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Imposing the Royal Pardon: Execution, Transportation, and Convict Resistance in London, 1789

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Simon Devereaux
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Extract

Shortly after two o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 19 September 1789, the last act of the sessions at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey began. London's accused capital offenders were tried here eight times yearly. Those who were convicted and received sentence of death or transportation remained in nearby Newgate Prison until their sentences could be carried into execution. So, too, did the capital respites: those convicts who were to be spared execution but who would not actually be pardoned until the Recorder of London, the chief sentencing officer at the Old Bailey, had decided what condition should be imposed. The vast majority of pardoned capital respites were transported to New South Wales. Before that condition of pardon could be put into effect, however, the respites had first to be brought back into the court at the end of another sessions in order to be formally notified, and to signal their acceptance, of the condition of their pardon—that is, to “plead their pardon” at the bar of the court. Although it is unclear from the sources whether or not the respites were still obliged, as they had been down to the 1690s at least, to present the most overt symbol of deference—kneeling while pleading their pardon—the symbolic significance of this procedure seems still to have been thought important, even if it had become largely a formality.

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Law and History Review , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 101 - 138
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Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2007

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References

1. Although they frequently take note of this procedure, no accounts from the printed Old Bailey Proceedings (hereafter OBSP) specifically state the respites to have been kneeling when receiving their pardons (as a search of >http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/< reveals, when using “knees” or “kneeling” as a keyword search). My sense, as will be apparent from the rest of this article, is that such a formality had given way in the face of the practical difficulties involved in conveying the king's intention to pardon to large numbers of respites on any given occasion.

2. Here and in the following notes, I give shortened citations to the online version of the Old Bailey Proceedings >http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/<. Readers may find specific trials by going to the site and searching the proceedings by “reference number.” The account given in this paragraph is derived from OBSP 1788–89, pp. 888–92, (s17890909–1); and The Times of London, 21 Sept. 1789Google Scholar.

3. OBSP 1785–86, pp. 1162–63 (t17861025–3), 1186–89 (t17861025–10).

4. OBSP 1786–87, pp. 405–9 (t17870221–33), 646–53 (t17870523–17); OBSP 1787–88, pp. 52–57 (t17871212–34).

5. OBSP 1787–88, pp. 277–83 (t17880227–42), 543–47 (t17880625–10), 665–66 (t17880910–22); OBSP 1788–89, pp. 5–8 (t17881210–4).

6. For the subsequent fates of the eight men, see Flynn, Michael, The Second Fleet: Britain's Grim Convict Armada of 1790 (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1993), 196–97Google Scholar , 228, 238–39, 351–52, 435, 458–59, 503–4, 662.

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15. These other seven were: Mary Talbot in December 1790 (The Annual Register 32 [1790]: 227)Google Scholar , whose initial defiance goes unnoticed in OBSP 1790–01, p. 90 (o17901208–1); Elizabeth Cummings in May 1791 (The Gentleman's Magazine 61 [1791]: 484)Google Scholar , whose efforts are similarly unnoted in OBSP 1790–91, p. 402 (o17910608–2); and the seven others noted in MacKay, “Refusing the Royal Pardon,” 23, 37–38, n. 16.

16. It is surprising that MacKay seems confident that the words of the respites are reproduced more or less verbatim in the OBSP, “unmuffled by the wrappings of deference” and thus affording us “a rare, small window into the minds of eighteenth-century plebeian capital convicts” (“Refusing the Royal Pardon,” 21). By 1789 publication of the OBSP was largely funded and regularly monitored by the government of the City of London. See Devereaux, Simon, “The City and the Sessions Paper: ‘Public Justice’ in London, 1770–1800,” Journal of British Studies 35 (1996): 466–503CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Devereaux, , “The Fall of the Sessions Paper: The Criminal Trial and the Popular Press in Late Eighteenth-Century London,” in Crime, Punishment, and Reform in Europe, ed. Knafla, Louis A., Criminal Justice History, 18 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 57–88.Google Scholar For the sake of brevity, I will not pursue in detail a reservation that might be raised concerning any evaluation of the accuracy and fullness with which convicts' words may have been reproduced in the OBSP, but only note that it might raise some interesting questions surrounding how far exactly we might regard it as an “official” or “hidden” transcript, and force us to think a little more clearly about what such phrases may or may not mean in this context.

