by Alan Brooke
Anti-Catholicism needed little encouragement and in 1678 another outbreak of hysteria had occurred as the result of rumours of a Popish Plot. At the centre of the rumour was Titus Oates (1649–1705), an Anglican priest and liar and perjurer of quite monumental proportions. With Israel Tonge he invented the story of the Popish Plot which involved a Jesuit-led plan to assassinate Charles II thereby hastening the accession of his fervently Catholic brother James. This story was a total fabrication. It was revealed first by Oates and Tonge to the magistrate for Westminster, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. When he died under mysterious circumstances shortly afterwards, many people were all too ready to conclude that the plot had begun. Catholics were always the prime target for popular retribution and three innocent Catholic men, Robert Green, Lawrence Hill and Henry Berry were framed, convicted and subsequently hanged at Tyburn in February 1679. Also implicated was William Staley, a banker and goldsmith, who was executed at Tyburn in 1678. His friends and relatives had pleaded that his body be given decent burial. His funeral service was held at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden but the King was said to be so angry at hearing the singing of the Masses and the funeral display of grief that he ordered the opening of Staley’s coffin. The corpse was removed and dismembered and the quarters displayed on the City gates and the head on London Bridge. Staley’s head was said to be the last to have been exposed there (Pierce 2001: 223).
These events sparked another wave of anti-Catholic hysteria and persecution with some thirty-five innocent people executed and hundreds of others suffering as a result of the perjured evidence of Oates and Tonge. Several more innocent men died at Tyburn including Edward Coleman, William Ireland, John Grove, Thomas Whitebread, John Fenwick and John Gavan. Some of those who went to the scaffold over this sorry affair suffered the aggravated punishment of having their genitals cut off. Public opinion can be capricious and Oates, who at one moment was hailed as a great patriot and saviour of the nation, later found himself convicted of perjury. He was now reviled and fined, flogged and imprisoned. He was later imprisoned for life but the sentence was then changed to the very curious one of having to stand in the pillory five times a year at Tyburn, Westminster, Charing Cross, Temple Bar and the Royal Exchange. In June 1689 in an attempt to close the whole episode the King granted Oates an ill-warranted free pardon.
Removal of the genitalia had earlier been decreed for those convicted of treason in the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. The judges’ verdict in Cobbett’s State Trials gives an interesting explanation of the process of drawing, hanging and quartering which, as we have seen, was frequently applied to wretches who died at Tyburn. It states that the traitor:
Must be drawn with his Head declining downward, and lying so near the Ground as may be, being thought unfit to take benefit of the common Air. For which Cause also he shall be strangled, being hanged up by the Neck between Heaven and Earth, as deemed unworthy of both, or either; as likewise, that the Eyes of Men may behold, and their Hearts condemn him. Then he is to be cut down alive, and to have his Privy Parts cut off and burnt before his Face, as being unworthily begotten, and unfit to leave any Generation after him. His Bowels and inlay’d Parts taken out and burnt, who inwardly had conceived and harboured in his heart such horrible Treason. After, to have his Head cut off, which had imagined the Mischief. And lastly, his Body to be quartered, and the Quarters set up in some high and eminent Place, to the View and Detestation of Men, and to become a Prey for the Fowls of the Air.
(Cobbett 1809: ii. 184)
On 1 July 1681, Oliver Plunkett the Catholic Primate of Ireland met his fate at Tyburn. Over a decade earlier, in 1669, Pope Clement IX had promoted him to the see of Armagh. For most of his time Plunkett was forced to conduct his business in secret and hide in various places because Catholicism was then outlawed in Ireland. Plunkett was accused of being in league with the French government and of plotting to aid a French invasion of Ireland. He was arrested on 6 December 1679 and appeared six months later at a court at Dundalk where even the predominantly Protestant jury failed to convict him. By October 1680 he had been brought to Newgate where he suffered from kidney stones and eye infections as a consequence of the appalling conditions in which he was housed. Plunkett was accused of soliciting the invasion of Ireland by the French and of taking money from the Irish clergy for that purpose. Additionally, he was alleged to have incited the landlords of the north to take up arms to retrieve their confiscated estates. Plunkett was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. He was sentenced to be drawn, hanged, disembowelled and quartered. His head was saved by friends and is preserved in the Catholic church of St Peter in Drogheda.
