Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (7 page)

The first sin … was Sabbath breaking, thereby I got acquaintance with bad company, and so went to the alehouse and to the bawdy house: there I was perswaded [sic] to rob my master and also murder this poor innocent creature, for which I come to this shameful end.

(Sharpe, 1985a:151)

Apprentices and servants made up half of the workforce in London. It is estimated that between 1640 and 1660 apprentices numbered some twenty thousand in London and domestic servants exceeded that number several times over. Both groups were vulnerable to being laid off during trade slumps and it was all too easy for them to turn to crime when times were bad. It is hardly surprising that sizeable numbers of apprentices and servants appeared on the scaffold at Tyburn.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the production of cheap printed literature such as broadsides, newspapers, chapbooks, ballads and pamphlets and these constitute an important source for the study of early modern popular culture. Contemporary pamphlets gleefully described the gory details of executions and Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
which extolled the heroism and endurance of Protestant martyrs during Mary’s reign, was used as official propaganda during that of Elizabeth. Broadsides provided information on a single sheet with a woodcut illustration at the top and a popular narrative or sometimes a scurrilous attack on a figure in the public eye. Broadsides and ballads sold particularly well at Tyburn and although only a few survive from the seventeenth century, they offer insights into those who went to witness the executions.

By the mid-seventeenth century, more people, particularly in London, had learned to read although not necessarily to write. Because London had a higher literacy rate than elsewhere, publishers were quick to take advantage of what became a lucrative market. Much of this ephemeral printed matter was cried round the streets by itinerant ballad-sellers of whom there may have been over three hundred in London in the 1640s. They had been regarded as vagabonds during Elizabeth’s reign and were always of low social status. However, crowds of the size that gathered to witness many of the executions at Tyburn always provided a ready market for their wares. Although this street-literature was diverse in the topics it covered – romance, chivalry, bawdiness, heroism, the supernatural – crime was one of the most popular themes and especially when it involved murders or bizarre or salacious activities. Ballads focused with prurient relish on murders involving the aristocracy, on wives who murdered their husbands, on serial murderers, on murders where witchcraft or necrophilia was thought to be involved or on any unusual sexual practices. This street literature was generally loyal to the Crown and condemnatory of rebellions or conspiracies such as the Gunpowder Plot. It therefore played a role not unlike that of today’s tabloid newspapers. Ballads flourished during the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries but went into decline with the appearance of new kinds of prose writings which could be said to be the forerunners of the literary genre of the novel.

Another practice which developed in early modern England was the elaborate playing out of rituals of various kinds on or around the execution site. One of these was the last dying speech, a sixteenth-century innovation intended by the secular authorities, supported by the Church, to uphold their power through ideological means. It developed at a time when various statutes were broadening the range of offences for which the death penalty could be imposed (Sharpe, 1990: 31). Treason, homicide, coining, rape, horse-stealing, cutpursing and the theft of items valued at more than 40
s
now became capital offences. Dying speeches were intended to provide a very public articulation of the fact that crime did not pay and that those who heard them should realise how important it was to respect secular and religious authority. However, not all felons used their valedictory speeches in this way; sometimes they delivered speeches which mocked and debunked the authorities, thereby converting the activities around the scaffold into a parody, a popular, carnivalesque celebration which undermined the powers that be (Laqueur: 1989).

Public execution at Tyburn and elsewhere and the rituals surrounding it were intended by the authorities to emphasise the omnipotence of the law and the condign, inevitable punishments that would befall those who seriously transgressed it. In reality, what often happened was a burlesque, both on the way to and at the place of execution and the development in popular culture of a widespread belittling of and irreverence for the authorities. Evidence of this can be found in the many slang terms that emerged to describe both the hanging day and the hanging itself. These include: ‘the hanging match’; ‘collar day’; a ‘hanging fair’ or the ‘Paddington Fair’; to ‘dance the Paddington frisk’; ‘jammed’; ‘collared’; ‘nubbed’; ‘stretched’; ‘tucked up’ or ‘turned off’. The noose was a ‘horse’s nightcap’ or a ‘Tyburn tippet’. Other slang references included: ‘a man will piss when he cannot whistle’ and ‘there is nothing in being hang’d, but a wry neck and a wet pair of breeches’ (Sharpe 1985a: 16).

