Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (4 page)

Among the thousands executed at Tyburn throughout its long history there was a steady flow of those who had taken part in rebellions. An early threat to London came during the reign of Richard II. In 1377, at the age of ten, he succeeded Edward III. Within four years he was faced with a serious rebellion when peasants led by Wat Tyler took up arms in protest over the new poll tax, marched from Kent and Essex to storm the City and demanded to see the King. The revolt was suppressed but provided an excuse for taking reprisals against perceived dissenters. One such group were the Lollards, the name given to the followers of John Wycliffe. The Lollards were heretics active in England in the latter part of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries. Believed to be England’s only native medieval heretical body, they originated in Oxford in the 1370s.

Tyburn as a place of execution came very much to be associated with the Lollards in the popular mind and somehow even the origins of its name were described by some as due to this association: ‘Tieburne, some will have it so called from Tie and Burne, because the poor Lollards for whom this instrument was first set up, had their necks tied to the beame, and their lower parts burnt in the fire’ (Clinch 1890: 67).

The troubled times of the reign of Richard II at the close of the fourteenth century had helped the spread of Lollard ideas. With the accession of the House of Lancaster in 1399 an attempt was made to reform and restore constitutional authority in Church and state. In 1401 the Act ‘De Haeretico Comburendo’ – on the burning of heretics – was introduced. This Act was directed against the Lollards, ‘who thought damnably of the sacraments and usurped the office of preaching’. Evidence shows that many Lollards were executed in London, particularly at Smithfield and places such as St Giles but few are definitely known to have died at Tyburn despite the claim mentioned above that Tyburn was erected precisely for the purpose of executing them.

There are many cases of people being drawn, hanged and quartered in London after Mortimer’s execution in 1330. Among these was Alderman Nicholas Brembre in 1388. He was an immensely ambitious man who had been a close adviser to Richard II, but, being prepared to stop at nothing to elevate his own position, found that he had made powerful enemies who were only too happy to bring him down and had few friends to support him. Detailed information on executions around this time is scanty but one definite case is that of a man who was murdered in his own home by an intruder who broke in for the purposes of theft. John Stow suggests that there was a miscarriage of justice as the murdered man’s wife was accused and burnt and three servants were executed for the crime at Tyburn. Only later, in 1391, was the actual intruder brought to justice and hanged.

Famine hit the City in 1391 and ill-feeling was exacerbated when rumours circulated about the King’s extravagant lifestyle. In 1399, in a climate of intense social unrest resulting from high taxes, John Hall was executed at Tyburn for being an accomplice to the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, the seventh and youngest son of Edward III, and one of a group of nobles who had opposed Richard II for some years. From 1397 these men were arrested, Gloucester himself being imprisoned in Calais. However, he died within weeks amid suspicion that he had been murdered. Now more rumours circulated to the effect that Richard had ordered four knights to kill Gloucester. Two years later Hall was arrested and charged as an accomplice to the murder of Gloucester, it being alleged that he had kept the door of Gloucester’s room open which allowed the knights to enter with ease and smother him. On 17 October 1399 Hall was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn where he was hanged, had his bowels burnt and was then quartered. His head was brought to the place where Gloucester had been murdered. Following Richard’s abdication in favour of Henry IV, the four knights were later arrested and executed at Cheapside. Ironically, Richard II was himself murdered shortly afterwards at Pontefract Castle on 14 February 1400.

After Richard’s death there were plots to overthrow his successor Henry IV. Seditious material attacking Henry was published and distributed, but in 1402 the King moved against the perpetrators, some of whom were arrested and eventually executed at Tyburn. Roger Clarendon, a knight and eight friars were ‘strangled at Tiborne and their [
sic
] put into execution’ (Halle 1809: 26). In addition, Walter de Baldocke, the prior of Launde in Leicestershire, and another friar were executed although it is unclear whether this happened at Tyburn.

