1

...

the streets in carts, dressed in their best clothes, with white gloves and nosegays, if it be the season. Those that die merrily or that don't at least show any great fear of death, are said to die like gentlemen; and to merit this encomium most of them die like beasts, without any concern, or like fools, having no other view than to divert the crowd. . . . Though there is something very melancholy in this, yet a man cannot well forbear laughing to see these rogues set themselves off as heroes by an affectation of despising death. . . . . The frequent executions, the great numbers that suffer together, and the applauses of the crowd, may contribute something to it, and the brandy which they swallow before their setting out helps to stun them.' Women who were found guilty of murdering their husbands, or of the other offences comprised under the terms high or petit treason, were publicly burnt, by a law which was not abolished till 1790.2 A stake ten or eleven feet high was planted in the ground. An iron ring was fastened near the top, and from it the culprit was hung while the faggots were kindled under her feet. The law enjoined that she should be burnt alive, but in practice the sentence was usually mitigated, and she was strangled before the fire touched her body. A horrible case, however, occurred in 1726 at the execution of a murderess named Katherine Hayes. The fire scorching the hands of the executioner, he slackened the rope before he strangled her, and though fresh faggots were hastily piled up, a considerable time elapsed before her agonies were terminated. The law which condemned a man guilty of high treason to be cut down when half hung, to be disembowelled, and to have his bowels burnt before his face, was still executed in ghastly detail. The law which condemned a prisoner who refused to plead on a capital charge to be laid naked on his

1 Muralt's Letters on the English Nation (English trans. 1726), pp. 42–

44.

For

2In treasons of every kind the punishment of women is the same, and different from that of men. as the natural modesty of the sex forbids the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies, their sentence (which is to the full as terrible to the sense as the other) is, to be drawn

to the gallows and there to be burnt alive.'-Blackstone, iv. ch. 6.

Andrews, p. 279. See too, her life, in The Lives of Eminent Criminals executed between 1720 and 1735.

4 See Andrews' Eighteenth Century, p. 281. Eight persons guilty of holding commissions in the army of the Pretender, were executed in 1746 on Kennington Common. The State Trials (xviii. 351) give the following descrip

back in a dark room, while weights of stone or iron were placed on his breast till he was slowly pressed to death, was enforced in England in 1721 and in 1735, and in Ireland as late as 1740. A criminal was sentenced in England to the same fate in 1741, but he at last consented to plead; and the law was not repealed till 1771. The punishment of the pillory, which was very common, seemed specially adapted to encourage the brutality of the populace, and there are several instances of culprits who perished from the usage they underwent. Men, and even women, were still whipped publicly at the tail of a cart through the streets, and the flogging of women in England was only abolished in 1820.2

On the whole, however, the institutions and manners of the country were steadily assuming their modern aspect. From the ministry of Walpole the House of Commons had become indisputably the most powerful body in the State. Then it was that the post of First Lord of the Treasury came to be universally recognised as the head of the Government. Then it was that the forms of parliamentary procedure were in many respects definitely fixed. In 1730 the absurd practice of drawing up the written pleadings in the law courts in Latin was abolished,

tion of the execution of Mr. Townley, who was one of them. After he had hung six minutes he was cut down, and, having life in him as he lay upon the block to be quartered, the executioner gave him several blows on his breast, which not having the effect required, he immediately cut his throat; after which he took his head off; then ripped him open and took out his bowels and heart and threw them into the fire, which consumed them; then he slashed his four quarters and put them with the head into a coffin.'

1 Andrews, pp. 285-286. The last case is from the Universal Spectator, Sept. 1741. 'On Tuesday, was sentenced to death at the Old Bailey, Henry Cook, shoemaker, of Stratford, for robbing Mr. Zachary on the highway. On Cook's refusing to plead there was a new press made and fixed in the proper place in the press-yard, there having been no person pressed since the famous Spiggott, the highwayman, about twenty years ago. Burnworth, alias Frazier, was pressed

at Kingston, in Surrey, about sixteen years ago.' The Irish case was at Kilkenny. Madden, Periodical Literature, i. p. 274.

2 See the very large collection of passages from old newspapers and magazines, illustrating the penal system in England, in Andrews' Eighteenth Century, and in that great repository of curious information Notes and Queries. See, too, Knight's London, Cowper's Hist. of the Rod, and Madden's Hist. of Periodical Literature in Ireland. For cases of criminals being killed by the illusage they underwent in the pillory, see Prior's Life of Burke, i. 367; Nichol's Memoirs of Hogarth, pp. 190191. Johnson wrote a very humane and sensible protest against the multiplication of capital offences, Rambler, No. 114, and Fielding in his Causes of the Increase of Robbers advocated private executions. The public whipping of women in Eng. land was abolished in 1817, the private whipping only in 1820.

in spite of the strenuous opposition of the Chief Justice Lord Raymond. The last impeachment of a Prime Minister was that of Walpole; the last battle fought on British soil was in the rebellion of 1745. The last traces of the old exemptions from the dominion of the law were removed by the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions in Scotland, and of the right of sanctuary in London; and the most conspicuous sign of the insular spirit of the nation disappeared when England consented to adopt the same calendar as the most civilised nations on the Continent.

