EARLY CHRONICLES OF TYBURN
Of all the fashionable folk who roll by in their carriages from the
West-end to Hyde Park, and enter by the gates at Marble Arch to join
the gay throng, so full of life and animation; of all the hurrying
populace who pass in omnibuses or on foot towards Bayswater, or turn
the sharp corner where the traffic flows in an unceasing stream up the
Edgware Road,—how many, I wonder, ever pause at the three cross roads
to give a moment’s thought to the fact that this was Tyburn?
How many among them are even aware of the fact?
This is the blackest spot in all the wide extent of the Metropolis,—the
most tragic, if not the most historical, spot in all England. Memories
of the illustrious dead,—sacrificed to the ambitions, jealousies, and
vindictive hatred of monarchs in a ruder age, hallow that quiet space
on Tower Hill where the heads of so many statesmen and warriors, nobles
and bishops, rolled in the sawdust. That is marked off by a little
square of bricks surrounded by railed-in gardens—a pleasant patch of
green amid the tall warehouses which crowd upon it on all sides, save
where the gaunt grey walls of the fortress rise.
[Illustration: The Marble Arch (formerly Tyburn) at three o’clock in
the morning.]
The execution ground within the Tower, beneath the shadow of the little
church of St. Peter-in-Chains, calls to mind only some of the most
sympathetic names in history; gentle Anne Boleyn, the heroic Countess
of Salisbury, and the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey.
Tyburn has other associations. Martyrs have perished here, bigots
have suffered, Society has found its victims, and punishment has been
dealt out for villainy and crime in its most unattractive forms. Such
sensational fame as the place may claim rests upon the exploits and
end of Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild, “Sixteen-Stringed Jack,” and the
ghastly indignities heaped by Charles II. upon the bodies of Cromwell
and the regicides.
Few will recognise the old “Tyburn Road” in modern Oxford Street,
with its huge drapery and furniture emporiums, and the attractions
which bring so large a part of the populace to shop there. A century
and a half ago this was a country road, along which the two-wheeled,
springless carts passed from Newgate with their escorts of sheriffs,
officers, and marshalmen conveying condemned men to execution.
What can be farther from the sordid associations of “Tyburn Lane” than
Park Lane of to-day, in all its wealth and luxury? Along here the
crowds surged in thousands going to witness the turning off at Tyburn’s
“Triple Tree” of many a handsome, dashing gentleman of the road, a
darling of the populace.
One will find these old names marked in maps of a century ago, but
may search a London Directory of to-day in vain for the name of any
street, passage, or alley of which Tyburn formed a part.
The town has grown over the place, and Tyburnia, as the district used
to be called, has been altered out of recognition. Possibly a few of
the old elms along the course of the West-bourne may still rock in
the winds which blow across Hyde Park. The ditch in one part has been
transformed into the Serpentine, elsewhere it has been filled and the
ground levelled. The Ty-bourne, if it flows at all, flows underground
through the sewers. Tyburn turnpike, where tolls were taken on entering
London, disappeared in the early part of the nineteenth century, and
its site is marked by the zero milestone of London.
The famous hanging-place has nothing left by which it can be recognised.
It is a common idea that hanging as a means of punishment is
comparatively modern. People have even placed its origin within our own
historic times. Instead, it is very old indeed, dating back certainly
to the Mosaic Law, which was thus delivered by Moses to the Israelites
(Deut. xxi. 22):
“And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to
death, and thou hang him on a tree; his body shall not remain all night
upon the tree, but thou shalt surely bury him the same day; for he that
is hanged is accursed of God; that thou defile not the land which the
Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.”
The earliest record of the punishment being actually carried out is
found in the Book of Numbers (xxv.), on the occasion of the Israelites
having sacrificed to the gods of the Moabites at Baal-peor, when Moses
received and put into effect the Divine command to hang the leaders in
the acts of idolatry.
Later, when a famine was raging in the land of Israel, David handed
over to the Gibeonites seven of the sons of Saul, whom they hanged.
Another instance of punishment by hanging is found in the Book
of Esther (ix.), when King Ahasuerus condemned the ambitious and
unprincipled Haman to be hanged on the gallows he had prepared for the
Jew Mordecai; and at the request of Queen Esther the same punishment
was meted out to his ten sons.
Hanging was regulated by law by Henry I., but the earliest recorded
use of the rope in England can be traced to the days of Henry II. This
questionable distinction belongs to the town of Malden, which, in the
year 1167, “was amerced three marks for having hanged a robber without
such view,” that is to say, the approval of the King’s Sergeant.
