Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (5 page)

On 25 May 1535 Sebastian Newdigate, the King’s Sergeant, was arrested for unwisely denying the King’s supremacy. He was imprisoned in the Marshalsea where he was kept for fourteen days bound to a pillar, standing upright with iron rings around his neck, hands and feet. He was said to have been visited by the King himself and to have been offered riches and honours galore if he would only recant. He refused to do so, an act that Henry was hardly going to overlook, and Newdigate went to the Tower briefly before being executed at Tyburn on 19 June 1535.

Henry’s religious changes and the process of dissolving the monasteries that was embarked upon at the same time were unpopular in some parts of the country. Moreover, they occurred when there were many other issues on which discontent could easily focus. This general disenchantment led to a series of uprisings in 1536, starting in Lincolnshire and developing particularly in the northern counties, that came to be known collectively as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Henry VIII for all his braggadocio, was insecure about his kingdom but every bit as ruthless in suppressing subversive activity as his father had been and he moved quickly to arrest and execute the ringleaders and crush the rebellion. In May 1537, Lord Darcy, Sir Henry Percy and the Abbots of Fountains, Jervaulx and Sawley died at Tyburn for their involvement.

Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves in 1540, but within months the marriage was annulled and he swiftly married Catherine Howard who was much younger and fitter and already well-versed in sexual matters. It is likely that by this time Henry was either impotent or was certainly unable to be the kind of sexual partner craved by Catherine, a healthy young woman of considerable spirit. On 13 February 1542 Catherine was executed at Tower Hill for adultery. Earlier, in December 1541, Thomas Culpepper and Francis Dereham had been executed at Tyburn. It was alleged that Dereham and Catherine had been lovers before her marriage while Culpepper had been her lover while she was married to the King. Dereham was hanged, drawn and quartered while Culpepper, by virtue of being Gentleman to the King’s Privy Chamber, was accorded the privilege of death by beheading. It is to be hoped he appreciated the honour.

Reflecting on the late 1530s in a sermon he gave in May 1549, Hugh Latimer mentioned the large number of executions that had taken place in London at that time. He stated that there were ‘three weekes sessions at Newgate and fourthnyghte sessions at the Marshalsea’. Among the gory harvest produced by these sessions were, for example, in 1538, Sir John Allen and an ‘Irish Gentleman’ who were hanged and quartered at Tyburn as were Henry Harford, Thomas Hever and Henry Pole. In 1540 it was the turn of Thomas Empson, Laurence Cooke, William Horne, Giles Horne, Clement Philip, Darby Gening and Robert Bird. All these men had been found guilty of treason for denying the King’s supremacy. Many others, some of whom remain anonymous, died for the same offence. German Gardiner was the last martyr to die at Tyburn during the reign of Henry VIII. He was executed at the same time as John Larke and John Ireland. The latter had once been Thomas More’s chaplain. All three had their heads and quarters buried under the gallows, but a fourth condemned prisoner despatched with them, Thomas Heywood, was pardoned for recanting his opinions as he was on the hurdle being taken to Tyburn.

Henry was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Edward VI, in 1547. There were many sources of grievance at this time. Unwontedly rapid population growth, price inflation, poor harvests, rent increases, food shortages, currency debasements, plague and the weak regimes of Protector Somerset and the Duke of Northumberland, led to considerable social and political instability. The religious factor, too, was never far away, especially under Edward’s successor, Mary. Both reigns were highly turbulent with rebellions in the provinces, unpopular wars abroad and unsuccessful fiscal policies.

In 1553, at the age of thirty-seven, Mary became Queen. She attempted to reverse the reforms of her father and return England to the Catholic faith. Although a full restoration of Catholicism was intended, it never became possible. Her marriage to Philip of Spain and the threat to Protestantism sparked off rebellion in Kent led by supporters of the former Protectors Somerset and Northumberland. In 1554, 3,000 Kentish rebels led by Sir Thomas Wyatt were prevented from entering the City at Ludgate and the rising collapsed, Wyatt himself being executed at Tower Hill. Many other rebels were also executed: gallows were set up specially in Fleet Street, Cheapside, Holborn, Leadenhall, London Bridge, Bermondsey, Charing Cross and at Hay Hill near Hyde Park where three people were hanged in chains. In this case Tyburn saw little use, its one victim being William Thomas, Clerk to the Council. He had tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide but was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn in May 1554 where he was hanged, beheaded and quartered. His head was set upon London Bridge and his quarters were placed over Cripplegate.