17. The bibliography in this area has grown vast in recent years. Useful guides include several of the contributions to Dickinson, H. T., ed., Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Mori, Jennifer, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution, 1785–1820 (Harlow: Longman Pearson, 2000)Google Scholar.

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22. OBSP 1788–89 (June), p. 636 (o17890603–1).

23. A copy of the pamphlet is preserved at NA, Treasury Solicitor Papers (TS) 11/388. Most of it is reprinted in the account of the trial in Howell, T. B., ed., Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (34 vols., 1809–1826), 2:175–236.Google Scholar A full account of the pamphlet, the government's responses and the significance of the incident is provided in Hay, Douglas, “The Laws of God and the Laws of Man: Lord George Gordon and the Death Penalty,” in Protest and Survival: The Historical Experience: Essays for E. P. Thompson, ed. Rule, John and Malcolmson, Robert (London: Merlin Press, 1993), 60–111Google Scholar.

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25. OBSP 1788–89 (Sept), p. 890 (o17890909–7).

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27. The Times of London, 21 Sept. 1789Google Scholar (emphases in original); The Whitehall Evening- Post, 19–22 Sept. 1789.Google Scholar Thus, in December 1786, Joseph Wooley, suspected by the judge of having committed a theft “with an intention of being transported to Botany Bay,” found himself instead sentenced to be transported to Africa (OBSP 1786–87, p. 67 [t17861213–32]). One may also compare another suspicion of 1787 that Botany Bay was attractive enough a prospect actually to encourage criminality (The Times, 6 Jan. 1787)Google Scholar with the later relief, once news of the new settlement had arrived and been disseminated, that it was—like death—a place “From whose bourne no Traveller returns” (The Morning Chronicle, 14 Jan. 1791, 6 Dec. 1791)Google Scholar.

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29. OBSP 1789–89 (April), pp. 483–85 (o17890422–1); The Times, 1 May 1789.Google Scholar Two of the women, Sarah Storer and Sarah Cowden, were exceptions. In both April, and then again in June (even when their fellow respites had submitted or were shortly to do so), the grounds on which they attempted to refuse their pardons were that their original convictions were unjust. See OBSP 1788–89, pp. 483 (o17890422–1), 634–36 (o17890603–1); and MacKay, , “Refusing the Royal Pardon,” 21–27)Google Scholar.

30. OBSP 1788–89 (Sept), pp. 888 (o17890909–2), 890–91 (o17890909–9).

31. The process can be followed from the dates on the group pardons recorded in the government's “Criminal Entry Books” (NA, Secretary of State Papers [SP] 44/79a-96) and the notices of those convicts' appearances in court recorded in the OBSP.

32. Devereaux, Simon, “The Making of the Penitentiary Act, 1775–1779,” Historical Journal 42 (1999): 405–33CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed (esp. 423–24, 428–29); this discussion is expanded upon in Devereaux, , Convicts and the State: Criminal Justice and the English Government, 1750–1810 (forthcoming), chap. 4.Google Scholar See also Branch-Johnson, William, The English Prison Hulks, rev. ed. (Chichester: Phillimore, 1970)Google Scholar; Oldham, Wilfrid, Britain's Convicts to the Colonies (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1990), chap. 3Google Scholar; and Campbell, Charles, The Intolerable Hulks: British Shipboard Confinement, 1776–1857, 3rd ed. (Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2001), esp. chap. 3.Google Scholar For a more optimistic portrait of the early hulks system, see Frost, Alan, “Overcrowded Hulls, Foetid Sinks? The Hulks System and the Thames Hulks, 1776–1786,” in his Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia's Convict Beginnings (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 9–41Google Scholar.

33. Concise summaries of the search for an alternative convict settlement are provided by Martin, Ged, “The Foundation of Botany Bay, 1778–90: A Reappraisal,” in Reappraisals in British Imperial History, ed. Hyam, Ronald and Martin, Ged (London: Macmillan, 1975), 44–74Google Scholar; and Martin, , “The Founding of New South Wales,” in The Origins of Australia's Capital Cities, ed. Statham, Pamela (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 37–51Google Scholar.

34. OBSP 1783–84 (May), pp. 790–91 (t17840526–80); OBSP 1786–87 (Dec), pp. 65–66 (t17861213–31); OBSP 1788–89 (Sept), p. 890 (quote) (o17890909–6).

