I Introduction

One of the most familiar, and certainly the most colorful, of all early eighteenth-century figures is that of the “game” criminal—the bold and dashing highwayman or street robber who dressed like a beau, drank like a lord, and went without tears or trembling to the gallows, cheerfully playing the leading role in that most famous of Augustan performances, public execution at Tyburn. The stereotype is perhaps most vividly expressed in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical poem “Clever Tom Clinch going to be hanged.” During his triumphal procession from Newgate to Tyburn, Tom bows jauntily to his female admirers and stops at a tavern for a bottle of sack, promising (with true gallows humor) “to pay for it when he'd come back.” At the place of execution, instead of forgiving the hangman, let alone tipping him (both were customary), “Tom gave him a Kick in the Guts for his Fee,” assuring spectators he would “see [them] all damn'd” before he would “whittle” (betray his comrades). And so it was that with his “Conscience…clear” and “Spirits…calm”—but notably “without Pray'r-Book or Psalm”—Clever Tom Clinch “hung like a Hero, and never would flinch.”Footnote 1

This, at any rate, was the caricature. But the game criminal was not simply a caricature: he represented an ideal to which many “real-life” criminals aspired, with varying degrees of success—and an ideal, I will argue, which differed considerably from the caricature. He was the darling of Augustan satirists and the bugbear of contemporary moralists who appropriated him, variously, as a vehicle to expose the corruption and hypocrisy of the age, on the one hand, and its worldliness and impiety, on the other. For nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators and antiquarians, the eighteenth-century game criminal came to epitomize the brutality and “grossness” of his age, and the noisome excesses of the Tyburn procession in particular; in fact, whether they evoked self-congratulatory scorn or prurient fascination—or both—the image of the game criminal and that of the public hanging as a kind of debased spectator sport were to become indissolubly linked.

The early modern hanging day continues to exert a certain fascination, if for rather different reasons. Modern scholars have focused on the public execution not as a mob scene but as a theater of punishment, in which the words and actions of spectators and participants are read as a dramaturgical exposition and reproduction of power relations. Generally speaking, scholars influenced by the work of Michel Foucault view the execution as a site in which social control is maintained and legitimated; others, however, read the public hanging as a “carnivalesque” occasion, or at least a contested or “unstable” one, in which the normative message intended by the authorities is reappropriated and inverted by an irreverent crowd.Footnote 2 As for Marxist historians, Tyburn is the locus of class conflict: in the words of Peter Linebaugh, the “conflict of the Powerful and Propertied against the Weak and the Poor.”Footnote 3

Typically, scholars have distinguished between those of the condemned who died penitent and those who died game, sometimes to the extent of neglecting one group in favor of the other. It is generally assumed that the former expressed a kind of “internalised obedience” that legitimated the values of the society whose norms they had transgressed; the latter, a resistance to normative religious doctrine and even nascent class consciousness.Footnote 4 To some extent this distinction may reflect the difference between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In a recent article, J. A. Sharpe has pointed to the “heterogeneous” nature of the eighteenth-century London crowd, raising the possibility that the “experience of religious theatre” he has seen as characteristic of the seventeenth century “may have fragmented in the eighteenth century.”Footnote 5 This certainly corresponds with the view that the eighteenth century witnessed a shift from a religious to a more “secular discourse,” even the rise of “individualist” values at the expense of older “universal ideologies and corporate identities.”Footnote 6

While I cannot hope to resolve such large questions here, I will, however, suggest that the relegation of the early and mid-eighteenth-century game criminal to a primarily secular category is not only premature but may well obscure and distort much of the message he imparted to contemporaries. Indeed, I see no necessary contradiction between J. A. Sharpe's contention that early modern men and women “clearly read the theatre of punishment in religious terms” and V. A. C. Gatrell's characterization of the brave or game death as a strategy “to cope with the pain and shame of scaffold death.”Footnote 7 For whether “dying game” is regarded as a species or as a hostile variant of “dying well,” it cannot be divorced from larger questions regarding the spiritual fitness of the condemned. In short, this article will argue that the gallows performances and last dying speeches of game criminals are most intelligible when read within the context of a religious, rather than a secular discourse. Indeed, I will suggest that it was the game criminal's conformity to most of the articles of the Anglican creed of “dying well” that made his ultimate statement of impenitence (i.e., his inappropriately high spirits) so subversive in the eyes of contemporaries.

For as we shall see, few of even the boldest highwaymen seemed willing to die, like Clever Tom Clinch, “without prayer-book or psalm,” let alone with a parting kick at the hangman. Rather, the game criminal who went to the gallows betraying neither dread of the prospect of pain in this world nor judgment in the next, typically advertised not only his willingness but his fitness to die: like the penitent, he forgave his enemies, assumed responsibility for his actions, and declared his willingness to die for them. But both in his cheerful demeanor and his refusal to succumb to tears—the traditional signs not just of penitence, but of an acknowledgment of guilt—the game criminal resembled not the penitent, but the martyr.

II Sources

If, as we are all too aware of these days, all historical documents are “representations,” mine are doubly problematic in that they are, in a sense, “representations of representations”: accounts reporting the words and gestures of men (for the game criminal was by definition male) who were themselves conscious of playing a part. Such documents were in their very nature both partisan and scripted, mediated and shaped both by the conventions of the genre and the expectations of their audience.Footnote 8 Certainly, contemporaries frequently complained of the many unscrupulous “sons of Grub street” and professional “Dying-speech-makers” who palmed forgeries and lies off on the public.Footnote 9 The favorite target for such accusations was the Ordinary, or prison chaplain of Newgate, who enjoyed as one of the more lucrative perquisites of his office the exclusive right to market the biographies, confessions, and last dying speeches of the condemned criminals consigned to his care. The Ordinary's Account of the Behavior, Confession, and Dying Words…of the Malefactors executed at Tyburn…,Footnote 10 as it came to be known, emerged as a regular serial publication in the mid-1670s. It flourished until the mid-eighteenth century, after which it seemed to experience a decline in popularity, petering out altogether in the early 1770s.Footnote 11

While it is of course difficult to say how much editorial control criminals were able to exert over their last dying confessions as, in theory at least, they were supposed to be printed posthumously,Footnote 12 public demand for the details of criminals' lives was such that bald-faced forgeries were unlikely to go unchallenged, and the gallows so public a forum that goings-on there were unlikely to be grossly misrepresented. The last dying speeches and behavior of the condemned were, however, anything but personal or original expressions. Not only did they typically conform to one of several familiar scripts, but most contemporaries, wary after the Civil War and Interregnum of anything smacking of enthusiasm or personal revelation, would have regarded any departure from the formula with suspicion. After all, given that the confession of sins was like any other “set solemn constant Prayers unto God,” it was “very impudent, and too presumptuous to trust to your own extempore expressions, and boldly say only what at present comes into your mind; for this is to be as one of them that tempt the Lord.”Footnote 13

Yet it does not follow that because gallows speeches were formulaic they were meaningless. In 1683, when Lord Russell was about to be executed for his involvement in the Rye House Plot, he solicited the advice of Gilbert Burnet in composing his last dying speech, as he had “not been accustomed to draw such papers.” Burnet obliged, writing up “a scheme of the heads fit to be spoken to, and of the order in which they should be laid”—in other words, an outline. After laboring over the speech for three days, Russell ordered copies to be made; he then signed the copies, delivered one to the sheriffs to publish, and gave the original and three of the copies to his wife for safekeeping.Footnote 14 This example not only illustrates the precautions people took against having their speeches suppressed or forgeries published in their place, but the fact that the condemned could, within the boundaries of convention, nonetheless exercise some choice in terms of expression—much in the same way we may choose one of a variety of standardized greeting cards to express a range of sentiments.