Those who recorded executions during these times did not always make it clear exactly where these happened. Some records state no more than ‘executed in London’. For example, William Serle who had been a servant of Richard II spread the idea after 1400 that the King was still alive and additionally forged a seal in his name. Serle was recorded as having been ‘drawn from Pontefract through the chiefest Citties of England and put to death at London’. Gregory’s Chronicle, however, actually states that Serle was executed at Tyburn.

Despite the sparseness of sources relating to Tyburn during these centuries, those that are available give the impression that it is mostly men of rank who died there – women get scarcely a mention. In 1416, for example, there is a record that Benedict Wolman, custodian of the Marshalsea Prison, was executed at Tyburn, while in the 1420s Sir John Mortimer met a similar fate. He had been lodged in the Tower on a charge of treason and then attempted to escape, a crime deemed to be petty treason. He received a beating and was then hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. If poor people were indeed executed at Tyburn, then the chroniclers clearly thought their deaths were not usually worth mentioning. A few who appear in the records are the thief Will Wawe hanged at Tyburn in 1427; William Goodgroom, a horse dealer in 1437; John David, an apprentice, executed in 1446; and John Scott, John Heath and John Kenington who went to their deaths for slandering the King and some of his council. Others of the commonalty who died at Tyburn are not even named. They included a locksmith executed in 1467 for robbery and four yeomen of the Crown hanged in 1483.

Tyburn witnessed the culmination of a remarkable case in the 1440s. Roger Bolingbroke, an astrologer and magician, along with Canon Thomas Southwell of St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster, were charged with treason for attempting to kill Henry VI by sorcery. The purpose of the plot, in which Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was also implicated, was to replace Henry as King with his uncle the Duke of Gloucester. It was alleged that on 25 July 1441, Bolingbroke ‘with all his instruments of necromancy’ worked his malevolent spell although it had clearly not achieved its aim. All the plotters were arrested and when undergoing questioning Bolingbroke blamed Eleanor for causing him to ‘labour in the sayd art’ of witchcraft and sorcery. Bolingbroke, Southwell and Eleanor were indicted for treason. Margery Gourdemaine was also accused of involvement. Margery, often known as the ‘Witch of Eye’, had been charged eleven years previously on suspicion of practising witchcraft and Eleanor was said to have used Margery’s services against the King. Margery was burnt as a witch at Smithfield in October 1441. Southwell perished in the Tower after prophesying that he would never die at the hand of the law. Eleanor, after performing a penance by walking barefoot through the streets of London carrying a lighted candle and dressed in a white sheet, was imprisoned for life. Bolingbroke was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn where he was hanged and quartered. (This strange case is reflected in Shakespeare’s
Henry VI
; see
Appendix
, p.
239
.)

Events on the gallows were sometimes accompanied by elements of black humour and never more so than in the case in 1447 of five condemned men who had been brought to Tyburn and were being made ready for execution and subsequent dismemberment. They had just been stripped when, at the eleventh hour, a reprieve arrived. Now, the law stated that the hangman was entitled to the clothing of any prisoner. This practice, although bizarre to modern eyes, was a useful perk for the hangman because these items, often believed to have supernatural properties, could be sold for considerable sums. The reprieve notwithstanding, the hangman was utterly determined not to forego his perks and he refused to hand the clothes back to the prisoners who must have started feeling very chilly. What entertainment there must have been for the crowd that day as the hangman and the shivering, naked but reprieved prisoners stood on the gallows arguing vehemently about the clothes. While derisive shouts and ribald catcalls doubtless rang in the air as the men trudged home naked, they must have been only too glad of the reprieve and eager to put a distance between themselves and the Tyburn gallows.

In 1455 racial violence erupted in the City aimed at the Lombards who were successful Italian merchants. Three men attacked a Lombard who responded by complaining to the mayor, as a result of which one of the attackers was arrested. This prompted action by fellow apprentice mercers and supporters of the arrested man, who having managed to get him released, proceeded to seek out and attack other Lombards. The situation threatened to get out of hand until the master of the Mercers’ Company intervened. Although order was restored, some of the rioters were arrested for robbing the Lombards and they were eventually hanged at Tyburn. The sighting of Halley’s Comet a few months later was widely seen as an unhappy portent of unrest and certainly the following year further outbreaks of violence took place against those regarded as rapacious foreign merchants, unduly favoured by the powers that be.