Eight years later, Andrew Bucquinte, a thief, who had carried out
numerous robberies in the City of London, was sentenced to be hanged,
“which was done, and the Citie became more quiet”; while the later
chroniclers give full details, which had been passed on to them, of the
death in 1196 of William FitzOsbert, or “Longbeard.” Matthew Paris,
Stow, and Hollinshed all name “the Elms” as the place of hanging. Roger
de Wendover records that Longbeard was drawn to the gallows “near
Tyburn,” and there hanged with nine of his followers.
This would seem to be the first authentic account of an execution
by hanging at Tyburn, though, in fact, it is very doubtful—Roger de
Wendover notwithstanding—if Longbeard met his fate at Tyburn. “The
Elms” was the name given to the hanging-place at Smithfield long before
the law’s last penalty was demanded at Tyburn, and at the “Elms, at
Smithfield,” a century after Longbeard’s death, William Wallace was
hanged and quartered in 1305.
The name seems to have been carried to Tyburn when hangings were
transferred there, and for a time the two execution-grounds flourished
simultaneously.
Longbeard was the first of a line of romantic impostors who attracted
admirers by hundreds, and ended their days under the gallows. He
represented to Richard I. that the wealthy citizens of London were
oppressing the poor; he preached to the masses, proclaiming that he
was their saviour, and that to him they must look for deliverance.
Richard listened to his story. This so encouraged him that he “had
gotten two and fiftie thousand persons readie to have taken his
part,” and all rich people went in fear of their lives. Summoned to
appear before the Archbishop of Canterbury for inciting to rebellion,
Longbeard was accompanied by so many followers that the Prelate dared
not deliver sentence. He then retired, with his paramour, to the Tower
of St. Mary-le-Bow, which he had previously provisioned and fortified.
Ignoring all the Archbishop’s commands to appear, it was only when the
church had been assaulted and set on fire that, driven out by smoke and
flames, he surrendered. He was dragged to the Tower, and thence to the
final scene.
Longbeard was a man of evil life, but the poor looked upon him as
a martyr, and, Stow says, “pared away the earth that was be-bled
(sprinkled) with his blood, and kept the same as holy reliques to heale
sicknesse.” It would therefore appear that he was not only hanged, but
drawn and quartered as well.
This custom of carrying away trophies from the gibbet was a
superstition, and Brand, in his edition of Bourne’s _Antiquitates
Vulgares_, writes:
“Chips of gallows and Places of Execution are used for Amulets against
Agues. I saw lately some Saw-dust, on which Blood was absorbed, taken
for some such purpose from off the Scaffold on the beheading of one of
the rebel lords, 1746.”
Possibly the added information that the crowd stole “the gibbet” is a
misconception by the chronicler to whom the tradition is handed down.
The passage is not without difficulty. So early in our history “Tyburn”
meant merely the Ty-bourne, or brook, where it flowed from Hampstead
towards the Thames, not necessarily the common place of execution
which afterwards took to itself the distinctive name of Tyburn. What
the “Elms” represented has never, so far as can be gathered, been
satisfactorily cleared up. It is reasonably supposed that rows of trees
stood on the banks of the burn where it passed through the forest and
marshes, and probably their branches afforded convenient means for
hanging prisoners.
With so much growing timber about, it would have been useless expense
and labour to bring carpenters to construct a gallows, and to people of
the thirteenth century a quite unnecessary refinement. “The Elms” near
Tyburn was the scene of many executions after that of Longbeard. If, in
fact, the hanging-place at “the Elms” was on trees growing beside the
bourne, then, owing to its course, the execution-ground must have been
some few hundred yards farther eastward than the Tyburn of later days.
King John not only hanged some Welsh rebels at Nottingham in 1212, but
nine years later Constantine Fitz-Arnulph and two confederates were
hanged for raising a tumult at Westminster, so by this time hanging
as a method of capital punishment had become an accepted institution.
The records tell of twelve pirates hanged in Hampshire in Henry III.’s
reign, and of eighteen Lincoln Jews suffering the same fate a few years
later. In London also great strife between the goldsmiths and tailors
led to the imprisonment of many rioters, thirteen of whom were hanged
for the trouble they had caused in the City.
As if London had not enough horrors of its own, the custom was
established in the reign of Edward I. of bringing offenders from the
provinces to the capital for execution, and taking wrongdoers of
London to certain towns in the country for the same purpose. Jews at
Northampton being accused of having crucified a Christian boy on Good
Friday, many “Jewes at London after Easter were drawne at horse tailes
and hanged”; and such wholesale punishments of that persecuted tribe
were of frequent occurrence.
