More often than not, though, a traitor’s head was kept in, or sent to, London. Heads were preserved so that they could be displayed for as long as possible. Dafydd’s head was ‘bound in iron, lest it should fall to pieces from putrefaction, and set conspicuously upon a long spear shaft for the mockery of London’. More usually, traitors’ heads were coated in tar or parboiled to slow the rot. Parboiling was a common practice for centuries, particularly with famous traitors’ heads, because it extended their useful life. Not unlike the processes of steaming, drying and shrinking heads in other cultures, parboiling traitors’ heads set them outside the normal processes of decomposition and transformed them into more durable emblems of government and military power.
Maintaining a good display of heads around the city took time and effort. For more than three hundred years, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, there was a Keeper of the Heads who lived in the gatehouse on London Bridge, and whose job it was to arrange traitors’ heads and body parts to their best effect. Heads that had become too rotten were usually thrown in the river to be replaced by new, fresh heads. Sometimes the displays were arranged symbolically. When the Scottish nobleman John of Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl was executed as a traitor in 1306, his head was placed next to Wallace’s, but on a higher pole to signify his higher status. When twenty-six of the Kentish rebels were executed in 1451, nine of their heads were displayed on London Bridge, with the head of their leader, Jack Cade, who had been killed while fleeing London, in the centre of the group.
In other cities, the watchmen who patrolled the walls and gates took responsibility for displaying heads and body parts when necessary. As well as arranging heads strikingly, they had to protect their exhibits from theft by family members or sympathizers intent on burying their dead. Some of the more famous instances of ‘head theft’ occurred after the Jacobite rising of 1745. Francis Towneley, a Jacobite army officer who was captured at Carlisle Castle that year, was hung, drawn and quartered in July 1746 and his head was dipped in pitch and spiked on Temple Bar, but it did not stay there long, because it was stolen and kept secretly in the Towneleys’ home for two hundred years. For a long time, it was kept behind the panelling in the family chapel, and then in a basket in the sideboard, before being sent in a hatbox to Drummonds Bank, in Trafalgar Square, for safekeeping. Towneley’s head was removed from the bank and interred in the family vault in 1945.
The circumstances surrounding the theft of Towneley’s head in 1746 are unclear, but robberies were taken extremely seriously. When two Jacobite heads disappeared from one of the city gates at York in 1754, the Lord Mayor climbed to the top of the walls to view the scene of the crime for himself, the King was informed, and the government offered a reward for any information leading to an arrest. When the offender was found, he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and a £5 fine. In at least one instance, however, patience repaid a grieving family member. When Sir Thomas More was executed on 6 July 1535, his head was set on a spike on London Bridge, where it was carefully watched by his daughter, Margaret Roper, and her friends. When, a month later, it was taken down to be discarded in the river, Margaret bribed the executioner and took her father’s head away. She was summoned before the Privy Council and charged with keeping a sacred relic, but she argued in her defence that she intended to bury More’s head in the family vault. She was released, and reportedly preserved her father’s head with spices. It was only after her death in 1544 that More’s head was placed in the Roper family vault in St Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury.
While some people’s heads were rescued by their supporters, others were defaced by enemies. Putting people’s heads on display also exposed them to further abuse. There are numerous examples of Catholic martyrs whose bodies were vandalized in the aftermath of execution. When the priests George Nichols and Richard Naxley were executed in Oxford in 1589, members of the crowd hacked at their remains with knives. Eight years later, officials scratched the face of the Franciscan John Jones and blackened it with powder. In 1642, members of the Dorchester crowd who saw Hugh Green put to death played football with his head and poked sticks in his eyes, ears, nose and mouth.
It was not unusual for the crowd to try to take matters into their own hands, either by defacing a corpse to reinforce the punishment or by stealing parts of the body to deny the government its ‘trophies’, all of which could make the executioner’s job even more challenging. After all, it was up to the executioner to provide his audience with a good show.
Decapitation was the executioner’s masterpiece, and the crowds around the scaffold were quick to judge his performance. A beheading was an important event. In Britain, it was traditionally reserved for the wealthy, as though the most powerful members of society required an equally formidable show of force on the part of the state when they were sentenced to death. In many European countries, decapitation was perceived to be an honorable, and less agonizing or humiliating, way to go. Kneeling or lying down to receive the strike of a blade was more dignified than swinging from a rope, and, at the hands of a competent executioner, death was virtually instantaneous. In Germany, hanging was common for crimes committed in secrecy, like larceny or burglary, while beheading was more usual for crimes committed in public, like manslaughter. Convicted prisoners often sought a reprieve by converting a sentence of hanging, or death on the wheel, to death by beheading. In the Netherlands, beheading, the penalty for homicide, was generally reserved for those who had killed in a fight, since it was deemed a more honourable way to die.
