The crime of coining the King's money is still treated as
treason, and women, for the commission of this crime as well as that of
murdering their husbands, were sentenced to be strangled, and afterwards
publicly burned. In London this horrible outrage upon civilized feelings
was perpetrated in Smithfield. One of these melancholy exhibitions took
place within the memory of many persons. The criminal was a fine young
woman, and the strangling had not been completed, for when the flames
reached her at the stake, she uttered a shriek. This produced, as it
well might, a general horror, and the practice was abandoned, though the
law was not abrogated. It was the mild and enlightened Sir Samuel
Romilly who first brought in a bill to annul the old acts which ordered
the most revolting mutilation of the corpses of traitors, agreeable to a
sentence expressed in the most barbarous jargon. Mark, this was only a
few years since, I believe in 1811.
What must have been the taste of our forefathers, who suffered
miscreants to obtain their livelihood for the moment by stationing
themselves at Temple-bar, after the rebellion in 1745, with
magnifying-glasses, that the spectators might more nicely discriminate
the features of those unfortunate gentlemen whose heads had been fixed
over the gateway.
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