Rumours and plots were nurtured within the culture of the coffee houses and publicised by the newspapers which enjoyed increasing popularity and circulation in the latter half of the seventeenth century. These helped to develop a climate of opinion in favour of William on religious and political rather than personal grounds for he was not the kind of sovereign who would ever enjoy popular acclaim. In 1695 censorship ended and an even greater number of periodicals appeared on the market and helped to shape a new, popular reading public. The development of new media of communication and the spread of literacy enabled governments to play a more active role in moulding public opinion.
A curious incident occurred in July 1685 when Thomas Dangerfield, one of the informers associated with Titus Oates, was brought to trial and, like Oates, was sentenced to be whipped in the pillory. On the way back from Tyburn, Dangerfield who, rather unusually, was travelling in a coach, was jeered at by an onlooker, a Tory barrister by the name of Robert Francis. Dangerfield responded by insulting Francis who then stuck his cane in Dangerfield’s face. Somehow the stick pierced his brain and he died the next day. Francis was found guilty of murder and was executed at Tyburn.
In 1670 Tyburn saw the execution of Claude Duval. This man was the very stuff of which legends about handsome, gallant highwaymen were made. Born in Normandy in 1643 of humble parentage, as a youth he had drifted to Paris where he made the acquaintance of English Royalist exiles ruefully licking their wounds over events back home and waiting to return when conditions became more propitious. In 1660 Charles II ascended the throne and this was a signal for these exiles to come back to England’s shores. Duval came with them. Not for him a life of honest graft. The well-off wanted to flaunt their wealth after the drab austerity of the Interregnum and Duval soon found rich pickings from highway robbery for which he seems to have had a natural flair. He developed a reputation for the daring with which he carried out his robberies and for his Gallic good looks, of which he made good use in his encounters with female travellers. Credited with a host of female conquests, his reputation grew every time stories were told about him. With the incentive of a price on his head he was captured lying in a drunken stupor in a London tavern. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Although numerous women are reported to have attempted to intercede on his behalf, he was hanged at Tyburn aged just twenty-seven. A stone in the centre aisle of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, carries a eulogistic epitaph over his remains although some claim that he is buried at St Giles-in-the-Fields, Holborn.
In 1678 much interest and speculation about supernatural interference were aroused when the gallows at Tyburn were uprooted one night and left in pieces on the ground. Without difficulty witnesses were found who solemnly declared that they had seen ghosts – undoubtedly those of some of Tyburn’s past victims – squatting on the gallows and screeching before demolishing the structure. Others averred that it had been taken down by a company of quack doctors who had planned to remove it and use its magical properties in their patent medicines, but they had been disturbed and forced to leave the pieces on the ground. The mystery was never satisfactorily explained. As a result of this event a new triangular gallows was erected which claimed its first victims, three women and two men, on Friday 6 September 1678 (The Confession … 1678).
Around the late 1670s a broadside called The Plotters Ball
ad made the first reference to the infamous hangman Jack Ketch who often presided at Tyburn. The broadside talked of the ‘Receipt for the Cure of Traytrous Recusants, or Wholesome Physicke for Popish Contagion’ and included a woodcut showing Edward Coleman drawn on a hurdle to his execution at Tyburn in December 1678. Coleman is depicted as saying, ‘I am sick of a traitorous disease’. Ketch is holding an axe in one hand and a rope in the other and exclaiming, ‘Here’s your cure sir’ (Laurence 1932: 96). Richard Jacquett or John Catch became better known as Jack Ketch and his reputation is based on the generic use of his name for the executioners who followed him as well as on the Punch and Judy character inveigled into hanging himself by Mr Punch.
The procession of the largely unknown to Tyburn continued throughout these years. One little-known victim was Robert Foulkes who was hanged in 1679 for the murder of his newborn baby. Foulkes was a minister of the Church from Stanton Lacy in Shropshire. He was married with two children and had attempted to conceal the pregnancy which resulted from an extra-marital affair. Foulkes went clandestinely to London with the young woman and took lodgings in the Strand, murdering the baby when it was born. The Newgate Calendar states that some women of the neighbourhood became suspicious and began to question the girl who eventually confessed what had happened. Foulkes was charged with murder, committed to Newgate and taken thence to Tyburn on 31 January 1679.