Arguably, the most important text delivered by the condemned was a visual one: his or her behavior on the gallows. Here, more than with a printed speech, much was subject to interpretation. Whether regicides, Jesuits, or Jacobites died martyrs or traitors depended on the chronicler. Similarly, the same criminal might be characterized as “decent” by the clergyman who had attended him and “hardened” by the prison chaplain whom he had rebuffed. Doubtless, some of the condemned were too debilitated by illness or fear to adhere to their chosen script; others struck a false note or were drowned out by the crowd. Yet for all this, executions were, as Peter Lake and Michael Questier have recently argued, inherently “unstable” events that often allowed for the opening up of “discursive space,” enabling the condemned to “extemporize,” or break from the normative script: in other words, sometimes a criminal or traitor was able to express sentiments that jarred with those of his or her audience, or at least those who staged the execution.Footnote 15

Indeed, the condemned could on occasion successfully appropriate the scaffold as his or her own forum, and by his or her behavior make a strong impression even on the most hostile of audiences. In 1679, when five Jesuits were hanged at Tyburn for their (alleged) part in the Popish Plot, they died so well and so bravely, so solemnly attesting to their innocence, that even the most rabid anti-Papists were thrown into confusion. Much ink was spilled attempting to explain their otherwise inexplicable courage and cheerfulness as a function of their “sham-religion”—that, among other things, the pope commonly issued dispensations so that Catholics could “dye with Lyes in their mouth” and still escape damnation.Footnote 16 (Indeed, as a result of such charges, it became almost de rigueur for Catholics executed for treason to sign their papers swearing that what they had written was “the plain and naked truth, without any Equivocation, Mental Reservation, or secret Evasion whatsoever; taking the Words in their usual Sense and meaning, as Protestants do, when they discourse with all Candour and sincerity.”)Footnote 17 Yet, all “animadversions” aside, even Burnet (no great friend to Catholics) would acknowledge that “the behavior and last words of those who suffered [for the Popish Plot] made impressions which no books could carry off.”Footnote 18

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance early modern men and women read into the last words of those teetering on the brink of “Death, Judgement and Eternity.”Footnote 19 Last dying speeches were “esteemed as of greatest authority” as it was widely believed that only an atheist, a lunatic, or an idiot would risk appearing “before the high tribunal of Almighty God” with a lie still fresh in his or her mouth.Footnote 20 The right both to speak and to hear the truth in the form of public confessions of innocence or guilt was popularly viewed as one of the inalienable privileges of the free-born Englishman—hence the indignation of the regicide Thomas Scot, who, when his last dying speech was continually interrupted by the sheriff, complained that it was “hard that an Englishman hath not Liberty to speak” and, that it was “a mean and very bad Cause that will not bear the Words of a dying Man.”Footnote 21 Indeed, any attempt to silence scaffold speeches inevitably conjured up images of the Marian martyrs (and, by extension, the illegitimacy of the regime under which they suffered). According to Protestant hagiography, officials guaranteed the silence of the martyrs by threatening to cut out their tongues if they attempted to make speeches. Although the latter acquiesced, anxious to preserve their tongues to praise God, speeches were of course unnecessary: their prayers and their carriage provided more than sufficient testimony of their innocence.Footnote 22

A kind of gallows censorship did persist into the late seventeenth century. Political prisoners were often warned, as was the regicide Colonel Barkstead in 1662, that they could “say any thing between God and [themselves], but nothing in justification of the Act.” Over twenty years later, Sir Thomas Armstrong was told by the sheriffs that “you have leave to say what you please, and shall not be interrupted unless you upbraid the Government.”Footnote 23 And while late seventeenth-century traitors, unlike Marian martyrs, did not have tipstaffs thrust into their mouths if they spoke out of turn, the words of those who, like Sir Harry Vane, ignored instructions to “say nothing reflecting upon His Majesty or the Government,” were liable to be drowned out by trumpets or drums.Footnote 24

Just because Vane's speech was rudely cut short by a trumpet blasting directly in his face, “the paper in his hand” snatched by the sheriffs, and his “pocquets” rifled for other copies does not mean that he failed in delivering his message.Footnote 25 For as far as executions were concerned, the medium was the message, if we take the medium to be the body of condemned—in this particular case, the “noble and great Presence” with which Vane graced the scaffold, apparently devoid of any “Signs of inward Fear.”Footnote 26 One observer even claimed that Vane's willingness to die was manifested by the fact that his cheerful “Countenance” did not change even after his head was severed from his body. By all accounts, certainly, Vane “died with so much composedness, that it was generally thought that the government had lost more than it had gained by his death.”Footnote 27

Individuals who went to the gallows (or the block) exuding both courage and cheerfulness thus made a statement that was profoundly political, regardless of whether or not they spoke, or tried to speak, against the government. In an early modern context, to speak to one's spiritual state was to make a statement about guilt or innocence, a statement that could, if accompanied with the right signs (I will discuss these at greater length below) convincingly testify to the justice of the cause in which an individual died. The extent to which this cultural shorthand of righteousness, as it were, could and did resonate in the words and gestures of common criminals is a question to which I will shortly return.

III Definitions

Although I have used the word “game” to refer to the criminal who died advertising both his courage and cheerful indifference to death and his refusal to implicate comrades, the term itself is anachronistic, as it did not come into common use until the early nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes its first entry for “dying game” to The Beggar's Opera (1728)—a plausible etymology, given the fact that the 1720s (the age of Captain Macheath, Tom Clinch, and many colorful real-life criminals, such as Jack Sheppard)Footnote 28 seems to have marked the apogee of the game highwayman. Yet I have found no trace of the term in any authorized edition of the play.Footnote 29 To the best of my knowledge, the first printed use of the word “game” dates from 1752, when the young street robber William Signal and “his profligate companions” told the disapproving Ordinary of Newgate that “by G-d, they were resolved to die game.” Although it is not unlikely that such expressions were deliberately omitted from the record, I have not found another instance of the term in the criminal annals until 1805, when another young robber, Richard Haywood, whose “constant boast” was that he would “surpass the notorious Abershaw” in his “contempt of death,” also broadcast his resolve to “die game.”Footnote 30 “Dying game” was, all authorities agree, originally a cant term and seems to have made its first appearance in Grose's 1785 canting dictionary. In the 1811 edition it is given as a synonym for dying “hard”—that is, “to shew no signs of fear or contrition at the gallows; not to whiddle or squeak.”Footnote 31

While it is important to bear in mind that “dying game” may have some connotations peculiar to a later period, I have nonetheless chosen to retain the term, in part because it is familiar and evocative and in part because it seems to have derived largely from earlier terms of roughly equivalent meaning—that is, to die “hard” or “brave” or “like a hero” or “like a man.” Almost fifty years before Clever Tom Clinch “hung like a hero,” one of the condemned highwaymen in the late seventeenth-century Newgate comedy The Reveng (reprised in 1715, with some modifications, as A Woman's Revenge) exhorted his comrades to lay all their money out “in Drink,” and “when the Hour comes, dye like Hero's [sic], sing the Psalm merrily, and then—be hang'd till we're sober.”Footnote 32 And the most famous fictional highwayman of all, Macheath, the rakish hero of The Beggar's Opera, consistently entertained audiences from the play's first performance in early 1728 with his resolve that, “since I must swing—I scorn, I scorn to wince or whine.”Footnote 33 Nor, it would seem, was there any dearth of real-life Macheaths who, like the highwayman Abraham Stacey, resolved “that since he must die, he would as he phras'd it, Die like a Man.”Footnote 34 Isaac Darkin, another highwayman who while in Newgate “frequently diverted himself with reading The Beggar's Opera,” “said it was always his Determination, whenever he should have the ill Fortune to be taken, ‘to suffer without discovering the least Dread of Death; never to betray his Connections, but to die like a Hero.’”Footnote 35 Indeed, Darkin completed the game formula by at the place of execution stepping off the ladder before it was “turned”—thus effectively communicating to his audience that, while he was not afraid to die, he would do so at the moment of his own choosing (but more on this formula later).

