Penitent Minds: The Role of Religious Advisors

The role the church performed at the gallows was a key factor in helping guide the criminal towards a penitent death that was conducive to the aims of the sheriff. Any diligent clergyman sought a criminal brimful of forgiveness and remorse, prepared for the coming judgment of God.

The idea that the diligence of the clergy fitted conveniently with the needs of the state is exemplified twice in the autobiography of William Ullathorne, a devout Catholic who was at one time the Vicar General of Sydney.^[310] On the first occasion Ullathorne travelled with an Anglican priest to comfort two convicts (one Catholic, the other Anglican) who had recently beaten an overseer to death. By recalling a conversation he had with the Anglican priest prior to the hanging, Ullathorne reveals a great deal about his own methods of preparing the criminal for death:

The Anglican clergyman again wished to see me. He asked what I should do on the way and on the scaffold? I told him that my poor man was well instructed, that on the way I should repeat a litany which he would answer, and I should occasionally address words to him suited to his state.

Upon arriving at the gallows the convict under Ullathornes care wanted to make a final speech and meet with some friendly faces gathered below. However, this did not align with Ullathornes plan and he successfully persuaded him out of the interaction:

The young man was bent on speaking to his comrades below, but I would not let him: for such speeches at the dying moment are commonly exhi­bitions of vanity. He obeyed me, I pressed his hand, and he was cast off.2⁹

On another occasion Ullathorne travelled to Norfolk Island to comfort thirteen convicts who were executed for the �mutiny’ of 1834.30 According to his autobiography, Ullathorne gave them spiritual guidance and comfort at every available hour in the week leading up to the hang­ings. On the night prior to their execution the mutineers were granted a rare �indulgence’ to fuel their religious fervour: �My Men asked as a special favour... to be allowed some tobacco, as with that they could watch and pray all night’.^{[312] [313] [314] On the day of execution, the condemned convicts displayed their obedience to Ullathorne’s instructions in a passage that is worth quoting at length:}

When the irons were struck off and the death warrant read, they knelt down to receive it as the will of God; and next, by a spontaneous act, they humbly kissed the feet of him who brought them peace. After the executioner had pinioned their arms they thanked the jailers for all their kindness, and ascended the ladders with light steps, being almost excitedly cheerful. I had a method of preparing men for their last moments, by associating all that I wished them to think and feel with the prayer, �Into Thy hands I commend my spirit; Lord Jesus, receive my soul.’ I advised them when on the scaffold to think of nothing else and to say nothing else...

Travelling across both colony and denomination, Reverend William Bedford was another who was no stranger to properly preparing the guilty for an impending death. Before migrating to Van Diemen's Land in 1823, Bedford was made an Ordinary at London's Newgate Prison that turned out to be an ideal preparation for the sombre task he took on in his new home. After a decade in the colony Bedford was already a veteran of the gallows, comforting many fellow Anglicans awaiting their fate. Speaking at an early meeting of the Hobart Temperance Society in 1832 he told them that he had already attended to the dying needs of condemned criminals at �no less than 3 and 400 executions'.^[316] In the next breath he stated that �19/20ths' of those criminals who were hanged owed their fate to alcohol and the effects of drunkenness.^[317]

Bedford made a habit of speaking to the crowd on behalf of the criminal in his or her last moments. These addresses were often struc­tured with a general confession of the crime bookended by statements of remorse and requests for divine forgiveness.^[318] To say that these final remarks were further coloured with gushes of moral feeling comes as little surprise given his statements made to the Temperance Society. For example, at the execution of Thomas Jerries in 1826 Bedford, in his speech, took care to highlight the elements of the parable that were contained in his path to the gallows:

The unhappy man, Jeffries, now before you, on the verge of eternity, desires me to state, that he attributes all the crimes which he has committed, and which have brought him to his present awful state, to the abhorrent vice of drunkenness.

Years later in 1845, a criminal named Gardiner requested that Bedford state to the crowd gathered that: �Sabbath-breaking and disobedience to parents had been the first steps of an evil course of life which was thus about to be terminated by a premature and shameful death'.^[320] Bedford's orations framed how the crime and execution ought to be perceived by those gathered at the foot of the scaffold and overlaid the whole cere­mony with a deep spiritual significance. As for the criminals in Bedford's care, this practice removed a major opportunity for displays of �game' indifference and manly bravado in the face of death.

Bedford, like Ullathorne, ensured that the criminal was prepared for his or her fate well before the actual day of execution. When two partic­ularly obstinate criminals presented themselves to Bedford in 1832 he organised for prison officers to take turns reading scripture to the men during the hours when he, or another religious advisor, were absent.^[321] Bedford prepared another man named Charles Routley in a similar manner. Routley was given a �sense of the awful situation in which he was placed' by the repeated exertions and prayers of the experienced Bedford in the week leading up to his hanging.^[322] It was something of a triumph according to The Hobart Town Courier because, before Bedford's intervention, the criminal was �one of the most horrid and most blood­thirsty monsters that have yet disgraced the annals of humanity'.^[323] On the scaffold Routley confessed to all his crimes, prayed for the King and

Governor of the colony by name and, in his own words, offered the crowd a first-hand account of the slippery slope he took to the gallows:

He implored all those who heard him to set its due price on the gospel, and not undervalue its glad tidings as he had done, and he besought them, if they would avoid his awful end, immediately to forsake all wicked and dissipated courses of life, for he said the beginnings of crime though at first small, and often committed without discovery, gradually led to offences more and more deep, until at last robberies and murders like his would be committed.^[324]

Being chief comforter to Anglican criminals during the reign of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur (1824—1836) meant that Bedford was a dependable hand on the scaffold during a period of Tasma­nian history in which the frequency of hangings was unparalleled (see Chapter 2).

William Ullathorne and William Bedford were models for conscien­tious and well-meaning men of religion whose want for the criminal to die penitent was foremost in their efforts. As already noted by Australian historians, this desire was something that dovetailed handily with the needs of those who ran the execution.^[326] However, it should be pointed out that clergymen did not work on behalf of the state in some grand conspiratorial manner. Men of faith like Ullathorne and Bedford placed existential demands on the condemned before death out of a sincere concern for the spiritual welfare of those in their care. Clergymen of any denomination would have wanted a penitent criminal, remorseful as they countenanced eternal life and steeled for the coming judgment of God. It was merely a matter of mutual convenience that, with the help of spiritual advisors, the sheriff was more likely to have a contrite and dignified criminal on the scaffold.