There was a marked increase in prosecutions for infanticide at this time. In 1624 the Act to Prevent the Murdering of Bastard Children required the defendant to prove innocence rather than the prosecution to prove guilt. For a young girl to become pregnant could be a disaster especially if she worked in an occupation where she needed to be single, such as domestic service or prostitution. Women employed in domestic service were especially vulnerable to sexual advances by their masters and other males in the household. Peter Linebaugh has shown that between 1703 and 1772, of the women who died at Tyburn, 12 per cent were hanged for infanticide and a large number of them were domestic servants. As he states, the common themes of the women involved were poverty, loss of employment and irreligion (Linebaugh 1993: 148–9).
There were many victims of poverty who resorted to crime such as Mary ‘Moll’ Jones who was born in Chancery Lane where her parents lived in permanent debt and she worked as a hood-maker. Mary married an apprentice for whom she had a great love but he was so extravagant that Mary resorted to picking pockets in order to survive. She was caught stealing from Jacob Delafay who was a chocolate-maker to James II and William III. For her crime she was committed to Newgate and there received the common punishment for thieves of being branded on the hand. Although released, she turned to shoplifting for a further four years before being caught and branded once more. Mary was eventually executed for stealing a piece of satin from a shop on Ludgate Hill. She was hanged at Tyburn at the age of twenty-five on 18 December 1691.
The story of Mary Jones is a pathetic one of a downward spiral of deprivation and despair leading to crime, punishment and eventual hanging and it is one that can be replicated in the case of any number of other seemingly petty offenders who ended up as victims of the ‘Triple Tree’. However, there were cases which saw justice done and the death penalty meted out to offenders whose activities were an affront to society. On 22 February 1681, Captain Richard Dudley was executed at Tyburn and it is hard to have much sympathy for the plight in which he found himself. He had obtained a captain’s commission in a regiment of foot. One day he was inspecting the troops on parade when he noticed that one soldier was standing out of line. Dudley instructed his sergeant to strike the man. The sergeant obeyed, but not forcefully enough as far as Dudley was concerned. To show what he had meant, he grabbed a halberd and brought it down on the trooper’s head, killing him instantly. This incident meant that Dudley was forced to leave the army and take to highway robbery. He had a longer career on the road than many but was finally arrested and paid the price at Tyburn.
The golden age of the highwayman was almost certainly the century or so after 1660 and many of these robbers found their way to Tyburn. Some were invested with an aura of romance and chivalry and others were popular because they had robbed the rich and powerful who in many cases hid peculation and graft behind their respectable public personas.
On 5 July 1691 Thomas Sadler was executed at Tyburn. A scapegrace and recidivist, Sadler had tried his hand at highway robbery but what proved to be his last crime, carried out with the help of two accomplices, involved stealing the Lord Chancellor’s mace and official purse. In a symbolic parody, Sadler walked across Lincoln’s Inn Fields with one of his colleagues in front of him parading the mace and the other behind acting the role of purse bearer. Officialdom was not amused by this burlesque and Sadler and his accomplices were arrested. To his credit, Sadler pleaded most forcefully that they were innocent and one was reprieved.
In 1669 Stephen Eaton, a confectioner, George Roades, described as a ‘broker’, and Sarah Swift were executed for the murder of the Revd John Talbot. A gang attacked Talbot and stole about 20s and a knife with which they attempted to kill him by cutting his throat. They botched this and so they stabbed him in the chest. The noise of this unseemly fracas roused the local dogs and neighbours soon emerged to find Talbot lying bleeding and seriously injured in the street. He was carried to the Star Inn in Shoreditch. The suspected assailants were quickly caught. Talbot died of his injuries shortly afterwards but not before he had identified three of his attackers. They were conveyed in a cart to Tyburn where they were executed on 14 July. They could not plead poverty or circumstances as a defence for what was a very squalid crime.