Although “the Elms” is not actually mentioned, the accounts related
of Rice ap Meredith, a rebel, and of Gilbert Middleton, in 1316, lead
to the conclusion that they ended their days at “the Elms”; they were
drawn “through the streets of the citie to the gallowes.” Middleton, a
fourteenth-century “Dick Turpin,” was brought from the north to London,
and hanged in the presence of two cardinals whom he had robbed. These
Church dignitaries had come to England with the view of making a double
peace, namely, between Edward II. and Thomas, Duke of Lancaster, and
between England and Scotland. But after Middleton had attacked and
robbed them in the north, they were so disgusted they never visited
Scotland at all. These were the early days of the self-assertion of the
populace—about which we now hear so much under the banner of Socialism.
Richard Davey, in his _Pageant of London_, writing of this time, says:
“The evolution of slavery into serfdom, and of serfdom into
vassalage—one of the greatest efforts towards true progress effected
in this age—very rapidly brought about the creation of what we might
describe as a lower class, whose voice was soon to be heard clamouring
for its share in direct or indirect administration. Hence the
increasing influence of universities, guilds, and corporations.”
It must not be supposed from this, however, that education took any
important turn, for the middle-class man and woman could neither
write nor read until the money derived from the destruction of the
monasteries was utilised for founding Grammar Schools. That is why
it is so difficult to glean far-away facts when information and
chronicling were in the hands of so few.
By the time Wat Tyler’s rebellion had been put down, and ruthlessly
punished, London appears to have possessed a permanent gallows. Victims
numbered by hundreds, who had participated in the rising, dangled on
trees and gibbets all over the counties of Middlesex, Essex, and Kent,
and the excessive use of the hangman’s rope no doubt made some such
structure a necessity. “The Elms” drops out of notice. Baker, relating
in his _Chronicle_ the arraignment of Roger Mortimer half a century
earlier for encompassing the death of Edward II., and his subsequent
execution, speaks of him as being “hanged on the common gallows at
the Elms, now called Tyburn, where his body remained two days as an
opprobrious spectacle for all beholders.”
This is but a small detail, but it is in such strokes of the pen that
we learn much of the general state of things in past ages, and that
word “Common” depicts a gallows in frequent use. It was after this
that the place of execution seems to have been moved to Tyburn Road,
and perhaps it was the erection of the permanent gallows at this time,
that led Fuller to speak of the gibbet having been placed there as “an
instrument of torture and punishment for the Lollards” (the followers
of John Wyclif), and to quaintly write:
“Tieburne some will so have it called, from Tie and Burne, because the
poor Lollards, for whom this instrument (of cruelty to them, though of
Justice to Malefactors) was first set up, had their necks tied to the
Beame, and their lower parts burnt in the fire.”
The worthy Fuller refers to the Act “De Heretico Comburendo,” for,
not content with mere death, it had been thought necessary to invent
another mode of punishment for persecuting the Lollards, and this Act
authorised the burning of heretics in a high public place.
As for the derivation here attempted, it seems rather a quaint conceit
by Fuller than a serious explanation of the origin of a word which for
so many centuries bore a notorious meaning. The Bourne flowed along
its course from time immemorial; as we know, it was called Tiburne, or
Tyburn, in the earliest references extant, and it is much more likely
that the execution-ground took its name from the Bourne, than that the
brook itself owes its distinctive title to a particular form of death
practised so late as the time of the Lollards.
The executions of Nicholas Brembre and Judge Tresillian in 1388 are
supposed to have been the first recorded deaths at this new Tyburn.
These men had been impeached for high treason. Brembre had been four
times Lord Mayor of London. The charge against him was that he had
“intended to slay some thousands of the citizens, to alter the name
of London to that of ‘New Troy,’ and to have himself created Duke
thereof.” So the gentleman was not without ambitions.
Roger Bolingbroke, who met his death for alleged necromancy, was
another of the early victims of Tyburn. The whole charge arose out of
the bitter jealousy existing between Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, son
of Henry IV., and Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, the son of
John of Gaunt and Catharine Swynford. On the death of Henry V. each
vied with the other for the guardianship of the young King (who was
but nine months old when his father died) and the leadership of public
affairs. Beaufort’s huge wealth secured him the support of the Church,
into whose coffers he poured large gifts, and finally Humphrey was
arrested and thrown into prison. Meantime Beaufort had devised that
charges of witchcraft should be brought against Gloucester’s chaplain,
Roger Bolingbroke and his wife Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester,
representing that she was exercising necromancy to encompass the death
of Henry VI. and place her husband on the throne.
