Capital Punishment and the Criminal Corpse in Scotland, 1740–1834

Front matter

“iia

THE CRIMINAL CORPSE INI a i sc i

Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife

Preface

Capital punishment has a long and storied global history. Within the annals of this penal narrative, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have offered a sustained attraction to historians of Western Europe. However, studies of the Scottish capital punishment experience have remained limited by comparison. This book seeks to redress this scholarly lacuna. Based upon an extensive gathering and analysis of previously untapped resources, it takes the reader on a journey from the courtrooms of Scotland to the theatre of the gallows. It introduces them to several of the malefactors who faced the hangman’s noose and explores the traditional hallmarks of the spectacle of the scaffold. The study demonstrates that the period between 1740 and 1834 was one of discussion, debate and fundamental change in the use of the death sentence and how it was staged in practice. In addition, it contextualises the use of capital punishment against the backdrop of key events in Scottish history in this period including Anglo-Scottish relations in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union, the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation witnessed by the country. In doing so, the current study goes beyond redressing a scholarly gap and instead demonstrates that an exploration of Scotland’s unique capital punishment history enhances the current field in some areas but provides a crucial caveat to the broader narrative in others. Finally, this study writes the post-mortem punishment of the criminal corpse into Scotland’s capital punishment history. In demonstrating that the journey of several capitally convicted offenders, predominantly murderers, vii vill PREFACE did not end upon the scaffolds of Scotland, it takes the reader from the theatre of the gallows to the dissection tables of Scotland’s main universities and to the foot of the gibbets from which criminal bodies were displayed. In doing so it identifies an intermediate stage in the long-term disappearance of public bodily punishment.

Warwick, UK Rachel E. Bennett

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The current study was developed from the author’s doctoral research which was completed at the University of Leicester as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse’ (grant number WT095904AIA). I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues on the project: Owen Davies, Zoe Dyndor, Elizabeth Hurren, Peter King, Emma Battell Lowman, Francesca Matteoni, Shane McCorristine, Sarah Tarlow, Floris Tomasini and Richard Ward. The fruitful discussions to come out of our project meetings and their insightful comments and feedback were invaluable in helping to shape my doctoral thesis. I would also like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for their assistance and advice during the publishing process.

The completion of this work would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my family and friends. Special thanks must go to my parents Ronnie and Alison Bennett, and to my sister Laura and my nana Fay, for the encouragement and support they have always given me. I would also like to thank my friends who have kept me laughing these past few years and Lauren Darwin with whom I have spent countless hours discussing all things crime and punishment. Her comments on previous drafts of this research were very much appreciated. Finally, I would like to thank my nana, Marion Harvey Potts, who was a truly brilliant woman in every way. The completion of this book is dedicated to her memory.

Part II The Theatre of the Gallows in Scotland 5 The Spectacle of the Scaffold

6 A Fate Worse than Death? Dissection and the Criminal Corpse xii CONTENTS 7 Hanging in Chains: The Criminal Corpse on Display 187 8 Conclusion 215

ED CRC GUA HO

JC

NAS

SP

TNA

ABBREVIATIONS

Edinburgh University Centre for Research Collections Glasgow University Archives

Home Office

Justiciary Court

National Archives of Scotland

State Papers

The National Archives, Kew xiii

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 2.4 Table 2.5 Table 2.6 Table 2.7

Table 2.8

Table 2.9 Table 3.1

Table 3.2

Table 6.1

Table 7.1

List OF TABLES

Total executions by circuit

Percentage of total executions made up by each circuit Population of Scotland

Executions per 100,000 head of Scotland’s population Executions broken down by category of offence Proportion of capitally convicted offenders executed Proportion of offenders capitally convicted for murder executed

Proportion of offenders capitally convicted for property offences executed

Pardons broken down by category of offence Executions for property offences per 100,000 head of Scotland’s population

