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NOTES ON ISSUE 3: GLOSSARY
PART 3 OF 4
“Treason!” “That’s
quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!” “It’s
the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised
spectacles upon him, “It is the law.”
Darnay’s trial, in A Tale of Two Cities, is based
on the trial of Francis Henry de la Motte. De la Motte,
a French baron residing in England because of pecuniary difficulties,
was charged with treason; his trial is reported in the 1781
Annual Register (of which we know Dickens possessed a
copy) and State Trials
(which he also consulted). The connection between Darnay’s
trial and de la Motte’s was first identified by James
Fitzjames Stephen in a hostile review of A Tale of Two Cities
in the Saturday Review, December 17, 1859.
According to the Annual Register
for 1781, de la Motte was apprehended on January 5, 1781 when,
climbing the stairs to the Secretary of State’s office,
he dropped a bunch of papers. Among them were
…particular lists of every ship of
force in any of our [England’s] yards and docks, the complement
of men they have on board at the time of their sailing, with
remarks of their being well manned, when short of the regulated
number, &c. He has even gone so far as to furnish the most
accurate lists of the seamen in the different hospitals at Portsmouth
and Plymouth. In consequence of the above papers being found,
Henry Lutterloh, Esq. of Whickham, near Portsmouth, was afterwards
apprehended and brought to town. (162)
Lutterloh and other accomplices were arrested
after de la Motte’s apprehension, and Lutterloh ultimately
informed against de la Motte at his trial. An account of his
testimony is also given in the Annual Register of 1781:
This morning [the 14th of July, 1781] came
on before Judge Willes, at the Old-Bailey, the trial of Mr.
de la Motte for high-treason. Mr. Lutterloh, the chief evidence
against the prisoner, swore, that he had been employed by Mr.
de la Motte to procure from the French ministry the most authentic
intelligence respecting our naval operations, at 50 guineas
per month. A number of papers found in Mr. Lutterloh’s
garden were produced, and proved to be his hand-writing, giving
an exact detail of the state of our docks, the sailing of our
fleets, the number of men on board each ship, and other useful
information, which had been obtained through the means of a
clerk in one of the public offices in the naval department.
Among other circumstances contained in these papers, was an
account of Governor Johnstone’s intended operations. The
trial lasted 13 hours, when the jury, after a short deliberation,
pronounced the prisoner Guilty, when sentence was immediately
passed upon him, “To be hanged by the neck, but not till
dead; then to be cut down, and his bowels taken out and burnt
before his face, his head to be taken off, his body cut into
four quarters, and to be at his majesty’s disposal.”
The prisoner received the awful doom with great composure, but
inveighed against Mr. Lutterloh in warm terms. (184-5)
De la Motte’s anger at Lutterloh is
understandable. The latter had apparently played both sides,
informing against de la Motte in hopes of a reward from the
British government while blackmailing him (promising to withhold
evidence) at the same time (Sanders 59).
Dickens’ version of the de la Motte trial is of course
altered: Darnay’s trial predates de la Motte’s by
a year (it is held in 1780 instead of 1781), and Darnay is ultimately
acquitted. Like de la Motte’s trial, however, Darnay’s
coincides with the American Revolution (in which France sided
with the American colonies against the English), and, according
to Sanders’ Companion to A Tale of Two Cities,
“The indictment against de la Motte occupies seventeen
columns of State Trials and has much in common with the
‘infinite jingle and jangle’ which accompanies the
indictment against Darnay” (59).
They hanged at Tyburn, in
those days, so the street outside Newgate had not obtained one
infamous notoriety that has since attached to it.
Tyburn was the site of public executions until 1783 –
three years after Darnay’s trial (which occurs in 1780)
(Baedeker 98). From 1783 to 1868 (after which executions took
place inside the prison), the condemned were executed at Newgate.
Tyburn, according to one 19th-century guidebook, was originally
named after “a small brook coming from Kilburn and flowing
[southward] into the Thames” (Baedeker 284). In the 18th
century, Tyburn was at the northwest extremity of London, opposite
the entrance to Hyde Park (near the location of the present
Marble Arch).
