Arthur Griffiths - The Chronicles of Newgate (Vol. 1&2)

Robert Ockam in the Pillory

that Stubbs, when his right hand was cut off, plucked off his hat with his left, and said with a loud voice, ‘God save the Queen.’ The multitude standing about was deeply silent, either out of horror of this new and unwonted kind of punishment, or out of commiseration towards the man. …” The process of mutilation was at times left to the agonized action of the culprit: as in the brutal case of one Penedo, who in 1570, for counterfeiting the seal of the Court of Queen’s Bench, was twice put in the pillory on market-day in Cheapside. The first day one of his ears was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner that he should be compelled “by his own proper motion” to tear it away; and on the second day he was to lose his other ear in the same cruel fashion. William Prynne, it will be remembered, also lost his ears on the pillory, but at the hands of the executioner. The Earl of Dorset, in giving the sentence of the Star Chamber Court, asked his fellow-judges “whether he should burn him in the forehead, or slit him in the nose? … I should be loth he should escape with his ears; … therefore I would have him branded in the forehead, slit in the nose, and his ears cropt too.” Having suffered all this on the pillory, he was again punished three years later, when he lost the remainder of his ears, and was branded with the letters S. L. (seditious libeller) on each cheek. Dr. Bastwick and others were similarly treated.[106] Prynne was a voluminous writer, and is said to have produced some two hundred volumes in all. A contemporary, who saw him in the pillory at Cheapside, says “they burnt his huge volumes under his nose, which almost suffocated him.”

Although mutilations and floggings were frequently carried out at the pillory, that well-known machine was primarily intended as a means of painful and degrading exposure, and not for the infliction of physical torture. The pillory is said to have existed in this country before the Norman Conquest, and it probably dates from times much more remote. The ετηλη of the Greeks, the pillar on which offenders were publicly exhibited, seems to have been akin to the pillory, just as the κυφων, or wooden collar, was the prototype of the French carcan or iron circlet which was riveted around the culprit’s neck, and attached by a chain to the post or pillory. With us the pillory or “stretch neck” was at first applied only to fraudulent traders, perjurers, forgers, and so forth; but as years passed it came to be more exclusively the punishment of those guilty of infamous crimes, amongst whom were long included rash writers who dared to express their opinions too freely before the days of freedom of the press. Besides Prynne, Leighton, Burton, Warton, and Bastwick, intrepid John Lilburne so suffered, under the Star Chamber decree, which prohibited the printing of any book without a license from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, or the authorities of the two universities. Daniel Defoe again, who was pilloried in 1703 for his pamphlet. ‘The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.’ Defoe gave himself up, and was pilloried first in Cheapside, and afterwards in the Temple. The mob so completely sympathized with him, that they covered him with flowers, drank his health, and sang his ‘Ode to the Pillory’ in chorus. Dr. Shebbeare was pilloried in 1759, for his ‘Letters to the People of England.’ But he found a friend in the under-sheriff, Mr. Beardmore, who took him to the place of penitence, in a state-coach, and allowed a footman in rich livery to hold an umbrella over the doctor’s head, as he stood in the pillory. Beardmore was afterwards arraigned for neglect of duty, found guilty, and sentenced to fine and imprisonment.

In 1765, Williams the publisher, who reprinted Wilkes’ ‘North Briton,’ stood in the pillory in Palace Yard for an hour. For the moment he became popular. He arrived in a hackney-coach numbered 45,[107] attended by a vast crowd. He was cheered vociferously as he mounted the pillory with a sprig of laurel in each hand; and a gentleman present made a collection of two hundred guineas for him in a purple purse adorned with orange ribbons. In front of the pillory the mob erected a gallows, and hung on it a boot, with other emblems, intended to gibbet the unpopular minister Lord Bute. Williams was conducted from the pillory amid renewed acclamations, and the excitement lasted for some days. Lampoons and caricatures were widely circulated. Several street ballads were also composed, one of which began:

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