For a few years in the 1760s and 1770s one of the best-known preachers in London was a clergyman who dressed well, spent freely and moved among the court. William Dodd ended on the gallows at Tyburn, and the public that had admired him spent his last weeks trying to save him.
The Horror
Dodd was born at Bourne in Lincolnshire in 1729, the son of the local vicar, and studied at Cambridge. In 1752 he published The Beauties of Shakespeare, which brought him fame. He was ordained, became a popular preacher, and in 1758 took the post of chaplain to the Magdalen Hospital, a charity for penitent prostitutes. In 1763 he was made chaplain in ordinary to the King. He lived extravagantly and was nicknamed the “Macaroni Parson”, a macaroni being a London fop.
The money ran out. In 1774 he tried to bribe Lady Apsley to obtain the rectorship of St George’s, Hanover Square. He was dismissed from his posts and went to France. When he returned, in February 1777, he forged a bond for £4,200 in the name of his former pupil, the Earl of Chesterfield, to clear his debts. A banker noticed a small blot on the document and had it rewritten. When the clean copy was put in front of the Earl to sign, the forgery came out. Dodd confessed at once and was held in the Wood Street Compter. Forgery was a capital crime.
What followed became a public campaign. A petition of 37 pages, carrying about 23,000 signatures, asked for mercy. Samuel Johnson was among those who supported him, and he wrote several papers in Dodd’s defence. He also wrote, in large part, the sermon “The Convict’s Address to his unhappy Brethren”, which Dodd presented as his own. When people suspected that Johnson was the author, he is reported to have made his well-known remark that the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man’s mind. The petition failed.
Dodd was hanged at Tyburn on June 27, 1777, aged 48, beside a youth who had stolen thirty shillings. Lincolnshire Life says the crowds delayed the journey by three hours, and that attempts to revive him in a hot bath failed. Executed Today, citing Wendy Moore, also records a resuscitation attempt, with no more detail. Beyond the fact of the attempt, the circumstances are unconfirmed.
The Modern Relic
Executed Today calls Dodd the last person hanged at Tyburn for forgery. That claim is unconfirmed. It is also often said that his case helped turn opinion against the number of offences carrying the death penalty. That is unconfirmed too, and it is an interpretation, not a record.
The one object that can be seen is a bronze bust of Dodd on a marble pedestal in the Library-Dining Room at Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The museum’s catalogue records that Soane bought it in 1825. It does not give the sculptor or the date it was made, and it does not describe the likeness.
