Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (8 page)

In April 1652, Joan Petersen, the ‘Wapping Witch’, was hanged at Tyburn. Joan had been asked to provide an alibi for a complex series of deceits involving the mysterious death of Lady Powell. Joan refused to be involved but found herself arrested anyway. Her house was searched and despite any very convincing evidence, she was charged with using witchcraft to kill Lady Powell. Joan vehemently denied the charges and declared that she had never even met the murdered woman. At her trial Joan was searched and, predictably, was found to have a ‘teat … in her secret parts’ (Ewan 1929: 274). It seems that the trial was rigged because defence witnesses failed to appear, possibly because of intimidation, while prosecution witnesses may have been bribed to testify against her. Joan vigorously protested her innocence even when she was offered a pardon if she confessed. In fact, her response to this offer was perhaps not the best one in the circumstances – she hit an officer of the law and made his nose bleed. The Ordinary or chaplain who travelled with Joan to Tyburn was so unrelenting in his attempts to make her confess that even the executioner asked him to desist.

Anti-Catholic rhetoric was a feature of English society after the death of Mary in 1558. It was frequently presented in a way which tried to make Catholicism synonymous with criminality and also, more loosely, it was often used to demonise women and others who could be regarded as threats to authority and order. The pursuit of so-called ‘witches’, some of whom died at Tyburn, involved both Protestants and Catholics and was a part of this process. It was a response, frequently violent, by those in power to prevent social, economic and political changes which they thought were undermining and threatening the status quo. They were absolutely right because processes were evolving which over a period of two or more centuries would make Britain the crucible of a new order, an urbanised and industrial society. However, most of those who died at Tyburn in this period, both female and male, did not analyse or attempt to explain the circumstances in which they found themselves. They were unwitting victims in a process of historical change.

The majority of those executed in the period under review were not religious offenders but nameless felons. For example, Machyn records in his diary that in 1556 ten thieves were hanged for robbery, sixteen felons were hanged in 1590 and nineteen in 1598. He mentions also in 1598 that a hangman with a ‘stump-lege’ was executed for theft and it was noted with some glee that he had ‘hangyd many a man and quartered many and beheaded many a noble man and other’ (Nichols 1848: 109). There is brief mention of other felons such as Thomas Green, a goldsmith, executed in 1576 for clipping and coining and in 1598 of Richard Ainger who was executed for the murder of his father at Grays Inn. The body was found floating in the Thames and Ainger, after being placed in manacles and tortured, was hanged at Tyburn.

Many felons were found guilty of coining and clipping and appeared at the ‘Triple Tree’. The shortage of coin by the late fourteenth century led to widespread clipping and counterfeiting which became particularly prevalent in the early modern period. Laws against coining were harsh and it was considered serious enough to be a treasonable offence. In 1540 four felons died at Tyburn for clipping gold coins, two men were executed in 1554 for the ‘coining of naughty money’ and three more in July 1555. Other coiners are recorded as dying at Tyburn in 1572, 1576 and 1586. The anonymity of these offenders suggests that their crimes and their characters made no great impact at the time.

D
uring the reign of the Stuarts between 1603 and 1714, London’s built-up area was expanding westwards, particularly into the neighbourhoods of Bloomsbury, Marylebone and Mayfair, and advancing steadily and apparently inexorably towards Tyburn which, however, remained a predominantly rural location at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The ‘Triple Tree’ continued to bear its gory fruit. Among the many felons executed at Tyburn there was a continuing presence of Catholics dying for their beliefs even if the state designated them as traitors.

One such victim was Anne Line, disowned by her family for embracing Catholicism. She became the housekeeper of premises in London owned by Father John Gerard, a leading Jesuit. He had been arrested and placed in the Tower but had managed to escape in 1597. When the authorities began to suspect Anne’s involvement with clandestine Catholic activities, she moved to another house which became a rallying point for recusants. On 2 February 1601 a group of Catholics was about to celebrate Mass in her house when the pursuivants or priest-catchers broke in. The altar prepared for the ceremony was all the evidence that was needed for the arrest of Anne, who was indicted for harbouring a priest. On 27 February 1601, she was taken to Tyburn and hanged with the Catholic priests Mark Barkworth and Roger Filcock. She continued vigorously to declare her faith right until the end.