Stow tells us the story:
“Roger Bolinbrooke a great Astronomer, with Thomas Southwell, a Chanon
of Saynt Stephen’s Chapell at Westminster, were taken as Conspiratours
of the King’s death, for it was said, that the same Roger shoulde
labour to consume the King’s person by way of Necromancie, and the said
Thomas should say Masses in the Lodge of Hornesey park beside London,
vpon certain instruments, with the which the said Roger should use the
craft of necromancies, against the faith, and was assenting to the
said Roger in all his works. And the 5 and twentieth day of July being
Sunday, Roger Bolinbrooke, with all his instruments of necromancie,
that is to say a chayre paynted herein he was wont to sit, vppon the
4 corners of which chayre stood foure swords, and vppon every sword
an image of copper hanging with many other instruments. Hee stoode
on a high scaffolde in Paules Churchyard, before yᵉ crosse, holding
a sword in his right hand and a scepter in his left, arrayed in a
marvellous attire, and after the Sermon was ended by Maister Low Byshop
of Rochester, he abjureth all articles belonging to the crafte of
necromancie of missowning to the faith, in presence of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, the Cardinall of Winchester, the byshop of London,
Salisbury and many other.”
Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was brought before Chicheley,
Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester,
and others, in St. Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster. Bolingbroke was
produced as a witness against her, and accused her of inciting him to
practise necromancy. Finally a Commission was appointed to inquire
into the various witchcrafts and treasons against the King’s person,
and Bolingbroke and Southwell as principals, and Eleanor Cobham as
an accessory, were indicted for treason. Bolingbroke was condemned
to death and was taken to Tyburn, where he was hanged, drawn, and
quartered, denying the crime of treason, but crying for God’s mercy for
having presumed too far in his cunning.
Nor did Beaufort’s vengeance end here. Humphrey of Gloucester was
thrown into prison, where he languished and died in 1446—murdered, some
writers allege, by Beaufort. In the following year five of his most
noted sympathisers were arrested and put in the Tower, from whence they
were “drawn to Tiborne, hanged, let down quick, stripped, marked with
a knife to be quartered.” At that juncture the Duke of Suffolk arrived
with a pardon, which did not, however, deprive the hangman of his
perquisites. Says Stow: “Yᵉ yeomen of yᵉ gallows had their livelode,
and the hangmen their clothes and wearing apparel.” He adds that the
pardon was secured by the prayers of “Master Gilbert Worthington, the
parson of St. Andrewes in Holborn.”
A quiet hanging was little to the taste of either the dispensers of
justice or of vengeance, or of the crowds that gathered at executions
in those rude days, or, indeed, in the days of the Tudors, or even of
Charles II. Common malefactors were swung upon a gibbet and left there,
no more trouble was bestowed upon them; but for the plotter against
the State, the process of death was more elaborate. References to the
victims being “hanged, drawne, and quartered” abound.
It is impossible within the limits of decency to describe in detail the
revolting tortures and mutilations practised upon the poor wretches
whom ill-fortune brought to Tyburn. What the sentence implied can
be found in the State Trial of the Duke of Buckingham, where it was
delivered in all its unabashed nakedness by the Earl of Norfolk, though
Henry VIII. substituted decapitation. What it meant in actual practice
may be judged from the records of the punishment of those concerned in
the Babington Plot against Queen Elizabeth. Fifteen men were condemned
to die, and after a day and a half had been spent on the ghastly work,
leaving it still incomplete, the Queen, disgusted with the sickening
business, bade the executioners “despatch with haste” the remaining
victims, remitting the last abominations.
It was the earliest custom to tie the wretched victim by the heels,
attach him by a rope to a horse’s tail, and thus drag him from gaol to
the place of execution. Arrived at his destination, jeered and howled
at all the way, and sorely bruised as he jolted over the rough roads to
his death, he was placed on the gibbet. The rope, after much fumbling,
was adjusted mid the yells of the spectators, and then the prisoner
was hoisted on high by the executioner and his assistant, until slow
suffocation ended his misery.
Later, for humanity’s sake, a rough hurdle was utilised, to which the
condemned man was bound, and on this he was dragged to the gallows. Not
until Stuart times was the malefactor’s springless cart introduced.
In only too many cases, however, the dread sentence of “hanged, drawn,
and quartered” was carried out with all its attendant horrors. The
condemned wretch, after he had been dangled from the gallows on a
short rope for a considerable time, and undergone all the horrors of
death by suffocation without its merciful release, was cut down still
alive. Then he was stripped, his clothes being the executioner’s
perquisite, and with his knife that functionary marked off the lines
he would follow in carrying out the quartering. The victim was then
disembowelled, the entrails being thrown on a fire and burnt before his
dying eyes. The head was decapitated. Finally, the mutilated corpse was
divided into four pieces, which were sometimes salted or par-boiled,
and, with the head, made five ghastly evidences of the consequences
that would befall those who offended the higher powers. These “bits”
were sent for exhibition in five different localities where it was
supposed that such warning would be most beneficial.
