Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree

by Alan Brooke

  Another conspiracy in which Tyburn received the plotters was hatched in 1584 and involved George Haydock, John Nutter, Thomas Hemerford, James Fenn and John Munden. They met their Maker at Tyburn on 12 February 1584. All had said Mass before setting out on their journey to Tyburn. The first to be dealt with was Haydock, the youngest and the weakest in health. An eye-witness described him as ‘a man of complexion fayre, of countenance milde and in professing of his faith passing stoute’. He recited prayers all the way to Tyburn and acknowledged Elizabeth as his rightful queen but confessed that he had called her a heretic and then expressed the wish that all Catholics would pray for him and his country. To this, one bystander retorted by crying, ‘Here be noe Catholicks’. The cart was then driven away and the attendant is said to have pulled the rope several times before Haydock fell. He was then disembowelled while alive. A similar fate awaited the others. Insult was added to injury in the case of Fenn who was stripped of all his clothes except his shirt. After the cart was driven away even his shirt was pulled off his back, so that he hung stark naked, ‘whereat the people muttered greatly’, as well they might.

  Between 1581 and 1603, no fewer than 180 Catholics were executed for treason, the vast majority of them at Tyburn. In 1604 Thomas Alfield would have had every reason to feel aggrieved. He was executed at Tyburn after receiving a reprieve which for some unknown reason arrived too late to save him. On occasion, punishment on the scaffold might be modified. For example, Polydore Plasden, also known as Oliver Palmer, at his execution stoutly declared that Elizabeth was his lawful queen whom he would defend to the best of his power against all her enemies and continued by saying that he would pray for her and her whole realm. On the orders of Sir Walter Raleigh, he was allowed the privilege of hanging until he was dead, rather than being cut down and disembowelled while still alive. However, Eustace White who went to the scaffold at the same time as Plasden was not so fortunate. He was cut down alive and managed to rise to his feet only to be tripped up, whereupon two men stood on his arms while the executioner butchered him.

  The authorities responded to the displays of Catholic martyrdom from the 1580s by executing priests along with other felons in order to blur the religious significance of martyrdom by associating those who died for their beliefs with others who were hanged for serious criminal activity. This action tended to rebound somewhat because Catholics then likened their deaths to that of Christ, who was flanked on the cross by common thieves. Another similarity with Christ was the attempt made by several priests to convert condemned felons during imprisonment or on the way to execution. The night before he was executed, the priest William Pattenson converted six out of seven of his fellow occupants of the condemned cell. Not all those indicted for treason were Catholic priests, however. For writing seditious books, Henry Barrow, John Greenwood and Robert Bowley were executed at Tyburn in March 1593.

  On 7 June 1594 Roderigo Lopez was hanged and quartered at Tyburn. He was a Spanish Jew who had settled in England in 1559 and become a house physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. He attended Sir Francis Walsingham and the Earl of Essex and in 1586 Elizabeth had appointed him as her chief physician. Because of his knowledge Lopez proved to be useful to both the English Crown and to Spain. Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief minister, used Lopez as an interpreter but also as a source of intelligence about Spain and Portugal. His fall from favour began when a group of Spaniards tried to use him in a plot to poison Elizabeth. Lopez was offered a gold ring and a substantial financial bribe to carry the assassination out. However, the conspirators’ correspondence, which was written in code, was seized by Walsingham’s spies and Lopez and some of the conspirators were arrested and charged with treason. Under torture Lopez was confirmed as being involved. He confessed but then recanted. It did him no good. He was carried in the customary fashion on a hurdle from Westminster to Tyburn. While on the gallows, Lopez, according to William Camden, affirmed that he loved the Queen as he loved Jesus Christ, ‘which from a man of the Jewish profession was heard not without laughter’. Lopez and the two others with him were hanged, disembowelled and quartered. It seems that the Queen had some sympathy for Lopez and may have doubted his conviction. For the rest of her life she wore at her waist the ring Lopez had received from Philip of Spain (Hyamson 1908: 136–9).