Newgate, which “obtained [the] infamous notoriety”
of public executions in 1783, was the prison in Old Bailey from
1770 until 1902. Named for “New Gate” – originally
a gate in the London city wall – the Newgate in A Tale
of Two Cities is actually the second prison of that name
(the first having been closed because of an epidemic of “gaol
fever”). The new Newgate, however, was scarcely finished
in 1780 (the year of Darnay’s trial) when the Gordon Riots
broke out in London, and a number of prisoners escaped (Darnay’s
trial occurs early in the year, but was probably one of the
last trials heard in 1780, as the riots erupted in June [Sanders
59]). Restored, Newgate stood until 1902 (when the current Central
Criminal Court was constructed [Woodley 128]). When its “infamous
notoriety” of public execution commenced, prisoners were
executed “in front of that wing of the prison called Debtors’
Door, before which the scaffold [was] erected”; executions
took place at 8:00 a.m. on Mondays (Gaspey 26-8; Dickens’s
Dictionary of London 199-200).
But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery
and villainy were practiced, and where dire diseases were bred,
that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed
straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and
pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened, that
the judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly
as the prisoner’s, and even died before him.
Gaol fever was rampant in the English jails of the 18th century,
and had necessitated the destruction of the first Newgate Prison
and subsequent construction of the second (newly completed when
Darnay stands trial in 1780). Tallis’s Illustrated
London (1851) tells the story of gaol fever in Newgate:
In 1750 that frightful distemper, the gaol-fever,
broke out in the prison [of Newgate], and Sir Samuel Pennant,
the Lord Mayor, Alderman Lambert, two judges, one of the undersheriffs
of Middlesex, several barristers, jurors, and other persons,
were sacrificed to its virulence. This fearful pestilence led
to some attempt on the part of the municipal authorities to
amend the internal economy of Newgate, in which the prisoners
were separated as far as practicable, and a better system of
ventilation introduced. Nevertheless, the gaol still remained
in a disreputable condition, and in 1770 the corporation of
London applied to and obtained from parliament a grant of fifty
thousand pounds, to enable them to construct an entirely new
prison, of which the first stone was laid by Sir William Beckford,
the Lord Mayor. Mr. George Dance was the architect under whose
direction it was commenced and finished. It was hardly completed,
when, in 1780, Lord George Gordon’s rioters burst open
the doors, rescued nearly three hundred prisoners, and destroyed
the whole interior by fire; the massive stone walls remained
standing, uninjured by the flames…. Money was afterwards
voted by the House of Commons to make the necessary restorations,
and in 1782 the existing prison was completed, the cost of its
erection having exceeded the original estimate of forty thousand
pounds. (vol. 1, 26-7)
Dickens’ allusion to the “black
cap” (which announces the judge’s death as well
as the prisoner’s) refers to a black cap assumed by English
judges when announcing the death sentence.
For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly
inn-yard, from which pale travelers set out continually, in
carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other world:
traversing some two miles and a half of public streets and road,
and shaming few good citizens, if any. So powerful is use and
so desirable to be good use in the beginning.
In the 18th century, Tyburn – where public executions
were held until 1783 – was at the northwest extremity
of London: Condemned prisoners were conveyed in a cart from
Newgate Prison along Holborn, St. Giles High Street, and Oxford
Street to Tyburn, which stood opposite the entrance to Hyde
Park (Sanders 61). The passage can be traced on this portion
of Thornton’s map of London (1784).
Click
on map for larger view
This journey through the city toward execution
in “carts and coaches” suggests a parallel between
London and Paris, foreshadowing the journey of the French tumbrils
from the Revolutionary Tribunal to the guillotine.
It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution,
that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the
extent; also, for the whipping-post … ; also, for extensive
transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom,
systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes
that could be committed under Heaven.
