The story of James and John – the last two men to be hanged for homosexuality
It was not just ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, in the words of Oscar Wilde’s lover.
In mid-19th century Britain, sex between men was still the crime that dare not speak its name.
When a new law was introduced in 1826 making it easier to convict for sodomy, Sir Robert Peel did not even say ‘the crime against Christians not to be named’ in English – opting instead for Latin.
Despite the widespread disgust at even uttering the offence, hundreds of men were still being given the death penalty for it.
England had the worst record in Europe. Most other countries had never executed anybody for homosexuality and those that did had stopped centuries before.
Yet between 1806 and 1835, 404 men were given the death penalty here for sodomy, with 56 sent to the gallows.
The last of those, James Pratt and John Smith, were hanged at the infamous Newgate prison in November of that year.
Sir Chris Bryant, the long-serving Labour MP who became the first person to celebrate a same-sex union in the Palace of Westminster in 2010, has written a book about the two men, James and John.
In it, he recounts the story of the pair – ‘just two more victims of an era of spectacularly cruel and bloodthirsty prejudice’ – and explores why England hated homosexuality.
Speaking to Metro, Bryant says: ‘In 1835, we had a government that was changing lots of things.
‘The voting system had been changed to make it less corrupt, you had a new Factories Act trying to limit how many hours kids could work and things like that.
‘But the one thing nobody seemed to want to change was the law on homosexuality, which still said that sodomy was a capital offence.
‘And while lots of other things were capital offences, what tended to happen for everything else – including burglary, theft and all that kind of stuff – you would be sentenced to death but then you would be reprieved.
‘What is shocking about this particular story is that so many other people were sentenced to death at Newgate but these were the only two men that were hanged. Everyone else was reprieved.’
So obsessed were we that visitors from overseas began noticing how English men – who used to greet each other by kissing on the cheek – now shook hands for fear of being suspected.
The condemned, James and John, were both working class men who had worked as servants.
Very little is known of either man, but the scant records that do exist show James Pratt was originally from Great Burstead in Essex.
He was married to wife Elizabeth, with whom he had a daughter, by the time of his fateful meeting with John Smith, originally from Worcester, on August 29, 1835.
After heading into London for lunch with a couple of friends, he made his way to a rented room belonging to William Bonnell in Southwark and was let in by Smith.
Bonnell’s landlords, John and Jane Berkshire, were already suspicious of him and would later tell the three men’s trial at the Old Bailey he frequently took men to his room, often in pairs.
Those doubts apparently piqued once more, Mr Berkshire clambered up into the loft of the stable next door and punched out one of the tiles to get a view inside the room.
‘That’s where he sees James and John sitting on each other’s lap,’ Bryant says.
‘He thinks no more about it and then his wife goes upstairs and looks through the keyhole which is when she sees James and John having sex.
‘She runs downstairs, gets her husband to come back upstairs, he looks through the keyhole, sees the same, shoves open the door and goes and demands the police come and arrest them.’
The two men offer up their purses to be let go but Mr Berkshire got one of the other lodgers to stand guard while he went to find a constable.
‘They must have been absolutely terrified,’ Bryant adds.
‘Because they would have known that this was a hanging offence.’
The three men were marched to the local police office and put before the magistrate, who remanded them in custody at Surrey County Gaol to await trial.
They were then moved to Newgate – ‘the most horrific prison of the lot’.
Referred to as ‘Hell above ground’, it was filthy, damp and overcrowded with prisoners having nothing but straw to use as bedding.
‘The irony was that there were so many men and they were lying with only about six inches between them, it seems there was quite a lot of shenanigans,’ Bryant points out.
Pratt’s only relief would have been visits from Elizabeth, who had to queue up with around 150 other people each time.
There is nothing in the records to suggest Smith or Bonnell received similar visits.
The three men were taken to the Old Bailey in late September. In front of them sat two alderman, the Recorder of London and the judge, Sir John Gurney.
‘They were probably in the smartest room they had ever been in in their life with all the power and privilege shown by all the vestments the judges were wearing and the lawyers and so on, crowd in the gallery,’ Bryant says.
‘It would have been very, very intimidating. It was designed to be intimidating.’
Unlike the system we recognise today, judges then acted more like the lead prosecutor in a case rather than an impartial arbiter. And defence lawyers could not actually advocate for their clients.
