England in the late eighteenth century had witnessed the highpoint of hanging. In the nineteenth century Peel and more radical reformers such as Romilly and Mackintosh had successfully restricted its ambit, until by 1861 only murder, treason, piracy with violence, and arson in the royal dockyards were deemed worthy of death. Progress thereafter stymied. In the eyes of public moralists such as Dickens and Thackeray, the worst excesses of public hangings – the lewd deportment of the crowds who came to gawk and get drunk – were removed after 1868 by confining all hangings behind prison doors. The process was sanitised, the procedure was carried out with solemnity and decorum and with the imprimatur and involvement of the Established Church, the numbers of those hanged were few, the offences for which they hanged were grave. It was Bill Sykes who was hanged for committing murder, no longer the Artful Dodger for picking pockets.

It was not until after the Great War that agitation to abolish the death penalty was revived, this time with political support. Newly elected MPs secured the establishment of a House of Commons Committee on Capital Punishment. The demise of the Labour government in 1931, however, put paid to further parliamentary progress. In the fraught and fear-filled 1930s such interest in abolition as persisted was kept alive by an unlikely duo: a leading socialist intellectual and future archbishop of Canterbury, and an eccentric millionairess with a suspect foreign name.

William Temple was a novelty: an eminent Anglican divine who actually opposed capital punishment. This was significant. Fines or imprisonment did not require religious sanction. Capital punishment always did. Both proponents and opponents relied on scripture. Its clerical defenders, from Archdeacon Paley in the eighteenth century to Archbishop Fisher in the twentieth, resolutely upheld its practical efficacy and its Old Testament imprimatur.