Amazing True Stories of Execution Blunders

by Abbott, Geoffrey

  On reaching the scaffold he ascended the steps with firmness, then turned to the old executioner; at that, Jean-Baptiste, after showing him his withered arm, pointed to his son, who was standing at the other end of the scaffold in order to conceal the sword he was holding, and explained that he was too old to strike, and therefore his promise must be discharged by a stronger arm and a steadier hand than his. De Lally-Tollendal thanked him by an inclination of the head, whereupon Charles-Henri now approached, and was about to raise the sword when his father stopped him. With a firm hand he took the gag out of the Count’s mouth and, bowing respectfully, said ‘Monsieur le Comte, I am the master here. Just as it happened thirty-five years ago, so today you are my guest. Accept the supreme hospitality which I then promised you.’

  De Lally-Tollendal then prayed, after which he asked Charles-Henri to untie his hands, but the younger Sanson explained that it was not allowed. ‘Then,’ said the victim ‘help me take off this vest and give it to your father.’ Charles-Henri obeyed, taking off the vest, which was made of gold Indian cloth, each button being a large ruby of the finest quality. The Count then exclaimed in a loud voice, ‘And now, you can strike!’ Charles-Henri raised the weapon and brought it down on the Count’s neck, but the hair, which had not been cut but only drawn back, obstructed the blade; instead of decapitating the Count, it only inflicted a severe head wound.

  According to the Memoirs of the Sansons:

  ‘The blow was so violent that de Lally-Tollendal was struck down to the earth, but he sprang to his feet in an instant and glared at Jean-Baptiste with an expression of indignation and reproach. At the sight, the old executioner rushed towards his son and, suddenly recovering his former strength, he took the bloody sword from his son’s hands and, before the cry of horror which rose from the crowd subsided, de Lally-Tollendal’s head was rolling on the scaffold!’

  A leader of the second Jacobite uprising, the 80-year-old Scot, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, climbed the steps to the scaffold on Tower Hill, London, in 1747, assisted by his two yeoman warders. Looking at the vast crowd assembled to watch his execution, he exclaimed, ‘God save us! Why should there be such a commotion about taking off an old grey head that cannot manage to get up a few steps without three bodies to support it?’

  George Praun

  In seventeenth-century Germany, as indeed in England, beheading ranked as an honourable way of paying one’s debt to society, hanging being reserved for thieves, robbers and other criminals of low birth. Master Franz Schmidt, public executioner for the city of Nuremberg from 1573 to 1617 recorded an execution that amazed him:

  ‘George Praun, a cook and swordsman, stole 13 dollars from the bag of a youth from Greyffenberg who was travelling with him, putting stones in their place. After that he took 8 florins from him at Koppenhagen and a further 5 florins from him at Hamburg. At Vienna he stole a pair of white silk stockings from a man, and from a Walloon’s wagon, a valise containing a blue mantle and a pair of red hose, also a white satin doublet. I beheaded him with the sword, and when placed on the stone, his head turned several times as if it wanted to look about it; it opened its mouth and moved its tongue as if wanting to speak, for a good half quarter of an hour.’ The diary entry ended with his incredulous comment, ‘I have never seen the like of it!’

  Archibald Campbell, ninth Earl of Argyll, supported the abortive Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 and so was condemned to die on the Scottish Maiden, an early type of guillotine. The proud Earl, bowing his neck beneath its pendant blade, commented wryly that ‘it was the sweetest maiden he’d ever kissed.’

  Angelique Ticquet

  She was young, she was rich, she was beautiful but, hating her elderly husband, she plotted to have him murdered.

  Angelique Carlier, as she was then, was born in 1657, the daughter of an affluent printer and bookseller, and on his death she inherited a half-share in the large fortune he had bequeathed to her and her brother. Strikingly attractive, she never lacked male companionship in the social circles in which she moved, but wishing to move into the upper echelon of Paris society, she accepted the marriage proposal offered her by Pierre Ticquet, a well-to-do but elderly magistrate. He spared nothing in gratifying her every wish; on her birthday he presented her with a magnificent bouquet, the flowers being intermingled with diamonds and precious stones.