The term “game” itself derives from “game-cock”; thus, to “die game” meant simply to die with the spirit and the “pluck” of the game-cock, although the double entendre was as obvious in the eighteenth century as it is today. In the 1715 play, A Woman's Revenge, one condemned robber bids farewell to a comrade in the following terms: “Pray remember my kind Love to my Brother Sam, and be sure [to] tell him I dy'd like a Cock, damn'd hard.”Footnote 36 This memorable image resurfaces in a 1728 pamphlet sometimes attributed to Defoe, in which the author claims to have overheard “one rogue” saying “to another…G—d D—mn…Jack Such-a-one made a clever figure when he went to Tyburn [the] other Day, and died bravely, hard, like a cock.”Footnote 37 Clearly, dying game was a masculine cult.Footnote 38

But dying “game” or “hard” or “like a man” could have less profane associations. In the second volume of The Pilgrim's Progress, the Christian champion Great-Heart asks Honest what he would do if on his pilgrimage to the Celestial City he were beset by robbers. After the latter assures him that he “would have fought as long as breath had been in me…for a Christian can never be overcome, unless he should yield of himself,” Great-Heart praises him thus: “Well said, father Honest…for by this I know that you are a cock of the right kind.”Footnote 39 Dying “like a man”—that is, bold and unyielding even in the face of the so-called King of Terrors (death)—also had religious connotations, particularly in the seventeenth century. This was, after all, a period in which the image of the “godly man” was primarily that of “the martial hero,” “manfully” waging “continual warfare” against “the crafts and assaults of the Devil.”Footnote 40 For while I am not implying that condemned highwaymen and robbers who died bravely were saints—far from it—we should not overlook the extent to which early modern discourses of manly valor were bound up with religious imagery, with “fighting the good fight,” as it were. Moreover, self-denial and an indifference to pain or suffering were viewed by late seventeenth-century divines as peculiarly “masculine” virtues, best exemplified by the martyr who, “having attained to a more Masculine State in Christianity” (as opposed to more “effeminate” worldlings), “chearfully submits” to the worst of deaths, if such is God's will.Footnote 41

It is hardly surprising, then, that attacks on criminals who died bravely consistently emphasized the total want of religious feeling on the part of the condemned. Henry Fielding complained vociferously of the “Mock-Heroism” of the “miserable Wretches” at Tyburn who “seemed to vie with each other in displaying a Contempt of their shameful Death, and a total Indifference as to what might befall them after it.”Footnote 42 Mandeville expressed a similar disgust at the proceedings at Tyburn, where he claimed “the further a Man is removed from Repentance, nay, the more void he seems to be of all Religion, and the less Concern he discovers for Futurity, the more he is admired by our sprightly People.”Footnote 43 This stereotype of the cheerfully impious highwayman received much reinforcement from the picaresque and semi-fictionalized collections of highwayman “lives” so popular in the early eighteenth century. The highwayman Sawney Douglas, hanged in 1662, was supposed to have carried the ballad of Chevy Chase (rather than a prayer book) to Tyburn, where “he bid the hangman to be speedy, and not make a great deal of Work about…a meer Trifle”; in the same collection, we are told that one Tom Cox, executed in 1690, not only refused to join with the Ordinary in prayer, but (like Clever Tom Clinch) swore at him and kicked both him and the executioner out of the cart.Footnote 44

This charge of kicking the hangman (and the Ordinary) out of the cart was almost certainly untrue, as the Ordinary's own account of the execution mentions only that Cox and another criminal “were very Impertinent” and had to be “Check[ed]” for having “reflected on the Government.”Footnote 45 But it would be difficult to think of an accusation more damning, literally, for in the context of a culture that placed a tremendous importance on charity—forgiving others as one hoped to be forgiven—kicking the hangman instead of pardoning him (it was customary for the executioner to beg forgiveness of the condemned before carrying out his office) was nothing short of a renunciation of God.Footnote 46 But, outside of fiction, there were few game criminals willing to renounce God, or at least to appear as though they had done so. Fielding himself acknowledged as much with his complaint that any criminal who had “Sense enough to temper his Boldness with any Degree of Decency” was regarded by spectators with “Approbation.”Footnote 47 Indeed, as I will discuss in the next section, far from being disruptive and irreverent, even the most celebrated of game criminals, such as Jack Sheppard, seemed to make a point of dying both “decently” and “gravely.”Footnote 48

IV Dying Well

Despite alarmist contemporary discourse on the encroaches of deism and “free thought,” identifiable atheists seem to have been thin on the ground in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Even the dissipated earl of Rochester was supposed to have denied ever having met “an entire Atheist”; while, at the end of his long life, John Wesley claimed that “for upwards of fifty years” he had found only two in the whole of the British Isles (and even these subsequently recanted).Footnote 49 Nor do the criminal annals seem to have numbered very many self-confessed atheists or even “free-thinkers”; while there were many Catholics, dissenters, and Jews (not to mention Anglicans) who rejected the ministrations of the Ordinary—indeed, the latter sometimes suspected criminals of merely pretending to be Catholics in order to avoid chapelFootnote 50—even the most recalcitrant generally maintained that they believed in God, even if they required no assistance from the Ordinary to make their peace with Him. In fact it would seem that the majority of the condemned, particularly after the “Dead Warrant” had come down and their sentences of death were apparently final, took the business of spiritual preparation for death seriously enough. Not that the religiosity of the condemned was always expressed in ways considered appropriate by prison officials: in 1689, for instance, eight prisoners who had attempted to break out of Newgate through the “Common Shoar” (sewer), claimed to have been “singing of Psalms all the while they were at work, pleasing themselves with the Conceit of being upon their Duty towards God.”Footnote 51

Sometimes the most notorious characters made the greatest show of piety. The street robber John Dalton, who scarcely did himself justice when he described himself as “one of the most impudent, irreclaimable Thieves, that ever was in England,” nonetheless “behaved always civilly in Chappel” and “professed himself a penitent.” At the place of execution, Dalton joined heartily in prayers and hymns, requesting they sing the “Humble Suit of a Sinner.”Footnote 52 William Blewit, one of the most prominent members of a particularly infamous gang of street robbers, was reported as praying “with great earnestness” at his execution, where he “not only named the Penitential Psalm…but repeated the words of it to the other Criminals, as set the tune to it”—and all “with a loud Voice.”Footnote 53 Similarly, the “very bold, hardy and daring” robber William (“Cockey”) Wager, often “reproved” by the Ordinary for smiling and laughing during service, not only “profess'd himself a Penitent,” but at the place of execution “with an audible voice read to them all [the condemned].”Footnote 54 Indeed, many of these “undaunted and bold” criminals, like the street robber John Levee, seemed to be activated by a desire to cut as sharp a figure as penitents as they had distinguished themselves as “Bravo[s]” before. Levee received the sacrament “with a great deal of Devotion,” was “earnest” in his prayers, and declared that “he hop'd he had fought the good Fight, as formerly against innocent Men, so now against Satan, and evil Spirits.” Perhaps significantly, at the place of execution Levee “evinced a strange Anger and Passion that his Hands must be tyed like the others, and that his Cap must be pulled over his Face”; however, “Passion signifying nothing there, he was obliged to submit as the others did.”Footnote 55

Levee's “Passion” may well have reflected the fact that he had resolved to approach his penitence in an active and arguably masculine manner—that is, to fight “the good fight”—only to have thrust on him, at the most critical moment, a passive role. The conflict here was not so much that of piety versus impiety, but rather between two competing versions of what constituted appropriate penitential behavior. The Ordinary and other clergymen exhorted “Sinners and Criminals” to strive for “that happy mean between presumption and despair”; or, in other words, a humble and “lowly Hope in Gods free Mercy,” rather than the active and bold approach exhibited by “Bravos” like John Levee.Footnote 56 True penitence was distinguished by “self-condemnation”—a full confession accompanied with expressions of unworthiness—and a “broken and contrite heart” (Ps. 51:16).Footnote 57 Conversely, the “kind of Courage” or “Resolution” that consisted in “neither shedding Tears or appearing much dejected” was castigated by the Ordinary and other clergymen as both “untoward” and “unchristian.”Footnote 58

Even those criminals who otherwise behaved “decently” and “gravely” could be faulted for not having a nice enough sense of their condition. In February 1721 the Ordinary of Newgate noted that “no exceptions could be taken…against [the] Behavior” of all but two of the condemned, “unless they were perhaps entered too in the Notion, that they ought to bear their Misfortunes like Men, without Grief and Sorrow, and without any manner of Fear or Concern at their being so soon to dye.”Footnote 59 Typically, clergymen ascribed the refusal to succumb to tears to misplaced masculine pride, as is evidenced by the Ordinary's insistence that weeping “for sin” was “no dishonourable imputation of Effeminacy” (the warrior-king David was frequently invoked as a model); interestingly, dry-eyed men often responded as did the highwayman William Spiggot, who “thought himself…as sincerely [penitent] as he who show'd his Sorrow by his Tears, but that it was not easily in his Power to weep.” (Spiggot added that he could remember weeping on one occasion only: at his “final parting with his little Son.”)Footnote 60 Underlying such exchanges was the desire on the part of the clergy to dismiss such stoicism as a species of pride, rather than a calm resignation to death. Tears were not simply evidence of penitence, but also of a grief for sin, and hence, an acknowledgment of guilt and the incompleteness of one's repentance. It is perhaps not insignificant that Cranmer, the only one of Foxe's martyrs described as shedding tears of sorrow (rather than joy) at the stake, was also alone in having recanted his faith.Footnote 61

