by Richard Sugg
Needless to say, there undoubtedly was an unusually wide range of motives present at this rather famous beheading. (Even the author’s psychology seems ironically convoluted: he probably did not approve of commoners swabbing up Charles’s blood, but nevertheless felt compelled to boast that those seeking cures were indeed healed by the divinely touched person of the king.) An obvious division in the above account is that of positive and negative, or Royalists and Republicans. But it is also interesting to consider that, if some of the bystanders were indeed epileptics seeking a time-honoured cure, they may have treated Charles rather as certain ordinary people treated Christ in the Gospels.101 He was not valued in any moral sense, but simply because his body was seen as useful or powerful.102
From other angles, we find that Charles’s execution precisely matches features of routine executions. For a long time in England the executioner’s rope was held by many to have absorbed a similar potency to the execution stool or chopping block. Accordingly, the executioner might sell it, cut into the smallest possible pieces, to satisfy demand and maximise personal profit.103 In Germany, blood-soaked sand was routinely sold, and on at least one occasion (in 1820) a crowd stormed the scaffold in order to break up the stool of the condemned and distribute the pieces – a rough echo of the chopping block sold off piecemeal in 1649.104 Whilst some wanted Charles’s hair as a pious relic, others may have been merely following the habits of those Italians who routinely demanded hair from the executioner in Rome or Milan.105
The political context of Charles’s beheading naturally does imply that the actions of the Royalists around the scaffold had at least quasi-Catholic overtones. At the execution of the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell in 1595, ‘the crowd clamoured for mementoes of the dead man, and “dipped handkerchiefs in the sprayed blood”’.106 Later, when Cornelius O’Deveny, bishop of Down and Connor, was beheaded in Dublin in 1611, the Catholic hunger for relics was yet more pronounced (if the account by Barnabe Rich is to be trusted).107 We hear that ‘the executioner had no sooner taken off the bishop’s head, but that the townsmen of Dublin began to flock about him: some taking up the head with piteous aspect, accompanied with sobs and sighs’, while ‘some cut away all the hair from the head, which lousy commodity, they religiously reserved, for a lousy relic’. The head itself, Rich insists, would have been stolen if not for the executioner’s vigilance. Meanwhile, when the headsman
began to quarter the body, the women thronged about him as fast, and happy was she that could get but her handkerchief dipped in the blood of the traitor. And the body being once dissevered into four quarters, they neither left finger nor toe, but they cut them off, and carried them away. And to shew their Catholic zeal, they tore his garments into tatters, and some others that could get no holy monuments that appertained to his person, with their knives they shaved off chips from the hallowed gallows: neither would they so much as omit the halter wherewith he was hanged, but it was gathered up to be reserved for holy uses.108
The Bishop’s breeches were supposedly sold by the executioner for five shillings, and by way of poetic justice the executioner’s cloak was stolen, allegedly under the assumption that it was that of the Bishop. ‘Catholic’ as this may have been, some of it was probably also magical; and it is certainly clear that many of these supposedly papist excesses were being echoed by German Protestants well into the nineteenth century.
Infamy and Magic
In certain countries, the executioner was regarded with intense superstition by many of those around him. The ‘infamy’ which tainted this figure seems indeed to have resembled a kind of leprosy: it could infect those who came into contact with the executioner himself, his possessions, or even his family. So powerful was the taboo surrounding this figure in the island of Corsica that, as James Boswell noted in October 1765, the hangman of that nation was always a foreigner, despite the fact that any condemned Corsican could have saved his life by taking up the post.109 For the Corsicans, administering death was worse than suffering it.