  In 1595 the poet Robert Southwell was hanged at Tyburn. He had received his theological training at Douai and had secretly returned to Britain to officiate at clandestine services. Among the families in whose houses he had ministered were the Bellamys of Uxenden Hall near Harrow-on-the-Hill. In 1592 the entire family was arrested. One who was closely questioned by the Queen’s notorious agent Richard Topcliffe, was Anne Bellamy. He abused his position because he eventually seduced her and made her pregnant. She confessed that her family had indeed used Uxenden Hall to hear Mass and that the priest involved was Southwell. Topcliffe had Southwell arrested, a move he regarded as a really significant blow against the Catholic heretics. The unfortunate Southwell was subjected to torture and three years’ confinement in a dungeon until he was despatched to be hanged and quartered. When he arrived at Tyburn, he stood in the cart and before preaching from Romans 14, asked forgiveness for his sins. He acknowledged that he was a Catholic priest and declared that he never intended any harm or evil against the Queen. The hangman slowly strangled Southwell and when an attendant began to cut the rope of the still breathing priest, Lord Mountjoy and a number of other eminent spectators interrupted and told him to let Southwell alone to die before he was disembowelled. Many others among the crowd repeated the demand. Southwell’s writings, both in prose and verse, had been popular. His verse was widely admired and it is probable that Shakespeare had read Southwell and may even have imitated his literary methods.

  Topcliffe (1532–1604) was notorious for the brutal relish with which he hunted out and questioned recusants and Jesuits over a period of twenty-five years which saw him become in effect the man in charge of enforcing anti-Catholic measures. He made extensive use of torture and he even racked prisoners in his own home. His proud boast was that he had invented a rack of his own which inflicted far worse pain than ordinary common racks. Southwell suffered on one of Topcliffe’s racks. He was hung from a wall by his hands, with a sharp circle of iron round his wrist pressing on an artery, his legs bent backwards and his heels tied to his thighs. For a little light relief, when not engaged in hounding Catholics, Topcliffe turned his hand to torturing gypsies.

  In the 1580s, one of the leaders of resistance to religious change in Ireland was the rebel Sir Brian-na-Murtha O’Rourke who was active in Connaught. The O’Rourkes were among the most celebrated clans in Irish history and it was claimed that he had ‘made a wooden image for the Queen, and caused the same to be trailed at a horse’s tail … and horseboys to hurl stones at it, every day’ (Montrose 1999: 108). It was also said that he gave shelter to three hundred sailors of the Spanish Armada when their ship was wrecked off the coast of Sligo. O’Rourke was indicted for high treason because he had acted contrary to the laws of the Church of England and Ireland and because he celebrated ‘Popish’ ways. He fled to Scotland but was delivered up to the English by King James VI. In October 1591, O’ Rourke was held in the Tower where an interpreter acted for him as he knew no English. O’Rourke insisted that he would only answer to the Queen and not the court before which he stood. His wish was not granted. Found guilty of high treason, he was hanged at Tyburn in November 1591. On the scaffold it was reported that he refused to acknowledge the authority of the Queen and, when taunted that he had bowed to idols, he retorted in his own language that there was a great deal of difference between the Queen and the images of saints.

  Shortly after O’Rourke’s execution, Thomas Lee, an English officer fighting in Ireland, was appointed Provost-Marshal of Connaught. By August 1598, Tyrone was in open rebellion and Lee found himself being held in Dublin Castle under suspicion of treasonable communication with the rebels. Lee was in fear of his life but the c
ase was not prosecuted and he returned, somewhat shaken, to England in February 1601 just at the time of the Earl of Essex’s ill-considered and disastrous attempt to remove Elizabeth’s councillors and install himself in their place. However, Lee seemed to have a nose for trouble and, although not a part of this particular conspiracy, he later participated in a plot to seize the Queen and compel her to release Essex, for which he was arrested and convicted in February 1601. On the gallows at Tyburn, Lee spoke up in defence of Essex but he himself seems to have been a spent force as a result of all the excitement he had endured over the last few years. With an air of weariness and resignation, he said of himself that ‘he had lived in misery and cared not to live, his enemies were so great and so many’.