In essence, the template for dying well was the same for the criminal as it was for the “private sinner” on his or her deathbed: restitution (making “Satisfaction” to all one “had wronged,” which also included taking responsibility for one's own actions, so that the innocent would not be blamed for them); charity (asking for forgiveness, and forgiving “all the world”); repentance (a renunciation of one's sins, stemming not from fear of punishment but from a genuine hatred of sin as abhorrent to God); and confession.Footnote 62 A “free, full and ingenuous confession” was, in the case of the “public sinner,” or criminal, considered both a necessary precondition of genuine repentance and part of the restitution he or she owed society.Footnote 63 In contrast to the “private sinner,” whose sins could be confessed to God alone, the criminal was subjected to intense pressure to deliver a confession that was as “Publick and Exemplary” as his or her “Course of Life” had been “notoriously sinful.”Footnote 64 Such importunities met with considerable resistance from those who (understandably) suspected the Ordinary of simply wanting “materials only to fill up his account,” as well as from those who viewed any kind of “auricular confession” as dangerously close to popery.Footnote 65

As for the game criminal, he was typically “obstinate,” in that, while willing enough to own up to a general catalog of sins—from sabbath breaking on—he balked at delivering the detailed, or “particular,” confession that was considered necessary for salvation. For, as far as many churchmen were concerned, a general confession was worse than none at all, as its focus both on the “private” sins to which all men and women were prone and, by extension, on universal human depravity as the source of all crimes, tended to extenuate rather than to aggravate the guilt of the individual transgressor.Footnote 66 In other words, a general confession of guilt amounted to little more than an admission that one was human.

Nowhere was the tension between malefactor and would-be confessor more evident than in the administration of the sacrament. Despite the official Anglican view that a minister was “only the Judge of outward act,” and hence should not withhold communion from anyone professing repentance, the Ordinary typically required that the repentance of criminals be corroborated by the performance of “their Duty to confess to the World the Robberies they had committed, lest innocent Persons might be suspected; and also to satisfy those Families that they had injur'd.”Footnote 67 Needless to say, game criminals, whose refusal to “whittle,” or to betray accomplices, was proverbial (if often disingenuous; many who were loudest in proclaiming this resolve had in the past implicated comrades to save their own lives), frequently came into conflict with the Ordinary on this point. Indeed, the frequency and vehemence of such struggles testifies to the seriousness with which most of the condemned regarded their spiritual preparation for death. Interestingly, despite the fact that the Ordinary often threatened to deny the sacrament to any whose behavior or lack of instruction rendered them “unfit,” and even those who refused to answer “proper questions” about their accomplices and those whom they had robbed, in practice only the most hardened cases were refused.Footnote 68 For while the Ordinary was on occasion able to extort full confessions on threat of withholding the sacrament, he was at least as often forced to “be content with general expressions of repentance” on the part of those criminals more stubborn than himself.Footnote 69

Probably none were as stubborn as the highwayman Paul Lewis, hanged in 1763, a self-styled “McHeath” who boasted of his “heroic spirit and genius for the highway” and claimed to be (unlike the Ordinary) “a true Christian.”Footnote 70 Lewis “forced himself to the Lord's Table,” despite refusing “to discover his accomplices”: he claimed that he had written advising them “to quit their wicked courses” but that they had sworn on the Bible never to betray one another and “that the man who is false after such an oath and to such a league, merits damnation!”Footnote 71 Such expressions of an alternate morality (or “absurd [perversions] of the bible,” as the Ordinary would have it) were not unprecedented: “solemn promises” or oaths to comrades may not have always been honored, but they were often proudly invoked.Footnote 72 Some criminals seem to have been willing even to “solemnly [attest] to a Lying Story” to achieve a higher good. In 1714 the highwayman Edmund Eams, under pretence of “making amends,” made a “formal Declaration” before taking communion that he alone had committed the robberies attributed to a fellow prisoner; a statement he later tacitly acknowledged was false.Footnote 73

The game criminal's refusal to “whittle” can also be seen as a species of “charity.” The highwayman James Wright, for example, refused “to declare his Associates, or how they might be found, saying that perhaps they might Repent…and he would not bring them to the same ignominious Death with himself.”Footnote 74 In 1707, we are told that Charles Moor's and William Elby's “wicked Obstinacy” prevented them from divulging the names of any of their accomplices. According to Moor, “What good would it do me to hang three or four men, and ruine their Families as well as mine?” As for Elby, “he intended to die in Charity with the World; which he could not do, if he brought any into trouble.”Footnote 75 It would seem that many who were described by the Ordinary as being “hardened” or “obstinate” were in fact conventionally quite penitent, apart from their refusal “to make particular Confessions.”Footnote 76 In 1753, the housebreaker John Higgins, who admitted he had had accomplices, “but would tell no names,” was simultaneously described as behaving “with…apparent Undauntedness,” and “very quietly,” joining “very heartily” in prayers.”Footnote 77

It was characteristic of the game criminal to maintain his innocence of the crime for which he had been condemned but at the same time to accept sole responsibility for his fate (exonerating relatives, spouses, etc.). Indeed, like the robber John Mackrady, the game criminal often seemed to take a perverse pride in declaring himself “the most wicked, flagitious, disobedient, undutiful young Wretch upon Earth” who “suffer'd most justly, for the innumerable Villainies of his Life.”Footnote 78 James Dalton “absolutely deny'd…the Crime for which he suffer'd,” yet “own'd…that for twenty Years past he never rose out of his Bed, but he deserv'd the Gallows.”Footnote 79 This was a frequent refrain: in 1711, the housebreaker William Maw refused to deliver any confession other than that “he knew he had been a very great Sinner, and God was just, in bringing him to this Death.” Similarly, James Shaw “spake much as to the asserting his own innocency, as to the present crime,” but acknowledged that “former sins” had aroused God's anger, “or he would not have suffered him now to be condemned.”Footnote 80 The notion that a persistence in a course of venial sin caused God to remove his “preventing grace” (without which all men and women were capable of the worst enormities) was a popular one, particularly in the seventeenth century, and had the advantage of implying that the condemned was in fact no worse than many others whose sins went undetected and unpunished.

Moreover, the admission of being guilty of all crimes (murder always excepted) save that for which they were to suffer somehow conveyed the impression that the condemned actually chose to die. John Gulliford, a self-confessed “Old Offender,” claimed that he went “as easy to Execution, as if I was going to suck at my Mother's breast; and I think it is doing a great deal of Good to hang me out of the Way.”Footnote 81 As for Thomas Reeves, hanged in 1722, he declared “he was so far from fearing Death, that he rather chose to die than live” and “constantly affirmed, that he was in no doubt of his going to Heaven…for he believed he might as well find the Way to Happiness from the Gallows, as from the Bed.”Footnote 82 This is not to imply that such sentiments were always sincere; certainly, the highwayman Jeffrey Everett, who spent most of his time in Newgate in attempts to solicit a pardon, convinced few people with the “extraordinary” claim (delivered after he had been detected trying to escape) that “were Death, where he pointed with his Right-hand, and were my Pardon, where he pointed with his Left, and I was told to go to my Pardon upon Condition of being a Villain, I would fly into the Arms of Death.”Footnote 83

Like the otherwise “tightlipped” robber James Walker, the game criminal who claimed that “he forfeited his Life willingly” reflected the popular belief that one could “answer with the loss of his Life for all his Faults.”Footnote 84 Indeed, when the Ordinary attempted to convince the legendary highwayman “the Golden Farmer” that “his Repentance could not be syncere” until he made a full “Restitution” of all the money he had stolen, the latter replied that “he thought this to be a strange Doctrine, when as, he said, he dyed for Robbing.”Footnote 85 Nor was the idea of dying to expiate one's sins unique to criminals; death was commonly characterized as the “debt…that every man owes to Nature”—that is, the sentence laid on all men and women as a result of original sin.Footnote 86