  Their honeymoon lasted nearly three years, and they later took up residence in a splendid house in the city, where Mme Ticquet had her own carriage and horses, and daily entertained a host of guests in her drawing rooms. By constantly indulging her, her husband, whose only income came from his office, frequently ran into debt, but she ignored all his protestations to economise with a petulance that slowly turned into an all-consuming hatred.

  Among her guests was a certain captain in the French Guards Regiment, M. de Montgeorges, an elegant and handsome officer and, falling in love with him, an intimate relationship soon developed between them. Far from being discreet, she boasted about the affair to her friends, the news quickly reaching the ears of her husband, who wasted no time in putting a stop to her soirées and forbidding her gallant captain to enter the house. At that she vowed she would never lead the sort of domestic life her husband wanted to impose on her, and her aunt, agreeing with her, encouraged Pierre’s many creditors to take legal proceedings against him. For her part, Angelique demanded a judicial separation from him, but her husband instantly responded by obtaining a lettre de cachet from the President of the Parliament, a blank order for imprisonment which simply required to be completed by the holder. Brandishing this in front of her, he demanded that she cancel her plans to separate, to be more submissive, and to dismiss the captain from her thoughts and her presence forever. Whereupon the outraged Angelique grabbed the document from him and threw it into the fire.

  Unable to obtain another certificate, the cuckolded councillor became the laughing stock of Paris, this ridicule reinforcing Mme Ticquet’s determination to rid herself of him one way or another and to marry the captain, whom she was still meeting. She therefore decided to have her husband killed, and she recruited her porter, Jacques Moura, as her accomplice, together with some of his friends. Later, though, she had second thoughts and cancelled the scheme. However Pierre Ticquet, doubting Moura’s loyalty to him and suspecting that the porter was still admitting de Montgeorges to the building, dismissed the man and kept the keys to the house himself, thereby virtually imprisoning his wife. She, furious at the situation, then tried to poison him, sending her valet up to his room one night with a cup of broth, but the servant, suspecting her intentions and not wanting to become involved as an accomplice in a murder case, ‘accidentally’ dropped the cup and left the house. At that, by now frustrated beyond reason, Angelique decided that, come what may, her husband had to be killed.

  A few nights later Tiquet had been visiting friends nearby and as he emerged from the house several shots rang out from the shadows and he fell, having been hit by five bullets, none of which, surprisingly, proved fatal. As the news spread, a criminal investigation was started and Moura, the porter, was immediately arrested, suspicion also falling on Angelique. Friends tried in vain to persuade her to flee; a monk actually offered to disguise her, probably as a nun, and escort her to Calais, where she could embark for England, but she refused to leave Paris and her captain. Within the next few days she was arrested.

  Whatever defence she raised proved totally unsustainable when a man came forward and testified that he had been given money by Moura, on behalf of the accused, to take part in the first attempt to murder her husband, and as there was no evidence to substantiate charges regarding the third attempt, in which the shots were fired, she was tried and found guilty of conspiracy to kill.

  In late May 1699 the sentence of the court ‘condemned Angelique-Nicole Carlier to be decapitated in the Place de Gréve; Jacques Moura, her late porter, to be hanged; their property to be confiscated; and from her estate, ten thousand livres for the benefit of the King and one h
undred thousand livres for her husband, to be extracted.’ The compensation for M. Tiquet was subsequently increased to 120,000 livres by order of Parliament, but no appeal was allowed against the death sentence, despite the fact that the victim had survived the conspiracies.

  It was essential that a full confession should be obtained, and also confirmation that all the would-be murderers had been rounded up, and the only way to achieve this was to torture the instigator of the plot. Accordingly Angelique was taken to the torture chamber, escorted by Criminal Lieutenant Deffita, paradoxically one of her earlier admirers. Upon refusing to divulge the information required, she was strapped to the bench, a cowhorn inserted into her mouth and, from a nearby tub, a jug was filled with water and poured into the funnel. Further refusals would have been countered by successive jugs of water, until eventually it would enter her lungs via her windpipe, causing death by drowning. However, Mme Ticquet, unable to face such an appalling fate, soon capitulated and confessed everything.

