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Martyrs in Low Life? Dying “Game” in Augustan England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Andrea McKenzie
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , April 2003 , pp. 167 - 205
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2003

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References

1 The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Williams, Harold, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1958), pp. 399–400Google Scholar. An alternate date of 1727 is often given to this poem.

2 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1978), p. 66Google Scholar; Spierenburg, Pieter, The Spectacle of Suffering (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 59, 60Google Scholar; Sharpe, J. A., “Last Dying Speeches: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 107 (1984): 156, 158–59Google Scholar. For a discussion of public hanging and the “carnivalesque,” see Laqueur, Thomas W., “Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. Beier, A. L., Cannadine, David, and Rosenheim, James M. (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar. The notion that the gallows formed a “contested” space has recently become more fashionable; see, e.g., Lake, Peter and Questier, Michael, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” in Past and Present, no. 153 (1996): 64–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gladfelder, Hal, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore and London, 2001), pp. 55–57Google Scholar.

3 Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1993), p. xxGoogle Scholar.

4 Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches,” p. 159. In contrast to Foucault, who has described scaffold speeches as “more often fictional” than not (Discipline and Punish, p. 66), Sharpe sees most of the condemned as “willing central participants in a theatre of punishment” intended “to assert the legitimacy of the power which had brought them to their sad end” (p. 156), and their “confessions” as “usually forthcoming” and “generally unforced” (p. 150). For an emphasis on resistance, see Linebaugh, Peter, “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” in Hay, Douglas et al. , Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; and Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), esp. chap. 4Google Scholar.

5 Sharpe, J. A., “Civility, Civilizing Processes, and the End of Public Punishment in England,” in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Burke, Peter, Harrison, Brian, and Slack, Paul (Oxford, 2000), pp. 221–22Google Scholar.

6 Mascuch, Michael, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 199Google Scholar.

7 Sharpe, “Civility,” p. 220; Gatrell, Hanging Tree, p. 111.

8 For a discussion of last dying speeches and confessions, see Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches”; for the Tudor origin of such public confessions, see Smith, L. B., “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954): 471–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I will discuss the limitations and applications of this literature as a source at greater length in my book, Tyburn's Martyrs: Execution in England, 1670–1770 (London: London & Hambledon, in press), chap. 2Google Scholar.

9 The Bloody Register, 4 vols. (1764), 1:iii–iv; Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old Bailey, 4 vols. (1742), 1:78. Unless otherwise indicated, all printed primary sources are published in London.

10 The title did not become standardized until 1701; before then, the account was published under a number of different titles (e.g., The Behavior, Last Dying Speeches, and Execution, or A True Account of the Behaviour). Accounts published after 1701 will be hereafter abbreviated as Ordinary's Account, followed by their date; earlier accounts will be cited by abbreviated forms of their long title, with the Ordinary's name given as author to distinguish them from competing accounts.

11 For more on the Ordinary's Account, see Linebaugh, Peter, “The Ordinary of Newgate and his Account,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S. (London, 1977)Google Scholar; see also my dissertation, “Lives of the Most Notorious Criminals: Popular Literature of Crime in England, 1670–1770” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1999), chap. 4Google Scholar; Faller, Lincoln, “In Contrast to Defoe: The Rev. Paul Lorrain, Historian of Crime,” Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1976): 59–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent introduction to both the Ordinary's Account and criminal literature in general, see Harris, Michael, “Trials and Criminal Biographies: A Case Study in Distribution,” in Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700, ed. Harris, Michael and Myers, Robin (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.

12 Critics of the Ordinary made much of the fact that the Account was, until the early eighteenth century, published before the criminals were actually hanged. By 1704 the Account was published on the morning after the executions at Tyburn; see Ordinary's Account (21 June 1704), p. 2. But complaints that the paper had gone to press before the execution had taken place persisted; see, e.g., A True Account of the Behavior, Confession, and Last Dying Speech of John Herman Bryan (1707), p. 2.

13 Sherlock, Richard, The Practical Christian: Or, the Devout Penitent (1699), p. 54Google Scholar.

14 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop Burnet's History of his own Time, ed. Routh, Martin Joseph, 2d ed., 6 vols. (Oxford, 1833; reprint, Hildesheim, 1969), 2:282–83Google Scholar.

15 Lake and Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric,” pp. 103, 106.

16 Lying allowable with Papists to Deceive Protestants (1679), p. 4; Fitz-Harys's Last Sham detected (1681), p. 1; An Answer to Blundell the Jesuits Letter (1679), p. 1.