This notion that dying for one's sins wiped the slate clean long predated Macheath's famous line “Death is a debt…so take what I owe.”Footnote 87 But certainly after The Beggar's Opera, if not before, it is not difficult to read into such sentiments the suggestion that in the context of a world in which most men and women were sinners, the condemned was no worse than most, and better than many, in that he was willing to own up to his sins, and pay for them with his life. This may have been what John MacNaghton meant to convey when, at his execution in 1762, he “told some of his prosecutors…that he forgave them, but he did not ask forgiveness of any.”Footnote 88 (Game criminals were typically as ostentatious, if not always as sincere, in forgiving judges, juries, and prosecutors as they were in assuming full responsibility for their actions.) Some were less subtle: the would-be Macheath and “true christian” Paul Lewis shocked the Ordinary, not only by his insistence that he “only robbed the rich to give to the poor,” but also by merrily singing “if gold from the law can take out the sting, &c”—perhaps the most satirically charged of all the airs of The Beggar's Opera. Footnote 89

The game criminal also sang “the Psalm merrily”—typically the fifty-first, a penitential psalm (doubly familiar as its opening lines constituted the “Neck Verse,” the reading test to qualify for benefit of clergy).Footnote 90 As William Blanchar, hanged in 1689, exhorted his more timorous fellows: “Ne'er fear, God will have Mercy upon us; but however, let us have some Prayers, and a merry Psalm; I don't fear Death at all. Gentlemen, I have been a great Highway man, but hope God will have Mercy upon me.”Footnote 91 And perhaps the most subversive of all the messages communicated by the game criminal was that his cheerfulness and courage stemmed not from bravado or impiety but from his “great Assurance of Gods mercy to him”—an assurance that was, in the words of Captain Vratz, an “undaunted” criminal hanged in 1682, “not hope but certainty.” When a visiting divine (none other than Gilbert Burnet) “warned him of the danger of affecting to be a Counterfeit bravo,” Vratz replied, “That I should see it was not a false bravery, but that he was fearless to the last. [Burnet] wished him to consider well upon what he grounded his confidence: he said, he was sure he was now to be received into Heaven; and that his sins were forgiven him.”Footnote 92 The Ordinary frequently warned of the dangers of such ill-advised presumption in his sermons to the condemned: “a Wicked Man,” he thundered, “may sometimes desire to be like the Godly in a happy Death, yet such his Desire will always prove fruitless to him” who does not “live an Upright, Righteous, and Holy Life here in Earth.”Footnote 93

Such discourse reflected the long-standing tension within English Protestantism between an emphasis on faith and grace, on the one hand, and “holiness of heart and life” (Protestants of all stamps scrupulously avoided the phrase “good works” because of its popish associations), on the other.Footnote 94 By the end of the seventeenth century, Anglicans were increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of “free grace”—the idea that anyone, regardless of his or her merits, could be saved, if such was the will of God, and its concomitant emphasis on divine omnipotence and excellence and human inadequacy and depravity.Footnote 95 Criminal literature reflected this shift, with late seventeenth-century accounts portraying spectacularly repentant criminals as “monuments of grace” testifying to the awesome power of God to save even the worst of sinners, gradually superseded by the biographies and confessions retracing the criminal's one-way (and presumably irreversible) steps down the slippery slope of sin.Footnote 96

This is not to suggest that game criminals were doctrinal Calvinists (to the extent that they practiced any religion, most were either Anglicans or Irish Catholics); nonetheless, their cheerful confidence that they could, like “the Thief on the Cross [be] accepted at the Moment of…Death” raised troubling, even antinomian implications.Footnote 97 Moreover, the notion that salvation could be had for the asking by even the loosest of livers received dramatic reinforcement after about 1740, when the radical, and peculiarly optimistic, Wesleyan doctrine of universal free grace divorced from reprobation—that is, “free for all” that truly repented and not the exclusive property of the elect—began to be widely disseminated.Footnote 98 John Purdy, who claimed to have “never robb'd any poor Person” but only those who “had too much” (“and Master,” he said, “there's no great Sin in that,”) was no Methodist, but his claim “he could repent himself as clean from all his Sins in half an Hour as well as in 7 Years,” was surely troubling enough.Footnote 99 So, too, was the notion expressed by the street robber Robert Wilkinson, denied the sacrament after refusing to deliver a full confession; namely, that “he was under no great Concern on that Account; for he said, if he might not go to Heaven as the rest did, he hop'd to find the Way by himself.” As he “had heard that Fasting was a good Expedient for that Purpose” he “neither eat nor drank for three Days and three Nights before his Execution.”Footnote 100

V Hanging like a Hero

While death by hanging was often characterized as an “ignominious” death, these shameful associations coexisted with other, possibly older, traditions in which execution was viewed (in the words of the art historian Mitchell Merback) as “a species of the ‘good death’…the single occasion when a Christian could know the exact moment of his or her death, and thus prepare for grace up until the final blow.” Within a spiritual context, it was not execution, but “its opposite, sudden, unprepared death (mors improvisa), [which] inspired horror.”Footnote 101 The ultimate exemplar of the “good death” was, of course, Christ; and, while no human being could hope to emulate Christ in his sinlessness, the penitent thief crucified with him provided a popular (if often problematic) model of effectual late repentance.Footnote 102

Suffering, in an early modern context, was commonly viewed as both redemptive and purgative; in other words, God afflicted “his children in love in order to turn them towards salvation and keep them walking toward that ultimate goal.” Moreover, God not only sent “crosses” to the “godly” to “reclaim them” but to mark them out for special favor.Footnote 103 While post-Restoration orthodox churchmen (i.e., Anglicans) were distinctly uneasy about the idea of suffering as a sign of election, such notions persisted among dissenters such as John Bunyan and Richard Baxter, the former even going so far as to “rejoyce” at being the target of “slanders, foolish or knavish lies,” as Christ had ordained that victims of worldly persecution would be rewarded in heaven. It was widely believed, too, that premortem suffering could purge the sinner of his or her crimes: in the words of the penitential hymn “The Humble Suit of a Sinner” (the same requested at Tyburn by James Dalton), “Let me have, with Job, this Consolation, That afflicting me, thou would'st not spare me here, to punish me hereafter,” and “Only, O God of Justice, let my punishment be here in this Life, that I may find thee to be a God of Mercy in the Life to come.”Footnote 104 Many criminals echoed such sentiments. In 1721 William Bond declared that he was “satisfy'd” to die, “yet he hoped he should find, for his suffering here, the less Punishment hereafter”; two years later, Charles Weaver expressed the hope “that his Misfortunes, like those of the prodigal Son, had reclaim'd him; and that he should attain to the Portion of the Righteous, by dying the Death of the Wicked.” Similarly, the highwayman James Brown declared his conviction that he would be saved (“which we and the world were very doubtful and much afraid of”) on the grounds that “the more he suffered and the worse he was treated here, the better he hoped to fare hereafter.”Footnote 105

Indeed, there is considerable evidence to suggest that popular notions about the function of suffering as both purgative and diagnostic were informed by older beliefs and practices relating to purgatory and the ordeal.Footnote 106 Certainly, there was a persistent belief that those who died well—embracing their punishment willingly and without signs of resentment or fear—were assured of salvation. There had always been some dissenting voices, to be sure: in a 1631 sermon, John Donne questioned the notion that those who died without “reluctation” were saved, rather than being in the grip of “a dangerous damp and stupefaction”; for “The Tree lies as it falls; 'Tis true; but yet it is not the last stroke that fells the Tree; nor the last word, nor last gaspe that qualifies the Soul.…Our Criticall day is not the very day of our death, but the whole course of our life.”Footnote 107 Yet the argument itself is testament to the prevalence and tenacity of such beliefs.