The Catholic Church was formally restored under Mary in January 1555 and the execution of Protestants followed quickly – starting at Smithfield in February. The unhappy but fortunately short reign of Mary ended in 1558 and saw the death of many other martyrs at the same location. However, Tyburn came into its own as the place of execution for Catholics during Elizabeth’s reign. Religion continued to be a potent factor in political affairs after Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 and fuelled many of the plots and conspiracies that were a feature of her rule. The very existence of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87), as a pretender to the English throne created a focus for Catholic dissension as well as being a source of considerable anti-Catholic hostility. Her presence in Scotland and later imprisonment in various locations in England was a destabilising factor, given her avowed religion and close relationships with threatening Catholic countries such as France and Spain. For many Catholics, Mary was the rightful claimant to the English throne. She therefore, sometimes unwittingly, became the focus for a number of plots which were intended to remove Elizabeth. The threat presented by Mary, Queen of Scots, was finally expunged when she was executed at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire on 8 February 1587.

In 1569 a rebel army was raised by the Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland in the northern counties in defence of the Catholic faith. The rebels who supported Mary, Queen of Scots, were suppressed by Lord Sussex. Two adherents of the rebellion, Thomas Norton and his nephew Christopher, were condemned for high treason and sentenced to be ‘hanged, headed and quartered’ at Tyburn. Christopher was forced to watch, aghast, as his uncle was hanged, cut down while still alive and then disembowelled. His misery did not last long because he was soon despatched in a similar fashion. The heads of the two men were taken away to be displayed on London Bridge.

In Elizabeth’s reign, the need to stabilise the Protestant Church was important not only for religious but also for political reasons. Several factors were significant. Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope in 1570. Long-standing traditional beliefs meant that this was still widely seen as an appalling fate for the Queen and her subjects and evidence of the papacy’s determination to use terror in order to re-establish its hegemony in religious matters. Additionally, the illegal arrival in England of Catholic priests bent on supporting those recusants absolutely determined to continue practising their religion, meant that Catholicism was officially seen as insidious and subversive. The Elizabethan regime insisted that Catholics were executed for treason and not for heresy. This meant that Catholics were hanged and quartered but the state was able to boast that it tolerated religious differences and only executed Catholics because they treasonably refused to swear an oath accepting the Queen as Supreme Governor of the Church in England.

The famous ‘Triple Tree’, the triangular gallows at Tyburn, was erected during Elizabeth’s reign. At a height of 18 feet it looked imposing and forbidding and prompted the poet John Taylor to declare that in all his travels around the country, he had never seen the like. The triangular frame of the gallows was capable of hanging eight people from each beam and therefore twenty-four in all, which it did indeed do on a number of occasions. The Triple Tree loomed large in the popular imagination and on Tyburn Fair days vast crowds would gather in its vicinity, eager for the entertainment that went with the rituals of punishment and execution enacted there. The first mention of the Triple Tree in actual use dates from 1 June 1571 when it was recorded: ‘The saide [John] Story was drawn upon a herdell from the Tower of London unto Tiborn, where was prepared for him a newe payre of gallows made in the triangular maner’ (Harleian Misc. iii. 1809: 100–8). The fact that the Triple Tree came into use at a time of the harshening of the penal code and the relentless pursuit, prosecution and execution of Catholic dissenters is no coincidence.

Story, who was the first Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, had been imprisoned in 1563 for his persecution of Protestants during the reign of Mary. He eventually escaped and fled to Flanders but seven years later he was captured and brought back to England. He was a man of sixty when he found himself charged with high treason for allegedly conspiring with a noted magician against the Queen’s life and also for providing the Spanish with information useful for a possible invasion of England. The Tyburn crowd was extremely hostile to Story. A pamphlet was circulating which set out to discredit him by describing how, while at Oxford, Story had been a womaniser and bawdy reveller. Whatever the truth of this, Story made his mark on the gallows because it is said that while he was being disembowelled, he managed to summon enough strength to strike a blow at the executioner. However, his agonised screams at the butchery inflicted on him suggest that the executioner had the last laugh (Pollen 1920: 154). Tyburn saw the death of many more Catholic martyrs after Story including Thomas Woodhouse, John Nelson, Thomas Sherwood and Everard Hanse.