35. OBSP 1786–87 (May), p. 499 (t17870418–33); OBSP 1788–89, pp. 483 (o17890422– 1), 634 (o17890603–1).

36. Sharpe, J. A., “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present 107 (May 1985): 144–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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38. McKenzie, Andrea, “Martyrs in Low Life? Dying ‘Game' in Augustan England,” Journal of British Studies 42 (2003): 167–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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42. Lloyd's Evening Post, 10–12 July 1780.Google Scholar

43. The use of such decor had been anticipated twenty years earlier when the carts conveying five convicts to Tyburn, “were lined, for the first time, with black cloth” (The London Magazine 32 [1763]: 616)Google Scholar.

44. [Frederick Augustus Wendeborn,] A View of England Towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1791), 1:78Google Scholar.

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46. British Library (hereafter BL), Additional Manuscript (Add MS) 59356, ff.59–60, Under Secretary Evan Nepean to Home Secretary William Grenville, 1 m/45 p[ast] 1 pm, 8 Sept. [1789].

47. “Quarter sessions” is a misnomer in this instance, because the necessity for all criminal indictments to first be heard before grand juries at quarter sessions meant that, unlike the rest of the country, “quarter” sessions for the City and for Middlesex were in fact held eight times per year in order to accommodate felony trial at the Old Bailey.

48. The workings of justice in London, and the nature and extent of interactions between officials of the City and Middlesex and those of government, during the Restoration and early Hanoverian eras are explored in Beattie, J. M., Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

49. This particular aspect of the relations between London and governmental officials from the 1750s onward is explored in Devereaux, Convicts and the State (forthcoming), part 2.

50. BL, Add MS 59356, ff.59–60, Nepean to Grenville, 1 m/45 p[ast] 1 pm, 18 Sept. [1789].

51. BL, Add MS 59356, ff.61–62, Nepean to Grenville, 4 pm, 19 Sept. [1789].

52. HMC [30] Dropmore Papers, 1:516Google Scholar.

53. BL, Add MS 59356, ff.65–66, Recorder of London to Nepean, 9 pm, 19 Sept. 1789.

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55. HMC [30] Dropmore Papers, 1:523Google Scholar ; OBSP 1788–89, p. 980 (o17891028–1).

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57. Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–1769), 4:394.Google Scholar

58. The Annual Register 25 (1782): 220.Google Scholar Incomplete accounts of this communication also appear in The Gentleman's Magazine 52 (1782): 452Google Scholar , and The New Annual Register 3 (1782): 59.Google Scholar I have been unable to locate an official copy in the Home Office entry books for this time (NA, HO 13 and HO 43), but the corroboration of these other two periodicals and—above all—the subsequent practice of capital punishment in London suggest to me that The Annual Register's text is probably authentic. For similar policies at work outside of London during the 1780s, see Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 582–92,Google Scholar and King, Peter, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 273–78Google Scholar.

59. For purposes of consistency over time, I have eliminated from this figure two large groups of people hanged for singular, large-scale criminal incidents: the twenty-one people hanged in 1780 for the Gordon Riots; and the eight people hanged in 1783 for participating in the rebellion on board the convict ship Swift.

60. Brotherton Collection (Leeds University), Sydney/Townshend Papers K22, the Duke of Richmond to Lord Sydney, 7 April 1786.

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64. Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, chap. 10Google Scholar; Morgan, Gwenda and Rushton, Peter, Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law: The Problem of Law Enforcement in North-East England, 1718–1800 (London: UCL Press, 1998)Google Scholar; King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, passim.

65. The Gentleman's Magazine 53 (1783): 891, 973Google Scholar; see also 54 (1784): 955.

66. The Gentleman's Magazine 55 (1785): 319Google Scholar; see also 53 (1783): 802; 55 (1785): 484; 56 (1786): 990; and 57 (1787): 84–85.

67. The London Magazine, n.s. 4 (1785): 144, 305, 386Google Scholar; The Times of London, 20 Sept 1785Google Scholar (as quoted in Manchester, A. H., ed., Sources of English Legal History: Law, History and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1950 [London: Butterworths, 1984], 274–75)Google Scholar, 6 Jan. 1787; The Monthly Review 72 (1785): 146, 382–83Google Scholar; 74 (1786): 300; 75 (1786): 74, 231–32, 304–5; 78 (1788): 338–39; The Monthly Review, 2d ser., 2 (1790): 348Google Scholar 4 (1791): 355; 5 (1791): 350; 9 (1792): 349–50; 10 (1793): 232; 13 (1794): 108–9; 20 (1796): 403–15.

