‘The Only Good of an Execution’: The Condemned Sermon at Newgate, 1799-1865
Newgate Prison Chaplin - Where the Condemned Sermon would take place
By Hilary Carey, Professor of Imperial & Religious History
Hilary Carey gave this talk on 29 September as part of the University of Bristol’s lively History Showcase series.
22 August 1814 was not a good day for the Rev. Horace Salusbury Cotton, the newly appointed Ordinary of Newgate. The ‘Ordinary’ was the chaplain responsible for the spiritual preparation of prisoners at London’s busiest criminal prison and it was his job to accompany them to the scaffold, reciting the burial service, and looking for last minute confessions.
On the day in question, six men were scheduled for the scaffold. It was Cotton’s first attendance at an execution - and nothing went to plan. An execution broadside described the scene when one of several highway robbers executed on this day refused to go quietly: ‘Ashton, who had been in a state of insanity some days, when he came on the drop began to dance, clap his hands, and huzzaing, exclaiming, “I am Lord Wellinton (sic);” and after drop had feel, he sprung on the part that remains up, and began to dance again, exclaiming “Am I not Lord Wellinton now?” The executioner was obliged to force him through the drop, and we are told that the unfortunate Ashton ‘died in great agony.’
Witnessing this encounter with poor, mad, John Ashton on the scaffold was not the only challenge to the Ordinary’s composure. In an account of Cotton’s dealings with this first group of condemned men, there is a report of a conversation with the one educated convict – the forger John Mitchell – in this group. Mitchell agreed to engage with Cotton’s ministry on one condition, ‘that you will endeavor to aid me in escaping from that worst of all tortures, the condemned sermon’.
This view of the condemned sermon, as a moral humiliation worse than execution, was first voiced from about 1820 as part of the campaign to abolish capital punishment, particularly in the case of those convicted of nonviolent offences, many of whom were what today we would call white collar criminals.
So, what was the ‘condemned sermon’ – and when and why did it end?
The condemned sermon was preached in the prison chapel on the Sunday prior to an execution. It made up part of the ‘Tyburn Ritual’, the humiliation and public exhibition of criminals, a practice which was steadily reformed throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but which only ended with the abolition of public execution in 1869. At Newgate, the condemned sermon was paid for by a small bequest which supplemented the otherwise meagre salary of the Ordinary.
Whether through illness or other cause, the Ordinary could not attend every execution, but in the fifteen years from 1799 to 1814 the Rev. Brownlow Forde oversaw about 170 executions, an average of 11 per year, though the rate was more than double that in his first years in office. From his first attendance at an execution on 2 August 1814 until retiring in 1837, the Rev. Horace Cotton presided over more than 350 executions in 23 years, an average of 15.2 per year, all of which are listed in his 120-page Execution Diary with the names and dates of execution on the right and his own comments on the left. This grisly practice has ensured that the Rev. Horace Cotton and his fellow Ordinaries are remembered today, if at all, as pious bullies.
Yet the condemned sermon also had its defenders, even among those (including the majority of the Ordinaries of Newgate) who opposed the death penalty and advocated penal reform and a more humane system of criminal justice. In 1835, in one of the earliest attempts to restrict access to the condemned sermon at Newgate, Cotton saw it as ‘perhaps the only good of an execution – the solemn Admonition to the Public’. In 1845, when one of his successors, the Rev. John Davis, was asked by the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment to consider whether the public should no longer be admitted to the condemned sermon, he responded that, so long as visitors were kept to a reasonable number, he thought the practice ‘rather salutary than otherwise’. Davis also believed that capital punishment was the only fitting penalty for murder and that, as a clergyman, he observed the scriptural injunction: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed (Genesis 9:6).’
I am interested in the period after that which has been the major focus of historical attention – that is the decline and fall of the condemned sermon at Newgate in the nineteenth century. To my surprise, I have discovered that little if anything has been written about the condemned sermon after the disappearance of the published Ordinary’s Account in the late eighteenth century. I have been collecting the scriptural texts which were the focus of the condemned sermons for different crimes. There was a wide variety, with some focusing on the culpability of the criminal, and others on the comfort and forgiveness awaiting those who accepted their guilt. Cotton liked to fit the text to the crime. For the poisoner, Elizabeth Fenning (who was probably innocent), he preached from Rom. 6:21 ‘What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death’. But for the forger, John Wagstaffe, he was less confrontational, preaching from Ezechiel 18.23: ‘Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?’ In contrast, John Wesley, who preached to condemned criminals at Newgate in January 1785, chose to comfort rather than reprove, and chose his text from Luke 15:7: ‘There is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth’.
Because the material is so fascinating, I am writing a little book on the decline of the condemned sermon for the Palgrave Pivot series. This has involved considerable sleuthing in the London Metropolitan Archives and the National Library for records of the Ordinary of Newgate and the execution sermon. It has also involved reading some chilling sermons designed to wound and humiliate their criminal subjects. There is much more to discover, and my biggest challenge will be sticking to the word limit and also doing justice to these tragic lives.