send to the scaffold

English

Verb

send to the scaffold (third-person singular simple present sends to the scaffold, present participle sending to the scaffold, simple past and past participle sent to the scaffold)

1. To sentence to be hanged.
   • 1872, William Russell, William Jones, From the peace of Paris in 1763 to the Treaty of Amiens in 1802:

     The unfortunate widow of Louis XVI. was the first who was sent to the scaffold by the sanguinary tribunal of the revolution.

   • 1937, T. Arthur Plummer, The Bonfire Murder, page 348:

     Three men were sent to the scaffold—the Brothers Stanbourn (although a great fight was put up by Richard Stanbourn's counsel) for the slaying of William Jones and (in the case of Joseph Stanbourn) of Arthur Marsh.

   • 2018, Loren D. Estleman, The Branch and the Scaffold and Billy Gashade:

     He had seen often the traces of dust on the judge's knees after he had prayed for the souls of the men he had sent to the scaffold.

2. To cause someone to be condemned to be hanged.
   • 1845, George Newenham Wright, Jules Janin, Eugène Louis Lami, France Illustrated:

     On the other hand, how could the peerage — which had been the support of the now subverted throne, and which, perhaps, had secretly shared its hopes and its delirium — how could it escape public disgrace, if, too obedient to popular malice, a malice which had been accumulating since 1815, it sent to the scaffold the king's ministers, deputies, peers of France, men of their own rank and standard?

   • 1896, Albert Ross, Linn Boyd Porter, His Foster Sister, page 97:

     I understand, of course, why you are anxious to get this thing without disagreeable consequences to yourself. You regard it as one of the links in a chain that may some day send you to the scaffold.

   • 1972, Raymond Blaine Fosdick, The League and the United Nations After Fifty Years, page 19:

     The Drummonds were an old family who had provided Scotland with two Queens, and had always strongly supported the Stuarts, a loyalty that had sent some of its members into exile and others to the scaffold.