17 The Last Speech of Mr. Oliver Plunket (1681), p. 4.

18 Burnet, History of his own Time, 2:223.

19 Ordinary's Account (22 May 1732), p. 11.

20 The Last Speeches of the Five Notorious Traitors and Jesuits (1679), quoted in Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials, 34 vols. (London, 1809–26), 7:491–92Google Scholar.

21 The Dying Speeches and Behavior Of the several State Prisoners That have been Executed the last Three Hundred Years… (1720), p. 266.

22 See, e.g., Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, George, 8 vols. (New York, 1965), 6:698Google Scholar.

23 The Speeches, Discourses, and Prayers, of Col. John Barkstead, Col. John Okey, and Mr. Miles Corbet (1662), p. 24; The Proceedings against Sir Thomas Armstrong As also An Account of what passed at his Execution at Tyburn (1684), p. 3. Both the sheriff of London and the sheriff of Middlesex officiated at the executions at Tyburn.

24 Dying Speeches and Behavior Of the several State Prisoners, p. 293. Such measures were clearly seen as both unprecedented and severe: the trumpets in particular were viewed by Burnet “as a new and very indecent practice” (History of his own Time, 1:295–96).

25 Ludlow, Edmund, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, Part Five: 1660–1662, ed. Worden, A. B., Camden Fourth Series, vol. 21 (London, 1978), p. 313Google Scholar.

26 For the body of the condemned as a text on which was inscribed a divine and/or hegemonic moral, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, esp. pp. 44–46.

27 Burnet, History of his own Time, 1:295–96.

28 Jack Sheppard, the celebrated housebreaker turned prison breaker extraordinaire, hanged at Tyburn in 1724, has been taken by many authorities to be the model for Gay's Macheath; see, e.g, Denning, Michael, “Beggars and Thieves,” Literature and History 1 (Spring 1982): 41–45Google Scholar. Although there are other likely candidates I am inclined to favor the Irish highwayman James Carrick, hanged in 1722. McKenzie, Andrea, New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, in press), s.v. “Carrick, James.”Google Scholar

29 The Oxford English Dictionary lists as its first entry: “1727 [i.e., 1727/8] GAY Beggar's Opera. ‘Good bye, captain…die game, captain.’” While I have been unable to locate this phrase in any authorized edition of the play, it is possible that it originates from the extemporization of actors at a later performance; by the later eighteenth century “the running in of extra words and lines by the individual actors may have become a common practice.” See Schultz, William Eben, Gay's Beggar's Opera: Its Content, History and Influence (1923; reprint, New York, 1967), p. 77Google Scholar. The reference to the play (but not the quotation) can be traced to Partridge, Eric, Dictionary of the Underworld (London, 1950)Google Scholar, s.v. “die game.” One likely source for the passage in question may be John Baldwin Buckston, Jack Sheppard [1840?], a play in which John Gay receives inspiration for The Beggar's Opera after witnessing Jack Sheppard's execution. In act 4, scene 3, Sheppard's companions take leave of him as follows: “good bye! good bye, Jack…Die game, Jack” (I am much indebted to Beppe Sabatini, who generously provided the last reference).

30 Ordinary's Account (13 July 1752), p. 110; Knapp, Andrew and Baldwin, William, Criminal Chronology; or, the New Newgate Calendar, 4 vols. (1809), 3:287Google Scholar.

31 Grose, Francis, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), s.v. “game”Google Scholar, and A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (1811), s.v. “die hard or game.”

32 Betterton, Thomas, The Reveng: Or, a Match in Newgate (1680), p. 58Google Scholar.

33 Gay, John, The Beggar's Opera, ed. Loughrey, Bryan and Treadwell, T. O. (London, 1986), p. 117Google Scholar.

34 N.B., , A Compleat Collection of Remarkable Tryals of the most Notorious Malefactors, 4 vols. (1718–20), 1:160Google Scholar.

35 Knapp, Andrew and Baldwin, William, The Newgate Calendar, 3 vols. (1824), 2:287Google Scholar; The Authentic Trial, and Memoirs of Isaac Darkin, alias Dumas… (Oxford, 1761), p. 27Google Scholar.

36 Bullock, Christopher, A Woman's Revenge: Or, a Match in Newgate (1715), p. 55Google Scholar. This play is a slightly reworked edition of The Reveng (1680); the passage cited above constitutes one of the few major additions to the text.

