Arrest of the Body After Death
It was long erroneously believed that the body of a debtor might be taken in execution, in this country, after his or her death. Such, however, was the practice in Prussia, till its abolition by the Code Frédérique.
The above idle notion we remember to have been repeated in connexion with the pecuniary embarrassments of Sheridan, at the time of his death, in 1816. It may have been fostered through the mis-reading of an account of a sheriff’s officer arresting the dying man in his bed; “he would have carried him off in his blankets, had not Dr. Bain assured him it was too probable his prisoner would expire on the way to the lock-up house!” After Sheridan’s death, the removal of his remains from Savile-row to Mr. Peter Moore’s house, in George-street, Westminster, to be near the Abbey for interment, more probably led to the story that the body was removed to escape arrest.