The Newgate Calendar records the almost unbelievable story of Mary Carleton who claimed to be a German aristocrat by the name of Princess von Wolway. In reality she was the daughter of a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral. She had been in Cologne between her second and third marriages to accept a proposal of matrimony from an old and wealthy German whom she then proceeded to rob and from whom she perhaps gained the inspiration for her outrageous name. She fled Germany and returned to England where she met John Carleton who believed her story of misfortune and from whom she managed to extract some more money. Mary was footloose and she set out again on the road to use her natural charms and to swindle more men. Her exploits were the stuff of Restoration comedy. She was arrested for theft but discharged whereupon she married a wealthy apothecary whom she robbed of over £300, for which she was arrested in January 1673. Continuing offences meant that her luck ran out and she was eventually arrested once too often, tried and sentenced to death. Her attempt to ‘plead her belly’ on the grounds that she was pregnant did not gain her a reprieve. On 22 January with a picture of her husband pinned to her sleeve, she rode in the cart to Tyburn. When she arrived, she told the people there that she had been a very vain woman and deserved punishment for her sins. She was thirty-eight years of age when she died.
In 1683 a conspiracy to assassinate Charles II failed, following which a number of men were arrested and executed. This was the Rye House Plot for which in July 1683 Thomas Walcott, William Hone and John Rouse were drawn to Tyburn as traitors and hanged and quartered. Another of those involved, Lord William Russell, was executed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A fifth conspirator, Sir Thomas Armstrong, escaped to Holland but was captured in 1684. He also made the journey on a hurdle to Tyburn. He swung for about half an hour before being taken down and quartered. Another conspirator, James Burton, also escaped to Holland but became involved in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. This was an attempt by one of Charles II’s natural sons, the Protestant James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, to wrest the throne from the Catholic James II. When the Rebellion was defeated, Burton got away and sought refuge in London where he was sheltered by his wife, his neighbour and a woman who had given him shelter previously, Elizabeth Gaunt. In order to save his neck, Burton rather ungratefully betrayed these people by testifying against them. They died at Tyburn on 23 October 1685. Elizabeth made a minor contribu
tion to history. Her courage won the sympathy of the crowd and she was the last woman to be burnt for high treason.
Anti-Catholicism was still very much an issue at this time and was reflected in the execution for treason at Tyburn on 30 April 1684 of James Holloway. A dissident Bristol merchant and manufacturer, he was enraged by the election of Catholic Tory sheriffs in London and became involved in a planned uprising in the city in the summer of 1682. The plan was discovered in May 1683 and Holloway went on the run, firstly in disguise in the West Country and then, with the aid of his wife, he got away to France and later the West Indies. He was betrayed and brought back to England in chains and delivered a confession which was not believed. Holloway was convinced that he would be pardoned but the case went before Chief Justice Jeffreys who peremptorily ordered his execution for treason.
A last-minute reprieve was the desperate hope of many who took the route to Tyburn, there to have the noose placed around their necks. Visiting an execution in 1664, Pepys recorded that the condemned frequently delayed the fatal moment by engaging in long discourses and prayers in the hope of a reprieve or pardon. Thomas Laqueur has commented on the significance of pardons suggesting that they were part of an elaborate system of patronage and control and were a reminder of the King’s power and his gratuitous gift of life (Laqueur 1989).
There were cases of a reprieve arriving quite literally at the last minute. Jonathan Simpson was an apprentice to a linen draper in Bristol. He moved to London where he set up a business but his marriage broke up, the business failed and he took to highway robbery. Within a short time he was caught but rich relations came to his rescue and managed to get him a reprieve just as he was about to hang at Tyburn. On his return to Newgate the gaoler refused to let him back because he was discharged, a free man unless a fresh warrant for his committal could be produced. Simpson pushed his luck and went back to his life of crime on the road, carrying out around forty robberies in Middlesex within six weeks of his discharge. His career came to its inevitable conclusion at Tyburn on 8 September 1686 when he was aged thirty-two. Simpson, incidentally, had earlier carved out a little niche for himself in the history of robbery by being the only recorded highwayman on skates! The winter of 1683–4 was exceptionally cold and pickings on the roads were poor because few people were travelling. The River Thames in London, however, was frozen for about two months and thousands thronged to the ‘Frost Fair’ and enjoyed the novel experience of standing on the river and seeing familiar landmarks from a different angle. Simpson equipped himself with skates and enjoyed rich pickings by simply bumping into people, knocking them over and robbing them in the ensuing confusion.