68. Hill, G. B. and Powell, L. F., eds., Boswell's Life of Johnson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), 4:328Google Scholar; Lustig, Irma S. and Pottle, Frederick A., eds., Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–85 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 304–5, 338Google Scholar.

69. Lustig, and Pottle, , eds., Applause of the Jury, 304–5, 338.Google Scholar For more on Boswell's sympathetic identification with executed felons, see Carter, Philip, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 2001), 192–93Google Scholar.

70. Cobbett, William, The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 25, 1785–1786, 888–89.Google Scholar For the larger contexts of this measure, see Philips, David, “‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’: The Institutionalization of Law- Enforcement in England,” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, ed. Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, Bruce, and Parker, Geoffrey (London: Europa, 1980), 155–89Google Scholar; and Paley, Ruth, “The Middlesex Justices Act of 1792: Its Origins and Effects” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading, 1983)Google Scholar.

71. Radzinowicz, , History of the English Criminal Law, 1:446–48.Google Scholar

72. The Annual Register 31 (1789): 196Google Scholar; The Gentleman's Magazine 58 (1788): 926–27Google Scholar, 1024, 1117; 59 (1789): 271, 272.

73. Aspinall, Arthur, ed., The Later Correspondence of George III, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1962–1970), 1:402 (my emphasis).Google Scholar

74. William L. Clements Library (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Pitt Papers 2, William Pitt to Lord Sydney, 10 March 1789.

75. The numbers hanged in London would increase once more to near-1780s levels in the crisis of the post-Napoleonic War crime wave, but the severe responses of the early 1820s would quickly give way once more to restraint. For differing interpretations of government perceptions and practices on the eve of reform, see Gatrell, , Hanging Tree, part 6Google Scholar, and Devereaux, Simon, “Peel, Pardon and Punishment: The Recorder's Report Revisited,” in Penal Practice and Culture, ed. Devereaux, and Griffiths, , 258–84Google Scholar.

76. Smith, Abbott Emerson, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947)Google Scholar; Coldham, Peter Wilson, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-Conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and Other Undesirables, 1607–1776 (Baltimore, Md: Genealogical Publishing, 1992)Google Scholar; Herrup, Cynthia, “Punishing Pardon: Some Thoughts on the Origins of Penal Transportation,” in Penal Practice and Culture, ed. Devereaux, and Griffiths, , 121–37Google Scholar.

77. Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, chap. 9Google Scholar; Ekirch, A. Roger, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), chap. 1Google Scholar; Beattie, , Policing and Punishment, esp. chap. 9Google Scholar.

78. Accounts of these voyages can be found in Ekirch, A. Roger, “Great Britain's Secret Convict Trade to America, 1783–1784,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 1285–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Oldham, , Britain's Convicts to the Colonies, 80–94.Google Scholar The information that survives from these expeditions does not appear to be sufficiently extensive that we can know with certainty the exact proportion of London convicts on board; a rough calculation is made in Devereaux, Simon, “Convicts and the State: The Administration of Criminal Justice in Great Britain during the Reign of George III” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1997), 254, n. 149Google Scholar.

79. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1810 (45) XIV, pp. 1–58.

80. Ekirch, , Bound for America, 48–49.Google Scholar

81. Reprinted in The Gentleman's Magazine 56 (1786): 263–64.Google Scholar

82. Mackay, David, A Place of Exile: The European Settlement of New South Wales (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 57–58Google Scholar ; NA, HO 35/10, George Teer to the Commissioners of the Navy, 3 Feb. 1789.

83. HMC [30] Dropmore Papers, 1:523.

84. The Times of London, 26 Sept 1789.Google Scholar

85. I owe thanks to Dr Jonathan Fulcher of Brisbane, Australia for emphasizing this point in his comments on an earlier version of this article and obliging me to think a little harder about it.

86. Some of these concerns can be followed in Wilf, “Imagining Justice,” and Devereaux, “City and the Sessions Paper.” A fuller discussion of them would embrace such topics as the enhanced scale of public whipping in the metropolis during the 1770s and '80s, as well as new courtroom and prison architecture and the much-enhanced role of defense lawyers in criminal trial from the 1780s onward. For architecture, see Evans, Robin, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),Google Scholar and Chalkin, Christopher, English Counties and Public Building, 1650–1830 (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), chaps. 7–10. For defense lawyers seeGoogle ScholarBeattie, J. M., “Scales of Justice: Defence Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Law and History Review 9 (1991): 221–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Langbein, John H., The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and May, Allyson N., The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

87. OBSP 1788–89, pp. 887–88 (s17890909–1). By comparison, only nineteen received terms of imprisonment, fourteen were ordered to be whipped, and two were fined.