Outbreaks of plague and other epidemic disease were a feature of fifteenth-century London. In 1485 what became known as the ‘English sweating sickness’ made its first appearance. Unusually, this took most of its victims from the ranks of the upper classes. Since these contained many literate people who were therefore those most able to leave a lasting testimony, it seems that the disease carved a swathe of fear through English society. However, probably much more terrifying for the populace as a whole was the plague, known to have taken around 20,000 lives in just one visitation, in this case that of 1499. Such traumatic events must have destabilised society and helped create the conditions which kept a constant flow of wretches, many of so humble a status that their names were never recorded, ‘going west’ to receive the hangman’s attentions at Tyburn.

In 1485 Henry Tudor had established his dynasty when he became King Henry VII after defeating Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. However, he soon found his claim to the throne threatened by a number of pretenders. One such was Perkin Warbeck. He adopted the identity of Richard of York, the younger of the two ‘Princes in the Tower’, and rested the strength of his claim on his assertion that he had been allowed to escape when his brother was murdered. The story gained enough plausibility for his claim to be accepted by Charles VIII of France and Margaret of Burgundy, who ack-nowledged him as her nephew. The rebellion in Cornwall mentioned below, gave Warbeck great hope and he travelled to Bodmin where he declared himself King Richard IV. But his career in this character was short-lived and although he attracted some support, he was captured. At first his life was spared but when he attempted to escape, he was sent to the Tower and on 23 November 1499 he was drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn and hanged.

In 1497 Henry VII, regarded by many at the time and since as a usurper, faced the most challenging rebellion of his reign. The news that taxes would have to be raised in order to finance a military invasion of Scotland was met with widespread outrage. Nowhere was this more so than in Cornwall where an army of 15,000 rebels was assembled which then proceeded to march on London. A pitched battle was fought on Blackheath in June 1497 at which more than a thousand Cornishmen died and the rebellion was effectively suppressed. The leaders, Lord Audley, Thomas Flamank, a lawyer and Michael Joseph, a blacksmith, were captured and tried and found guilty of treason. Audley was executed at the Tower but Flamank and Joseph, being of lower social status, hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. All three enjoyed a certain social equality later on however, when their heads were set upon poles on London Bridge. Joseph is said to have declared on his way to Tyburn, that he should ‘have a name perpetual and a fame permanent and immortal’ (Marks 1908: 123).

T
he Tyburn gallows received many victims during the sixteenth century, a very large number of them falling foul of the religious turmoil of the period. Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s and the Act of Supremacy declaring him the head of the English Church began a process of religious change that was to lead over the next six decades to the execution of large numbers of Catholics and Protestants for their beliefs and practices. Following the Act of Supremacy, a Treason Act was passed in February 1535 which bound all ecclesiastical and lay officials to renounce papal law and uphold the supremacy of the King.

Soon after the passage of this Act, three Carthusian monks, Robert Lawrence, Augustus Webster and John Houghton were executed at Tyburn. Their ordeal was described by another Carthusian monk, Maurice Chauncy. He said that they were roughly fastened on a hurdle and then dragged by horses all the way to Tyburn over roads that were rough and hard in places and wet and muddy in others. When they arrived at the gallows, where a large and expectant crowd had gathered, the executioner bent his knee before the condemned men and craved their forgiveness. The monks then ascended the ladder but were asked if they would submit to the King’s command in order to obtain a pardon. They refused. The first to be executed was Houghton. When the rope was cut, his body fell to the ground where it apparently began to ‘throb and breathe’. He was moved away from the gallows and placed naked on a hurdle whereupon he was eviscerated by the executioner, his entrails and other organs being thrown into a fire. The others were subjected to the same horrors and ‘all of their remains were thrown into cauldrons and parboiled, and afterwards put up in different places in the city’ (Marks 1908: 136).