In 1606 Robert Drury was offered his life if he would only take the new oath drawn up under the rule of James I which required him as a Catholic to swear allegiance to the King as Head of the Church of England. Pope Paul V condemned the oath ‘as containing many things contrary to the Faith and Salvation’. Drury felt that his conscience would not permit him to take the oath and he died a martyr at Tyburn on 26 February 1607. It was declared that he and other prisoners were to be

Laid upon a hurdle and so drawne to the place of execution … then to have their secrets cut off and with their entrails thrown into the fire before their faces, their heads to be severed from their bodies, which severally should be divided into four quarters.

(Harleian Misc. 1809: 46)

For the occasion of his public demise Drury wore a new black cassock and shoes. He declaimed somewhat unctuously from the gallows that he had never told a lie but then added, after a pause pregnant with second thoughts, ‘not willingly’. A year later Thomas Garnet was also offered his life if he would take the oath but he refused. He was executed with several coiners but casting aside the slight to his religious beliefs that this involved, on the gallows he announced that he was ‘the happiest man this day alive’. In 1610 John Roberts, a Benedictine priest who was found guilty of illegally ministering in England, was hanged and quartered at Tyburn with sixteen other prisoners who had committed a range of criminal offences and was supposedly buried with them in a common grave, although the story is that his remains were later recovered and eventually reinterred at Douai.

Although accounts of the last dying speeches and the actions of the condemned on the gallows were used by officialdom for propaganda purposes, they sometimes offer useful insights into the interaction between the prisoners, the officials and the crowd. John Roberts had used the gallows to preach a valedictory sermon which so impressed the sheriff that he rebuked hecklers in the crowd who wanted him to stop. The sheriff had made it clear that Roberts would be permitted to say anything that he wanted ‘so long as he speaketh well of the Kinge’. Such concessions could be abused. In 1612 when the priest John Almond was about to be hanged, the sheriff was at first inclined to prevent him from speaking but on receiving an assurance from Almond that he would not say anything offensive to the King or the state, he relented. Almond then annoyed keen Protestants in the crowd by stating that salvation was only to be found within the Church of Rome. Although there were protests at this comment, he finished by mentioning repentance which was regarded as a crucial aspect of any last dying speech. After he had expired, it was said that his heart had leapt into the hands of a watching Jesuit (Lake and Questier 1996).

On the scaffold many condemned prisoners refused to confess and indeed some continued to protest their innocence right up to their deaths. Few went as far as Francis Newland who was hanged for murder at Tyburn in 1695. On the gallows he insisted on his innocence saying, ‘I am at peace with all the world … I suffer a most just reward, for my past sinful life and conversion.’ Edward Altham, executed for rape in 1688, stood on the gallows and declared his innocence so forcefully that he drew widespread sympathy from the crowd, ‘every person seeming to be very sorry for his untimely end’. George Goffe executed at Tyburn in 1700 provided a variation on the normal dying speech by confessing to his earlier sinfulness and adding that his fate was the result of malicious prosecution by men rather than a just judgment by God.

Peter Linebaugh and V.A.C. Gatrell have written about the dynamics of the eighteenth-century gallows crowd but finding evidence of crowd reaction from earlier periods presents greater difficulty. It is clear, however, that the crowd’s response to an execution often depended on the character of the victim. For example in 1571 the attitude shown towards John Story was hostile because he was a known persecutor of Protestants. The crowd’s sympathies might be swayed by the way in which the condemned behaved in the procession and on the gallows and also by their last words, if any. After the priest Mark Barkworth had been quartered it was noticed that constant kneeling had hardened his knees. Someone in the crowd picked up one of his legs after he had been dismembered and not without some sympathy and admiration is said to have called out, ‘Which of you Gospellers can show such a knee?’

