Francis Towneley and several other captured Jacobite officers involved in the Jacobite Rising of 1745 were executed, but by then the executioner possessed some discretion as to how much they should suffer and thus they were killed before their bodies were eviscerated. The French spy François Henri de la Motte was hanged in 1781 for almost an hour before his heart was cut out and burned, and the following year David Tyrie was hanged, decapitated, and then quartered at Portsmouth. Pieces of his corpse were fought over by members of the 20,000-strong crowd there, some making trophies of his limbs and fingers. In 1803 Edward Despard and six co-conspirators in the Despard Plot were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Before they were hanged and beheaded at Horsemonger Lane Gaol, they were first placed on sledges attached to horses, and ritually pulled in circuits around the gaol yards. Their execution was attended by an audience of about 20,000. A contemporary report describes the scene after Despard had made his speech:  At the burnings of Isabella Condon in 1779 and Phoebe Harris in 1786, the sheriffs present inflated their expenses; in the opinion of Simon Devereaux they were probably dismayed at being forced to attend such spectacles. Harris's fate prompted William Wilberforce to sponsor a bill which if passed would have abolished the practice, but as one of its proposals would have allowed the anatomical dissection of criminals other than murderers, the House of Lords rejected it. The burning in 1789 of Catherine Murphy, a counterfeiter, was impugned in Parliament by Sir Benjamin Hammett. He called it one of "the savage remains of Norman policy". Amidst a growing tide of public disgust at the burning of women, Parliament passed the Treason Act 1790, which for women guilty of treason substituted hanging for burning. It was followed by the Treason Act 1814, introduced by Samuel Romilly, a legal reformer. Influenced by his friend, Jeremy Bentham, Romilly had long argued that punitive laws should serve to reform criminal behaviour and that far from acting as a deterrent, the severity of England's laws was responsible for an increase in crime. When appointed the MP for Queensborough in 1806 he resolved to improve what he described as "Our sanguinary and barbarous penal code, written in blood". He managed to repeal the death penalty for certain thefts and vagrancy, and in 1814 proposed to change the sentence for men guilty of treason to being hanged until dead and the body left at the king's disposal.