Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (3 page)

Even death brought no peace to poor John, for no funeral could have been more tumultuous. The mobs gathered again, offal and brickbats being hurled at the undertaker’s men, and at one time it seemed as though the body itself would be pulled out of the coffin. But at last order was restored, and John Thrift, hangman and axe wielder, was laid to rest in the churchyard of St Paul’s, Covent Garden.

Thrift’s inaccuracy with the axe was not unusual among those of his profession, and one can only hope that the first stroke at least rendered the victim unconscious. One such was Sir Walter Raleigh who, no favourite of King James I, was accused of treasonable plotting and was imprisoned in the Bloody Tower. Long years passed, and Raleigh eventually promised the King that, given leave, he would sail to South America, El Dorado, and bring back cargoes of gold for the Royal coffers. James agreed to this, though added the warning that, should there be any trouble involving the Spaniards who had settled there, thereby endangering relations with that powerful nation, Raleigh would face the block on his return.

The Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, learned of this and informed his masters in Madrid. They, seeing the opportunity to revenge themselves on the buccaneer who in the past had plundered so many of their galleons, set a trap. Arriving on foreign shores, Raleigh and his men were ambushed. In the fighting that ensued, his son, Wat, was killed and many of his party wounded. Shocked and defeated, Raleigh withdrew and returned to England, despite knowing that he faced certain execution.

On the morning of 29 October 1618 he was awakened in his cell, ate his breakfast and smoked his pipe as usual. Being asked how he liked the wine given to him, he replied: ‘It was a good drink, if one could tarry over it!’ And when Peter, his barber, said, ‘Sir, we have not combed your hair this morning,’ Raleigh replied, ‘Let them comb it, that shall have it!’

At eight o’clock he was escorted to the execution site at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, and as he approached the scaffold he noticed among the crowd one of his friends, Sir Hugh Ceeston, who was having difficulty in getting near it. ‘I know not whether you will get there,’ he commented drily, ‘but I am sure to have a place.’

Directly he mounted the scaffold he asked leave to address the throng. Having prepared his speech, he protested about the accusations which had been made against him and denied any disloyalty to his king or his country. When all was ready, he turned to the executioner and said he would like to examine the axe. He ran his finger along the edge and said, ‘This is sharp medicine, but it will cure all diseases.’ He then knelt down and placed his head on the block. After a short prayer he gave the signal and the axe descended, two blows being required.

His body was buried in St Margaret’s, Westminster, and his head, after being shown to the crowds on both sides of the scaffold, was placed in a leather bag and taken away by his wife, Lady Raleigh, in the mourning coach. Encased in a box, it remained in her possession until her death 29 years later. Their son, Carew, no less devoted to the memory of his father, kept it in his house, and it was finally buried with him at West Horsley, Surrey.

In the same way as the French aristocrats concealed their emotions on the scaffold by making light-hearted comments, so did those Englishmen as they faced the axe. Sir Thomas More, accused of treason for failing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church, commented drily to the executioner: ‘Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine duty; my neck is very short – take heed therefore thou strike not awry, for thine reputation!’ As he lowered his head on to the block, he went on: ‘I pray you let me lay my beard forward over the block, lest you should cut it; for though you have a Warrant to cut off my head, you have none to cut off my beard!’

He was one of the more fortunate victims, one blow of the axe being sufficient to decapitate him. His body was buried in St Peter’s Chapel within the Tower of London, the resting-place of others who had perished beneath the axe on Tower Hill. When the chapel was restored in 1876, all the remains were reinterred in the crypt of that Royal place of worship.

More’s head, like that of so many others, was impaled on a spike on London Bridge as a warning to all, having first been parboiled, that is, partially boiled in a large cauldron with salt and cumin seed added to deter the attentions of the sea birds. There it would have stayed, had not his loving daughter Meg Roper persuaded the keeper to let her have it ‘lest it be foode for the fishes’.

Just as Lady Raleigh had done, Meg cherished her father’s head until, ten years later, she died, and it was buried with her in the Roper tomb in St Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury, ‘in a niche of the wall, in a leaden box, something of the shape of a beehive, open in front, and with an iron grating before it’, as it was described when inspected in 1835.

John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, also incurred the displeasure of Henry VIII, being found guilty of the same ‘crime’ as that committed by Sir Thomas More. On hearing that Pope Paul III, in defiance of Henry’s ruling, had promoted Fisher to the post of cardinal priest of St Vitalis and had dispatched a cardinal’s hat to the prelate, the King, with savage humour, exclaimed: ‘Fore God, then, he shall wear it on his shoulders!’

Heads on London Bridge

The bishop was condemned to death and imprisoned in the Tower. One day his cook failed to produce his dinner and, on being questioned by his master, the servant explained: ‘It was common talk in the city that you should die, and so I thought it needless to prepare anything for you.’ The bishop shook his head slowly and replied: ‘Well, for all that, thou seest me still alive; so whatever news thou shalt hear of me, make ready my dinner, and if thou seest me dead when thou contest, eat it thyself!’