37 Street-Robberies, Consider'd (1728), p. 52.

38 The question of why female criminals do not seem to have been lampooned, execrated, or celebrated for dying game is one that merits more time and attention than I have to give here. Certainly, there were women who died resolutely, without naming accomplices, but on the whole female courage and cheerfulness at the gallows tended to be dismissed as a species of hardness and “masculine boldness” only. See Ordinary's Account (4 May 1763), p. 40. This was a view apparently shared by spectators as well as authorities, if the treatment of the coiner Barbara Spencer is any indication. Spencer, who broadcast her refusal to implicate others, even to save her own life and who was reprimanded for her unbecoming levity, was at Tyburn pelted so violently with stones that she was “beat quite down.” See Ordinary's Account (5 July 1721), pp. 5, 6. However, the vast majority of women criminals are described as dying penitently and/or tearfully; this includes even such picaresque heroines as the Irish pickpocket Mary Young (nicknamed “Jenny Diver”); see Ordinary's Account (18 March 1740/1), pt. 1, p. 17.

39 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678; reprint Ware, Hertfordshire, 1996), p. 202Google Scholar.

40 McGee, J. Sears, The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620–1670 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1976), p. 43Google Scholar; Gregory, Jeremy, “Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Hitchcock, Tim and Cohen, Michèle (London and New York, 1999), pp. 90–91, 99Google Scholar; Sherlock, Richard, The Practical Christian: Or, the Devout Penitent (1699), p. 12Google Scholar.

41 [Samuel Smith], S.S, The Character of a Weaned Christian: Or The Evangelical Art of promoting Self-denial… (1675), pp. 14, 21Google Scholar. See also Bray, Alan, “To Be a Man in Early Modern Society: The Curious Case of Michael Wigglesworth,” History Workshop Journal 41 (Spring 1996): 155–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Covent-Garden Journal (28 March 1752), reprinted in Goldgar, Bertrand A., ed., The Covent-Garden Journal and a Plan of the Universal Register-Office (Middletown, 1988), p. 416Google Scholar; see also entry for 28 April 1752, p. 428.

43 de Mandeville, Bernard, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn… (1725), p. 32Google Scholar.

44 Johnson, Captain Charles, A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen (1734), pp. 314, 342Google Scholar.

45 [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], A True Account of the Behavior, Confession, and Last Dying Speeches of the Six Criminals that were Executed at Tyburn, on Friday the 12th of September… (1690), p. 2Google Scholar.

46 Although there were occasionally last-minute escape attempts on the way to Tyburn, violence or resistance on the part of the condemned at the place of execution seems to have been extremely rare. I have found only one other reference to such behavior; in 1771, the highwayman John Hogan was said to have “struck the Executioner when he was put into the cart, and behaved badly to the last”; see Gentleman's Magazine (October 1771), p. 471. The custom of forgiving the hangman dated at least from the middle ages; see Huizinga, J., The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York, 1949), pp. 11–12Google Scholar; and Spierenburg, Spectacle of Suffering, p. 33.

47 Fielding, Henry, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings (1751), ed. Zirker, Melvin R. (Oxford, 1988), p. 167Google Scholar.

48 The Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 3 vols. (1735), 1:388Google Scholar.

49 Burnet, Gilbert, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester (1680), p. 22Google Scholar; Outler, Albert C., ed., The Works of John Wesley, vol. 4, Sermons IV (Nashville, 1987), sermon 130, p. 171Google Scholar. See discussion in Rivers, Isabel, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, vol. 1, Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 44, 230Google Scholar.

50 See, e.g., Ordinary's Account (24 September 1722), p. 2.

51 [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], A True account of the Behavior and Confession of the Nine Criminals that were Executed at Tyburn on Friday the 31st of May… (1689), p. 2Google Scholar. Presumably, they believed it to be “their Duty” to lengthen their lives in order to achieve an effectual repentance.

52 Select Trials (1742), 3:164; Ordinary's Account (12 May 1730), p. 4.

53 The Tyburn Chronicle… , 4 vols. (1768), 2:250–51; Parker's Penny Post (8 April 1726).

54 Ordinary's Account (3 March 1736/7), pp. 5, 12.

55 Ordinary's Account(8 February 1722/3), pp. 5–6; Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 1:220–21. The scriptural reference is to 2 Tim. 4:7: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

56 Ordinary's Account (4 May 1763), p. 37; Kettlewell, John, An Office for Prisoners for Crimes, Together with Another for Prisoners for Debt (1697), p. 24Google Scholar.