Executions for murder per 100,000 head of Scotland’s population

Breakdown by decade of murderers sentenced to dissection between 1752 and 1832

Chronology of hanging in chains in Scotland

34 35 36 38 40 41

45 46

170 188

XV

Introduction

The history of capital punishment has been the focus of extensive and sustained investigation, with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offering a particularly pervasive attraction to crime historians of Western Europe. However, studies of the Scottish experience have remined limited. This study provides the first in-depth investigation into the implementation of the death sentence and the carrying out of capital punishment in Scotland. It is shaped by the most thorough gathering and analysis of the Scottish Justiciary Court records to date and draws upon previously untapped resources offering rich qualitative detail related to the country’s capital punishment history. The study is focused upon the whole of Scotland to provide a national history of capital punishment whilst also exploring key regional variations over time. Within this, it seeks to provide a fresh perspective upon key events in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Scottish history including Anglo-Scottish relations in the post-Union period, the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and the rapid urbanisation, and population growth and density, witnessed in parts of the country, and how these things impacted upon the use of the death sentence.

This period in Scotland’s capital punishment history offers the potential for rich analysis as, following the 1707 Act of Union (6 Ann c.11), Scotland and England were governed by the same Parliament at Westminster. However, Scotland had maintained its own legal and court systems and, as this study will demonstrate, was distinct in its application of the criminal law. The following chapters will show that Britain’s capital

© The Author(s) 2018 l R.E. Bennett, Capital Punishment and the Criminal Corpse in Scotland, 1740-1834, Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its punishment history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not homogeneous, nor can the Scottish experience be assimilated into a more Anglo-centric narrative. When compared to their English counterparts, far fewer Scottish malefactors met their fate at the scaffold. This fact has been acknowledged by historians, and perhaps goes some way towards explaining the dearth in extensive studies focused upon Scotland. However, while the Scottish courts may have been discretionary in their use of the death sentence, they were not averse to using the full weight of the law. The study will demonstrate that an examination of Scotland’s capital punishment history in this period does reinforce certain themes and long-term developments highlighted within studies of England. However, in delving into the distinctions, this book will rethink elements of the British narrative and reveal distinct Scottish beliefs about capital punishment and, crucially, the role of the death sentence within the criminal justice system.

A central aim here is to chart the journey of offenders from the courtroom, where they would hear their lamentable fate, to the scaffold, where they would publicly suffer for their crimes and finally, for some, to the dissection table or the gibbet cage where post-mortem infamy would be inflicted upon their corpses to add further severity to the punishment of death. The study will explore the traditional hallmarks of gallows culture between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century including the procession to the place of execution and the deliverance of last dying speeches as well as providing an examination of execution practices in this period. Crucially, it will demonstrate how this period was one of debate and fundamental transition in the carrying out of the public execution spectacle. Furthermore, it will highlight that the enacting of additional punishments upon the body had been a penal option prior to the mid-eighteenth century but was used on a discretionary basis. However, the 1752 Murder Act (25 Geo II c.37) placed post-mortem punishment more squarely within the criminal justice system. It stipulated that the bodies of offenders executed for murder were to be either publicly dissected or hung in chains to “add some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy to the punishment of death.” Despite this, the post-mortem punishment of the criminal corpse has been largely neglected within histories of capital punishment until recently. Pioneering research into the subject has shed light upon the complex contemporary beliefs that existed surrounding the dead body and how they helped to shape the implementation of the post-mortem punishments of dissection and hanging in chains and the multitude of reactions they generated.! In examining the unique implementation of post-mortem punishment in Scotland, the current study will question its effects upon the condemned criminal and the spectator, and situate its usage within a wider examination of the changing nature of Scottish execution practices across this period.

EXPLORING THE HISTORIOGRAPHY

This introductory chapter will highlight the key themes and central research questions to be addressed throughout the study. However, it must first situate the current research within the vast body of secondary literature consulted in its development. As studies of capital punishment in Scotland in this period are very limited, this section will adopt a dual approach by demonstrating not only the originality of the study but also its historic relevance. It will first address Scotland’s unique position in the wake of the 1707 Union with England as, although they were governed by the same parliament, each country retained their own legal and court systems. In turn, research has shown that the British Parliament rarely passed criminal legislation for Scotland and that high-ranking members of the legal system were afforded a large degree of autonomy to deal with criminal matters north of the border.