Certainly, it was at the gallows that the game criminal made his most dramatic—and subversive—statement; namely, that he was neither unwilling nor afraid to die.Footnote 108 Authors and subjects of criminal accounts alike appear to have been keenly aware of the dramaturgical significance of last dying speeches and behavior. Indeed, many execution sheets and pamphlets report, and even focus on, what appear to be self-conscious and highly stylized words and gestures on the part of the condemned. At the execution of the housebreaker James Turner in 1664, for instance, the latter first “directed the Executioner to take off his Halter from his shoulders, and afterwards taking it in his hand, [kissed] it, and put it on his neck himself.”Footnote 109 When the hangman “tyed him up,” Turner rallied him (“What, dost thou mean to choak me?”) and facetiously instructed him on how to “put the knot.” He was “undaunted…to the last breath of life,” speaking calmly, raising his hands in prayer, and kissing his hand to a female acquaintance seconds before being turned off.Footnote 110 Adjusting, or removing and replacing, both the halter and the blindfold were common game gestures: in 1722 the Irish highwayman James Carrick “laughed and smiled upon those he knew” at the place of execution and “gave himself genteel airs in fixing the Rope aright about his Neck.”Footnote 111 Another “undaunted” criminal hanged the same year, “the notorious Foot-Pad” Thomas Wilson, refused to allow the “the Rope” to be “fastned” around his neck until he “shew'd himself several times by standing up to the Spectators,” telling them not to be imposed on by “any spurious Accounts which might be published of him,” and endorsing his authentic “Paper.” He then informed spectators that “as he was a dying Man, he knew nothing of Phelps”—a man who had been committed to Newgate for a robbery “mention'd by him in his Paper”—and that this Phelps “was not in any manner whatsoever concerned in that Robbery for which he had been apprehended.” Only then did Wilson “put the Rope about his [own] Neck, and submitted to his Death with great Resolution.”Footnote 112

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the game death was the attempt on the part of the condemned to impose on the event his own active presence—most famously, by jumping off the ladder before it was “turned,” or leaping from the cart before the signal was given for the horses to drive away.Footnote 113 This at least was the signature of self-styled “Heroes” such as Dick Turpin, Isaac Darkin, and Paul Lewis (the latter throwing himself “off the cart so violently” that he broke his neck).Footnote 114 Nor were extempore feats of courage less impressive. At the execution of the street robber Thomas Reeves in 1722, the crush of spectators knocked down one of the horses before the cart could be drawn away, leaving him in “a half-hanging Posture; but that not pleasing him, and being impatient to wait 'till the Horse got up again, he threw himself over the Side of the Cart, and swung in good Order.”Footnote 115

While such game criminals may have been exercising their preference for a quick death over a slow one by strangulation (the drop chute was not introduced in London until 1783), they also communicated two strong messages. One was that they were willing to die; the other, that they were not physically afraid. The two were not exactly the same thing: The first expressed one's confidence in receiving pardon at the “Judgment-Seat of Christ.” The second suggested that one died in a good cause—in other words, that one's courage and composure proceeded from the same source as the “constancy” of martyrs; that is, not from any “natural Power of their own, but unto the power of God's holy Spirit.”Footnote 116 According to Richard Baxter, “the Spirit of Christ” was the “Comforter of the Saints…If a draught of Wine, or some spiritful reviving liqour [sic] can take off fears, and make men bold; what then may the Spirit of Christ do by his powerful encouragements and comforts on the soul?”Footnote 117

Early modern men and women were clearly willing to read into the carriage of the individual sufferer the righteousness or iniquity of the cause writ large. While languishing in a Bedford prison in 1660, John Bunyan was tormented, not by the fear that he would be “called” to suffer for his faith, but that he should, while making “a scrabling shift to clamber up the Ladder…either with quaking or other symptoms of faintings, give occasion to the enemy to reproach the way of God and his People.”Footnote 118 (Not unlike a game criminal, Bunyan finally resolves to “leap off the Ladder even Blindfold into Eternitie,” relying on Christ to “catch” him.)Footnote 119 According to royal martyrologists, Charles I was supposed to have requested an extra shirt on the day of his execution to avoid any “Imputation” that he shook from “Fear” rather than the “sharp[ness]” of the “Season.”Footnote 120 And at his execution, the regicide Thomas Harrison was said to have defended himself against the “scoffing” of spectators by assuring them that his legs shook not because he was afraid—God had “carryed [him] above the fear of death”—but “by reason of much blood” he had “lost in the Wars.”Footnote 121 Conversely, at his execution the duke of Monmouth attempted to convince the sheriff's assistant that he was able to die “like a Lamb” not because of any “Natural Courage” of his own, for he was “as fearful as other men,” but because of “something within [him]” that convinced him he was going “to God.”Footnote 122 And even one of the Marquis of Argyle's worst enemies admitted that he was sure the former had gone to heaven, as Argyle, whom “he knew…was naturally a very great coward…had died with great resolution”—clear evidence that he had been the recipient of “supernatural assistance.”Footnote 123

That the scaffold performances of common criminals borrowed the shorthand of Protestant hagiographic tradition does not seem altogether farfetched in light of the enduring appeal of the works of Foxe and other martyrologists, on the one hand, and the popular equation “of persecution with tyranny and error, and martyrdom with truth and virtue,” on the other.Footnote 124 In his recent study on early modern discourses of martyrdom, John Knott has described the way many political prisoners, such as Prynne and Lilburne, conformed to an “unwritten script” of martyrdom borrowed both from scripture and Protestant hagiography, flaunting their cheerfulness “as a sign of divine support and proof of eagerness for the next life.”Footnote 125 Added evidence of the popular connection between the “game” and the “good death” may be inferred from the vehemence with which those such as the Ordinary of Newgate maintained that “it was a False-Courage, for Malefactors sentenced to dye, to appear wholly Careless and Unconcern'd…which rather shows Obdurateness and Insensibility, than a Manly and becoming Resolution.” Such behavior was rooted in pride—valuing the “good Opinion of Men, more than the Praise of God and Angels”—rather than true “Christian Courage,” which flowed from God, and was not afraid to confess to sin.Footnote 126

“False Courage,” as the Ordinary and other clergymen argued, was a compound of “Dissembl[ance]” and “the Effort and vigor of natural courage”: not only was the courage of such “False Martyrs” likely to abandon them at the gallows, but their “anticke” attempts to assume a “jocund Countenance” were clearly forced. “Real Martyrs, having the secret Consolations of God's Spirit, are not Transported with Aiery joys, neither are they Theatrical in their Carriage,” claimed the Ordinary of Newgate in 1679 (in reference to the five Jesuits who died far too well for the comfort of most Protestants); rather, God-given courage was “constant” and “uniform”—it “becalm[ed],” not aroused, “the Passions.”Footnote 127

Indeed, many people in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century appeared to apply a sort of primitive polygraph test to determine whether someone was guilty or innocent, saved or damned. For, just as during Algernon Sidney's trial for treason, the latter responded to Judge Jeffreys' suggestion that he was not “fit” to die by challenging him to check his “Pulse” to see whether he was “disordered,” many game criminals seemed anxious to demonstrate that they were free from any physiological symptoms of fear, passion, or agitation.Footnote 128 While the game criminal adjusted his halter or blindfold, joked with the hangman, sang psalms, or bowed or even “kissed his hand” to the ladies, he provided opportunities for spectators to judge whether his hands, his legs, or his voice shook. It was no accident that one of the central dramatic details of the account of Dick Turpin's 1739 execution was that, despite the latter's “amazing Assurance…as he mounted the Ladder, his Right Leg trembled, on which he stamp'd it down with an Air, and with undaunted Courage look'd round about him.”Footnote 129

Clearly, many criminals believed that they could demonstrate their innocence by dying boldly and in a way that implied their consent—that is, by leaping from the ladder or cart. At his execution in 1709, Christopher Slaughterford, who solemnly attested to his innocence of the murder of his sweetheart, requested only that “he might throw himself off.”Footnote 130 Sometimes unforeseen accidents provided additional evidence. At the execution of John MacNaghton in 1762, the latter took the halter from the executioner “and put it round his neck himself: he then went up to the very top of the ladder, and threw himself off with great force.” When the rope broke and Macnaghton fell to the ground, he “did not appear to be in the least disconcerted,” but “re-ascended the ladder with great calmness and composure.”Footnote 131 The author of the pamphlet clearly suggests that “false courage” alone could not have withstood such an ordeal.

It may also be that those of the condemned who prayed audibly were scrutinized for any sign of faltering over the sacred words. Thomas Carr, an attorney hanged for robbery in 1737, convinced many contemporaries of his innocence by taking a solemn oath to that effect during communion; at the place of execution, he “set the Psalm,” reading “every Line, with great Composedness.”Footnote 132 And guilt and innocence could be relative terms, as far as salvation was concerned. We are told that in 1733 the highwayman Richard Cass, who freely “confessed that he had been guilty of all vices but doubted not but that there might be mercy for him,” slipped his own head in the noose after claiming “he had no occasion for a hangman”; recited the “lord's prayer, without any trembling or change of countenance,” and then “he gently turned himself off the ladder, as if he were turning himself in bed.”Footnote 133 Despite Cass's admission of guilt and his appearance of “unconcern,” the conclusion of the account leaves little doubt as to Cass's final destination.