That this attempt to browbeat the people into respect for law and authority was unsuccessful is indicated by the fact that the crowds that surrounded the scaffold often contained people who would later feature centre-stage at subsequent Tyburn Fairs. An early example of the fact that the prospect of barbaric punishment did not necessarily dissuade people from committing serious crimes was one Edmund Kirk who had stood in the crowd at Tyburn watching the execution of a man for murdering his wife. Two days later, Kirk murdered his own wife.

The awful punishment of hanging and quartering which involved disembowelling was confined to men. Sir William Blackstone (1723–80), the eminent jurist, offers a not very convincing reason why women were not subjected to the same public pain and humiliation: ‘For as decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies, their sentence is, to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burned alive.’ However, this explanation is difficult to sustain given the practice of ‘carting’ around London. This involved male and female criminals being led at a cart’s tail around the streets and made the object of the onlookers’ ridicule and abuse. In certain cases women who underwent this punishment were ordered to walk naked. For example in 1579, three women – Joan Sharpe, Edith Bannister and Clemence Belton – who had all abandoned their infants, were stripped naked, tied to a cart and whipped with rods around the City and into Southwark (Griffiths and Jenner, 2000: 141). The offence of a wife who murdered her husband had been defined as petty treason since 1351 but in the sixteenth century a more serious view tended to be taken of this crime which was now seen as undermining the social order, an order dominated by men. Women found guilty of this offence were fastened to a stake and had a rope tied around the neck whereupon they were strangled before the surrounding material was ignited.

Peter Ackroyd argues that women in sixteenth-century London played a subordinate role to men in a markedly hierarchical and patriarchal society. In a ‘city of power and business, they retain a supportive invisible presence’ (Ackroyd 2000: 628). Be that as it may, their largely invisible presence was often made visible on the scaffold at Tyburn, as with a formidable beldame and cutpurse who was executed in 1557, but not before she had greatly entertained the crowds by directing at the legal authorities one of the most sustained outbursts of obscene invective ever heard at Tyburn. Women certainly appeared before the courts less than men at this time. The legal system of early modern England very much reflected this male-dominated society and they were not permitted, for example, to serve as jurors or, of course, as magistrates. In fact their involve-ment, except sometimes as suspects, was largely limited to the examination of other women for evidence of pregnancy or marks which would indicate that they might be witches. They might also be called upon in investigations where female corpses needed to be examined for evidence of violence (Gaskill 2000: 256).

As London continued to expand, particularly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, substantial numbers of women migrated there to seek work. Many of them were widowed, deserted or unmarried mothers. They were a very vulnerable group as is evident from the lives of some of those who ended their days at Tyburn. Peter Linebaugh’s analysis shows that of ninety-two women executed at Tyburn between 1703 and 1772, two-thirds were born outside London and ten had been convicted of infanticide (Linebaugh 1993: 148). Women were employed in large numbers in unskilled and low-paid work in the sweated trades and in domestic service. Their employment was particularly at risk at times of economic slump when it was all too easy for them to drift into prostitution and its concomitant, crime.

However not all the women who died at Tyburn fell into the category of the unskilled and underprivileged. In 1523 Lady Alice Hungerford was hanged at Tyburn and afterwards buried in Greyfriars. John Stow mentions a monument there to ‘Alice Hungerford hanged at Tiburne for murdering her husband’ (Stow 1999: 305). Although her name was given as Alice, it was in fact Agnes. She was the second wife of Sir Edward Hungerford, an influential West Country landowner and sheriff but it was her first husband, John Cotell, whom she was found guilty of murdering. This was a curious case because nobody suggested that she had committed the murder herself: those who actually carried it out were William Mathew and William Inges. After strangling Cotell, they had burnt his body in the furnace of Farleigh Castle kitchen. Agnes was charged with receiving, comforting and aiding the two murderers some months later when the incident came to light. William Inges, who was a servant of Agnes, pleaded benefit of clergy but this was not allowed. Her elevated social status did not prevent Agnes being found guilty, incarcerated in the Tower and eventually dying horribly at Tyburn.