The second part of this section will thematically explore the existing body of work focused upon the long-term developments in capital punishment and execution practices in England and Continental Europe. There is a considerable historical field focused upon the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the current study acknowledges that it is not possible to consult every work here. Instead, it has drawn out particularly pertinent key themes including the disappearance of older execution practices by the mid-eighteenth century and the decline in sanguine spectacles of pre-mortem suffering that were more characteristic of the Early Modern period. In addition, various works have demonstrated that this period was one of transition in terms of the theatre of the gallows and the carrying out of the public execution. An engagement with these broad developments in capital punishment and execution practices provides crucial context for the analyses conducted in subsequent chapters of this study.

When investigating the debates over the 1707 Act of Union, its provisions and its eventual passage through the two parliaments, historians have emphasised the importance of economic considerations on the part of the Scottish authorities for their acceptance of the act. For Queen Anne and the English Parliament, the major drivers for a political union with Scotland, to bolster the existing regnal union, were couched in concerns over the securing of the succession. There was a strong desire to quell the potential threat of Scotland being used as a stronghold for a rebellion in favour of the deposed male Stuart line.? Therefore, two of the most prominent institutions in Scotland, the Church and the legal system, were largely protected and afforded a degree of continued autonomy by the Articles of the Union in what Connolly termed an important “reassurance offered to Scottish sensibilities.” In addition, in the new British Parliament there were to be 45 Scottish Members in the House of Commons and 16 elected peers in the House of Lords. This brought the total number in the Commons to 558 as representation of England and Wales remained unchanged. Examining representation in Parliament per head of population, Hoppit demonstrated that the Union diminished Scottish representation. Furthermore, when investigating how Westminster legislated for the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland between 1707 and 1830, Innes showed that following their respective unions, Scotland with England in 1707 and Ireland with Britain in 1800, legislation relating to the latter two countries declined. For Scotland, the main criminal legislation passed in the eighteenth century dealt with unrest and peaked following the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and again with a few further acts passed following civil unrest towards the end of the eighteenth century.”

When examining the ways in which Scotland maintained a degree of autonomy following 1707, Paterson characterised the system of the governing of the country as “political management by the social elite whose values were moderation and rationalism.”° Similarly, Fry described the British influence in Scotland as being managed by “native Scottish surrogates.”” These elite men included the Lord Advocate, as the most senior member of the legal system, the Solicitor General and, on occasion, the Lord Justice Clerk and Justiciary Court judges, although they were answerable to a minister in London, from 1782 this was the Home Secretary. In 1725 various areas of Scotland, including Stirling, Dundee, Ayr, Elgin and most notably Glasgow, witnessed serious unrest following the introduction of the Malt Tax, from which Scotland had been exempted by Article XIII of the Union. General Wade and 400 dragoons were required to quell the riots. The Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas, was a key opponent of the tax and was dismissed from office over his handling of the situation. In London, the events were believed to have demonstrated Scotland’s inability, or unwillingness, to implement law and order on such a contentious issue and thus Robert Walpole appointed Islay Campbell, who would later inherit the Dukedom of Argyll, to manage Scottish affairs between the 1720s and 1761. He exercised great influence over Scottish MPs, ensuring political stability in Scotland for much of the period, but in return he had great patronage and authority to govern the country. The political management of Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century was vested in Henry Dundas, whose influence and powers of patronage resulted in him being referred to as the “uncrowned King of Scotland.”? In cases where a criminal had been capitally convicted and were sending petitions to London for a remission of the sentence, the opinion of the Lord Advocate was often solicited by both the petitioners and the authorities in London and could be pivotal in the decision-making process.

