Bernard Cornwell - Gallows Thief

Many felons were unlucky and had their petitions rejected, or else made no petition, and their deaths became public spectacles. In London the executions used to be at Tyburn's famous gallows, 'the triple tree', which stood at what is now Marble Arch, but in the late eighteenth century the scaffold was moved to Old Bailey. I have tried, in the first and last chapters, to describe the process of a Newgate execution as accurately as it may be depicted after a lapse of two hundred years, and I have used the real names of many of the participants; thus the Keeper of Newgate was William Brown (and he did indeed serve devilled kidneys to the guests who came to watch the hangings), the Ordinary was Horace Cotton and the hangman was James ('Jemmy') Botting, who lacked an assistant in 1817. Charles Corday, of course, is fictional, but he could well have survived his hanging. A number of folk survived, usually because they were cut down too soon, and it would be some years before the 'long drop' was adopted which killed more or less instantaneously. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Donald Rumbelow, author of, among many other good books, The Triple Tree, for his great help in disentangling some of the more confusing details of Newgate procedure during the Regency period. I am also most grateful to Elizabeth Cartmale-Freedman, who helped with the research, and to James Hardy Vaux who, in 1812, during his involuntary exile in Australia, compiled his Vocabulary of the Flash Language.

The original inspiration for Gallows Thief came from V. A. C. Gatrell's book The Hanging Tree (Oxford, 1994), a book that combines a scholarly account of the English and Welsh experience of execution between 1770 and 1868 with a fine and controlled anger against capital punishment. The Hanging Tree's cover picture alone, which is Gericault's sketch of an English public hanging in 1820, is a stunning indictment of a barbaric punishment. To Professor Gatrell I offer thanks and the assurance that any mistakes in Gallows Thief come not from him, nor from any other source, but are entirely of my own making.