Anything more horrible cannot be imagined. And yet a crowd always
assembled to witness the scene. Men, women, and children scrambled for
a front view, and the grand ladies and smart gentlemen of comparatively
refined times did not appear to consider it degrading to watch a person
hanged by the neck until he was dead. In fact, the morbid love of such
horrors pursued us till a much later date, for murderers were publicly
hanged outside Newgate, on a busy thoroughfare of the City of London,
as recently as 1866.
Perkin Warbeck—“that little cockatrice of a king,” as Bacon calls
him—was one of the mediæval victims who met his end at Tyburn in 1499.
With him went to their death the servants who were found conniving at
his escape from the Tower. No character in the arena of history at that
period has more glamour of romance about it than that of Warbeck. Even
the most unbiassed writers seem to waver as to whether he was really
the Duke of York or an impostor, so readily did he tell the tale of
how he, as the little prince, had escaped from the Tower, and now as a
grown man came to claim his heritage. In his imprisonment he had twice
made bids for freedom, been captured, and made to read a confession—on
the second occasion a public avowal, standing in Cheapside—after which
he was again confined in the Tower.
It has been alleged by some historians that this was a mere scheme of
Henry VII. to place him in contact with the Earl of Warwick, the son
of George, Duke of Clarence, and heir of the House of York, who had
been kept a prisoner in the Tower until he was practically bordering
on imbecility. The presence of this man would be a greater temptation
to Warbeck to make another attempt to gain his freedom, and probably
it would give the King an opportunity to rid himself of both these
claimants of Royal descent. The Earl of Warwick was beheaded on Tower
Hill, and Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn. For his end we can again refer
to Stow:
“Perken Warbeke—being in holde, by great promises corrupted his
keepers, named Strangwais, Blewet, Astwood, and long Roger, servants
to sir I. Digby, lieutenant of the Tower (as was affirmed) intended to
have slaine their Master, to have set Perken and the Earle of Warwick
at large; which Earle of Warwick had been kept in prison within the
Tower (as yee have heard) from the first yeere of this king to this 15
yeere out of all companie of men and sight of beasts, and therefore
could not of himselfe seeke his owne destruction, but by other he was
brought to his death, for being made privie of this enterprise devised
by Perken and his complices, he assented thereunto: but this devise
being revealed Perken and I. a Waters, sometime Maior of Corke in
Ireland, were arraigned and condemned at Westminster and on the 23 of
November drawn to Tiborne, where Perken read his former confession as
before he had done in Cheape, taking on his death the same to bee true,
and so hee & Iohn a Water asked the King forgivenesse, and tooke their
deaths patiently. And shortly after Walter Blewt and Thomas Astwood
were hanged at Tyborne.”
When Henry VIII. was King, Tyburn was yet more busy. The lesser victims
of that monarch’s policy and ambition, for whom the axe and block
were considered too good, were sent out of the Tower to the loathsome
prisons of the day, to meet an ignominious end under the gallows. A
long, sad procession they made, many priests among them, martyrs for
the Catholic faith.
Some of the most pathetic figures were the prior and monks from the
Charter House, whose execution is thus described in the _Contemporary
Spanish Chronicle of Henry VIII._, edited by Martin Hume.
“The monks of the Charter House refused to take the oath to Henry as
head of the Church (June 1535).
“When the King heard of it he ordered that justice should be executed
upon them, so they were taken two by two on hurdles and dragged to the
gallows (at Tyburn), which is three miles from London.
“The Prior went alone on a hurdle, and the holy friars confessed to
each other as they went along, the Prior embracing the crucifix and
saying many prayers. When they were arrived at the gallows they took
one of the first and cast a rope about his neck, and the hangman asked
his pardon. Then all the others placed themselves so that they should
see the first die, the Prior exhorting in Latin and comforting him as
he was led up. The friar turned to the hangman and said, ‘Brother, do
thy duty.’ The rope being placed on the gallows, the hangman whipped
the horse, and the friar remained hanging. Directly, before he was
half-dead, they cut the rope and stripped him: then they ripped up his
belly, plucked out his bowels and his heart, and cast them into the
fire that was burning there, and afterwards they cut off his head and
quartered the body. The holy friars looked on at all this, praying
the whole time, and when the first execution was finished the Sheriff
said to the other fathers: ‘Ye see what has become of your companion:
you had better repent and you will be forgiven.’ Altogether in one
voice, which was as if the Holy Ghost himself was speaking, they cried,
‘Sheriff, we are only impatient to join our brother.’ Each one offered
himself as first for martyrdom, and they all died like the first.”