In addition to acknowledgements that Scotland maintained her distinct legal system in the wake of 1707, there have also been some investigations of the distinctions of this legal system. These studies include legal commentaries produced by Scottish writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that expounded the distinction of Scots law.!° The subject has also received the more recent attention of historians. With a specific focus upon Stirlingshire, Davies provided surveys of the different types of criminal courts that operated in Scotland in the century leading up to the abolition of the Heritable Jurisdictions in Scotland by an act in 1747 (20 Geo II c.43).1! In addition, works by Farmer, Connolly and Crowther have respectively examined the mechanics of Scots law in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They have explored some of the distinctions within the Scottish court system that were not as readily comparable to English practices, such as the heavier reliance upon common law and the system of public prosecution.!? An engagement with this body of work will allow the current study to advance our understanding of the distinctions between the English and the Scottish legal systems and to offer some explanations for Scotland’s lesser use of capital punishment, especially when compared to its southern counterpart.

In terms of works dedicated to the study of the use of the death sentence in Scotland in this period, responses to homicide have received some historical analysis. Kilday’s Women and Violent Crime offered a detailed analysis of female offenders in Lowland Scotland between 1750 and 1815 and included chapters dedicated to homicide and infanticide.!% More recently, Knox’s study of homicide in eighteenth-century Scotland provided a fresh perspective upon recorded and prosecuted levels of interpersonal violence in this period.!* In addition, quantitative surveys of Scottish crime in the first half of the nineteenth century using the parliamentary returns, which were available more regularly after 1836, include those of Donnachie, whose work presented some discussion of the punishment of property offences, and King’s work on homicide rates.!° King and Ward’s more recent study of the geography of capital punishment in the third quarter of the eighteenth century highlighted major regional variations in the use of hanging in Britain for property offences at the centre, namely in London and the Home Counties, and on the peripheries which included large parts of northern and western England as well as Wales and Scotland.!° Historical attention has also been afforded to the development of police courts in Scotland in the first third of the nineteenth century.!” In terms of studies of the types of punishments meted out to Scottish offenders, Young’s Encyclopaedia of Scottish Executions detailed the cases of some of the criminals executed in this period but does not appear to have been based upon a systematic analysis of the court records as it is incomplete.!* In addition, in his investigation of petty crimes committed within Scottish burgh societies during the Reformation period, Falconer explored the important interplay between inclusion and exclusion through the use of punishments that fell short of the death sentence but involved public displays of humiliation and the performance of public penitential acts in these local areas.!? Building upon the current historiography, this study provides the most extensive geographical and chronological examination to date of the implementation of the death sentence and the carrying out of capital punishment in this period.

Within the current historical field dedicated to the history of capital punishment, substantial attention has been given to the carrying out of the death sentence in England and Continental Europe in this period. Key themes include the theatre of the gallows, the behaviour of the condemned and the importance of the spectators to the spectacle.?° Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree remains the leading monograph cited by historians of English execution practices. He detailed various aspects of the execution spectacle and provided a qualitative analysis of the practicalities and potential effects of the scaffold from 1770 until executions were moved behind prison walls in 1868. Gatrell called for historians to further engage with what happened upon the scaffold, to get closer to the “choking, pissing and screaming than taboo, custom or comfort usually allow”, to gain an understanding of its importance and how contemporaries felt about it.?! A central element of the public execution in this period was the crowd in attendance. Sharpe argued that there was little evidence of any great ceremony attending executed criminals in the Late Middle Ages but cited an elaboration of the scaffold ritual in the mid-sixteenth century owing to a desire on the part of the authorities to use it as a means of ideological control.?? Similarly, in his study of capital punishment in Germany, Evans found that executions were not ceremonial affairs until the late seventeenth century.?? In France, although there was a great deal of interest in Early Modern executions, Friedland regarded the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as marking the high point of a “public fascination with watching executions.”?* Banner also highlighted similarities between practices in Europe and the American colonies. He found that executions in the eighteenth century were conducted in big, open spaces to accommodate large crowds and included processions and last dying speeches as was customary in Britain.?®