Different countries adopted different methods. In Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and France, members of the elite were executed by sword while they knelt or sat, blindfolded, on the scaffold; but the British preferred the axe, which required a demeaning position kneeling face down on the block. There were always exceptions to the rules: Oliver Cromwell ordered Charles I’s executioners to lower the block so that the King had to lie flat on his stomach in an even more humiliating posture; while Henry VIII, in contrast, granted Anne Boleyn’s request to die at the hands of a French swordsman who travelled from Calais to kill her while she knelt upright in the French style. Both weapons, axe and sword, proved unreliable, particularly in Britain, where executioners were used to adjusting ropes rather than sharpening blades.
The crowd was almost as merciless as the executioner himself. If the swordsman was clumsy, and the prisoner’s torture unnecessarily prolonged, spectators might throw mud and stones or even attack. Occasionally an executioner, who was one of the most reviled and feared members of society, paid for a botched execution with his life. Stories of executioners stoned and beaten to death or murdered in their homes come from all over Europe. On one occasion, in the early eighteenth century in the Netherlands, angry members of the crowd managed to climb the scaffold and throw a fire pot at the executioner, who had been busy using it to brand criminals. In Augsburg, Germany, in 1464, the executioner missed his target, fled under a bridge, and was beaten around the head with an iron bar by an outraged spectator. At the other end of the country, in Zellerfeld, in 1607, an executioner who failed to do his job after five attempts was hacked to death in the streets. In Nuremberg, in the early sixteenth century, the city council had to protect the scaffold with guards to hold back ‘so great a crowd of people that had assembled everywhere with hammers, pick-axes and other weapons’. No wonder many executioners turned to drink to steady their nerves.
Alcohol may have fortified the mind, but it certainly did not steady the hand, and no doubt it only added to the executioner’s problems. One common excuse for failure was that the executioner had seen the condemned man’s head double before him and ‘therefore did not know which of the two was the real one’. There are stories of swords slicing through jaws and axes hacking into shoulder blades and skulls, and of it taking two, three, five, even twenty attempts to dispatch the poor soul on the scaffold. It took three blows to sever the head of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587, and many more in 1541 to kill Margar
et Pole, Countess of Salisbury, who defied her fate by refusing to place her neck on the block.
Stories like these point to the fact that it is incredibly difficult to behead a living person at a single stroke, even one who is bound and blindfolded, and that is without taking into account the distraction of a raucous crowd of spectators throwing things and heckling. Even a dead, or unconscious, criminal did not guarantee a clean operation. The Irish revolutionary Edward Despard was hanged in 1803 before being cut down to have his head removed by a surgeon. Unfortunately the doctor ‘missed the particular joint aimed at,’ as the historian V.A.C. Gatrell describes, ‘and was haggling at it, till one of the executioners took the head between his hands, and twisted it round several times, and even then it was with difficulty separated from his body’. Eventually, Despard’s executioner was able to lift his trophy and shout the customary declaration to the crowd of twenty thousand spectators: ‘This is the head of a traitor!’
Despite the demands of the job, or perhaps because of them, when beheadings went well they could bring an executioner great distinction. From the mid-sixteenth century, wealthier European executioners hired assistants, who administered minor punishments, but the job of beheading people was always reserved for the master. Myths grew up around executioners, and people told stories about their magical powers. It was said that they could recover lost children or stolen goods, that they could exorcise evil spirits and cure diseases with their touch, and that the swords in the executioner’s house rattled whenever a person was condemned to death. There was the story of an executioner who had decapitated a standing man so fast that the only visible mark on the dead man’s body was a thin stripe of blood around his neck. And some executioners were said to have dispatched a whole group of rogues in a matter of minutes.
Claus Flügge, the executioner of Hamburg, performed a remarkable feat in 1488 when he beheaded seventy-nine pirates non-stop. When the senate asked him how he felt on completing this coup, he replied, ‘I am feeling so well that I could easily go on and do away with the entire Wise and Honorable Senate.’ The senators, apparently, were not amused and Flügge’s insolence cost him his own head.
Most executioners who perished for their pains could only blame their nerves or incompetence. All too often, the state of the traitor’s head held aloft to the crowd confirmed the power of an incompetent slayer over a physically defenceless victim, and in the final years of the eighteenth century, the French government set about changing all that. It took the sword out of the executioner’s hand and gave him a pulley instead: it commissioned a decapitation machine.
The guillotine was designed to be discreet. When it was introduced in France as the official method for executions in April 1792, it was meant to make the brutal business of putting people to death altogether cleaner, neater, more reliable, and so more humane and less spectacular. Commentators heralded the guillotine as an improvement on the torturous and unpredictable procedures of earlier years, when the speed of a person’s death depended largely on their crime, their social status and their executioner’s skill, or lack of it. Now everyone who was sentenced to death in France would be killed in the same way, quickly and efficiently, by a machine.
The first spectators to witness the guillotine at work in the 1790s, however, were not impressed. They were used to more drama. The machine was too quick and perfunctory; there was nothing to see. There were rarely any mistakes, there was little scope for confusion and there was hardly any interaction between the people on the scaffold at all. No one minded seeing the condemned man’s head being cut off, they were used to that kind of thing; on the contrary, they were disappointed that they could not see the condemned man’s head being cut off. More than anything else, the first crowds to watch the guillotine in action seemed confused. Death was so quick it was impossible to discern.