It was at this time, also, that the modern military system was firmly established. An aversion to a standing army in time of peace had long been one of the strongest of English sentiments, and it was one in which both the great parties of the State cordially concurred. The Tories were never weary of dilating upon the military despotism of Cromwell, which had left an indelible impression on the mind of the nation, while the army of 30,000 men which James had maintained without the consent of Parliament furnished one of the gravest Whig charges against that sovereign. Of all the measures that accompanied the Restoration, none had been more popular than the disbandment of the army of Cromwell; but soon after, a conflict began between the Crown and the Legislature, which continually recurred with aggravated severity up to the time of the Revolution. The last two Stuart sovereigns aimed at the maintenance, in time of peace, of a considerable military force altogether subject to their control. They governed it by articles of war. They assumed, or claimed as part of their prerogative, a power unknown to the law, of administering justice, and inflicting punishments on their soldiers by courts-martial; and James, in defiance of the Test Act, had bestowed numerous military commands upon Catholics. The steady policy of Parliament, on the other hand, was to develop the militia, which it was assumed could never become inimical to the liberties of England; to insist upon the disbandment, in time of peace, of the whole army, except, perhaps, a body-guard for the King and garrisons for the forts; and to maintain the exclusion of Catholics from commands, and the principle that punishments

1 Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, vi. 119–120.

in time of peace could only be inflicted by order of the civil magistrate. The great part which this conflict had in preparing the Revolution is well known; and an article of the Bill of Rights expressly provided that, without the consent of Parliament, the raising or keeping of a standing army within the kingdom was illegal. It soon, however, became evident to all sagacious observers that a considerable army was indispensable if England were ever to engage in a land war with Continental nations. The French army, which under Henry IV. consisted of 14,000 men, amounted, after the Peace of Nimegue, to no less than 140,000; and before the close of his reign Lewis XIV. is said to have had as many as 360,000 men at one time under arms. The Emperor Charles VI. employed 170,000 soldiers in the war of 1733. The Prussian army, on the accession of Frederick the Great, consisted of 76,000 men; and every petty German ruler was augmenting his forces. The genius of Parma, Turenne, Condé, and Vauban transformed the art of war, and every improvement made a hastily levied militia more helpless before a disciplined army. Vauban and Cohorn may almost be said to have created the art of attacking and defending fortresses. Mining acquired a prominence in warfare, and was conducted with a skill formerly utterly unknown. Transportable copper pontoons for crossing rivers were invented by the French in 1672. The invention of the fixed bayonet has been attributed both to Mackay and to Vauban; and the Prussian infantry attained a perfection in manoeuvring and a rapidity in firing which made every battalion a walking battery, and was speedily copied in the rest of Europe.2

All these changes, by giving a new perfection to the art of war, made it evident that the time had arrived when a considerable permanent body of highly trained soldiers was necessary for the security of the State; and that necessity in England was still more felt on account of the perpetual fear of a Jacobite insurrection. But a permanent army could not exist unless adequate means were provided for preserving its discipline, especially at a time when the dispositions of the troops were

'Heeren.

2 Frederick II., Mémoires de mon Temps. See, too, for other military

statistics, Ranke's Hist. of Prussia, i. 420-421. Lord Hervey's Memoirs, i.86.

doubtful or divided. The declaration of 800 soldiers at Ipswich in favour of James in 1689 produced the first Mutiny Act, which was enacted for six months, and which enabled courts-martial to punish mutiny and desertion by death. The press-gang soon came into use, and it was much employed in time of war as a kind of irregular police; suspected criminals, or notorious bad characters, against whom no definite charge could be proved, being in this manner draughted in great numbers into the army. An Act of Anne gave justices of the peace express power to levy as soldiers such able-bodied men in their districts as had no lawful calling or employment, or visible means for their maintenance or livelihood.' 2

There are few more curious pages in English history than the slow and gradual change of public opinion on the subject of standing armies. For more than half a century the battle continued with almost unabated violence, and a century had elapsed before it altogether subsided. The Mutiny Act was regarded as a purely temporary contrivance, but it was soon felt by most experienced men that it was impossible to govern the army if military insubordination or desertion were treated as mere breaches of contract, and were punishable only by the civil courts. The Mutiny Act was accordingly re-enacted, sometimes for six months, more frequently for a year, but it was long before it was recognised as permanently necessary. In the reigns of William and Anne there were several periods-one of them lasting for more than two years-in which it was not in force, and its invariable enactment dates only from George I. Its opponents dwelt upon the danger of severing by a special code of laws the members of the army from their fellow citizens, and of tampering with the great constitutional principle that the civil magistrate in time of peace should have sole jurisdiction for the suppression of crime; and they urged that to permit the sovereign, of his own authority, to establish articles of war, and erect courts-martial for enforcing them, was to vest a sole legislative power in the Crown. On these grounds Windham and Shippen, at the head of the Tory party, strenuously opposed the Mutiny Act. Walpole took the same course, when he was in oppoition to Stanhope, and his saying that he who gives the power 3 & 4 Anne, ch. 11.

'Macaulay's Hist.