VI False Courage and Christian Courage: Shifting Definitions

Needless to say, those “Counterfeit bravos” and “Pseudo-Martyrs” who (in the view of chroniclers) died more cheerfully than their case should have warranted were frequently accused of having had recourse to “Artificial Courage”—that is, “Cordial-Spirits.”Footnote 134 Alcohol blunted the fear of death because it impaired the rational faculties; in the words of Macheath, “valour the stronger grows / The stronger liquor we're drinking. / And how can we feel our woes, / When we've lost the trouble of thinking?”Footnote 135 Mandeville complained of malefactors drinking copiously to “stifle their Fear” before setting off for Tyburn, only to stop “a half a dozen times, or more” along the way to refortify their “Courage.”Footnote 136 By all accounts, there were many criminals who, like Jack Sheppard's accomplice Joseph (“Blueskin”) Blake, were at the gallows so “disguised in Liquor” as to “Reel and Faulter in [their] Speech.”Footnote 137 In 1728 the “Foot-Pad” Thomas Neeves was so drunk “at the Place of execution” that he “stagger”d and was scarce able to stand.” When “reprimanded” by the Ordinary for having drunk too much, Neeves replied (unconvincingly), “no indeed Sir, I only took a Dram.”Footnote 138

While the degree to which condemned criminals drank was doubtless exaggerated by those keen to dismiss their courage as “Artificial,” there it is little doubt that many did drink on their way to Tyburn, especially before stricter regulations were imposed in the 1730s.Footnote 139 It is also clear, however, that many of the condemned made a point of refusing alcohol, at least publicly. The author of an account sympathetic to the attorney Thomas Carr makes much of the fact that the latter, while on his way to Newgate, not only “constantly persever'd in his Innocence,” but remained unmoved when heckled by a spectator, and “refus'd” a proffered glass of wine “with the calmest Submission.” In short, he “behaved like a Man, and like a Christian.”Footnote 140 Similarly, Christopher Layer, executed for treason in 1723, cheerfully declined the “Liquors” offered to him “to revive and sustain his Spirits.” (Nor did he betray the slightest “uneasiness” as he was dragged to Tyburn on a low sledge, despite the fact that “the Dust and extreme Heat were ready to stifle and suffocate others in Coaches and on horseback.”)Footnote 141 Conversely, of course, hostile authors were quick to attribute the high “Spirits” of traitors to “strong Cordial[s].”Footnote 142

As I have suggested, critics also explained away the apparent dauntlessness of dying malefactors either as a function of their being so “hardened” in a continual course of sin that they despaired of salvation or as a manifestation of atheism, or “Roman Courage,” which “outfaces Death with a stupid ignorance of a future Judgement.”Footnote 143 Bishop Morely, who attended Lord Capel before his 1649 execution, suspected that he was not allowed to pray with him at the scaffold “that they would have the people believe, that the lord Capel died indeed resolutely like an old roman”—that is, that he chose to have no minister with him (“which was most false”)—and that his “constancy and courage…was but an effect of his natural temper and constitution, and not of a christian faith and hope.”Footnote 144

Game criminals, supported by alcohol, worshipped at the feet of that “Idol” of “Honour and bravery”—worldly pride.Footnote 145 Needless to say, the “daring temper” mistaken by “the Vulgar” for courage arose “only from a wicked ambition of being thought brave,” rather than true “heroic Constancy of Mind,” the product of “Integrity and Innocence.”Footnote 146 The Ordinary of Newgate regularly bemoaned the game criminal's “Desire of appearing brave, and making the Figure of a Hero in low Life,” and his refusal to “shew any Fear or Terror at the Approach of Death.”Footnote 147 The Ordinary was however quick to point out those criminals who, like the street robber James Hacket hanged in 1707, thought it “a gallant and honourable thing” to “shew a bold and undejected Countenance” in “publick,” but showed “another Disposition”—one “more humble and more contrite”—in “private.”Footnote 148

The game criminal had always been, and would continue to be characterized as drunk, impious, and vainglorious. However, after the first third of the eighteenth century, critics focused less on the game criminal's failings as a Christian than on his social pretensions. Increasingly, the highwayman who, like Isaac Darkin, “studied more to appear like a Gentleman than a Christian” shifted from being a vehicle for social satire to being himself the butt of satire; or at best, an object of pity or scorn.Footnote 149 In 1750 the “Gentleman Highwayman,” James Maclaine, “engrossed the conversation of the town,” inspiring, according to Horace Walpole, “as many prints and pamphlets “as the [Lisbon] earthquake.”Footnote 150 Maclaine cut a poor figure as a robber, but was “very genteel…and very gay in his dress,” and a particular favorite of the ladies, who crowded to view his examination and trial, and showered him with sympathetic tears (Maclaine himself wept while delivering his confession).Footnote 151 This outpouring of sympathy elicited the standard complaint that all that was required to earn the “Voice, the Praise, and good Wishes of the Publick” was “to become a notorious Villain, and to go to the Gallows with a good Grace.”Footnote 152 But others attacked Maclaine in a more tender part; namely, his claims to gentility. According to the Ordinary of Newgate, Maclaine “very much affected the fine Gentleman, yet to a Man acquainted with good Breeding, that can distinguish it from Impudence and Affectation, there was very little in his Address or Behavior, that could entitle him to that Character.”Footnote 153 Maclaine, like most subsequent “gentlemen highwaymen,” was invoked as “a Lesson to young People of moderate or low Circumstances…not to affect a Taste and Appearance above themselves.”Footnote 154

The Ordinary of Newgate perhaps took the desire to prick the pretensions of criminals to ridiculous lengths when, in 1752, he described the self-styled game robber William Signal as having “the Vanity to set up for the Macheath of the Day, tho' he was no way equal to the Character, and nothing but Ignorance and Audaciousness, those two despicable, ill Qualities, could give him any Pretence to it.”Footnote 155 How Macheath's “Character” was superior to Signal's he neglects to say. Certainly, however, the connection between “Gentlemen of the Road” (highwaymen) and the “real” gentlemen they emulated became less a satirical trope and more a source of social anxiety in the second half of the eighteenth century. Several would-be penal reformers suggested imposing hard labor on highwaymen, rather than death, as the former would more effectually mortify the pride of “this infatuated race of men,” whose sole aspiration was “to enjoy the ease and dissipation of Gentlemen” before making “an heroic exit.”Footnote 156 The courage of the game criminal, in particular, was increasingly attributed to a desire to imitate his betters. In one 1737 fictive newspaper description of an execution, we are told that those malefactors who “affected…Intrepidity” did so “Because they would have the Glory of dying like Gentlemen.” Thus, they left “the World either like Brutes or Ideots [sic], having nothing in their Thoughts but how to obtain a few idle Praises!”Footnote 157

While criminals who died boldly had always been characterized as “hardened” or “ignorant” by the Ordinary and other commentators—and this would continue throughout the eighteenth century and beyond—this suggestion that all game criminals were by definition “Brutes or Ideots” reflects a subtly changing discourse about the nature of scaffold courage. While any man or woman who persisted in a course of sin could become hardened, and anyone could be ignorant for want of religious instruction, brutes and idiots were by definition incapable of true religious feeling. In the context of mid-eighteenth-century “rational religion”—in which both Creator and creature were rational beings—reason was the measure of all things. Far from having the secular connotations it has today, reason clearly demonstrated to the rational being the existence of God and the inevitability of death and judgment. Thus, Thomas Carr's “want of Concern” at his fate is defended by a sympathetic chronicler as “a rational contempt of death”—that is, a reasonable conviction of his salvation.Footnote 158

Conversely, the game criminal's courage was increasingly attributed to his inability to reason, to foresee the eternal consequences of his behavior. As one contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine explained, “a love of fame may raise a brutal hardiness above all sense of ignominy, or future distress,” especially as “these wretches” had “little or no apprehension” of an afterlife: “The soul,—they know nothing of it…as they have scarce any idea of a future existence, so they as little comprehend the miseries that await a life of impiety, and abandoned debauchery.”Footnote 159 One writer even defended The Beggar's Opera against charges of being dangerous to public morals on the grounds that “That heroism therefore of Macheath is not contagious, and the advice of his companions to die brave does not proceed from a contempt of the laws they have violated, but meant merely as a consolation, which in their poor capacities they think will give him spirits to bear the terrors and melancholy apprehensions of death with fortitude. It is their method of philosophizing—they have no abstract ideas.”Footnote 160