57 Richard Sherlock defines “self-condemnation” as “an unfeigned and sad acknowledgment to have incurred the dismal Sentence of condemnation to death eternal…Thus to examine, judge and condemn thy self, is the same Christian duty which is called Repentance” (Practical Christian, p. 5).

58 [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], A True Account of the Prisoners Executed at Tyburn, on Friday the 23d of May (1684), p. 3Google Scholar; [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], The Execution and Confessions of the Seven Prisoners Executed at Tyburn on Friday the 19th of December (1679), p. 2Google Scholar.

59 Ordinary's Account (8 February 1720/1), p. 3.

60 [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], The Behavior, Confession & Execution of the several Prisoners that suffered at Tyburn On Fryday the ninth of May, 1679 (1679), p. 7Google Scholar; Ordinary's Account (8 February 1720/1), p. 5. For more on men and tears, see Carter, Philip, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001), pp. 94–96Google Scholar.

61 See Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:86.

62 This is spelled out in Kettlewell, An Office for Prisoners for Crimes, p. 22; see also The Speech and Deportment of Col. Iames Turner At his Execution in Leaden-hall-street January 21 1663 (1663), p. 14.

63 The Behavior and Execution of Robert Green and Lawrence Hill who Suffered at Tyburn on Friday, February 21, 1678/9… (1679), p. 5; [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], A True Account of the Behavior, Confession and Last Dying Speeches of the Criminals that were Executed at Tyburn on Wednesday the 8th of March (1693), p. 1Google Scholar.

64 [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], A True Account of the Behavior, Confession, and Last Dying Speeches of the 15 Criminals that were Executed on Monday the 22th of December (1690), p. 2Google Scholar.

65 Ordinary's Account (4 May 1763), p. 30; for complaints about “auricular confession,” see Gilbert Burnet and Anthony Horneck, The Last Confession, Prayers and Meditations of Lieuten. John Stern (1682), p. 9; Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old Bailey, 4 vols. (1764), 4:155. Ironically, Catholic tenets prohibited confession, a sacrament, from being made public; clearly, what the prisoners objected to was being closeted with the Ordinary in a small room that resembled a confession booth.

66 Smith, Samuel, David's Repentance, or, a plain and familiar Exposition of the LI. Psalm, 25th ed. (1694), pp. 94–96, 133, 157–58Google Scholar.

67 Taylor, Jeremy, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, 13th ed. (1682), p. 213Google Scholar; Ordinary's Account (9 September 1723), p. 2.

68 Ordinary's Account (4 May 1763), p. 30.

69 Ordinary's Account (4 May 1763), p. 39. This recounts the successful campaign of the particularly badly behaved Paul Lewis to receive the sacrament without a full confession; however, only months before the Ordinary, Stephen Roe, refused to administer the sacrament to James Farr, who confessed to being “a very great sinner,” and to “repent of all my sins,” until he added “of that in particular for which I am about to die”; Ordinary's Account (10 November 1762), p. 74.

70 Ordinary's Account (4 May 1763), pp. 32, 36, 35.

71 Ordinary's Account (4 May 1763), pp. 36, 39.

72 Ordinary's Account (29 January 1719/20), p. 5; see also Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), pp. 259–60Google Scholar.

73 Ordinary's Account (10 March 1713/4), p. 4.

74 Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 1:101.

75 Ordinary's Account (12 September 1707), p. 1.

76 Ordinary's Account (20 November 1727), p. 2.

77 Ordinary's Account (16 April 1753), p. 48.

78 Ordinary's Account (9 October 1732), p. 17.

79 Ordinary's Account (12 May 1730), p. 4.

80 Ordinary's Account (24 October 1711), p. 2; [Samuel Smith, Ordinary of Newgate], The Behaviour of the Condemned Criminals in Newgate…who [were] Executed at Tyburn on Friday the 17th of October…(1684), p. 3.

81 Ordinary's Account (13 January 1741/2), p. 16.

82 Select Trials (1742), 1:151, 150.

83 Ordinary's Account (7 November 1750), p. 15.

84 Ordinary's Account (21 and 23 December 1747), pp. 25, 27; Ordinary's Account (12 September 1707), p. 2. The last quote in this sentence comes from William Elby.

