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CHOICE Review

Potter, a retired prison chaplain with degrees in history, theology, and law, analyzes religious attitudes to capital punishment in England from the early 1700s to the last hanging in 1969. He argues that the penalty's most ardent partisans were clergy, especially those of the Church of England. Anglican clergymen viewed hanging for murder as scripturally ordained, necessary to protect society from evil, and a deterrent to crime and violence. They also considered each execution as a unique opportunity to save a lost soul from damnation. Clerical advocacy diminished in the mid-20th century with changing perspectives toward the Bible and waning faith in an afterlife. Most opponents of the death sentence before the 1950s were laymen, especially Quakers and freethinkers. Based on exhaustive research in public and Anglican Church records, pro- and anti-hanging propaganda, and memoirs of prison chaplains, this book complements David D. Cooper's The Lesson of the Scaffold (CH, Apr'75) and James B. Christoph's Capital Punishment and British Politics (1962). Includes a chronology. All levels. D. M. Cregier; University of Prince Edward Island