The time had come to say good-bye for the last time. Peace asked his
weeping relatives whether they had anything more that they wished to ask
him. Mrs. Peace reminded him that he had promised to pray with them
at the last. Peace, ever ready, knelt with them and prayed for half an
hour. He then shook hands with them, prayed for and blessed each one
singly, and himself gave way to tears as they left his presence. To his
wife as she departed Peace gave a funeral card of his own designing. It
ran:

In
Memory
of
Charles Peace
Who was executed in
Armley Prison
Tuesday February 25th,
1879 Aged 47

For that I don but never
Intended.

The same day there arrived in the prison one who in his own trade had
something of the personality and assurance of the culprit he was to
execute. William Marwood--unlike his celebrated victim, he has his place
in the Dictionary of National Biography--is perhaps the most remarkable
of these persons who have held at different times the office of public
executioner. As the inventor of the "long drop," he has done a lasting
service to humanity by enabling the death-sentence passed by the judge
to be carried out with the minimum of possible suffering. Marwood took a
lofty view of the office he held, and refused his assent to the somewhat
hypocritical loathing, with which those who sanction and profit by his
exertions are pleased to regard this servant of the law. "I am doing
God's work," said Marwood, "according to the divine command and the
law of the British Crown. I do it simply as a matter of duty and as
a Christian. I sleep as soundly as a child and am never disturbed by
phantoms. Where there is guilt there is bad sleeping, but I am conscious
that I try to live a blameless life. Detesting idleness, I pass
my vacant time in business (he was a shoemaker at Horncastle, in
Lincolnshire) and work in my shoeshop near the church day after day
until such time as I am required elsewhere. It would have been better
for those I executed if they had preferred industry to idleness."

Marwood had not the almost patriarchal air of benevolent respectability
which his predecessor Calcraft had acquired during a short experience
as a family butler; but as an executioner that kindly old gentleman
had been a sad bungler in his time compared with the scientific and
expeditious Marwood. The Horncastle shoemaker was saving, businesslike,
pious and thoughtful.