In northern Europe, the infamy of the headsman seems to have been most powerfully felt in Germanic countries. After visiting in the early 1590s, Moryson wrote:
the Germans are so superstitious, as they think it a great reproach to touch the head or body of any put to death, and think it most ridiculous for any man to salute the hangman, or speak courteously to him, and esteem it a foul fault to eat or drink with them, or any of his family. Therefore the hang-man and those of their family, who help them in their office (and succeed them having no children) do all wear a green cap, or some apparent mark, by which they may be known … when they come into any company, lest any man should offend in the former kinds. And in public taverns they have tables proper to them, at which the basest body will not sit for any reward.110
This sketch is emphatically confirmed by Evans, who stresses that ‘the most dishonouring element of all in a German execution was the touch of the executioner’. He adds numerous details on the tabooed status of this figure: he could often marry no one except another executioner’s daughter; his children ‘could still find it difficult to get employment even in the late eighteenth century’; and in some cases he was barred from the local inn altogether, separate table or not.111
But this negative side of the executioner’s aura was inseparable from a range of more positive powers. He could, Evans adds, ‘earn money by performing small surgical operations on people, or by supplying them with magical cures for illnesses’.112 Stuart’s research on Germany indeed suggests that his popularity as a healer was greater than Evans’ brief words imply, and that in many cases he was remarkably effective.113 Pieter Spierenburg reports ‘numerous cases of hangmen practicing medicine … in the Dutch Republic from the 1590s to the 1790s’.114 Even in France it was believed that the hangman could cure ‘certain forms of illness by touching the sick with his hand when returning from carrying out an execution’.115 Like other highly charged vehicles of superstition, the executioner was never simply positive or negative in the eyes of those who feared him. Rather, he and the corpse he dealt with were, at bottom, powerful. Both had an unstable potency which could easily slide from good to bad.116 The crucial point to realise is that, ambiguous as it was, this dense supernatural aura could in fact have deflected those feelings of distaste or revulsion which might, to us, seem the most natural ones in such an area. For many, superstitious wonder overcame visceral repugnance.
Although we are chiefly concerned with the bodies the executioner handled, and the crowds who made use of these, the peculiarly dualistic status of the axeman offers us a useful model for the similarly paradoxical qualities of the felon.117 Moreover, as can often be the case with broadly magical beliefs, it is difficult to easily draw a line between the powers of the corpse and of the man who had dispatched him. Just where, for example, did the power of the shattered stool come from in 1820, or the chopped rope, or that of the splintered chopping block, in 1649? If we could ask those who sought to obtain these fragments, we may have had different answers from different people. But what does seem clear on surviving evidence is that the body, like the executioner, had an unstable and transferable power. Again, Germany abounds in examples: bits of the criminal body or clothing could bring possessors good luck; a finger could ward off lice; it could also attract money, or indeed customers, if suspended in a beer barrel by an innkeeper; while ‘pieces of skin … were used in amulets’. Blood, in particular, kept ‘“witches from house and stable”’ and protected them ‘“from the danger of lightning”’. In 1858 one peasant woman ‘“took some blood away with her in a little bottle”’, saying, ‘“‘I’m going to paint the front door with it, it’s good against the danger of fire’”’. In 1893, the biographer of the celebrated German executioner Julius Krautz stated that, though his subject had been retired some four years, ‘“not a week passes … without Krautz receiving … requests to ‘remove curses’ from cattle, or to provide pieces of rope and shards from the scaffold or handkerchiefs dipped
in the blood of the beheaded”’.118
Many of these uses serve to sharply underline the highly animate status of the corpse and the things surrounding it. Though the body died, its powers lived on. This impression is confirmed by the frequency of those thefts which occurred some time after the execution itself.
The Gibbet and the Wheel
Late one night in April 1635 a London butcher passed the corpse of Tom Shearwood, a notorious robber and murderer, recently executed and now hung in chains as an example outside Pancras Church. The butcher remarked soberly to himself that it were no bad thing if all such rogues should be served so. Ironically, he was just at this point set on by a gang of lurking villains. Finding little money on him, they stripped his clothes, gagged him, and bound him to the gibbet, wryly bidding him ‘watch the corpse’.