The English Chronicles record the Carthusian martyrdoms in this year
1535 (20th April, five men; and 19th June, three men) at Tyburn, and
this note appears to refer to the second execution. The quarters
were seared with pitch and set up at the gates on London Bridge and
before the Charter House. The Spaniard says that the quarters remained
incorrupt.
In all the number there are few brighter names than those of the Earl
of Kildare and his four kinsmen, whose capture, imprisonment, and death
(1537) furnished a deplorable tale of Tudor treachery and vengeance.
The earl, who had been involved in one of the numerous rebellions in
Ireland, which were the chronic state of that unhappy country, had
been promised pardon if he repaired to England. The story, so full of
pathos, and of the fear of death, brightened by the heroism of the
younger brother, cannot be better told than in Hollinshed’s quaint
phrases:
“And before his imprisonment was bruted, letters were posted into
Ireland streiatly commanding the deputie upon sight of them, to
apprehend Thomas Fitzgirald his uncles, and to see them with all speed
conuenient shipt into England. Which the lord deputie did not slacke.
For having feasted three of the gentlemen at Kilmainan immediatelie
after their banket (as it is now and then seene that sweet meate will
have sowre sawce) he caused them to be manacled, and led as prisoners
to the Castell of Dublin; and the other two were so roundlie snatcht
up in villages hard by, as they no sooner felt their owne captivitie
than they had notice of their brethren’s calamitie. The next wind that
served into England, these five brethren were imbarked, to wit James
Fitzgirald, Walter Fitzgirald, Oliver Fitzgirald, John Fitzgirald,
and Richard Fitzgirald. Three of these gentlemen, James, Walter, and
Richard, were knowne to have crossed their nephue Thomas to their power
in his rebellion and therefore were not occasioned to misdoubt anie
danger. But such as in thos days were enimies to the house, incensed
the King so sore against it, persuading him that he should never
conquer Ireland, as long as anie Giraldine breathed in the countrie:
as for making the pathwaie smooth, he was resolved to lop off as well
the good and sound grapes, as the wild and fruitlesse berries. Whereby
appeareth how dangerous it is to be a rub, when a King is disposed to
sweepe an alleie.
“Thus were the five brethren sailing into England, among whom Richard
Fitzgerald being more bookish than the rest of his brethren, and
one that was much given to the studies of antiquitie, wailing his
inward griefe, with outward mirth comforted them with cheerefulnesse
of countenance, as well as persuading them that offended to repose
affiance in God, and the King his mercie, and such as were not of that
conspiracie to relie to their innocencie, which they should hold for a
more safe and strong barbican than any rampire of Castell of brasse.
Thus solacing the sillie mourners sometime with smiling, sometime
with singing, sometime with grave and pittie apophthegmes, he craved
of the owner the name of the barke; who having answered, that it was
called the Cow, the gentleman sore appalled thereat, said: ‘Now, good
brethren, I am in utter despaire of our returne to Ireland, for I beare
in mind an old prophecie, that five earles, brethren, should be carried
in a Cowes bellie to England, and from thense never to returne’.
“Whereat the rest began afresh to howle and lament, which doubtlesse
was pitifull, to behold five valiant gentlemen, that durst meet in the
field five as sturdie champions as could be picked out in a realme,
to be so suddenlie terrified with the bare name of a woodden cow, or
to fear like lions a sillie cocke his combe, being moved (as commonlie
the whole countrie is) with a vaine and fabulous old wives’ dreame. But
what blind prophesie soever he read, or heard of anie superstitious
beldame touching a cow his bellie, that which he foretold them was
found true. For Thomas Fitzgirald the third of Februarie, and these
five brethren his uncles were drawne, hanged, and quartered at Tiburne,
which was incontinentlie bruted as well in England and Ireland, as in
foren soyles.”
In the midst of his arrangements for divorce the vengeance of Henry
VIII. fell upon a witless girl who was known as “The Holy Maid of
Kent.” She had become imbecile from frequent epileptic fits. Masters,
the vicar of Addington, and Dr. Bocking, a Canon of Canterbury, tutored
her to predict, as it suited their own ends, that Henry VIII. would
lose his kingdom and die a violent death if he cast aside Catherine of
Arragon, and married Anne Boleyn. The final scene of this diabolical
influence of strength over weakness was that the girl and her abettors
were hanged and beheaded at Tyburn, her head being set on London
Bridge, and those of the men on the City gates.
