Free Newgate: London's Prototype of Hell by Stephen Halliday Page B

Murphy, was despatched in 1789. On 1 May 1820 occurred the execution of five of the Cato Street conspirators 21 who had been sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered for high treason. Hanoverian justice was more merciful than its Tudor counterpart, so the conspirators were killed by hanging before being handed over to an unnamed executioner who cut off their heads. As each head was severed and raised aloft by the knifeman the crowd shouted ‘Ah!’ until one of the bloodied objects slipped from his grasp on to the platform itself – an action which was greeted by a cry of ‘butterfingers!’ The last public execution occurred on 26 May 1868 of Michael Barrett, the Fenian (Irish nationalist) whose bomb at Clerkenwell had killed seven people.
    THE BLOODY CODE FADES
     
    Although the Bloody Code 22 , with its multitude of capital penalties, remained a substantial legal force until the second half of the nineteenth century, its effects were much diminished in practice. Thus in six years between 1822 and 1839 of 5,061 convicts sentenced to death in England only 302 were actually executed, the remainder being commuted by the sovereign in council. 23 Legislative changes to the code came more slowly. Sir Samuel Romilly had begun the assault on the code in 1806 when he was appointed Solicitor-General and this was the start of a process of reform which lasted for over half a century. One of his early supporters was Lord Byron (1788–1824) whose maiden speech in the House of Lords was devoted to an eloquent but unsuccessful attack on a proposal to make the destruction of machinery a capital offence.
     
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Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818): grandson of a French Huguenot refugee from the persecutions of Louis XIV and son of a prosperous watchmaker, Romilly was born in Frith Street, Soho, and became a barrister of Gray’s Inn. He visited France and Switzerland and became acquainted with the French leader Mirabeau (1749–91) whom Romilly advised on Mirabeau’s unsuccessful attempts to establish a constitutional monarchy in France following the Revolution of 1789. He was a friend of William Wilberforce and strong supporter of the anti-slavery movement. He was offered the post of Solicitor-General by the short-lived Whig government, which took office in 1806 and subsequently sat for four constituencies. He devoted the rest of his career to mitigating the savagery of the penal codes in the face of determined Tory opposition. His limited successes included the repeal of an Elizabethan statute that made it a capital offence for a soldier or sailor to beg without a certificate from a magistrate or a commanding officer. He committed suicide in 1818, overcome by grief at the death of his wife four days earlier.
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    A Select Committee on the Criminal Law sat in 1819 and recommended a number of reforms which led to the abolition of the death penalty for many thefts and, in 1823, to the repeal of the anachronistic Waltham Black Act. In the 1830s a Royal Commission led to further reforms. Robert Peel’s government in the 1830s repealed 278 Acts and replaced them with eight. 24 Peel himself claimed in the House of Commons, while Home Secretary ‘there is not a single law connected with my name which has not had for its object some mitigation of the severity of the criminal law’. 25 By an Act of 1823, in cases not involving murder, Peel allowed a judge to ‘record’ the death penalty while making it clear that it would not be carried out, thereby relieving the convict of the anxiety associated with an appeal to the sovereign. By 1861 only four crimes carried the death penalty: murder, treason, piracy and arson in the royal dockyards.
    In the meantime, executive action greatly diminished the effects of the code. By the 1830s only about 7 per cent of those capitally convicted were actually executed, the great majority of sentences being commuted by the sovereign, on the advice of the Privy Council, either to transportation or to service in