A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  How long the heretic suffered in the fire varied in every case. In England, the burnings were carried out more mercifully than in some countries, such as France and the Netherlands, where additional tortures were sometimes inflicted as a further punishment on a heretic who refused to recant or who defied the authorities at the stake. In England, the heretic’s friends were allowed to supply him with some gunpowder to hang around his neck, so that the gunpowder would explode when the flames reached it and cause the heretic to die instantaneously. Even without the gunpowder, the heretic might die very quickly by being suffocated almost immediately by the smoke. But the burning could be horribly prolonged. The gunpowder sometimes failed to explode because it was damp or defective; and sometimes the fire burned slowly, especially if the faggots were green or damp. There were some slow burnings of heretics in the summer of 1556, after the very rainy winter and spring had made the wood wet.

  When Latimer and Ridley were burned at Oxford in October 1555, Latimer died almost immediately in the smoke; but Ridley suffered terribly from slow-burning faggots. His brother-in-law rushed forward and piled on more wood, in the hopes of ending Ridley’s sufferings; but the effect was to dampen down the flames and to prolong the agony. When Hooper, the Protestant Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, was burned at Gloucester in February 1555, he took three-quarters of an hour to die. All the Catholics and Protestants who watched the heretics burn considered that whether death was quick or prolonged was a manifestation of the will of God.

  Occasionally a cruel executioner deliberately tried to prolong the heretic’s sufferings. When John Lambert was burned at Smithfield in 1538, the men-at-arms who carried out the burning hoisted his burning body on to the point of a pike and lifted him out of the reach of the flames, before bringing him back into them again, in order to prolong the execution.

  Heresy was not the only crime which was punishable by burning alive. It was also inflicted on women who were guilty of high treason, or who committed petty treason by murdering their husbands or their employers; but witches, who were burned in Scotland and in most other countries, were hanged in England, where the fear of witches and the drive against them did not really get under way until the seventeenth century, after James I, who had acquired a great dread of witches in Scotland, became King of England.

  Male traitors who committed high treason against their highest overlord, the King, or petty treason against their immediate overlord by murdering their masters, were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered; but in the case of noblemen it was always commuted to beheading, and sometimes this mercy was extended to gentlemen and men of lower rank. High treason was regulated by the Act of 1351, which is still in force in 1988, and which enacted that it should be high treason to attempt to kill the King, to take part in a revolt against the King, or to aid the King’s foreign enemies in wartime. Later Acts of Parliament were passed, particularly in the sixteenth century, which made other offences high treason. One of them enacted that it was high treason to deny any of the King’s titles, and this Act was used to execute several Catholic supporters, including Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More, who denied that the King was the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Another Act made it high treason to pretend to foretell the date of the King’s death. This was directed against those who prophesied that the King would die within a few months, hoping that this prophecy would encourage the people to rebel. One result of this Act was that when Henry VIII was dying, his doctors, who realized that he had only a few hours to live, did not dare to tell him this, in case they were accused of high treason for foretelling the time of the King’s death. Sir Anthony Denny, who was one of Henry’s most intimate attendants, was prepared to take the risk, and warned the King to prepare for death.

  When a man was found guilty of high treason, the sentence of the court was that he should be hanged by the neck, but cut down while still alive, castrated, and, being yet living, should be disembowelled and his bowels burned before his eyes, before he was beheaded and his body cut into quarters. His head and four quarters were then fixed on a pole on London Bridge, or on the gates of London, York and other cities.

  The execution of traitors, like the burning of heretics, took place in public. Nine were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, about three miles west of London on the northern edge of Hyde Park, where Marble Arch is today. The traitors were brought to Tyburn from Newgate, or some other prison where they had been confined, tied face downwards on a hurdle drawn by horses. As with a burning, how much and how long they suffered varied in every case. The traitor or his family usually paid money to the executioner to allow the traitor, contrary to the sentence of the court, to hang until he was dead, or to dispatch him quickly with a stroke of the knife as soon as he was cut down, and before his bowels were cut out. If the executioner was not paid enough, or was vindictive towards the condemned man, he might deliberately prolong the execution.

  As the international ideological struggle between Catholics and Protestants became increasingly bitter during the sixteenth century, a demand arose for more savage punishments of the traitors. In 1584 the murderer of the Protestant leader, William the Silent, in the Netherlands was executed by prolonged torture, and after this had been widely publicized in London, the loyal English Protestants wished to inflict similar punishments on Catholics who plotted to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. When Anthony Babington and his colleagues were convicted in 1586 of a conspiracy to murder Elizabeth with the approval of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth wished the judges to sentence the convicted traitors to be executed by such means as the Privy Council should determine, so that they could be made to suffer a more painful death than hanging, drawing and quartering. She abandoned her demand when Lord Burghley convinced her that such a sentence would be illegal, and that if the sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering was properly carried out, it would be very painful and prolonged. She soon changed her mind, as she so often did, and after she had been told of the agony which Babington and three of the other traitors had suffered during their hanging, drawing and quartering, she ordered that the remaining traitors who were executed next day should be allowed to hang until they were dead.

