‘In no country,’ wrote Sir T. Smith, a distinguished lawyer of the time, ‘do malefactors go to execution more intrepidly than in England’; and assuredly, buoyed up by custom and the approval of their fellows, Wild’s victims made a brave show at the gallows.  Nor was their bravery the result of a common callousness.  They understood at once the humour and the delicacy of the situation.  Though hitherto they had chaffed the Ordinary, they now listened to his exhortation with at least a semblance of respect; and though their last night upon earth might have been devoted to a joyous company, they did not withhold their ear from the Bellman’s Chant.  As twelve o’clock approached—­their last midnight upon earth—­they would interrupt the most spirited discourse, they would check the tour of the mellowest bottle to listen to the solemn doggerel.  ‘All you that in the condemn’d hole do lie,’ groaned the Bellman of St. Sepulchre’s in his duskiest voice, and they who held revel in the condemned hole prayed silence of their friends for the familiar cadences: 

     All you that in the condemn’d hole do lie,
     Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die,
     Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near,
     That you before th’ Almighty must appear. 
     Examine well yourselves, in time repent
     That you may not t’ eternal flames be sent;
     And when St. Pulchre’s bell to-morrow tolls,
     The Lord above have mercy on your souls. 
     Past twelve o’clock!

Even if this warning voice struck a momentary terror into their offending souls, they were up betimes in the morning, eager to pay their final debt.  Their journey from Newgate to Tyburn was a triumph, and their vanity was unabashed at the droning menaces of the Ordinary.  At one point a chorus of maidens cast wreaths upon their way, or pinned nosegays in their coats, that they might not face the executioner unadorned.  At the Crown Tavern they quaffed their last glass of ale, and told the landlord with many a leer and smirk that they would pay him on their way back.  Though gravity was asked, it was not always given; but in the Eighteenth Century courage was seldom wanting.  To the common citizen a violent death was (and is) the worst of horrors; to the ancient highwayman it was the odd trick lost in the game of life.  And the highwayman endured the rope, as the practised gambler loses his estate, without blenching.  One there was, who felt his leg tremble in his own despite:  wherefore he stamped it upon the ground so violently, that in other circumstances he would have roared with pain, and he left the world without a tremor.  In this spirit Cranmer burnt his recreant right hand, and in either case the glamour of a unique occasion was a stimulus to courage.