  She was taken in the fatal cart, together with her spiritual adviser and Jacques Moura, the cortège slowly winding its way through the multitude of spectators, and finally reaching the site of execution. As usual she was clad in spotless white, her dress enhancing the beauty she still retained despite her 42 years. The vehicle had barely halted when a violent storm broke over the city, compelling the spectators to take cover in doorways and beneath balconies. On the scaffold two of the Sanson family

  – Monsieur de Paris having sent for his son – waited to do their duty. Delay was unavoidable, as it would have been suicidal to have attempted to swing the sword while standing on the wet, slippery boards, so executioners and victims had to sit for half an hour near the scaffold and next to the hearse which was there ready to transport Angelique’s corpse to the cemetery.

  At last the rain eased off. Jacques Moura was the first to be dispatched, then the older Sanson assisted the woman to mount the scaffold steps. As he did so, Angelique kissed his hand, grateful for the unspoken comfort he had given her. This touching gesture from such an elegant and composed woman about to be decapitated proved too much for Sanson; turning to his son he exclaimed, ‘Take my place! My strength is failing me!’

  Dutifully, if unwillingly, the young man stepped forward and waited until Mme Ticquet had prayed. She arranged her headdress, moving it clear of her slender neck and asked, ‘Sir, will you be good enough to show me the position I am to take?’ He answered, ‘Kneel down with your head up, lift your hair away from your neck and let it fall forward over your face.’ She obeyed, saying, ‘Am I well thus?’ He nodded, then stepped back and, gripping the heavy, two-handed sword, swung it round in an arc to gain momentum. As he did so, the woman, totally feminine to the very end, exclaimed, ‘Be sure not to disfigure me!’

  Sanson momentarily faltered at her interruption, his aim consequently going badly awry, the razor-sharp blade slashing across the side of her neck, the crowd gasping in horror at the sight of the blood as it poured from the gaping wound. Desperately Sanson struck again, the blade hissing through the air, but only inflicting yet another severe wound. Finally, as described in the Sanson family Memoirs, ‘blinded by the blood which spurted at every stroke, Charles brandished the weapon a third time in a kind of frenzy. At last the head rolled at his feet. His assistants picked it up, and several witnesses asserted that even in death it retained its former look of calmness and beauty.’

  Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, was found guilty of infidelity and incest with her brother, and in 1536 was sentenced ‘to be burnt within the Tower of London, or to have her head smitten off, as the King’s pleasure decrees.’ It was decided that she should be beheaded with a sword, ‘which thing had not before been seen in this land of England.’ Sir William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, wrote in his report, ‘I told hyr it sholde be no payne, it was so sottle [subtle]; and then she sayd, I have hard say the executioner was very gud and I have a lyttel nek, and she put her hand about it, laffyng hartely.’

  The Wheel

  Louis Dominique Cartouche

  To be broken on the wheel was assuredly one of most barbaric of all methods of execution, even for as notorious a criminal as Cartouche. Gangleader, highwayman and robber, he and his men preyed on French shops and banks, coaches, chateaux and ordinary pedestrians, the public breathing a deep sigh of relief when, on 15 October 1721, the police announced his capture. Despite being only four and a half feet tall, thin, with a large head and thinning hair, according to the Paris executioner Charles Sanson, the felon possessed an almost hypnotic power over women. ‘It was,’ the hangman said, ‘surprising that a man so ugly should be represented as a lady-killer.’