On 22 June 1535 the aged and infirm priest was taken in a chair to Tower Hill and there beheaded. The book of his life describes how:

‘The next daie after his buriall, the head, being somewhat parboyled in hott water, was pricked upon a pole and sett high on London Bridge. And here I cannot omitt to declare unto you the miraculous sight of this head, which after it had stand up the space of xiiii daies [a fortnight], could not be perceived to wast nor consume, neither for the weather, which was then very hott, neither for the parboyling, but it grewe fresher and fresher, so that in his lifetime he never looked so well; for his cheeks being bewtifyed with a comly redd, the face looked as though it could see the people passing bye and would have spoken to them, which many took as a miracle and notifying to the worlde the inocencie and holines of this blessed father.

Wherefore the people cominge daily to see this strange sight, the passage over the bridge was so stopped with their goinge and comminge that almost nether Cart nor horse could pass; and therefore at the end of xiiii days the Executioner commaunded that the head be thrown into the river of Thames, in the night time, and in place thereof was sett the head of the blessed Martyr St Thomas More [executed 6 July 1535].’

Among others who, despite the appalling strain they must have been under, nevertheless kept their spirits up with wry comments was Algernon Sidney, a republican who plotted against Charles I. On the scaffold he knelt over the block but failed to make the signal for the executioner to bring the axe down. Puzzled, the man waited for some moments and then, bending down, asked the condemned man if he was going to rise again. ‘Not until the resurrection!’ retorted Sidney. ‘Strike away!’

Another witty gentleman was George Brooke who, in 1603, had been found guilty of treason against James I and sentenced to death. On the scaffold, he was deprived by the sheriff’s man of his resplendent attire, a black damask gown worn over a suit of black satin. The executioner, whose right it was to claim the upper garments of all victims, demanded the clothes; when his request was refused, he answered that if the sheriff was going to keep them, the sheriff could do the beheading! And when Brooke came to put his head on the block, he told the executioner and his assistants ‘that they must give him instructions, for he was never beheaded before!’

If the ladies weren’t as witty, at least they were brave. Twenty-two-year-old Catherine Howard, charged with infidelity by her husband Henry VIII, was held in the Tower. The night preceding her execution the queen, determined not to exhibit any feminine weakness on the scaffold, ‘asked that the block might be brought to her room and, this having been done and the executioner fetched, to the amazement of her attendants she knelt and laid her head in the horrible hollow, declaring as she rose to her feet that she could now go through the ordeal with grace and propriety’.

And indeed she did, together with her lady-in-waiting, Lady Rochford, the latter paying the penalty for concealing her mistress’s adultery from the king, and also for the false evidence she had supplied whereby her husband, Lord Rochford, had been executed for alleged incest with his own sister, Anne Boleyn.

Incredible defiance rather than grace and propriety was shown when Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, mounted the scaffold. This elderly lady, whose family had fallen foul of Henry VIII, had been imprisoned for two years, without trial, warmth or adequate clothing. Now her final moments had come, but, when she was told to lay her head on the block, she refused, saying: ‘So should traitors do, and I am none.’ When the executioner insisted, she ‘turned her grey head this way and that, and bid him if he would have her head, to get it off as best he could; so that he was constrained to fetch it off slovenly’. And so he is said to have pursued her round the block, striking her head and shoulders with the axe until she finally succumbed to the onslaught, her mutilated corpse being buried in the Chapel of St Peter. But perhaps the best-known lady to suffer death by the axe was Mary, Queen of Scots. She was suspected by Queen Elizabeth I of plotting to ascend the English throne, a challenge that could be eliminated only by death. Mary was tried and found guilty, but the sentence was to be carried out not in the open, as usual, but in Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire.

There, the scaffold had been erected within the great hall, a wooden platform 2 feet high and 12 feet long, its rails draped with black cloth. Mary, wearing black robes, entered, accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting, and watched by the officers of the royal court and ministers of the Church. She sat on a stool and listened intently as the warrant for her execution was read out, afterwards taking up her beads and crucifix and praying aloud.

The executioner, one Bull by name, then knelt before her and asked her to forgive him. She did so, adding: ‘for now you shall make an end to all my troubles’. Next she was required to remove some of her voluminous outer clothes lest they impede the executioner, and she exclaimed that ‘she had never taken off her clothes in such a company!’

Her attendants helped her to discard her robes, to reveal a red velvet petticoat and a silk scarlet bodice. Removing her petticoat, she donned a pair of scarlet sleeves over her kirtle and knelt on the cushion which had been placed in front of the block. One of her women brought a Corpus Christi cloth, folded triangularly, and put it over her head as she reached out for the block. On seeing this, one of Bull’s assistants, ‘the bloody and unseemly varlet attending upon him’, as State Papers Domestic described him, moved her hands aside and held them lightly as she prayed, her head on the block.