Prior to the eighteenth century, the importance attached to the death sentence has been linked to the long-term process of state formation between c.1400 and c.1700 in Western Europe. Due to a quest for stabilisation, emerging states sought a means by which to maintain control and thus used the death penalty. Garland distinguished between three eras of capital punishment in the West: The Early Modern, the Modern and the Late Modern. Within this, he characterised the Early Modern period as the “heyday of capital punishment” in terms of both the level of executions but also the manner in which they were carried out.?° In France, Friedland charted the development of punishments increasingly spectacular and violent in nature, such as drawing and quartering, boiling alive, live burial and breaking on/with the wheel which formed the basis of Early Modern execution ritual.2”7 The ‘Scottish Maiden’, a similar mechanism to the ‘Halifax Gibbet’ used in West Yorkshire in England, was something of a precursor to the more infamous guillotine used in late eighteenth-century Revolutionary France. Now housed in the National Museum of Scotland, the ‘Maiden’ was introduced in mid-sixteenth-century Edinburgh to enact, and possibly to add further ceremony to, the punishment of decapitation for certain offences. Its last recorded use occurred in 1716.

An additional method of execution used in several Early Modern countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, France and Scotland, was breaking on/with the wheel. The executions involved tying the condemned down before the executioner proceeded to break their bones and limbs. The punishment could be conducted ‘from below’ where the executioner would begin at the legs and work their way to the head, a prolonged and agonising death, or the perceived more merciful breaking ‘from above’ where a blow to the head was intended to kill the person first. The punishment remained the standard form of prolonged execution in Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.** There are a few examples of the punishment being used against murderers in Scotland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is apparent that the condemned suffered the more prolonged execution and their point of death was unclear as the bodies were left on the wheel for a whole day.?? However, between the Early Modern period and the mid-nineteenth century, which marked the beginning of his Modern period, Garland argued that the primary purpose of capital punishment altered from being an instrument of rule, which was essential to state security, to becoming an instrument of penal policy with a narrower focus of “doing justice and controlling crime.”°° Within this transition, despite the continued importance and ceremony attached to the public execution, more overt displays of prolonged physical suffering declined.

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish remains one of the pioneering works within the historiography of crime and punishment. His opening chapter detailed the prolonged execution, through quartering, of the wouldbe regicide Robert Damiens in 1757. He contrasted this with the more regimented running of a house for young prisoners in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century in order to form the basis for his discussion of the shift from the public punishment of the body to the more private attempts at the reformation of the mind.*! However, subsequent historians have demonstrated that the journey from the scaffold to the prison did not follow such a linear trajectory.** Within this, the manner in which certain forms of executions were carried out was adapted over time. In some countries, burial alive and the drowning of women rapidly diminished in frequency, and decapitation, which had once been reserved only for the nobility, came to be used for a wider group of offenders.** Burning, following trials for witchcraft ceased between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Similarly, the burning of women for treason and petty treason in England was increasingly mitigated by the executioner strangling them first.*4 In Prussia in 1749 Friedrich I issued a decree stating that the objective of the punishment of breaking on the wheel was “not to torment the criminal but rather to make a frightful example of him in order to arouse repugnance in others.” Therefore, unless the case was utterly abhorrent, the criminal would be strangled by the executioner prior to their bodies being broken on the wheel. However, this was to be done in secret, without attracting the attention of the crowd, again demonstrating that the ceremony of the punishment remained an important element of the execution ritual, although increasingly this did not include prolonged pre-mortem suffering.*®

When questioning the gradual changes that occurred to execution practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we need to situate the study within the historiography focused upon the changing sensibilities of the execution crowd. German sociologist Elias argued that a long-term civilising process had occurred in Western Europe between the medieval period and the twentieth century. Through a detailed analysis of the changes to everyday manners and behaviours he provided an explanatory framework for changes in social organisation.*° Although he did not place capital punishment into his model, subsequent historians have acknowledged his study when attempting to understand the changing crowd reactions to the public execution.*” However, they have also shown that these changes cannot be solely attributed to the idea that as people became more civilised they began to view capital punishment with disdain. In his study of judicial punishment in England between the mid-sixteenth and late twentieth centuries, Sharpe argued that there was no “simple unilineal development, no simple progress from barbarity to humanity.”°° Furthermore, in his examination of penal thinking during the English Enlightenment, Cockburn highlighted how eighteenth-century commentators acknowledged the brutality of elements of traditional gallows culture but relegated them to an “earlier and unenlightened era of violence and insensitivity.”°° However, he demonstrated that this Enlightenment idea of a newly sensitised society, wherein witnessing the execution spectacle could actually be counter-productive, concealed cultural continuities in how people responded to the gallows and the government’s failure to develop a coherent penal policy on the implementation of judicial violence. For example, with their passing of the Murder Act, Sharpe argued that the government gave further momentum to the fashion of attending executions and knowingly provoked further violence.*? Subsequent chapters of the current study will demonstrate how the stipulations of the act harnessed anxieties over the treatment of the dead body for the ends of punishment and could provoke negative crowd reactions.

