Gustavus Adolphus; the Duke of Hamilton, the Earls of Lindsey, Dundonald, Northampton, Denbigh, Sunderland, Lichfield, and the Lords Brooke, Falkland, Aubigny, in the later civil wars of England; John Hampden; the Earls of Falmouth and Portland, at sea; the Dukes of Grafton and Schomberg, in Ireland; Lord Downe, Lord Howe, Mackay, Graham of Claverhouse, Wolfe, Braddock, Montgomery, Warren, Kleist, Korner, Scharnhorst, Moore, Desaix, Bagration, Picton, Bozzaris, the Dukes of Brunswick, sire and son; and, to close the catalogue with a name of Christian eminence, the gallant and pious Gardiner.

XI.

Death by Punishment.

"Now, men of death, work forth your will,

For I can suffer and be still;

And, come it slow, or come it fast,

It is but death that comes at last."

SCOTT.

It was a divine ordinance or prediction, that the blood of the murderer should be shed for retribution, for warning, and for the common safety. As soon as families became states, this power of punishment was reserved to the sovereign jurisdiction. Necessity, fear, revenge, and cruelty, extended the same doom to other crimes; and under some form and process of law, the lives of the guilty, and too often of the innocent, have been exacted amongst every people.

The first instance recorded in history is that of the chief butler of Pharaoh, who was hanged; a mode of death to which disgrace has been attached, and which may have been adopted, from the ease of making the dying culprit a spectacle to a multitude. So, by divine command, those heads of Israel were punished who had led the people into guilt; and thus seven of the posterity of Saul were claimed by the Gibeonites, and put to death while Rizpah, the mother of two of them, watched below, and drove the vultures and dogs away. The murderers, the robbers, and even the forgers and thieves of Britain have thus died; and thus the ignobler persons

who were charged with treason; and the sufferer was often taken down from the gallows that his body might be quartered, while his heart was yet throbbing. Amongst this unhappy throng, the half frantic Earl Ferrers, the ingenious Aram, the fallen Dodd, the once elegant Fauntleroy, the atrocious Thistlewood, were conspicuous malefactors. Thus died, too, David, the last Welsh sovereign, Hugh Despenser, Roger Mortimer, the favourites of a king and queen; the patriot Wallace; two successive primates of Scotland, Beatoun and Hamilton, the gallant Kircaldy of Grange, the Jesuit Campian, the unfortunate Sir Everard Digby, the fanatic Hacket, the noble Marquess of Montrose, the enthusiast, Hugh Peters, and such of the judges of Charles the First, as had neither sought clemency nor escape; thus the captive Guatimozin; and thus, bewailed by countrymen and foes alike, the victims of military rigor, Andre and Hale. The immediate cause of death in hanging is strangulation, or the fracture of the neck; and the Spaniards have therefore strangled criminals by an iron band or ring at a stake, sometimes before burning the body. Thus, not as criminals, died the last of the Incas, and Savonarola, and Tyndal.

Decapitation has been almost every where a punishment of common infliction. It was the mode by which John the Baptist, Justin, and Cyprian, suffered martyrdom. So died Cicero, the Constable de Luna, Biron, the young king Conradin, Egmont and Horn, Almagro, Balboa, Gonzalo Pizarro, the Doge Marino Faliero, Carmagnola, Barneveldt, and Lally. Charlemagne beheaded in one day forty-five hundred Saxon rebels. Christian the Second put thus to death ninety-four distinguished persons at Stockholm. In Britain, this kind of execution

was appropriated to crimes of state, charged upon persons of birth; and thus the axe fell upon the necks of the illustrious Waltheof, of Piers Gaveston, of one Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and another, Earl of Worcester, of a Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster, another, Earl of Kent, another, Earl of Cambridge, another, Earl of Warwick, and the last, the aged Countess of Salisbury; of several Howards, Nevilles, Staffords, Poles, Fitzalans, Grays, Scroops, Tuchets, Bohuns, Beauforts; of the aspiring Essex, the brother Seymours, the kingly Dudley, of Fisher, More, Laud, Strafford, Raleigh, Hamilton, Capel, Derby, Holland, the two Argyles, two Huntleys, Vane, Monmouth, Stafford, Russell, Sidney, of Thomas Cromwell, of several Douglasses and Homes, and Ruthvens, of Derwentwater, Kenmure, Lovat, Kilmarnock, Balmerino, of Anne Boleyn, and Catherine Howard, and Mary Stuart, and her royal grandson, Charles the First. The Swiss culprit sat in a chair, while a blade loaded with lead was swung by the arm of the executioner. In France, when the Revolution demanded a speedier process than the single stroke of a headsman, the guillotine was invented: the victim was but laid upon a board, the blade hung in a groove, the board was thrust in, the blade dropped, and all was over. Louis the Sixteenth, Marie Antoinette, the Princess Elizabeth, the Duke of Orleans, Barnave, Bailly, Malesherbes, Lavoisier, Madame du Barri, Charlotte Corday, Vergniaud, Brissot, Madame Roland, Manuel, Guadet, Barbaroux, Kersaint, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre, Hebert, Westermann, Chabot, St. Just, Custine, Houchard, Clootz, Dillon, Beauharnois, Fouquier Tinville, were but the foremost of a company of thousands whose heads fell under this dreadful machine, by which the peculiar terror of a death

instantaneous and unfelt, and yet fixed to a known moment, was substituted for all other fear or solemnity.

The horrible punishment of burning appears even in patriarchal times; for Judah commanded Tamar to be burned for adultery, though the command was not executed. Two false prophets of the Jews were burned by the King of Babylon; and the fiery furnace was there for all who, like Shadrach and his companions, refused to worship the golden idol. Fire was made by our Saviour a frequent figure of the future misery of the lost; and this seems the great cause for which it was chosen in the darker of modern ages as the doom of unbelief and heresy at the hands of human vengeance. Jews and blasphemers, Paulicians and Albigenses, Lollards and Hussites, and Socinians, and all who denied the spiritual sovereignty and infallibility of Rome, have been exposed to the stake. There, in one day, fifty-four Knights Templars suffered at Paris, in 1310, after thirty-six others had died upon the rack. There was the end of the days of the aged Polycarp; of Huss, and Jerome of Prague; of Joan of Arc; of Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley, and Ferrar, and Hooper; of Bilney, Frith, Barnes, Lambert, Anne Ayscue, Patrick Hamilton, Rogers, Bradford, Rowland Taylor, Saunders, Philpot, Palmer; of Algerius, of Giordano Bruno, of the bewildered Servetus, and the unhappy Vanini. The Spanish Inquisition presided over the most terrible and comprehensive of such inflictions; and what was called an Act of Faith included the agonizing death of such victims in the presence of a shuddering, shocked, and yet satisfied people. Sometimes, in England, gunpowder was allowed that the torment might be shortened; sometimes a barrel of pitch was suspended above. Cortez burned