Rational religion not only elevated man from the abject position he occupied in Calvinist thought to that of a reasonable being, created in the image of a reasonable God, but held that this “wise Creator…has implanted a Principle within us” that distinguishes right from wrong—that is, “Conscience, that Natural Magistrate in every Man's Heart.”Footnote 161 This internalization of “Vertue” and vice tended to undermine the notion that divine truths were manifested by the external signs (cheerfulness, composure, courage) traditionally associated with the “good death.” By midcentury, most writers agreed that reason was the criterion by which a cause should be measured, not the behavior of the person who suffered in it. The author of the “Life” of the Jacobite Charles Ratcliffe, executed in 1746, argued that there was no “Honour” in “a Man's dying for his Principles, which he cannot defend by the least Arguments drawn from Reason, or the Principles of sound Policy”; rather, this was “Enthusiasm…the Effect only of a warm Heart and weak Head.”Footnote 162

This divorce of the dying behavior of the condemned from the justice or iniquity of the cause for which he or she suffered unraveled the very seams of the confessional genre. The debate over the execution of the Jacobite Lords Balmerino and Kilmarnock in 1746 marks a watershed in this regard: both were described as dying “well” despite the fact that Balmerino went to the block with “uncommon firmness and intrepidity.”Footnote 163 Indeed, Balmerino was not only extolled “as a hero and a martyr” by Jacobites, but “many of the friends to the revolution and the present government,” while lamenting Balmerino's “erroneous political principles,” nonetheless “admir'd his fearlessness, and say he shew'd much greatness of soul, and died like a brave soldier.”Footnote 164 Balmerino's critics responded by arguing that “we can in no case, from the mere boldness and intrepidity of the sufferer, infer the goodness of his principle”; indeed, “the presumptions of enthusiasm are always more forward and assuming than the confidence inspired by rational religion.”Footnote 165 While I do not want to overstate the suddenness and completeness of such a shift—the belief that “no Man without Virtue can be Courageous” was, after all, persistentFootnote 166—the suggestion by both Balmerino's admirers and detractors that it was possible to die well in a bad cause marked a dramatic turning point in the history of execution. Adam Smith's confident pronouncement in 1759 that “the most heroic valour may be employed indifferently in the cause either of justice or of injustice” would have been unthinkable fifty years earlier.Footnote 167

The apparent courage of the game criminal may have been only bravado, deployed as it was “without one grain of reason, the foundation of a good conscience”; nonetheless, judging from mere externals, “Great Men and the Vulgar, or the Good and the Bad…often meet Death with the same Face.” There was, however, the “inward and invisible Distinction, that Faith, Conscience, or a true Sense of Honour, preserves the Decorum in one, which, in the other, proceeds from an harden'd Boldness, from Ignorance and Stupidity impenetrable…So that this contumacious Contempt of Death, which some haughty Malefactors affect to assume at their Executions…is properly nothing else, but the Fear or Inability of calmly considering and looking it in the Face; and all their pretended Bravery or Defiance may be said to do the same Office only to their Minds, that the Headband, or Night-Cap does to their Eyes.”Footnote 168

Real courage could, however, be distinguished from false by virtue of the fact that only a rational being was capable of true (“rational”) Christian courage. Rational courage consisted both in following the dictates of the conscience and mastering one's passions.Footnote 169 Indeed, selfrestraint was increasingly promoted to an “active” rather than a “Passive Courage.”Footnote 170 According to an essay “on HONOUR” reprinted in the London Magazine featuring a gentleman who refused, Charles Grandison–style, to participate in a duel, “there was more true Courage and Generosity” in restraining one's anger than in giving vent to it, as the former “was much more difficult: That Bulls and Bears had Courage enough, but it was a brutish Courage, whereas ours should be such as should become reasonable Creatures and Christians.”Footnote 171 The true gentleman, wrote Clement Ellis, “conquer[ed] himself” rather than others, looking “upon it as the basest degree of Cowardice, to yeild [sic] unto those feeble passions, which[,] did not both Reason and Religion step into their succour, would certainly become the prey of every light and empty toy.”Footnote 172 According to one 1762 execution pamphlet, “in mere natural courage there is no merit, for it is little more than insensibility of danger”; real “Courage,” however, “as the virtue of a rational being, is that strength of mind by which a sense of danger is surmounted; and fear, as a principle of action, over-ruled.”Footnote 173

Recent scholarly work on the subject of masculinity has demonstrated that ideals of manliness underwent a distinct shift toward the end of the early modern period—even if there were some defining masculine attributes, for instance, “sexual mastery and household authority,” that were more “resilient” to historical change.Footnote 174 While the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masculine ideals of “independence, moderation, courage and self-command” remained central, from the late seventeenth century increasing emphasis was placed on civility, as the ideal of “the polite man of the eighteenth century replaced the martial hero of earlier periods.”Footnote 175 And with the emergence of the “cult of sensibility” in the mid-eighteenth century, sensibility, as Philip Carter has demonstrated, came to be viewed as both a touchstone of true civility and gentlemanliness and a corrective to artificial politeness and overrefinement.Footnote 176 Nor was there any inherent contradiction between sensibility and manliness, as Adam Smith maintained: “Our sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being inconsistent with the manhood of self-command, is the very principle upon which that manhood is founded,” as “the man who feels the most for the joys and sorrows of others, is best fitted for acquiring the most complete control of his own joys and sorrows.”Footnote 177

Throughout the early modern period, as Susan Amussen has pointed out, “not all men could be manly…because independence was central to manhood,” and such independence was practically barred to those without property. Moreover, as a “reformed vision of manliness” in which honor was upheld “by self-restraint and the recourse to law,” began in the late seventeenth century to replace a “traditional model” in which such manliness could be defended by violence, “access to manliness” was “further restricted.”Footnote 178 Much the same could be said of access to genuine courage—that is, the “rational” Christian courage that advertised the claim to both virtue and truth on the part of its possessor.

The game criminal had always been depicted by his detractors as vain, drunken, and impious; however, after about the first third of the eighteenth century this critical discourse focused increasingly on his incapacity for reason and his want of sensibility, and thus on his inability to manifest or even to comprehend true, or “rational” Christian courage. The game criminal's courage, or hardiness rather, was the product of mere brutish instinct, as empty as his pretensions to being a gentleman. Indeed, the shifting representation of the game criminal from that of an erring sinner (and hence, in an early modern context, as “Everyman”) to that of a gentilhomme manqué served to diffuse or even silence what had once been a potentially subversive discourse. Increasingly, the language of courage and of righteousness alike were denied the game criminal. The right to express such home truths had become, it seemed, the monopoly of the reasonable Christian who was, by definition, a gentleman.Footnote 179

In this article I have argued that the game criminal preoccupied and disturbed contemporaries not—as Augustan caricature and nineteenth-century reformist mythology would have us believe—because he was brutishly irreligious, but rather because his cheerfulness and resolution communicated an assurance that the scaffold he ascended would, like Jacob's ladder, lead straight to heaven. This is not to say either that the game criminal was particularly devout or that he subscribed to a kind of “false consciousness”; merely, that he invoked a universal (Christian) language of righteousness and virtue. For, in the context of a world in which all men and women were sinners, there was something subversive in the way in which the game criminal went to the gallows clearly articulating his assurance that he (unlike many more “respectable” citizens) had paid his dues in this life; and, as for the next, he “was in no doubt of his going to Heaven.”Footnote 180

The relatively open forum enjoyed by the game criminal would after the middle of the eighteenth century begin to close, as public interest in accounts focusing on the dying words and behavior of the condemned began what would prove to be a precipitous decline. Nor was it likely to have been coincidental that during this same period the language of Christian courage altered and shifted in such a way as to exclude that of the game criminal. His behavior had always been dismissed by detractors as inappropriately bold and cheerful: by the mid-eighteenth century, however, his courage was increasingly portrayed as a species of social pretension; his words and gestures, increasingly divorced from the religious frame of reference that had once lent them meaning and force. The game criminal was no longer an “Everyman” who gladly honored his debt to nature, but a “poor, unhappy, ignorant” wretch, deluded enough to try to pass himself off as “the Macheath of the Day.”Footnote 181