85 [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], A True Account of the Behavior, Confession, and Last Dying Speeches of the 15 Criminals that were Executed on Monday the 22th of December (1690), p. 1Google Scholar.

86 Speech and Deportment of Col. James Turner, p. 3.

87 Gay, The Beggar's Opera, pp. 115–16.

88 Some Authentic Particulars of the Life of the late John Macnaghton, Esq; of Benvardon; Who was Executed in Ireland on Tuesday the 15th of December (1762), p. 54.

89 Ordinary's Account (4 May 1763), p. 35.

90 Betterton, The Reveng, p. 58: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions” (Ps. 51:1).

91 N.B., A Compleat Collection of Remarkable Tryals… (1718), 1:58.

92 Burnet and Horneck, Last Confession, Prayers and Meditations of Lieuten. John Stern, pp. 6, 7.

93 Ordinary's Account (21 April 1714), p. 1.

94 The phrase is from John Greene, Salvation by Grace, But Not without Holiness in Heart and Life (1761); the term “holiness of life” was commonly used by Anglicans to emphasize the importance of a timely repentance and thorough reformation of life. See, e.g., Sherlock, William, A Practical Discourse Concerning Death (1690), 36th ed. (1810), pp. 274–84, 288, 291–92, 300, 306–7, 322–27Google Scholar.

95 For a discussion of the differing approaches to salvation by Anglicans and puritans (or later, dissenters), see McGee, Godly Man in Stuart England, and “Conversion and the Imitation of Christ in Anglican and Puritan Writing,” Journal of British Studies, 15, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 21–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Unlike McGee, however, who (rightly) stresses the puritan view of salvation as being more “difficult” than the Anglican, in that the former's view of human nature was more pessimistic, my emphasis here is on free grace, which in Calvinist thought theoretically bore no relation to the merits of the recipient. For more on shifting perceptions of God, see the excellent discussion in McGowen, Randall, “The Changing Face of God's Justice: The Debates over Divine and Human Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England,” Criminal Justice History 9 (1988): 312–34Google Scholar.

96 The late seventeenth-century emphasis on criminals as monuments to free grace is best exemplified by pamphlets such as A Warning to Youth: the Life and Death of Thomas Savage, which was first published in 1668, and had run through twenty-one editions by 1720. It seems to have been the inspiration for George Lillo's 1731 play A London Merchant; or the History of George Barnwell and collections like Increase Mather, The Wonders of Free Grace: or a Compleat History of all the Remarkable Penitents that have been Executed at Tyburn… (1690). For more on this genre, see Cohen, David, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Criminal Literature and the Origins of Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; and Lake, Peter, “Popular Form, Puritan Content? Two Puritan Appropriations of the Murder Pamphlet for Mid-Seventeenth-Century London,” in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Fletcher, Anthony and Roberts, Peter (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 313–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I discuss this shift in relation to criminal literature at more length in Tyburn's Martyrs, esp. chaps. 4 and 9.

97 Ordinary's Account (15 June 1724), p. 5. While the penitent thief was often invoked by criminals as an example of successful last-minute repentance, most Anglican ministers took great pains to demonstrate that, as a conversion before the dissemination of the gospel—and probably a miraculous one at that—this was strictly a “one-off.” See, e.g., T.B., The General Inefficacy and Insincerity of a Late, or Death-bed Repentance (1670), esp. pp. 2–4, 76; Sherlock, Practical Discourse, pp. 277–84; Lorrain, Paul [Ordinary of Newgate], The Dying Man's Assistant (1702), p. 96Google Scholar; Stevens, John, Christ made Sin for his People, and they made the Righteousness of God in Him (1760), pp. 23–25Google Scholar.

98 Wesley, John, Free Grace (1740), pp. 5–8Google Scholar. E. P. Thompson has described “the doctrine of justification by faith, in its antinomian inflexion, [as] one of the most radical and potentially subversive of the vectors which carried the ideas of seventeenth-century Levellers and Ranters through to the next century”; it was “anti-hegemonic” in that “it displaced the authority of institutions and of received worldly wisdom with that of the individual's inner light”; see Thompson, , Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993), p. 5Google Scholar. It is only fair to mention that in light of Thompson's earlier work, it is unlikely that he would connect this “antinomian” tradition with Methodist ideas, as I do here.

99 Ordinary's Account (5 October 1737), p. 11.

100 Select Trials (1742), 1:255.

101 Merback, Mitchell B., The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, 1999), p. 156Google Scholar. See also Ariès, Phillipe, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Weaver, Helen (New York and Oxford, 1981), pp. 10–13, 108, 118Google Scholar.