In many instances, the executioner had some degree of discretion on how he might inflict the decreed punishment. For example, he could choose whether or not to strangle the condemned prisoner before going on to disembowel him. The great eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone commented that in most cases a degree of humanity was employed which ensured that the prisoner was dead before being eviscerated.

The gallows were considered to be a place of great spiritual and magical power, particularly but not exclusively where the death of martyrs was concerned. For example, the hands of those who had been executed were believed to possess curative powers and it was common for people with various maladies to stroke themselves with the hands of a felon who had just died. The hangman, too, was believed to be endowed with special powers because of his unique relationship with his victims. However, those who were employed in erecting the gallows undertook a ritual to protect themselves from the taint that went with touching the scaffold (Sawday 1995: 82).

When a victim had been executed and the ritual of dismembering and displaying the body had been completed, the state on some occasions sought to make political capital by advertising the consequences of treason on handbills and other public notices. Catholics tried to counter this by making the bodies of their martyrs, or even the various component parts of them, into relics. For example, after the death of Everard Hanse his bodily remains and even the bloodstained earth beneath the gallows were gathered up and eventually became either revered relics or commodities bought and sold for profit on the open market. In 1583 William Hart, a Catholic priest, was executed at York. No sooner was he cut down than there was a rush to pillage his clothes and in the mêlée parts of his body were actually torn off and carried away either as relics for devotional purposes or as objects that could be offered for sale. When order was eventually restored, the executioner was left gloomily to quarter what was by now a very incomplete corpse.

On 28 May 1582, three Catholic priests, Thomas Ford, John Shert and Robert Johnson, were condemned for high treason. They were taken from the Tower and then hanged, disembowelled and quartered at Tyburn. Shert provided good value for the watching crowd when he not only admonished them with a wagging finger but also declared that he would have the last laugh because they, as Protestants outside the Catholic Church, would die in a state of damnation. He then provided even better entertainment when, about to be hanged, he made a despairing grab at the rope and this allowed the sheriff to proclaim that, ‘notwithstanding his obstinacy, see how willing he is to live’. In 1608 George Gervase used his valedictory speech to inform the assembled multitude at Tyburn that he wanted not ‘the prayers of heretics’.

Many Catholics attempted to affirm their status as martyrs against the efforts of the authorities who wanted them to be seen simply as traitors. Their speeches and actions were intended to impress the spectators at the execution site with the steadfastness of their beliefs. So it was that at Tyburn and elsewhere, before and even during the most brutal punishments, some of the martyrs responded with acts of defiance and even with expressions of joy at the end to which their faith had brought them. In acting in this way, they also managed to cock a snook at the state which had sent them to their deaths as traitors.

In December 1581 the martyrs Edmund Campion, Alexander Briant and Ralph Sherwin died at Tyburn, all found guilty of treason. Perhaps because of his fame, Campion had a hurdle to himself while the others had to share one between them as they were dragged westwards from the Tower to their deaths. Educated at Oxford before becoming a Catholic priest, Campion joined the Jesuits in 1571 and then returned illegally to England to support and develop Catholic practices there. These efforts ended when he was arrested at Abingdon and later he had to run the gauntlet of scoffing crowds when he was paraded through London to the Tower tied to a horse and with a sign stuck to his hat which read, ‘Campion the seditious Jesuit’. Although tortured, he refused to recant. When the three prisoners arrived at Tyburn, the crowd was markedly hostile, probably because of the perceived threat of invasion from Spain and the fact that Catholic priests were widely believed to be spies. Campion made a point of kissing the halters, ladders, gibbets and the executioner and his assistants. He died defiantly. Briant infuriated the crowd when he embarked on his last speech by talking of his days at Oxford. He was interrupted by someone in the crowd who shouted, ‘What have we to do with Oxford? Come to the purpose and confess thy treason.’ Briant again denied the charge and began reciting Psalm 51 in Latin when, to the crowd’s delight, the cart on which he was standing was pulled away and he was left hanging. The spectators were then treated to the agonies he suffered because the rope was not fixed firmly around his neck. It slid up his chin and he was still alive when he was cut down. He then attempted to stagger to his feet but the executioner threw him to the ground and began to disembowel him.