The OED describes the pillory as
[a] contrivance for the punishment of offenders,
consisting usually of a wooden framework erected on a post or
pillar, and formed, like the stocks, of two movable boards which,
when brought together at their edges, leave holes through which
the head and hands of an offender were thrust, in which state
he was exposed to public ridicule, insult, and molestation.
In other forms, the culprit was fastened to a stake by a ring
round his neck and wrists.
In England, the pillory was used from the
medieval period forward; it was abolished except in cases of
perjury in 1815, and totally abolished in 1837 (OED).
As Dickens notes, it was “a punishment of which no one
could foresee the extent,” for though people in the pillory
were exposed to public ridicule, and were often pelted with
missiles like “cats, dung, and rotten vegetables”
(Maxwell 450-1), the experience was not necessarily fatal. Some,
however, died from the effects of confinement or exposure. For
example, The Book of Days (a miscellany of 1868) records
that in “1780 [the date of this part of A Tale of Two
Cities] a coachman, named Read, died on the pillory at Southwark
[south of the Thames, across from London proper] before his
time of exposure had expired” (830). In its general account
of the pillory, The Book of Days agrees with Dickens,
describing it as “a mode of punishment so barbarous, and
at the same time so indefinite in its severity, that we can
only wonder it should not have been extinguished long before
[1837]” (830). It includes illustrations of an individual
and a group pillory, and the following history of the device:
The pillory was for many ages common to most
European countries. Known in France as the pillori or carcan, and in Germany as the pranger, it seems to have existed in England
before the Conquest in the shape of the stretch-neck, in which
the head only of the criminal was confined. By a statute of
Edward I it was enacted that every stretch-neck, or pillory,
should be made of convenient strength, so that execution might
be done upon offenders without peril to their bodies. It usually
consisted of a wooden frame erected on a stool, with holes and
folding boards for the admission of the head and hands, as shown
in the sketch of Robert Ockam undergoing his punishment for
perjury in the reign of Henry VIII. In the companion engraving,
we have an example of a pillory constructed for punishing a
number of offenders at the same time, but this form was a rare
occurrence…. (vol. 1, 830-2)
 
Though Dickens was writing about the pillory
over two decades after it was abolished, pillories could still
be seen in England. In 1864, as The Book of Days reports,
“A pillory [was] still standing at the back of the market-place
in Coleshill, Warwickshire, and another [lay] with the town
engine in an unused chancel of Rye Church, Sussex. The latter
is said to have been last used in 1813” (vol. 1, 832).
The “whipping-post, another dear old institution,”
came into use in the 16th century – though public whipping
was considerably older. Whipping was originally a punishment
for vagrancy, the vagrant stripped naked and whipped through
town behind a cart; it was only under Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558-1603)
that it became a stationary punishment, often combined with
the stocks in a single post. The Book of Days (1864)
illustrates a “Whipping-post and Stool” and describes
this method of punishment:
Sometimes a single post was made to serve
both purposes [i.e. the whipping-post and the stocks]; clasps
being provided near the top for the wrists, when used as a whipping-post,
and similar clasps below for the ankles when used as stocks,
in which case the culprit sat on a bench behind the post, so
that his legs fastened to the post were in a horizontal position.
Stocks and whipping-posts of this description still exist in
many places, and persons are still living who have been subjected
to both kinds of punishment for which they were designed. Latterly,
under the influence, we may suppose, of growing humanity, the
whipping part of the apparatus was dispensed with, and the stocks
left alone…. The stocks was a simple arrangement for exposing
a culprit on a bench, confined by having his ankles laid fast
in holes under a movable board. Each parish had one, usually
close to the churchyard, but sometimes in more solitary places….
The whipping of female vagrants was expressly forbidden by a
statute of 1791. (599-600, vol.1)
Finally, “blood-money” is, in
the sense used here by Dickens (“systematically leading
to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed
under Heaven”), a “reward for bringing about the
death of another; money paid to a witness who gives evidence
leading to the conviction of a person upon a capital charge”
(OED).
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