In his study of ritual in Early Modern Europe, Muir labelled the public execution as one of several examples of “carnivalesque rites of violence.” However, he attributed the gradual decline of public judicial rituals of punishment towards the end of the Early Modern period to an “expanding sensibility to the shame of violence even when violence was inflicted on the criminally culpable.” His framework of analysis is particularly pertinent to the current study’s discussion of the gradual changes that occurred to the staging of the public execution as he argued that, as the authorities abandoned ritual punishments, they became less tolerant to popular rites, such as public executions, that had the potential to lead to violent disorder.*! This broadly resonates with Foucault’s argument that, by the early nineteenth century, bodily punishment had gradually ceased to be a spectacle and that the theatrical elements of public executions were downgraded as part of a shift in how penal ceremony was understood.*?

In his investigation of the criticism levelled at the public execution in the mid-eighteenth century, McGowen stressed the changes in the way respectable society viewed the spectacle. He proposed that they had begun to lose faith in the deterrent value of the scaffold and that this was due to a “class dimension that was not reducible to psychological states.”4° These shifts in attitudes may have signalled respectable society’s desire to distance itself from the execution spectacle, whether from an ideological or a spatial stance. However, Gatrell argued that, by the mid-eighteenth century, curiosity had become a “valued element in the sympathetic sensibility” and was retained as an alibi for attendance at the public execution by people of various social standings into the 1830s.*# Furthermore, the subsequent chapters of the current study will show that, while we cannot accurately depict the composition of each execution crowd or its response to the gallows scene, we must acknowledge that public executions continued to attract large and diverse crowds throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition, this study will present a further dynamic to the history of the crowd and the public execution by questioning their reactions to the post-mortem punishment of the body. It will demonstrate that there were examples of adverse attitudes towards the punishments of dissection and hanging in chains which led to open attempts to prevent them, even though the execution of the criminal had occurred with no reported unrest.

STRUCTURING THE NARRATIVE

The study commences in the mid-eighteenth century when the Union was over three decades old and had begun to provide some of the economic benefits desired by the Scots. However, Scotland remained legally, culturally and socially distinct and nowhere were these distinctions more acute than in the Highlands. During the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, it was in the Highlands that the deposed Stuarts gained most of their support and they employed anti-Union rhetoric to stir the existing resistance to central government control in the area. However, with the decisive defeat of the rebels at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, came a renewed and vigorous determination to suppress elements of Highland culture believed to have made the area a hive for unrest, and then to permanently establish central government control, including over jurisdiction within the criminal courts. The year 1747 marked the final step, in the long-term dismantling of the older Scottish judicial system, with the abolition of Heritable Jurisdictions.

The mid-eighteenth century also witnessed the passing of the Murder Act in 1752 which placed the post-mortem punishment of the criminal corpse at the centre of the criminal justice system’s response to homicide. The act was passed at a time of increased execution levels in Scotland and in England and was intended to add some further severity to the punishment of death. The study ends in 1834 as this year saw an act (4 & 5 Will. IV c.26) passed to formally abolish the penal option to hang an offender’s body in chains. As the dissection of criminal bodies had already been abolished by the 1832 Anatomy Act (2 & 3 Will. IV c.75), the year 1834 marked the final repeal of the clauses set out in the Murder Act. Despite the importance of these specific dates in bookending the study, these chronological parameters also allow the book to demonstrate that the period between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century was one of debate and transition in the use of the death sentence and one of fundamental change in the carrying out of the public execution spectacle in Scotland.