102 See n. 97 above.

103 McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England, p. 31; Michael Sparke, The Crumms of Comfort (1632), quoted in McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England, p. 25; Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding: With Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. Stachniewski, John and Pacheco, Anita (Oxford, 1998), p. 85Google Scholar; see also A Salve for a Sicke Man: or, a Treatise Containing the nature, differences, and kindes of death; as also the right manner of dying well [1625], pp. 24–26Google Scholar; and Baxter, Richard, A Treatise of Death, the last Enemy to be Destroyed (1672), p. 106Google Scholar.

104 Gibbs, Thomas, Practical Discourses (1700), pp. 139, 141Google Scholar.

105 Ordinary's Account (8 February 1720/1), p. 4; Ordinary's Account (8 February 1722/3), p. 3; Ordinary's Account (19 September, 12 October, and 22 October 1763), p. 76.

106 I hope to discuss the survival of such beliefs—in particular, in relation to the practice of peine forte et dure (the penalty of being “pressed” by heavy weights meted out to criminals who refused to enter a plea)—in a future article.

107 Donne, John, Deaths Duell, ed. Keynes, Geoffrey (1631; reprint, Boston, 1973), pp. 15, 17Google Scholar.

108 I have encountered only one game criminal who resisted execution (although there were many who meditated escape even on their way to the gallows, including Jack Sheppard). In 1739, we are told that the otherwise bold and “merry” highwayman James Cook was only “with some Difficulty brought to suffer the Halter to be put about his Neck, being lifted by three men and held up by them, while the Hangman fastened him to the Tree, saying, That he would not to be accessary to his own Death.” See A Full and Genuine Account of the Lives, Characters, Behavior, last Dying Words and Confessions, of the Four Malefactors, That were Executed on Friday the 6th Day of this Instant April at Kennington-Common [1739], p. 15.

109 At Tyburn, and probably elsewhere as well, it was customary to tie the hands of the condemned in front, presumably in order to permit them to clasp their hands in prayer.

110 Speech and Deportment of Col. James Turner, pp. 20–21.

111 Ordinary's Account (18 July 1722), p. 6.

112 Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (1735), 1:185–86.

113 At Tyburn (near the site of the present-day Marble Arch), where most criminals in London were hanged, malefactors were drawn to the place of execution on a cart (traitors were dragged on sledges); they were then tied up to the gallows (the “Triple Tree”); at a signal either from the condemned or the hangman, the horses drew the cart away, leaving the malefactors to strangle to death. The drop chute was introduced after executions were moved from Tyburn to just outside Newgate in 1783. In most other parts of England, the condemned climbed a ladder that was knocked aside, leaving the criminal to dangle from a tree or the gallows.

114 The London Chronicle; or, Universal Evening Post (3–4 May 1763), p. 429.

115 Select Trials (1742), 1:151. Such behavior seems to have not only continued past my period, but was in all likelihood more common, as game mythology became more clearly defined, even stylized. James Frankling, hanged in 1777 for highway robbery (and apprehended when he returned to a coach he had just robbed to kiss the ladies), “behaved in a most undaunted manner at the gallows, placed the rope about his neck, and threw himself off the ladder with a force as if to pull his head off”; Gentleman's Magazine (April 1777), p. 191.

116 An Impartial Account of the Behavior of Sir Thomas Armstrong, From the time of his Apprehension to his Execution (1684), p. 2; The Mirror of Martyrs, 6th ed. (1685), p. viGoogle Scholar.

117 Baxter, A Treatise of Death, pp. 33, 35.

118 Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 91.

119 Ibid., pp. 91, 92. Bunyan's prison library was supposed to have consisted of only two books—the Bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, as cited in Knott, John, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 154Google Scholar. In his important work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century martyrological discourse, John Knott has seen Bunyan's approach to martyrdom as a dramatic departure from those of Foxe, whose martyrs were passive rather than active. This supports the argument that there was a strong martial tincture to seventeenth-century conceptions of godliness, although the changing mode of execution (from being burned at the stake to being hanged) may also account for it (Discourses of Martyrdom, p. 195).