Even for hardened criminals, the proximity of a decaying corpse must have offered some deterrent. But it seems that these lurking robbers had good reason to wait in that particular spot. Shearwood’s corpse was an immensely popular spectacle in 1635 – so much so that civic authorities had ultimately to respond to the trampling of the ‘growing fields’ around the site by moving the body further out, ‘to the ring- cross beyond Islington’. (This itself had to be done at night, just so as to avoid further ‘confusion of spectators’.119) Some of these wondering onlookers were probably just fascinated by the spectacle, or by the special notoriety clinging to Shearwood, who had carried out his crimes with the aid of a female accomplice, Elizabeth Evans. But some would almost certainly have been seeking relics or cures from the corpse – the simplest of these being the touch of the dead hand or body. We should add that Pancras Church was conveniently near to Bucklersbury, the street of London apothecaries, who may have occasionally taken some of their more fearless clients there to touch the corpse.
Chained or gibbeted bodies such as these might often be left exposed for at least several months. Clearly this was the idea in the case of Shearwood, who could otherwise have been buried with less trouble than it took to move him. In his 1609 Masque of Queens, Jonson has a witch tell of ‘a murderer … hung in chains’ so long that ‘the sun and wind had shrunk his veins’.120 Back in 1591 Jonson himself may have seen such a body, after Arnold Cosby was hung on Wednesday, 27 January for the murder of Lord Burke. Carted to a high hill at Wandsworth town end, Cosby made a penitent end, pouring forth prayers before he was turned off the ladder, ‘still calling upon God to forgive him even to the last gasp’. He was then left in this prominent spot, ‘hanged up in chains’ for all to see.121 A similar fate fell to William Anderson Horner in 1708, suspended in chains between Edinburgh and Leith after his execution for the murder of a Mrs Blyth.122 In Britain gibbets were abolished by law only in 1834.123
For those who wanted to merely touch a corpse, a single body would have gone a long way. In Germany, Evans notes, one corpse rotted patiently on the gallows outside Munich from 1697 to 1702; another was supposed to have endured from 1776 to 1784; and ‘the doctor Louis Stromeyer … remembered seeing “the blackish remains” of an executed malefactor on the gallows near Hanover over a period of at least ten years’ in the early nineteenth century.124 Moryson seemed to be struck by the number of such bodies, as well as by the frequency of executions, and the range of crimes for which one might suffer death.125 He also remarked on the torments and methods of execution peculiar to the continent: ‘he that kills a man of set malice, and like heinous murtherers, have all their bones broken upon a wheel, and in some cases their flesh is pinched off, with hot burning pincers’. Meanwhile, ‘after the execution, the bones and members of the malefactor are gathered together, and laid upon the wheel, which is set up in the place of execution … for eternal memory of his wickedness, with so many bones hanging on the sides of the wheel, as he committed murthers or like crimes; and my self have numbered sometimes eighteen, often fourteen bones thus hanging for memory of so many murthers’.126
Whilst Moryson describes ‘these marks’ as ‘long remaining’, Evans shows that this was frequently not the case. ‘In 1770 the fingers were cut off and removed from the body of a criminal hanged in Memmingen’, and similar thefts were reported some way into the nineteenth century, with one of the bones described by Moryson being stolen from a wheel in Pollnow around 1811. In Rochlitz in 1837 ‘the head of a decapitated murderer disappeared without trace the night after the execution’, and in Hamburg in 1801 one doctor ‘complained that the corpses of executed criminals were “completely ransacked in a moment for the purposes of anti-epileptic pharmacology”’.127 It seems likely that the doctor was complaining specifically because people were managing to mutilate criminal corpses before physicians could procure them for anatomy.128 If this kind of theft was swift and enterprising, the removal of bones from the wheel may also have required some skill and determination, given that the wheel itself was usually set upon a pole some twelve feet from the ground.129
Although we know less about such thefts in other countries, we do know that bodies would have been displayed in a similar way in France (Robert Perceval, a visiting Irish medical student, was shocked by such a spectacle in 1781).130 And we know from Pomet’s remarks that body parts were in much demand in that country in the late seventeenth century. Over in Louvain in around 1536, in an ironic reversal of the plundering which the German doctor complained of, the celebrated anatomist Vesalius had stolen the bones of an exposed criminal in order to construct a skeleton.131 On the European continent especially, Paracelsus’ suggestion about gibbeted bodies was evidently a quite practical one.