The 1530s were a politically sensitive period and to speak out against Henry and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was regarded as treason. One who did so was Elizabeth Barton, a maidservant from Aldington in Kent who was known as the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’. Since 1525 Mary had suffered from a form of epilepsy which gave rise to trances. For this reason she was credited with having some form of second sight and this ‘divine gift’ made her famous. Elizabeth entered the Benedictine nunnery of St Sepulchre at Canterbury in 1527 where Catholic priests made use of her condemnation of Luther’s ideas. When Henry had formally divorced Catherine of Aragon in 1533, Elizabeth was outraged and was foolish enough to have predicted publicly that Henry would die within a month of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Considering that it was Elizabeth, who was already well known, who had made this prediction, such an outburst could not be ignored and she was arrested for treason. She was taken to the Tower and tortured and hanged at Tyburn in April 1534. It is reputed that hers was the only female head ever to be spiked and exhibited on the drawbridge gate of London Bridge.

Another woman who died at Tyburn was Margaret Ward who helped a priest named Watson to escape from prison. She was flogged and suspended by her wrists for such a long time that she was crippled and temporarily paralysed. She was executed on 30 August 1588. We can be fairly certain that as well as the small number of recorded women who died at Tyburn, there must have been many others whose deaths scarcely warranted a mention. There is likely to have been a continuous procession of anonymous victims such as the ‘five men and four women executed for theft’ in June 1562 (Nichols 1848: 285).

The sixteenth century saw a great increase of trials and executions for witchcraft, especially after the Witchcraft Act of 1563. There then followed about a century during which this activity was widely prevalent. Middlesex and London did not have a Quarter Sessions and Assizes. Sessions of the Peace were held twice a year as well as Sessions of Inquiry. Hence those charged with witchcraft in Middlesex could be tried in the Session of Peace for Middlesex or Westminster, the Sessions of Gaol Delivery of prisoners from Newgate or the Old Bailey.

Among those hanged at Tyburn for witchcraft were Margaret Hackett in 1585, Anne Kerke in 1599, Elizabeth Sawyer in 1621 and Joan Petersen in 1652. Margaret Hackett, from Stanmore, was the servant of William Goodwinne and her case is recorded in the contemporary pamphlet
The Severall factes of Witch-crafte
where she was described as ‘this ungodly woman … this witch’. She was a 60-year-old widow who had been accused of causing a series of incidents which were said to have brought misfortune on a number of her neighbours. Anne Kerke of Broken Wharf in the City was alleged to have used her skills in witchcraft to kill several children. When, in 1599, she attended the funeral of one Anne Taylor for whose mysterious death she had been blamed, she was offered no share in the traditional doles for the poor for which she was apparently ‘sorely vexed’ and in consequence is said to have directed her magic against a member of the family (Thomas 1971: 664). At her trial, in order to disprove the idea that a witch’s hair could not be cut, the justice took some hairs from her head. However, a ‘serjeant attempting to cut [the hairs] with a pair of scissors, they turned round in his hand, and the edges were so battered, turned and spoiled, that they would not cut anything’. When this was followed by an attempt to burn the hair, it was said that the fire flew away from it (Purkiss 1996: 126).

Elizabeth Sawyer was the subject of the play
The Witch of Edmonton
, first performed in 1621 at the Cockpit in Drury Lane. Her case is interesting because it throws light on the attitude of the courts to cases of witchcraft and also shows how an accusation could become distorted and fictionalised through popular ballads that were sold at the execution. Elizabeth was accused of causing the death of a neighbour by witchcraft. Curiously, the court seemed unsure how to proceed until a local magistrate, Arthur Robinson, intervened and told them that Elizabeth had a mark on her body which would confirm the suspicion that she was indeed a witch. The justices then ordered officers of the court to bring three women to conduct a body search of Elizabeth. The women reported that they had found a teat longer than a finger and this was considered to be sufficient evidence on which to find her guilty and condemn her to death. Elizabeth was visited by the Revd Henry Goodcole, the part-time Ordinary of Newgate, who not only wanted her to confess in order to shrive her soul but obviously hoped to pick up some juicy information which would sell well when Elizabeth’s ‘last dying confession’ was put onto a broadsheet and touted round the crowd at Tyburn. Elizabeth cared little for co-operating with Goodcole, who had to admit that her confession was extracted with great labour. In fact it was said that she was constantly swearing, cursing and blaspheming, something which would only have confirmed in the minds of many that she was most certainly a witch. Her fame or notoriety went before her and assured a large turnout at Tyburn where several different versions of her last dying confession were circulating among the crowd. Henry Goodcole was seriously put out by the appearance of these alternative accounts and he compared his own account with ‘the most base and false ballads, which were sung at the time of our returning from the witch’s execution’ (Purkiss 1996: 233).