A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

London’s main gallows - Tyburn, at Hyde Park corner - were usually public holidays. They became
known as ‘gallows days’, which in turn became ‘gala days’. On the day when James Whitney - the
highwayman who resisted capture for an hour - was taken to Tyburn, he was one of eight men who
were sentenced to hang simultaneously on the triangular shaped scaffold that had been erected in
the time of Queen Elizabeth. (The older type, consisting of two uprights and a cross bar, was less
efficient in that it would only hang one or two at a time.) Only seven men were hanged on that
occasion; Whitney was reprieved at the last moment for offering to betray his accomplices.
Whitney was lucky enough to be popular; he was driven back through a cheering crowd with the
rope still round his neck. But he was hanged a week later, having told all he knew.
In 1735, it struck a bookseller named John Osborn that the lively interest excited by criminals could
be turned to his advantage, and he issued three volumes of Lives of the Most Remarkable
Criminals. Pamphlets about famous criminals had been popular since the time of the Elizabethans;
but they usually concerned people in the upper ranks of society and dealt with only one case at a
time. By the time of Osborn, most criminals were ordinary highwaymen, footpads, housebreakers
and pirates. But he recognised that the public had an insatiable appetite for the details of the lives of
the people they loved to see hanged. Almost every one of the Lives, two hundred or so cases,
begins with a moral preamble: ‘It is an observation that must be obvious to all my readers, that few
who addict themselves to robbing and stealing ever continue long in the practice of those crimes
before they are overtaken by Justice...’, and so on. And this was not because Osborn felt the need to
justify himself in publishing tales of crime. It was because he recognised that his readers enjoyed
congratulating themselves that they were not in the hands of the law. The pleasure of watching an
execution was based on the feeling that you were in the crowd, not on the gallows. The public of
Henry Fielding’s day had very little imagination, very little capacity to identify itself with another
person’s suffering. This is why one of the popular entertainments was going to ‘Bedlam’ to laugh
and jeer at the mad people. It would take another century before novelists like Dickens could
persuade people to enjoy putting themselves in the place of the ‘unfortunates’ of society.
The most striking thing about Osborn’s Lives of the Criminals is the utterly commonplace nature of
most of the crimes, and their curious lack of personal interest. We live in an age of personalities, of
gossip columns, of ‘people in the news’. It is true that ninety-five per cent of the crimes that now
take place in London or New York are commonplace and ‘impersonal’. But the remaining five per
cent help to fill scandal sheets with titillating details. We are accustomed to crimes having a strong
‘individual’ interest, the element that makes them suitable for film or television treatment. In
Osborn, not even one per cent of the crimes would be suitable for dramatic treatment.
One of the few possible exceptions is the case of Catherine Hayes, a housewife who conspired with
her two lovers to murder her husband, a retired moneylender. They lived in lodgings not far from
the Tyburn gallows, and Catherine’s relations with her husband were poor - she declared that he
was pathologically mean, which is probably true. A young tailor named Thomas Billings came to
the house and became her lover while her husband was away on business. Soon afterwards, a man
named Thomas Wood moved in and also became her lover. She offered to share her husband’s
fortune of fifteen hundred pounds - a vast sum for those days - with her lovers if they would help
her get rid of John Hayes. They did this one evening in 1725, after all four of them had drunk bottle
after bottle of wine between them. (They were rich enough to drink wine, not gin.) One of the
lovers hit Hayes with a hatchet and fractured his skull. The next problem was to get the body to the
river. Catherine suggested that they cut off the head, so that if they were forced to abandon the
corpse en route, it would be unrecognisable. With a great deal of retching, the two men sawed off