Anatomists
Our discussion of the early stages of English corpse medicine showed surgeons, rather than physicians, playing an especially active role. For much of Elizabeth’s reign, it was surgeons who were left to undertake the still lowly and demeaning task of dissection for medical training. Even in the first year of the Lumleian lecture there were complaints about the poor attendance of the physicians.132 We can well imagine, then, that the surgeons would also probably be left to dispose of the bodies used as anatomy specimens once lectures were over.133 Given their early advocacy of corpse medicine, it would be surprising if figures such as Banister and Hall did not take advantage of this source of supply. Surgeons and physicians were permitted just six convicts’ bodies per year (from 1584), so that in England such commodities would have been especially precious, given the difficulty of buying materials from the executioner.134
And there is certainly evidence to suggest that both physicians and barber-surgeons were not always overscrupulous about final disposal of criminal corpses. The historian Sidney Young records an edict from the Annals of the barber-surgeons for 1578, forbidding its members to remove parts of criminal bodies from its Hall – and specifically prohibiting them from removing skins in order to ‘tan [them] like leather’. Young argues that this ruling reflected a ‘mania for the relics of notorious criminals’ in late-sixteenth-century England.135 It is hard to say if this mania rivalled that of Germany: but we do know that in that country skin was highly valued by midwives and pregnant women. An executioner named Johann Georg Trenkler told in 1747 of how ‘he had “given pregnant women very valuable help by applying human skin”’, and Stuart shows that it was indeed probably tanned first, then being ‘cut into straps, which women wore as belts during labour’.136 The English ruling tells us two things. One: there was a strong demand for human body parts which were thought to have both supernatural and medical powers. Two: at least some barber-surgeons were prepared to smuggle corpse materials out of Surgeons’ Hall. As they were almost certainly doing this for financial gain, they may well have been ready to supply other substances, such as human fat or bone. Although his reasons might have been different, a Scottish surgeon, John Bell, was accused of smuggling body parts from Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh in 1794.137
Were the physicians also involved in this kind of trade? In Jonson’s 1605 comedy Volpone, the eponymous protagonist at one point imitates a mountebank, or quack doct
or, under the assumed name of ‘Scoto of Mantua’. His fictitious panacea – modestly labelled ‘Oglio del Scoto’ – is an oil which includes ‘six hundred several simples’ along with ‘some quantity of human fat, for the conglutination, which we buy of the/anatomists’.138 By this stage, ‘anatomists’ may well indicate physicians rather than surgeons.
One story in particular suggests that the physicians had certain attractions for more genteel patients. We know that the physician and anatomist Robert Fludd was an especially keen advocate of corpse medicine. Fludd was able to obtain the flesh of ‘a man strangled in the air’ for use as medicine. This would almost certainly have been derived from one of the six criminal corpses permitted annually for the physicians’ public anatomy lectures. Fludd was probably sharing the role of lecturer (with William Harvey and others) from the mid-1620s onwards. In a posthumously published book he reveals that it was customary for lecturers to prepare for the public events by practising privately on a separate criminal corpse.139
Having this body in his house on such an occasion, ‘I was’, he tells us, ‘solicited by Mr Kellet the apothecary, to permit a gentlewoman, who had a schirrous tumour in her belly, to be touched and stroked with the dead man’s hand, because experience had taught it to be very efficacious, for the abolishing of the like horrid protuberation in others’. Fludd agreed, and shortly afterwards the woman’s husband came to thank him, explaining that she was now cured.140 The incident shows us that such therapies were sought after by the educated; that apothecaries might act as intermediaries, and that a sympathetic physician would be ready to co-operate. (In later decades, Boyle ‘highly recommended’ this remedy for those suffering from goitre.141) It also shows us that there was a conveniently discreet alternative to the distasteful mêleé of the public scaffold. In this case, unusually, nothing was eaten. But we cannot rule out cannibalistic uses of anatomy specimens. If a physician genuinely believed in the power of corpse medicine, they could indeed assist in this practice, and perhaps chiefly for the good of their patients.