The London gallows crowd was the subject of outrage and disgust voiced by various commentators and also sometimes of praise depending on the social, economic and political circumstances of the events in question. For example, the crowds who assembled around Westminster during the period prior to the Civil War in the early 1640s were described by an observer as ‘rabble … porters and other dissolute rude fellows’. However, elsewhere they were said to be ‘citizens and ‘prentices’ or comprising ‘for the most part men of good fashion … many thousand of the most substantial of the citizens’ (Manning 1978: 25).

The size of the crowd varied enormously and it seems that it was not necessarily those whose crimes or executions have been well documented or who have otherwise been remembered who drew the largest numbers. It is likely that there were huge crowds for some criminals now hardly known and that this reflects the dynamic complexity of public executions in the culture of the time. While the responses of the crowds may seem capricious, even inexplicable to us today, they probably made perfect sense in the context of the times.

In 1616 the Catholic priest Thomas Maxfield drew a crowd of just 4,000 at his execution. However, on the evening before his death the gallows at Tyburn were adorned with garlands and flowers and the ground strewn with bay leaves and sweet herbs, a mark of respect or reverence which does not seem to have been extended to other martyrs. Very large numbers were attracted to the execution of an apprentice, Nathaniel Butler, in 1657. His case generated enormous interest at the time and even while he was in prison many pamphlets were published dealing with it. In the condemned cell, he was visited by many Puritan divines who converted him on the strength of hopes of salvation and forgiveness. The Puritans then carefully stage-managed his appearance and performance on the gallows and used it as evidence of divine intervention. At Tyburn, Butler’s speech described his fall from grace, his sense of redemption after conversion and ended with an appeal to the members of the crowd urgently to reform their own manners.

Crowds around the gallows were by no means always tolerant of expressions of pious contrition or other religious exhortations from condemned prisoners about to die. When a prisoner engaged in lengthy sessions of prayer or gave long admonitory sermons, the patience of the crowd could wear distinctly thin. John Nelson was heckled during his prayers with shouts of ‘Away with thee’ while the supplications of William Sherwood and Thomas Woodhouse were interrupted by cries of ‘Hang him, hang him’.

Were such catcalls evidence of disapproval by the crowd of the religious beliefs of those on the gallows? It is likely that the demeanour of the prisoner on the gallows counted for more than protestations of religious conviction. V.A.C. Gatrell has drawn attention to the way in which the crowds could be won over by the defiance, the courage or the modesty of the condemned man. He also argues that during the periods of religious persecution, some last speeches had a telling effect. For example, the Venetian Ambassador described Henry Garnet as a man of ‘moving eloquence’ and said that the power of his speech could ‘produce just the reverse of what they desire’ (Gatrell 1994). However, while some individuals elicited sympathy and moral support by giving a good performance in the very public theatre of Tyburn, even where contentious religious issues were involved, the crowd could respond with mockery or hostility to signs of cowardice or arrogance on the gallows.

While the procession over the years of the nameless poor to Tyburn went largely unrecorded, crime in high places has always attracted interest and extensive coverage and the murder of Richard Overbury in 1613 was one such case. A writer and poet, courtier to James I and mentor to one of James’s favourites, Robert Carr, Overbury became involved in writing love letters for Carr, who had fallen in love with Frances Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. There was a snag. Frances was already married to the Earl of Essex. Howard, with Carr’s approval, attempted to get a divorce but Overbury objected. Carr was displeased and when James offered Overbury a prestigious foreign appointment, he perfidiously advised Overbury to refuse it. Carr then reported Overbury’s refusal of the offer to the King and suggested that Overbury had rejected it with contempt. Overbury was seized and thrown into the Tower. Carr had not done with Overbury. With the assistance of some prison guards, he made sure that Overbury was fed with some tarts and jellies laced with poison mixed by a pliant physician called Franklin. The plan was successful and Overbury wasted away and died. The wished-for divorce went ahead and Carr, who became the Earl of Somerset, was married three months after Overbury’s murder. However the plot was leaked by the physician’s assistant. The outcome was the hanging of Richard Weston, the under-keeper of the Tower, at Tyburn in October 1615 followed, perhaps rather unfairly, by that of a Mrs Turner who had delivered the sweetmeats to the unsuspecting Overbury. The physician Franklin was executed at St Thomas a Waterings for his part in the murder.