[Illustration: LONDON BRIDGE (Showing heads displayed).
_From a Print in Magdalene College, Cambridge._]
We have little idea of the tremendous religious antagonism of those
days, an antagonism which brought so many poor sufferers to the gibbet
at Tyburn. Indeed, so determined were those in power to extirpate all
remains of Roman Catholicism, that a search was actually instituted
from house to house, and all rosaries and other objects savouring of
Romanism were destroyed.
That a man was priest, open or disavowed, during that fierce struggle
between Henry VIII. and the Church which he had overthrown and
despoiled, was sufficient to condemn him to suffer under Tyburn’s fatal
tree:
“The 8 of October last before passed I. Low, I. Adams, and Richard
Dibdale, being before condemned for treason, for being made Priests
by authority of the Bishop of Rome, were drawne to Tyborne, and there
hanged, bowelled, and quartered.
“The 18 of Februarie, Harrington, a seminary priest, was drawne from
Newgate to Tyborne, and there hanged, cut downe alive, struggled with
the hangman, but was bowelled and quartered.”
Elizabeth, too, found the terrors, which the very name of Tyburn
instilled into the minds of her subjects, useful in maintaining public
order and punishing plotters against her personal welfare. The gibbet,
indeed, became a corrector of manners.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, after the closing of the
monasteries, the peasantry found it difficult to find work on the
countryside, and thus it was that they flocked to London in hundreds
seeking employment, in exactly the same way that thousands of the poor
do to-day. The results, however, are different. In our times we house
them in workhouses, feed them in soup-kitchens, and allow them to sing
in our roads, until they make life hideous. We encourage them in every
way until the street loafer is a curse to London, and the want of
labourers in the country an unceasing cry.
This is our modern way of creating mendicity. Formerly they were not
so foolish, though perhaps too severe. Any one caught begging, or
aimlessly wandering about, was seized, ordered to be whipped, and sold
as a chattel.
Thus it was that hundreds of these poor creatures were shipped off to
the West Indies and the early American colonies. Travelling in those
days was not so luxurious as it is now, and many of them died on the
way. Those who remained behind were even worse treated. They were often
ruthlessly beaten and continually starved; they were, in fact, brought
to such dire distress that they were bought and sold as mere slaves.
How surprised the loafers, who bury their noses in mother earth and
sleep by the hour on the green grass of Hyde Park, would be if such
drastic measures were applied to them; but surely some happy medium
between the hanging of the sixteenth century and the encouragement of
loafing of the twentieth might be found.
Punishments were altogether more severe in those days, and even as
late as the end of the eighteenth century batches of men, women, and
children were hanged at Tyburn for deeds which would hardly be punished
nowadays, and, any way, would not be reproved by more than a day or two
in prison. In fact, when the last century dawned, there were no less
than two hundred and twenty-three capital offences.
Even soldiers and sailors, who are still noted for their jollities on
landing from distant climes, were marched to the scaffold in the “good
old times.”
“Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake, being returned, as ye have
heard many of their Saylers, and souldiers, shortly after their landing
fell sick, and died of a stanch bred amongst them on shippe board,
other some of them so rudely behaved themselves about the countrey,
about the Court, and elsewhere, that many men misliked of their doings,
and divers of them being apprehended, on the twenty 7 of August one
was hanged on the end of a signe at an Inne doore in the Towne of
Kingstone-uppon-Thames, for a terror to the rest. The twenty nine of
August, two more were hanged in Smithfield, two at the Tower Hill, two
besides at Westminster, and one at Tiburn” (Stow).
An Irishman who had shown marked disrespect to the Virgin Queen
received equally short shrift. Bren O’Royrke was arraigned at
Westminster on the 28th October 1591, and found guilty of high treason
on ten different charges. Stow (_Annals_) records what was doubtless
the most grave of them:
“That the said O’Royrke, a Dremaher aforesaide, caused the picture of a
woman to bee made, setting to her her Majestie’s, and caused it to be
tyed to an horse tayle, and to bee drawne through the mire in derision
of her Majestie. And after caused his Calliglasses to hew the same in
pieces with their axes, uttering divers traiterous and rebellious words
against her Majestie.”
When before his judges, he refused to plead unless he was remanded
for a week to allow a lawyer to come from Ireland, and to receive the
counsels of his friends. But he was told that if he maintained his
contemptuous attitude judgment must be given, and he was guilty of his
own death; and the interpreter, one John Ly, expounded his sentence
in all its gruesome detail. We learn that “Uppon Wednesday, being
the third of November, Bren O’Royrke was drawne to Tyborne and there
hanged”—leaving out the disgusting after-business. But before this was
done, John Ly and the Archbishop of Cashel exhorted him to crave God
and the Queen’s forgiveness. “O’Royrke turned upon him and sayde, hee
had more neede to looke to him selfe, and that he was neither here nor
there.” After his death “his heart was holden up by the hangmanne,
naming it to be the arch traytor’s heart, and then did he cast the same
into the fire.”
