Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (6 page)

Other martyrs also used the occasion of their hanging to emphasise the strength they obtained from their religious convictions. One such was Mark Barkworth. He had spent time in what was called ‘Limbo’, the horrible underground dungeon at Newgate, then sang all the way from there to Tyburn; even when he was cut down from the rope he stood upright and, much to the delight of the crowd, shouted ‘Lord! Lord! Lord!’ while struggling with the executioners. No amount of propaganda on the part of the authorities could disguise the defiance of Barkworth and many other Catholics who died for their beliefs at Tyburn. Even some of those who stood mocking them in the crowd must privately have admired their fortitude and religious conviction.

One who watched the heroism of Campion on the scaffold was so impressed that he went on to become a Jesuit priest. His name was Henry Walpole and he became a chaplain to the Spanish army in Flanders between 1589 and 1591. Later on in Spain he met Edward Squire, an ex-mariner who had once worked in the royal stables but had been captured at sea and placed in prison. Walpole was influential in Squire’s decision to convert to Catholicism. Together they concocted a plan to kill Queen Elizabeth by the unusual method of applying a powerful poison to the saddle of her horse. Squire’s knowledge of the royal stables was crucial to this plan which he hoped would provide him with generous financial rewards. On the strength of this plot, Walpole persuaded the Spanish authorities to release Squire. Both men returned to England in 1593 and an unsuccessful attempt was made by Squire on the Queen’s life. Walpole meanwhile had been arrested for Jesuit activities and under torture admitted to complicity in Squire’s assassination plan. Walpole was executed at York and Squire was hanged and quartered at Tyburn for high treason in November 1598.

Elizabeth was the target of plots, conspiracies and attempts on her life throughout her reign and events between 1583 and 1587 brought her government under severe pressure. These plots included John Somerville’s plan to kill Elizabeth by pistol fire and the Babington plot of 1586 which effectively sealed the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots. Earlier than this the Throckmorton plot of 1583 had involved an attempt to free Mary and place her on the English throne. Francis Throckmorton, the son of Sir John Throckmorton, Chief Justice of Chester, was a Catholic who acted as a go-between for Mary and the Spanish Ambassador in London, Bernadino Mendoza. Throckmorton was arrested with a letter to Mary in his hand and confessed under torture that he was engaged in a grand ‘Enterprise’ to assassinate Elizabeth. After his confession he was alleged to have said that Mary was the dearest thing in the world to him. The so-called ‘Casket Letters’ that were found in Throckmorton’s home listed Catholic noblemen who supported Mary and details of potential invasion ports where a Catholic army could land. He was charged with treason at the Guildhall and condemned to death. In July 1584 he was hanged, disembowelled and quartered at Newgate. The Ambassador, Mendoza, was expelled and left the country threatening darkly that he would be back – and next time he would have an army to support him.

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 case 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: