (between 1805 and 1832 there were 102 executions for rape in England and Wales and 50 for sodomy). Most executions were for robbery (938 between 1805 and 1832), with murder the second most common capital offence (395 cases). In all there were 2028 executions in England and Wales between 1805 and 1832, and the victims included women and at least one child as young as fourteen. This averages about 75 executions a year, of which about one fifth took place outside Newgate, while the rest were in assize towns or at Horsemonger Lane, but some years the gallows were much busier and the period between 1816 and 1820 was among the busiest, averaging over 100 executions a year. Yet, and this is a crucial point, only about ten per cent of those condemned to death were actually executed. The vast majority had their sentences commuted (almost invariably to transportation to Australia). Thus, between 1816 and 1820, when 518 executions took place in England and Wales, there were actually 5853 sentences of death passed.
What accounts for this enormous discrepancy? Mercy? It was not a merciful age. Instead the figures betray a cynical exercise of social control. The friends and relatives of a person condemned to death would invariably petition the crown (which meant the Home Secretary) and they would do their utmost to secure the signatures of prominent members of society, such as aristocrats, politicians or senior churchmen, knowing that having such names on a petition made it more likely to be granted. Thus were bonds of subservient gratitude forged. This was never made explicit, but the process of condemnation, petition and reprieve was so well understood and established that it cannot have another explanation.
Many felons were unlucky and had their petitions rejected, or else made no petition, and their deaths became public spectacles. In London the executions used to be at Tyburn’s famous gallows, ‘the triple tree’, which stood at what is now Marble Arch, but in the late eighteenth century the scaffold was moved to Old Bailey. I have tried, in the first and last chapters, to describe the process of a Newgate execution as accurately as it may be depicted after a lapse of two hundred years, and I have used the real names of many of the participants; thus the Keeper of Newgate was William Brown (and he did indeed serve devilled kidneys to the guests who came to watch the hangings), the Ordinary was Horace Cotton and the hangman was James (‘Jemmy’) Botting, who lacked an assistant in 1817. Charles Corday, of course, is fictional, but he could well have survived his hanging. A number of folk survived, usually because they were cut down too soon, and it would be some years before the ‘long drop’ was adopted which killed more or less instantaneously. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Donald Rumbelow, author of, among many other good books, The Triple Tree, for his great help in disentangling some of the more confusing details of Newgate procedure during the Regency period. I am also most grateful to Elizabeth Cartmale-Freedman, who helped with the research, and to James Hardy Vaux who, in 1812, during his involuntary exile in Australia, compiled his Vocabulary of the Flash Language.
The original inspiration for Gallows Thief came from V. A. C. Gatrell’s book The Hanging Tree (Oxford, 1994), a book that combines a scholarly account of the English and Welsh experience of execution between 1770 and 1868 with a fine and controlled anger against capital punishment. The Hanging Tree’s cover picture alone, which is Gericault’s sketch of an English public hanging in 1820, is a stunning indictment of a barbaric punishment. To Professor Gatrell I offer thanks and the assurance that any mistakes in Gallows Thief come not from him, nor from any other source, but are entirely of my own making.
About the Author
Bernard Cornwell was born in London, raised in Essex and worked for the BBC for eleven years before meeting Judy, his American wife. Denied an American work permit he wrote a novel instead and has been writing ever since. He and Judy divide their time between Cape Cod and Charleston, South Carolina.
www.bernardcornwell.net
Bernard.Cornwell
@BernardCornwell
Also by Bernard Cornwell
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(in chronological order)
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Sharpe’s Triumph (1803)
Sharpe’s Fortress (1803)
Sharpe’s Trafalgar (1805)
Sharpe’s Prey (1807)
Sharpe’s Rifles (1809)
Sharpe’s Havoc (1809)
Sharpe’s Eagle (1809)
Sharpe’s Gold (1810)
Sharpe’s Escape (1811)
Sharpe’s Fury (1811)
Sharpe’s Battle (1811)
Sharpe’s Company (1812)
Sharpe’s Sword (1812)
Sharpe’s Enemy (1812)
Sharpe’s Honour (1813)
Sharpe’s Regiment (1813)
Sharpe’s Siege (1814)
Sharpe’s Revenge (1814)
Sharpe’s Waterloo (1815)
Sharpe’s Devil (1820–1821)
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Bernard Cornwell, Gallows Thief
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