  The 1590s were a volatile period, characterised by high prices, food shortages, plague, heavy taxation and the wars against Spain and Ireland. In 1592 over 14 per cent of London’s population died from plague, a total of 10,675 recorded deaths. The decade also witnessed possibly the worst price inflation of early modern times culminating in 1597 in the lowest real wages ever recorded in English history. The polarisation between the wealthy and the destitute majority became ever more apparent. With continued population growth in London went an eightfold increase in convictions for vagrancy in the period 1560 to 1601. The government, concerned by the threat to law and order posed by vagrants and masterless men, issued a proclamation in 1595 entitled ‘Enforcing Curfews for Apprentices’. This reflected deep unease about disorder and potential revolt and placed the responsibility for control of troublesome apprentices on their masters. In June 1595 alone there were twelve disturbances in which apprentices, who had long had a reputation for fomenting or being involved in such incidents, had started riots against the Lord Mayor and against food prices. These riots have been described as the most dangerous and prolonged urban uprising in England from the beginning of the Tudors in 1485 to the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640 (Manning 1988: 208). The 1595 proclamation noted ‘a very great outrage lately committed by some apprentices and others being masterless men and vagrant persons, in and about the suburbs of the city of London’. London apprentices were perceived to be lawless and truculent and it is therefore not surprising that they frequently appeared as victims at Tyburn, a point illustrated in Hogarth’s famous engraving of the Idle ’Prentice on his way to Tyburn.

  The associating of apprentices with prostitutes was seen as the beginning of the fall into greater sins. Prostitutes, ‘lewd women’, or nightwalkers, were blamed for leading not only apprentices but also servants and other dependent workers into immoral habits. Thomas Savage who was hanged at Tyburn in 1668 for murdering a fellow servant included the frequenting of bawdy houses as one of the reasons for his fall into sin:

  The first sin … was Sabbath breaking, thereby I got acquaintance with bad company, and so went to the alehouse and to the bawdy house: there I was perswaded [sic] to rob my master and also murder this poor innocent creature, for which I come to this shameful end.

  (Sharpe, 1985a:151)

  Apprentices and servants made up half of the workforce in London. It is estimated that between 1640 and 1660 apprentices numbered some twenty thousand in London and domestic servants exceeded that number several times over. Both groups were vulnerable to being laid off during trade slumps and it was all too easy for them to turn to crime when times were bad. It is hardly surprising that sizeable numbers of apprentices and servants appeared on the scaffold at Tyburn.

  The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the production of cheap printed literature such as broadsides, newspapers, chapbooks, ballads and pamphlets and these constitute an important source for the study of early modern popular culture. Contemporary pamphlets gleefully described the gory details of executions and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs which extolled the heroism and endurance of Protestant martyrs during Mary’s reign, was used as official propaganda during that of Elizabeth. Broadsides provided information on a single sheet with a woodcut illustration at the top and a popular narrative or sometimes a scurrilous attack on a figure in the public eye. Broadsides and ballads sold particularly well at Tyburn and although only a few survive from the seventeenth century, they offer insights into those who went to witness the executions.