  The authorities had been trying to capture him for years, but eventually his gang was infiltrated by a spy, Duchatelat, who eventually reported that the wanted man could be found at a wine dealer’s house in La Courtelle. Forty fully armed soldiers led by the Secretary of State for War, M. le Blanc, attacked his hide-out. There they found him in bed and managed to overpower him before he had a chance to seize one of the six loaded pistols lying on his bedside table. Arrested, he was taken to Chatelet Prison, there to be chained to a stone pillar, with four men guarding the cell’s triple doors. But Cartouche refused to be defeated; he and his cell-mate, an ex-mason, dug down into the earthen floor, breaking into a sewer. Wading through the effluent, they hacked their way through a side wall, to discover that they then stood in a greengrocer’s cellar. The owner, alerted to their presence by the barking of his dog, was sympathetic towards the escapers and led them out to the street, but unfortunately a passing police patrol saw them and, possibly realising by the chains still attached to their wrists and ankles that they were not customers doing a little late shopping, captured the pair and took them to the Conciergerie, the main prison.

  Put on trial on 26 November 1721, Cartouche displayed his usual happy-go-lucky attitude in the court, but his nonchalant air faded as the sentence was read out; he and five members of his gang were first to endure the question ordinaire et extraordinaire,

  i.e. to be interrogated while receiving the lesser and greatertortures of the torture chamber, then to be broken on the wheel. Then, as much information as possible having been extracted from him by the application of the torture of the Boots and other fiendish devices, the crippled felon was taken in the cart to the Place de Gréve, where the scaffold, surrounded by an immense crowd, had been erected.

  It was a truly spectacular occasion, one long awaited by the populace, and the square was packed, a contemporary journal describing how, ‘All night long, carriages transported passengers to the Place until it was jammed with people. Windows facing the square were lit all night. The cold was biting, but the people lit fires right in the square and the local merchants sold food and drink. Everyone was laughing, drinking, singing, and celebrating. Most of the spectators had had their places reserved for over a month.’

  En route to the scaffold Cartouche started to show signs of agitation and when he saw the fearsome cartwheel mounted on its upright axle, he turned pale, beads of perspiration forming on his brow. All cynicism now long gone, nevertheless on being secured to the Croix de St André, the St Andrew’s Cross, of planks nailed to the face of the wheel, he managed to call out ‘One!’ when Sanson delivered the first blow with the iron bar, fracturing part of one limb, but then lapsed into silence.

  No matter how serious the crimes committed by a criminal, the court usually gave him the benefit of the retentum, a fatal blow to the heart after a certain number of strokes, and that merciful clause had been included in Cartouche’s sentence, but due to an appalling error by a clerk, Sanson was not informed, and so the sickening procedure had to be meted out in full. More blows rhythmically rained down on the victim, shattering his arms above and below his elbows, and his legs above and below his knees. Cartouche eventually received eleven blows with the bar, and it was reported that he was still alive twenty minutes after first being strapped to the wheel. />
  Broken On The Wheel

  The persuasive capability of the instruments in the torture chamber was such that an almost complete round-up of the remaining members of the Cartouche gang then swung into action. More than 150 of them were arrested, many subsequently being hanged; renegade jewellers, informers, receivers and collaborators were also caught and suitably punished. Nor were those women and children associated with the mob spared; Cartouche’s animal magnetism where women were concerned was never more evident than when five of his mistresses were taken into custody and later hanged on Sanson’s scaffold, and the gangleader’s brother, although only fifteen years of age, was sentenced not only to hard labour for life, but was also the first to suffer an unusual and unnatural punishment, the brain-child of Judge Arnould de Boueix.

  In revenge for the recent murder on the highway of his father, a police officer, he ordered that the boy ‘be suspended under the armpits for two hours in the Place de Grève.’ Accordingly, Sanson and his assistants obeyed, placing the noose around his chest, but the boy’s frantic screams and protestations that he would rather die than endure such pain, faced them with a predicament, one that was only solved by the executioner deliberately disregarding the judge’s instructions; on seeing the lad’s face being suffused with blood and then being unable even to whisper, he cut down their victim long before the specified two hours had elapsed and ordered that he be returned to the prison. Regrettably however, the boy died without regaining consciousness.

  When, in 1535, Sir Thomas More was ordered to position his head on the block, ‘he, having a great grey beard, said to the Executioner, “I pray you let me lay my Beard forward over the Block lest you should cut it off; for though you have a Warrant to cut off my Head, you have none to cut off my Beard!”’