The men had no idea what to say other than to plead not guilty. An admission to the charge would have meant the death penalty without any prospect of mercy.
Mr Berkshire was the first witness, recalling what he had spied through his makeshift looking hole.
His wife followed him, telling the jury of predominantly shopkeepers she had seen Smith’s ‘private parts’, which she said were ‘moving’.
Next came the policeman, who claimed to have seen a substance resembling semen on Pratt’s shirt, thereby proving ejaculation as required by the law.
With nobody to represent them, the three men could only repeat their pleas.
The entire defence case amounted to 14 words – Pratt’s ‘I am not guilty’, Smith’s ‘I am innocent of the charge’, and Bonnell’s ‘I am quite innocent’.
The indictment alone ran to some 585 words and took nearly six minutes to read out – only slightly shorter than the eight minutes an average trial took to complete.
More men had been acquitted of sodomy at the Old Bailey than were convicted in the 25 years before their trial.
Yet the jury did not even bother retiring before finding the three of them guilty – Pratt and Smith for the ‘felony’ offence and Bonnell for facilitating.
Sentencing fell to the Recorder of London, the Old Bailey’s most senior judge, who was then Charles Ewan Law.
‘He’d just been elected a Conservative MP that summer, and one of the first things that he did was table amendment to make it easier to get convictions for attempted sodomy,’ Bryant says.
‘We know what kind of man he was and what his interests were, but it’s extraordinary that when it comes to the sentencing there are lots of people who are to be sentenced to death – I think 15 of them – but he takes just the two of them to one side and does them separately because he says otherwise the other criminals could be contaminated by standing next to James and John.’
Law had yet to oversee a single execution, and Bryant says all the records suggest he was keen that this would finally be his moment.
Even at the very end he sought to further intimidate and humiliate the pair.
Reports at the time state they were reduced to tears during Law’s tirade, in which he implored them to seek mercy from God, ‘as they stood upon the brink of eternity, guilty of offences which hardly excite a tear of pity for their fate, and in consideration of which in a British country mercy had ever been a stranger’.
Condemned prisoners could not be put to death until the Recorder had presented a report to the King and Privy Council.
Elizabeth wrote to him, including in her letter the signatures of 50 neighbours and local business people all pleading for a reprieve. Even the Berkshires signed it.
The magistrate who committed them to the Old Bailey in the first place, Hensleigh Wedgwood, did too.
He stated: ‘The detection of these degraded creatures was owing entirely to their poverty, they were unable to pay for privacy and the room was so poor that what was going on inside was easily visible from without.’
Bryant says it was ‘one of the most moving and commonsensical letters of the period, and brave too’.
But neither was included in the Recorder’s report.
‘I think he wanted a hanging and this would do,’ Bryant says.
‘It was judicial murder, because there wasn’t a fair trial. There wasn’t a fair appeal process because the appeal was to the Privy Council and the King and they never even saw the proper evidence.
‘They hadn’t even seen Elizabeth’s letter, let alone Hensleigh Wedgwood’s letter. So of course it was judicial murder – the process had killed them.’
But Bryant also writes that ‘it takes a whole kingdom to hang a man’.
‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘Because you need a legal system to operate in the way that it did. You need laws set by Parliament to require the death penalty and fight to keep it.
‘You need crowds gathering for the execution out in the street. You need individual lawyers who are prepared to make those arguments, and it is clear that this was a pretty popular policy at the time.
‘So, it felt as if the whole nation was gathered and approved.
‘But it’s interesting that this was the last – and maybe it did suddenly make certain politicians at least think hang on, is this right?
‘After this point, people were still sentenced to death but they were always reprieved and transported either to Botany Bay or Van Diemen’s Land.’
In his introduction, Bryant says he wrote the book not only to tell the story of James and John, but ‘to point out that the freedoms we enjoy today carry no guarantee of permanence’.
Homosexuality was still a criminal offence when he was born and remains one in 34 of the 54 nations in the Commonwealth. You can still be executed for it in nine nations around the world.
‘It’s quite shocking,’ he says.
‘You have to be careful that the freedoms and the liberties that we have today are not necessarily guaranteed forever, which is why I think Pride and that movement is so important.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.