  By the mid-seventeenth century, more people, particularly in London, had learned to read although not necessarily to write. Because London had a higher literacy rate than elsewhere, publishers were quick to take advantage of what became a lucrative market. Much of this ephemeral printed matter was cried round the streets by itinerant ballad-sellers of whom there may have been over three hundred in London in the 1640s. They had been regarded as vagabonds during Elizabeth’s reign and were always of low social status. However, crowds of the size that gathered to witness many of the executions at Tyburn always provided a ready market for their wares. Although this street-literature was diverse in the topics it covered – romance, chivalry, bawdiness, heroism, the supernatural – crime was one of the most popular themes and especially when it involved murders or bizarre or salacious activities. Ballads focused with prurient relish on murders involving the aristocracy, on wives who murdered their husbands, on serial murderers, on murders where witchcraft or necrophilia was thought to be involved or on any unusual sexual practices. This street literature was generally loyal to the Crown and condemnatory of rebellions or conspiracies such as the Gunpowder Plot. It therefore played a role not unlike that of today’s tabloid newspapers. Ballads flourished during the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries but went into decline with the appearance of new kinds of prose writings which could be said to be the forerunners of the literary genre of the novel.

  Another practice which developed in early modern England was the elaborate playing out of rituals of various kinds on or around the execution site. One of these was the last dying speech, a sixteenth-century innovation intended by the secular authorities, supported by the Church, to uphold their power through ideological means. It developed at a time when various statutes were broadening the range of offences for which the death penalty could be imposed (Sharpe, 1990: 31). Treason, homicide, coining, rape, horse-stealing, cutpursing and the theft of items valued at more than 40s now became capital offences. Dying speeches were intended to provide a very public articulation of the fact that crime did not pay and that those who heard them should realise how important it was to respect secular and religious authority. However, not all felons used their valedictory speeches in this way; sometimes they delivered speeches which mocked and debunked the authorities, thereby converting the activities around the scaffold into a parody, a popular, carnivalesque celebration which undermined the powers that be (Laqueur: 1989).

  Public execution at Tyburn and elsewhere and the rituals surrounding it were intended by the authorities to emphasise the omnipotence of the law and the condign, inevitable punishments that would befall those who seriously transgressed it. In reality, what often happened was a burlesque, both on the way to and at the place of execution and the development in popular culture of a widespread belittling of and irreverence for the authorities. Evidence of this can be found in the many slang terms that emerged to describe both the hanging day and the hanging itself. These include: ‘the hanging match’; ‘collar day’; a ‘hanging fair’ or the ‘Paddington Fair’; to ‘dance the Paddington frisk’; ‘jammed’; ‘collared’; ‘nubbed’; ‘stretched’; ‘tucked up’ or ‘turned off’. The noose was a ‘horse’s nightcap’ or a ‘Tyburn tippet’. Other slang references included: ‘a man will piss when he cannot whistle’ and ‘there is nothing in being hang’d, but a wry neck and a wet pair of breeches’ (Sharpe 1985a: 16).

  That this attempt to browbeat the people into respect for law and authority was unsuccessful is indicated by the fact that the crowds that surrounded the scaffold often contained people who would later feature centre-stage at subsequent Tyburn Fairs. An early example of the fact that the prospect of barbaric punishment did not necessarily dissuade people fr
om committing serious crimes was one Edmund Kirk who had stood in the crowd at Tyburn watching the execution of a man for murdering his wife. Two days later, Kirk murdered his own wife.

  The awful punishment of hanging and quartering which involved disembowelling was confined to men. Sir William Blackstone (1723–80), the eminent jurist, offers a not very convincing reason why women were not subjected to the same public pain and humiliation: ‘For as decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies, their sentence is, to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burned alive.’ However, this explanation is difficult to sustain given the practice of ‘carting’ around London. This involved male and female criminals being led at a cart’s tail around the streets and made the object of the onlookers’ ridicule and abuse. In certain cases women who underwent this punishment were ordered to walk naked. For example in 1579, three women – Joan Sharpe, Edith Bannister and Clemence Belton – who had all abandoned their infants, were stripped naked, tied to a cart and whipped with rods around the City and into Southwark (Griffiths and Jenner, 2000: 141). The offence of a wife who murdered her husband had been defined as petty treason since 1351 but in the sixteenth century a more serious view tended to be taken of this crime which was now seen as undermining the social order, an order dominated by men. Women found guilty of this offence were fastened to a stake and had a rope tied around the neck whereupon they were strangled before the surrounding material was ignited.