120 State Trials, 4:1132.

121 The Speeches and Prayers of Major General Harrison [et al.] (1660), p. 12.

122 An Account of what passed at the Execution of the late Duke of Monmouth (1685), pp. 2–3.

123 Burnet, History of his own Time, 1:228.

124 Lake and Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric,” p. 69. For the popular appeal of martyrology as a genre, see Woolf, D. R., “The Rhetoric of Martyrdom: Generic Contradiction and Narrative Strategy in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments,” in The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, ed. Mayer, Thomas F. and Woolf, D. R. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995), p. 252Google Scholar.

125 Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, p. 82. See also Roston, Murray, Biblical Drama in England (London, 1968)Google Scholar, for a discussion of “postfiguration”: i.e., the way in which the English protestant “began to see himself in biblical terms, re-enacting or ‘postfiguring’ in his life leading incidents from the lives of scriptural heroes” (p. 71).

126 Ordinary's Account (8 February 1720/1), pp. 2–3.

127 Smith, Samuel [Ordinary of Newgate], An Account, of the Behavior of the Fourteen Late Popish Malefactors, whil'st in Newgate Also, a Confutation of their Appeals, Courage, and Cheerfulness, at Execution, p. 37Google Scholar.

128 The Arraignment, Tryal & Condemnation of Algernon Sidney, Esq; for HighTreason… (1684), p. 67.

129 The Genuine History of the Life of Richard Turpin… (1739), p. 33.

130 An Account of the Dying Behavior of Christopher Slaterford [sic] Executed at Guilford on Saturday the 9th of July, for the Murder of Jane Young (1709), p. 2.

131 Some Authentic Particulars of the Life of the late John Macnaghton, Esq (1762), p. 55.

132 Some Observations on the Trial of Mr. Thomas Carr, Who was Executed at Tyburn, January 18. 1737 (1737), pp. 9, 10.

133 Grub-Street Journal (9 August 1733).

134 Burnet, and Horneck, , The Last Confession, Prayers and Meditations of Lieuten. John Stern…, p. 7Google Scholar; An Account, of the Behavior of the Fourteen Late Popish Malefactors, p. 37.

135 Gay, , Beggar's Opera, p. 117Google Scholar.

136 Mandeville, , An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn…, p. 23Google Scholar.

137 Ordinary's Account (11 November 1724), p. 6. Blake's behavior, according to the early nineteenth-century commentator Francis Place, illustrated the “grossness of manners and the want of morals” typical of the first half of the eighteenth century; see Francis Place Papers, British Library, Add MSS 27826, fol. 64.

138 Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 3:87–88.

139 An Account, of the Behavior of the Fourteen Late Popish Malefactors, p. 8. In June 1735, the Court of Aldermen forbade the consumption of alcohol by prisoners on their way from Newgate to Tyburn; see London Magazine (July 1735), p. 389. But clearly, the rules could be stretched: in 1737, Thomas Carr was told by one of the sheriff's officers that he might have a glass of wine, “contrary to their Rule and Orders as he was a Person of Discretion, and he did not doubt but he would make a proper Use of the Indulgence.” See Some Observations on the Trial of Mr. Thomas Carr (1737), p. 10. The evidence suggests that drinking on the way to Tyburn continued into the middle of the eighteenth century. See, e.g., Richardson, Samuel, Letters Written To and For Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions (1741), p. 139Google Scholar. By 1763, however, the Ordinary would write that “this kind of unseasonable Indulgence is long since disused and abolished”; see Ordinary's Account (15 June 1763), p. 51.

140 Some Observations on the Trial of Mr. Thomas Carr (1737), p. 10.

141 A Supplement to the London Journal, of February 2. 1722–3. Being a Large and Impartial Abstract of the Tryal of Christopher Layer (1723), p. 5.

142 The Indictment, Arraignment, Tryal, and Judgement, at large, Of Twenty-nine Regicides (1724), pp. xx–xxi. Accounts of the regicides' deaths were intensely partisan; similarly, one account of Lord Stafford's execution described the latter as “Divinely Elevated”; see Stafford's Memoires (1681), p. 69. Conversely, The English Gazette claimed that he had “taken…Liquors that had intoxicated his Brain” (29 December 1680–1 January 1680/1).

143 [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], The Behavior, Confession & Execution of the several Prisoners that suffered at Tyburn On Fryday the ninth of May, 1679… (1679), p. 7Google Scholar.

144 Bishop Morley, Account of the Manner of the Death of the Right Honourable Arthur Lord Capel, reprinted in State Trials, 4:124.