  Noblemen, and other traitors who were allowed to be beheaded, were executed on Tower Hill, just outside the walls of the Tower on the western side. They had usually been imprisoned before their execution in the Tower, and were allowed to walk the few yards to Tower Hill instead of being drawn there on a hurdle. The condemned traitor made a short speech to the crowd of spectators before he was beheaded. He was expected, in this speech, to praise the King who had ordered his execution, to urge the people to be loyal subjects, and to acknowledge his guilt; and the great majority of condemned men made the speech that was expected of them. Most of them behaved with courage and dignity on the scaffold. They usually gave a small gift to the executioner, to encourage him to do his job well and quickly. Sometimes the victim died at the first stroke of the axe, but sometimes two or three strokes were necessary.

  Very occasionally, a condemned traitor was not beheaded on Tower Hill, but on the Tower Green within the Tower, in the presence of only a few selected officials, and not of the general public. This privilege was extended to Henry VIII’s two Queens, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. Anne Boleyn was not beheaded by the public executioner with an axe, but with a stroke of a sword by an executioner who had been specially brought from St Omer because he had experience of beheading with a sword. The old Countess of Salisbury, whose chief crime was to be the mother of Henry VIII’s great enemy, the exiled Cardinal Pole, was beheaded on Tower Green in 1541, and so were Lady Jane Grey in 1554 and the Earl of Essex in 1601.

  The crimes of murder and theft, and other felonies, were punished by death by hanging, the convicted criminal being hanged on a gallows and left to hang until he was dead; but after a rebellion, rebels were sometimes hanged in chains, being hung on a gibbet by chains under their armpits and left hanging there until they died of hunger. Other crimes w
ere punished by imprisonment in Newgate, the Fleet, the Counter and the Marshalsea in London and Southwark, and in the various county jails. Short terms of imprisonment were often imposed, but it was very unusual for anyone to be sentenced to a fixed term of imprisonment of longer than a year. Political offenders were usually sentenced to imprisonment during the King’s pleasure, and could then be held in the Tower, the Fleet or the Marshalsea indefinitely, or be released when it pleased the King and the Council.

  Another common form of punishment was a whipping. Offenders were sometimes sentenced to be whipped through the streets when tied behind a slow-moving cart – ‘whipped at the cart-arse’4 – usually on market days, when there would be more people in the town to witness the punishment. Offenders were also placed in the stocks, where they were forced to sit fastened by the legs, or to stand in the pillory fastened by the arms. In the stocks or the pillory, they were surrounded by crowds who pelted them with eggs, stones and offal, while they sat or stood there, a fixed and defenceless target.

  Sentences of mutilation were also imposed. The criminal was sentenced to have an ear nailed to the pillory, or to have the ear cut off. This was usually carried out in the market town on market day. Sometimes, as an aggravated punishment, the criminal was sentenced to have both ears cut off, often losing the second ear a week or a month after the other, on the next market day, so as to prolong and renew the pain of the punishment.

  Various Acts of Parliament were passed, providing that certain offences were to be punished by cutting off the offender’s hand. In order to prevent any violence at court, which might endanger the King’s person, an Act provided that anyone who shed blood within the area of the court should lose his hand. In 1541, two gentlemen of the King’s household quarrelled during a game of tennis in the tennis court at Hampton Court, and one of them, Sir Edmund Knyvett, drew his sword and wounded the other in his anger. He was sentenced to have his hand cut off, as usual in public. But at the last moment, when the King’s master cook was there with the knife, the Sergeant of the Scullery with the mallet, and the King’s master surgeon with the searing iron and the bandages, word arrived that the King had pardoned the offender.

  There was no pardon for the Puritan propagandist, John Stubbs, when he wrote a book in 1579 denouncing the project for Elizabeth I to marry the King of France’s brother, the Duke of Anjou. Elizabeth was very angry, for she considered it seditious for one of her subjects to meddle with the question of her marriage or her foreign policy. Stubbs was convicted under an Act which had been passed in Mary’s reign in 1555, which provided that anyone who published a writing which vilified the Queen should have his hand cut off. The sentence was carried out before a disapproving crowd in Palace Yard in Westminster. After losing his right hand, Stubbs took off his hat with his left hand and cried ‘God save the Queen!’ before he fainted. He was also sentenced to be imprisoned during the Queen’s pleasure, and was held for more than a year in the Tower before he was released.

  The Privy Council itself dealt with political offenders, and exercised judicial as well as executive powers. People suspected of sedition were summoned to appear before the Council. Occasionally the suspect was arrested and brought to the Council by men-at-arms, but much more often he was merely ordered to appear on a fixed day, and came freely of his own accord, out of the respect for the royal authority which was so deeply ingrained in the ordinary Englishman during the Tudor Age; though in sixteenth-century Scotland a person summoned to appear before the ‘Secret Council’ (Privy Council) of the King of Scots would almost certainly have refused to come, and would have taken refuge in the territory of some powerful lord where the government would not venture to pursue him.