The execution of Dr. Lopez and his confederates for plotting with the
Spaniards to poison Queen Elizabeth is graphically depicted in _Treason
and Plot_, by Martin Hume. The execution took place early in June 1594:
“All England was in a ferment of indignation owing to the revelations
made by Ferreira and Tinoco, and the heat introduced into the
accusations against Philip and his ministers by the Essex party: and at
length, early in June, 1594, the three poor wretches, bound to hurdles,
were dragged up Holborn to Tyburn, and the penalty of treason was paid
by all of them, with sickening barbarity, exceeding even the usual
awful rites. It is related that one of the three, probably Tinoco who
was the youngest, recovered his feet after the hanging, and, mad with
pain and desperation, attacked the executioner. The crowd applauding
his pluck, broke through the guard and formed a ring to witness the
unequal fight. Two burly ruffians came to the hangman’s help, but
one was immediately felled by a blow from the prisoner, who kept the
other at bay for some time. The half-strangled creature was at length
stunned by a blow upon the head, and the disembowelling then proceeded.
Dr. Lopez in vain tried to speak to the vast scoffing crowd. Almost
incoherent with agitation he solemnly protested his innocence: mocking
laughter and ribald interruption alone greeted his despairing cry. He
was unfortunately inspired to say that he loved his mistress better
than his Saviour Jesus Christ: and this coming from a Jew so incensed
the multitude that the tumult silenced all else, and Ruy Lopez went to
his death leaving his final secret to be guessed by others.”
Major Hume was apparently convinced that Lopez was really innocent of
an intention to kill Elizabeth. He _was_ guilty of an intention to
poison Don Antonio, the Portuguese pretender; and he had also pretended
a plot against the Queen in order to get money out of the Spaniards; so
in any case he was rightly punished.
The dreadful tale of horrors might be continued almost interminably.
One willingly passes over in silence many other sufferers, to include
just one more notable scene at Tyburn, when, under remarkable
circumstances, the gallows took a curious part in reforming fashion in
the reign of James I.
Plots grew thick and fast under the first of the Stuarts, as under his
predecessors. The murder of Sir Thomas Overbury differed from most,
inasmuch as it was designed to satisfy private vengeance rather than
an intrigue against the State. Overbury had done all in his power to
prevent the Earl of Somerset from marrying the Countess of Essex, and
had thus won her hatred. She poisoned the mind of the Earl against
his friend, and he, in turn, influenced the King. So when Sir Thomas
refused to be sent as ambassador to Brussels, James I. was easily
persuaded to imprison him in the Tower. There Overbury languished and
died.
The Earl and Countess of Somerset were brought to trial, with their
four accomplices, for encompassing his death. The principals escaped,
but their accessories were condemned, and one Weston and Mrs. Turner
were hanged at Tyburn in 1615.
This murder was committed, if the evidence is to be believed, with the
utmost perseverance. Witchcraft, which was believed in firmly at that
time, was attributed to Mrs. Turner. It was alleged in the trial that
seven forms of poison were given by her to Sir Thomas Overbury. Arsenic
was mixed with his salt; when he asked to have some “pig” for dinner,
she put into it _lapis cortilus_, and _cantharides_ was added to the
sauce instead of pepper.
The execution of Mrs. Turner excited immense interest. She had made
herself famous in the fashionable world as the inventor of a yellow
starch. In allusion to this circumstance, Lord Chief-Justice Coke—who
had already addressed her in sufficiently contumelious terms, telling
her categorically that she had been guilty of the seven deadly
sins—declared that as she was the inventor of yellow starched ruffs
and cuffs, he hoped that she would be the last by whom they would be
worn. Accordingly, he gave strict orders that she should be hanged in
the very uncomfortable attire she had made so fashionable.
This amusing addition to the sentence was strictly carried out. The
fair demon Mrs. Turner, on the day of her execution, came to the
scaffold arrayed as if for some festive occasion, with her face
mightily rouged, and a wide ruff, stiffened with yellow starch, around
her neck. Numerous persons of quality, ladies as well as gentlemen,
went in their coaches to Tyburn to see the last of her. The yellow ruff
was never worn from that day.
Yellow starch had rendered Society stiff and uncomfortable, and Society
was only too pleased to discard its use when the originator of the
fashion came to this ignominious end.