René-George Gastellier, a physician and representative to the National Assembly, said the speed of the guillotine was such that ‘from the first point of contact to the last, there is no distance; it is an indivisible point; the blade falls, and the patient no longer exists’. The crowd was almost stupefied by the speed of the execution, and shouted, ‘Give me back my wooden gallows, give me back my gallows!’ What was the point of coming out to watch something you could not see? But as far as the authorities were concerned, this was exactly why the guillotine was the perfect solution to a long-standing problem: it provided a non-spectacular spectacle – an execution that was at once public and invisible.
The first execution by guillotine, Place du Carrousel, Paris, 13th August 1792.
Few French people today would find a public guillotining an anti-climax, but in the eighteenth century the French were used to seeing long, drawn-out deaths on the scaffold, as criminals were stretched, flayed, burned, mutilated or broken on the wheel. Although the French were not the most prolific nation when it came to the death penalty – the English could claim that dubious honour – they were among the most cruel. It may be hard for us to imagine living in a society that condoned such tortures, never mind actually watching them for ourselves, but our sensibilities are relatively recently formed.
The earliest records of public executions, which could be extremely protracted events, rarely make any reference to the physical pain of the victim. According to the Chronicle of Lannercost, Dafydd ap Gruffydd ‘was first drawn as a traitor, then hanged as a thief; thirdly, he was beheaded alive, and his entrails burnt as an incendiary and homicide; fourthly, his limbs were cut into four parts as a penalty of a rebel, and exposed in four of the ceremonial places in England as a spectacle’. Traitors like Dafydd were dehumanized in the literature, so that they became little more than a body that symbolized their crimes.
During the sixteenth century, when religious strife brought thousands of people to the scaffold, people began to focus more on the behaviour of the condemned: would they repent, or would they go to the scaffold unrepentant, even joyful in their heterodox convictions? The performance on the scaffold was no longer simply about getting justice done, it was about observing the final act in a personal drama. By the late sixteenth century, regardless of the crime, popular leaflets were printed describing criminals and their misdeeds, and it had become customary for the condemned to give a final speech on the scaffold. Still, executions were as popular as ever. Across Europe, thousands came to see people hanged, mutilated and tortured to death. They paid high prices for the best seats, they thought of it as a form of entertainment, and many of them watched with an almost clinical detachment. Felix Platter, a medical student in Montpellier in the late sixteenth century, detailed fifteen public executions in his diary. He gave no description of the victim’s response, but he recorded when the executioner used red hot pincers, or cut off a man’s hands on a chopping block, or decapitated him and cut him into pieces to be hung on the trees outside the city walls.
When for the first time in many years a nobleman was sentenced to be decapitated in Paris in 1737, a great crowd gathered, filling the streets and the windows overlooking the scaffold, and when the act was done, they did not gasp or cry and look away – no, ‘Everyone applauded in order to compliment [the executioner] on his skill.’ Even at the the famous and extraordinarily brutal execution of Robert-François Damiens in 1757, ‘the execution of the century’, when thousands crammed the streets, buildings and roofs of the Place de Grève and waited for hours to watch Damiens tortured with molten lead and boiling oil before being pulled apart, slowly and ineptly, by horses, and then cut to pieces by the executioner, no one shouted or cried. ‘The Parisians seemed only like gawkers, behaving in an ordinary manner, and even indifferent. They showed neither hatred nor pity.’ One man broke through the barrier with his notebook and diligently wrote down everything Damiens said during his terrible ordeal.
When the Cato Street conspirators were hanged and decapitated in 1820 in front of 100,000 spectators, the London crowd hissed, hooted and groaned as the blood flowed so freely over the scaffold that it gained ‘t
he aspect of a slaughter house’. One spectator, Cecil Fane, who joined a party watching from a window above, had to turn away, but his squeamishness ‘excited great contempt’ from his companions. A young woman in the group ‘kept her eyes fixed on it all the time, and, when they had hung a few seconds, exclaimed, “there’s two on them not dead yet!”’.
People continued to flock to executions, but by the turn of the nineteenth century, when the guillotine made its entrance on the scene in France, many commentators were troubled by the bloody pageantry of the scaffold. Almost no one questioned the death penalty itself, but they questioned people’s desire to watch. It came to be seen as heartless and unnatural to be able to witness someone else’s suffering and remain unmoved. Women in particular were thought to embody the compassionate instinct, and men pronounced their shock at the insensitivity of female spectators at executions.
Commentators were as horrified by the crowds who chatted and laughed below the scaffold as they were by the scenes on the gallows itself, although in many cases their horror did not prevent them from going along to watch as well, if only to ‘bear witness’ to the emotional deficiencies of their compatriots. Charles Dickens went to see Courvoisier’s hanging in 1840 and saw in the audience no ‘emotion suitable to the occasion … No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes.’ William Makepeace Thackeray was also there and noted mechanics, gentlemen, pickpockets, Members of Parliament and journalists in the crowd; and he watched too, even though he felt ‘ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight’. Some spectators were overcome at executions, but many watched criminals being put to death without feeling any particular emotion at all.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 10