145 Burnet, and Horneck, , The Last Confession, Prayers and Meditations of Lieuten. John Stern, p. 12Google Scholar.

146 London Magazine (June 1733), pp. 273–74.

147 The Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 3:74; A Select and Impartial Account of the Lives, Behavior and Dying-Words of the Most Remarkable Convicts, 2d ed., 3 vols. (1745), 2:155Google Scholar.

148 Ordinary's Account (6 June 1707), p. 2.

149 The Authentic Trial, and Memoirs of Isaac Darkin, alias Dumas… (Oxford, 1761), p. 2Google Scholar. See, e.g., Faller, Lincoln, Turned to Account: the Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987), p. 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

150 A Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of James Maclean… (1750), p. iii; Walpole to Mann, 20 September 1750, Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. Lewis, W. S. (New Haven, Conn., 1965), 20:188Google Scholar.

151 The Whitehall Evening-Post; Or, London Intelligencer (26–28 July 1750).

152 A Complete History of James Maclean, the Gentleman Highwayman (1750), pp. 2, 1, 2–3.

153 Ordinary's Account (3 October 1750), pp. 84–85.

154 Account of the Behavior of Mr. James Maclaine… (1750), p. 28.

155 Ordinary's Account (13 July 1752), p. 110.

156 Gentleman's Magazine (June 1776), p. 255; see similar suggestion in The Malefactor's Register, 5 vols. (1779), 1:vii.

157 Fog's Journal (March 19, 1737).

158 Some Observations on the Trial of Mr. Thomas Carr, p. 9.

159 Gentleman's Magazine (December 1750), p. 533.

160 Miles, William Augustus, A Letter to Sir John Fielding, Knt., Occasioned by His extraordinary Request to Mr. Garrick for the Suppression of the Beggar's Opera (1773), p. 42Google Scholar.

161 Ordinary's Account (29 June 1737), p. 3; [Smith, Samuel, Ordinary of Newgate], A True Account of the Behavior, Confession, and Last Dying Speeches Of the 8 Criminals that were Executed at Tyburn, On Monday the 26th of January (1690/1), p. 1Google Scholar. See also Sherlock, The Practical Christian, pp. 2–5.

162 The Life and Character of Charles Ratcliffe, Esq. Who was Beheaded on Tower-Hill, on Monday, December 8, 1746 [1747], p. 5.

163 Gentleman's Magazine (June 1746), p. 394. See also Ford, Thomas, An Account of the Behavior of William, late Earl of Kilmarnock, and Arthur, late Lord Balmerino (1746)Google Scholar, and True Copies of the Papers wrote by Arthur Lord Balmerino [et al.] And delivered by them to the Sheriffs at the Places of their Execution (1746).

164 Gentleman's Magazine (June 1746), p. 393; Westminster Journal (13 September 1746).

165 Westminster Journal (13 September 1746).

166 Gentleman's Magazine (May 1738), p. 275.

167 Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; reprint, New York, 1966), p. 351Google Scholar.

168 Gentleman's Magazine (August 1746), p. 413; London Magazine (September 1746), p. 433.

169 See Foyster, Elizabeth, “Boys Will be Boys? Manhood and Aggression, 1660–1800,” in Hitchcock, and Cohen, , eds., English Masculinities, pp. 151–66Google Scholar.

170 London Magazine (September 1732), p. 278.

171 London Magazine (February 1741), p. 82.

172 Ellis, Clement, The Gentile Sinner, Or England's Brave Gentleman Character'd in a Letter to a Friend: Both As he is, and as he should be (Oxford, 1672), p. 144Google Scholar.

173 Some Authentic Particulars of the Life of the late John Macnaghton (1762), p. 51.

174 Tosh, John, “The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities, 1750–1850,” in Hitchcock, and Cohen, , eds., English Masculinities, p. 225Google Scholar.

175 Carter, Philip, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001), p. 70Google Scholar; Jeremy Gregory, “Homo Religiosus,” p. 99.

176 Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society; see also Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar.

177 Smith, , Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 213, 214Google Scholar.

178 Amussen, Susan, “‘The Part of a Christian Man’: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early Modern England,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Amussen, Susan D. and Kishlansky, Mark A. (Manchester, 1995), p. 227Google Scholar.

179 For the gentleman as the “master-figure of the traditional honour system in medieval [and early modern] Europe,” and the sole arbiter of “truth,” see Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London, 1994), p. 69Google Scholar.

180 Select Trials (1742), 1:150.

181 Ordinary's Account (13 July 1752), p. 110.