  The Privy Council never imposed the death penalty; if the King wished the offender to be put to death, he had to be tried and convicted by a special commission, or by a jury in the King’s common law courts. But the Council, after hearing what the accused person had to say, could sentence him to lose an ear in the pillory, or to imprisonment during the King’s pleasure. Sometimes he was sentenced to be held under house arrest, either in his own house or in the house of some member of the Council, or of some politically reliable member of his own family. In the reign of Edward VI, the Catholic bishops, who refused to submit and accept the Protestant doctrines and Church services prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, were sometimes ordered to be confined as prisoners in the household of one of the Protestant bishops, who would argue with the recalcitrant bishop during his sojourn there and put him under moral pressure to submit. Sometimes the suspect, after the hearing before the Council, was bound over to be of good behaviour in some very large sum of money – £10,000, or an amount equal to most of his property – which he would forfeit to the King if he broke the conditions of his bond and offended against the royal authority.

  An important part in the judicial system was the use of torture to elicit information from a suspected prisoner. Torture was more widely practised in England during the Tudor Age than in any other period before or since. It was not used in the ordinary criminal procedure of the English common law; for although painful punishments, such as hanging, drawing and quartering and mutilation, were imposed by the common law judges, there was no place for the torture of suspects in the English system of trial by witnesses and verdicts by juries, unlike the procedure under the civil law of continental Europe and Scotland, with the inquisitorial system of direct questioning of the defendant. The English common lawyers always frowned on the use of torture, though probably more from their professional dislike of the Roman law than for humanitarian reasons.

  But the canonists of the Church and the ‘civilians’ in the King’s government, with their training in the Roman civil law of the Continent and the canon law of the Church, considered torture to be a proper legal procedure in certain circumstances. Torture came into use in cases of high treason and sedition about the middle of the fifteenth century, and became much more common under Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth I. It ceased to be used in England early in the seventeenth century, and was declared illegal by Parliament in 1640, though it continued in Scotland until 1708.

  Unlike those countries in the twentieth century where torture is used in interrogation by the police, torture in the Tudor Age was openly acknowledged and legal, and the circumstances in which it could be used were strictly prescribed. It could only be inflicted under a warrant signed by the King or the Privy Council. The practice was only to torture a prisoner as a last resort. Although other forms of torture were occasionally used, by far the most common was the rack; the prisoner was fastened to a rack, which was extended by pulleys so that his arms and legs were painfully extended and dislocated, often inflicting substantial physical injury. The theory behind the use of torture was that if the prisoner was innocent, God would give him the strength to endure the pain, but that if he were guilty, it would force him to confess and speak the truth which he was obstinately refusing to reveal.

  The practice was to question the prisoner several times without ‘the pains’. If he refused to disclose important matters which he was suspected of concealing, he was taken to the torture chamber and ‘shown a sight of the instruments’ of torture, and then again questioned without ‘the pains’. If he still remained obdurate, the King or the Privy Council signed a warrant authorizing the application of torture, and he was questioned ‘under the pains’, usually in the presence of a member of the Privy Council.

  Noblemen and noble ladies, and the members of the royal family, had the privilege of being exempt from interrogation under torture; but gentlemen and their wives were sometimes tortured. When Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned in England, she was suspected of being involved in the plot of the Italian banker, Ridolfi, to assassinate Elizabeth I. Mary’s representative in London, the Bishop of Ross, to whom she had accorded the rank of her ambassador, was arrested by Elizabeth’s government and accused of complicity in the plot. As he refused to reveal the information which the government require
d, he was examined by the Privy Council and threatened with interrogation under torture. He claimed that, as Mary’s ambassador, he had diplomatic immunity from torture; but Lord Burghley and the Privy Councillors denied that he was a properly accredited ambassador, or that he had immunity from being questioned under the pains. The matter was not put to the test, because the Bishop of Ross ultimately gave the information which was required of him without being tortured.

  The severity of the criminal law was considerably modified by the doctrines of sanctuary and benefit of clergy, which had been established during the Middle Ages, when the Church was at the height of its power. A fugitive from justice who succeeded in entering a church or monastery was safe from arrest as long as he stayed there, for the authorities were not permitted to enter the church to seize him; and although there were a few notorious cases in which the right of sanctuary was violated by the pursuers, it was nearly always respected. Some important abbeys and cathedral churches were given additional privileges of sanctuary; at Beverley and Hexham, the area of the sanctuary was extended for one mile from the abbey in every direction, and the limits of the sanctuary were marked by boundary stones.

  A criminal who had reached the safety of sanctuary was allowed to remain there for forty days. He was then compelled to leave the sanctuary and go before a JP and confess his offence; but he was given a specified number of days in which to go unmolested to the nearest port and leave the kingdom, after he had promised not to return to England without the King’s permission.

  Banishing criminals from England proved to be unsatisfactory. They were not welcome abroad, and foreign governments adopted the same policy which the English Privy Council did with regard to gipsies and foreign criminals who came to England, ordering them to leave the realm within a given number of weeks on pain of death. English criminals who had gone abroad from sanctuary had no choice but to break their oaths and return secretly to England without the King’s leave, landing at some unguarded place on the coast and continuing their life of crime. So the law was changed; instead of banishing the fugitives who were in sanctuary, they were allowed to remain there permanently under the supervision of a ‘Governor of the Sanctuary’.