88. BL, Add MS 59356 ff.65–66, Recorder of London to Nepean, 9 pm, 19 Sept. 1789. See also OBSP 1788–89, pp. 889 (o17890909–4), 890 (o17890909–7).

89. Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, chap. 8Google Scholar; King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, passim.

90. I hope to develop this argument at greater length in future work; some preliminary observations are made in “The Criminal Branch of the Home Office, 1782–1830,” in Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New: Essays in Honour of J. M. Beattie, ed. Smith, Greg T., May, Allyson N., and Devereaux, Simon (Toronto: Centre of Criminology, 1998), 270–308Google Scholar.

91. Beattie, , Policing and Punishment, 458–61Google Scholar; House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1819 (585) VIII, pp.146–54.

92. The Times of London, 2 Nov. 1789.Google Scholar

93. OBSP 1788–89 (June), p. 634 (s17890909–1).

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95. HMC [30] Dropmore Papers, 1:518–19, 523.

96. NA, HO 48/1A, Attorney General Richard Pepper Arden to Lord Sydney, n.d. [ca. Aug.–Oct. 1784].

97. HMC [30] Dropmore Papers, 1:517–18.

98. NA, HO 13/11 pp. 224–25, 225, Recorder of London to the Duke of Portland, 27 June 1797; and reply, 29 June 1797.

99. NA, HO 48/8, Attorney General John Scott and Solicitor General John Mitford to the Duke of Portland, 5 April 1799.

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101. The provisions of this Act were not extended to London, however, because the king retained a direct role in deciding all reprieves or hanging through the procedure of the Recorder's Report, and Tory ministers were unwilling to legislate so overt and explicit a restriction of monarchical prerogative.

102. HMC [30] Dropmore Papers, 1:523–24.

103. Atkinson, Alan, “The Free-Born Englishman Transported: Convict Rights as a Measure of Eighteenth-Century Empire,” Past & Present 144 (August 1994): 88–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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108. The Times of London, 11 August 1809.Google Scholar It may be significant that Jones's execution was one of several during the 1790s and 1800s that were conducted, not immediately outside Newgate, but across the street from it, thus allowing the physical and psychological space between the condemned and the crowd to be bridged. Presiding officials may also have seen it as more practical to allow such speeches on those occasions—far more numerous during these years—when only one person was being hanged rather than a group.

109. The Times of London, 27 Feb 1800.Google Scholar

110. 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: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 305–55Google Scholar; Gatrell, , Hanging Tree, 56–105, 601–11Google Scholar; King, , Crime, Justice and Discretion, 340–51.Google Scholar The increased concern of City officials regarding unruly crowds at executions, as manifested by the appointment of extra constables, is described in Harris, Andrew T., Policing the City: Crime and Legal Authority in London, 1780–1840 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 58–70Google Scholar.

111. The most influential analysis of “theater” and “counter-theater” in eighteenth-century English social relations is Thompson, E. P., “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7 (1973–74): 382–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and idem, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?” Social History 3 (1978): 133–65, subsequently re-worked as “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in Thompson's Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1993), 16–96.Google Scholar The impact of Thompson's perspective, both early and recent, is apparent in Wrightson, Keith, English Society, 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982),Google Scholar and Hay, Douglas and Rogers, Nicholas, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar For a considered critique of it, see King, Peter, “Edward Thompson's Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Studies: The Patrician-Plebeian Model Re-Examined,” Social History 21 (1996): 215–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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114. The formal sentencing of death at sessions' end, however, could still afford room for a show of defiance. One man sentenced to death in June 1791 reportedly “went from the Bar laughing, while the rest of the Prisoners were crying round him” (The Morning Chronicle, 15 June 1791).Google Scholar And the friends and relatives of the condemned might still provide their own critique. After the death sentences were handed down at another sessions, it was reported that “A most dreadful scene now presented … eight boys and seven women stood on the bail-dock for several minutes, filling the Court with shrieks and cries, imploring mercy—the whole Court and auditory seemed to feel sensations of the most interesting nature” (The Times of London, 19 Dec. 1789).Google Scholar If we may judge accurately from contemporary reports, however, such scenes were rare.