INTRODUCTION

_To close the scene of all his actions he
Was brought from Newgate to the fatal tree;
And there his life resigned, his race is run,
And Tyburn ends what wickedness begun._

If there be a haunted spot in London it must surely be a few square
yards that lie a little west of the Marble Arch, for in the long course
of some six centuries over fifty thousand felons, traitors and martyrs
took there a last farewell of a world they were too bad or too good to
live in. From remote antiquity, when the seditious were taken _ad furcas
Tyburnam_, until that November day in 1783 when John Austin closed the
long list, the gallows were kept ever busy, and during the first half of
the eighteenth century, with which this book deals, every Newgate
sessions sent thither its thieves, highwaymen and coiners by the score.

There has been some discussion as to the exact site of Tyburn gallows,
but there can be little doubt that the great permanent three-beamed
erection--the Triple Tree--stood where now the Edgware Road joins Oxford
Street and Bayswater Road. A triangular stone let into the roadway
indicates the site of one of its uprights. In 1759 the sinister beams
were pulled down, a moveable gibbet being brought in a cart when there
was occasion to use it. The moveable gallows was in use until 1783, when
the place of execution was transferred to Newgate; the beams of the old
structure being sawn up and converted to a more genial use as stands for
beer-butts in a neighbouring public-house.