Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree Read online

  The Tyburn now makes its surreptitious way through Mayfair by Lower Brook Street, the name again recalling the presence of the stream, to the foot of Hay Hill, through Lansdowne Gardens, down Half Moon Street and under Piccadilly at what used to be called the Kingsbridge. Mayfair takes its name from the erstwhile fair that was held on what was once called Brook Fields. This fair had become so disorderly, attracting belligerent, drunken crowds, mountebanks and confidence tricksters of all sorts and whores and pickpockets galore, that it was finally abolished in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The Tyburn then dips quite sharply through Green Park, heading in the direction of Buckingham Palace. The Tyburn’s subterranean presence may have been responsible for the mist that was once a feature on damp autumnal nights in the Green Park area.

  From this point the rest of the Tyburn’s course is disputed. Three main possibilities have been identified. One is that it approached Buckingham Palace from whence it went underground and pursued a course down what are now St James Street, Orchard Street and College Street and then alongside the walls of Westminster Abbey and into the Thames. The second variation claims that the Tyburn divided when it got to the Westminster area and its two courses created Thornea Island on which the Abbey stands. The third is that from the present site of Buckingham Palace, the Tyburn turned west and forming the ancient boundary of the City of Westminster, flowed close to Tachbrook Street, across what are now Vauxhall Bridge Road and Grosvenor Road, and into the Thames in the Pimlico area. To add to the confusion surrounding the Tyburn, there is also a Tyburn Brook, a very small stream rising near Marble Arch and flowing into the Westbourne which forms part of the Serpentine at that point.

  There is a story that Queen Anne (r. 1702–14) was rowed up the Tyburn in the Royal Barge as far as Brook Street and indeed traces of a mooring place were found in the vicinity during building works in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is recorded that the Tyburn once provided excellent sport for anglers.

  Tyburn or ‘Tybourne’ is mentioned in Domesday Book and was the name originally given to the area now known as Marylebone. Only in later times did the usage of the name Tyburn evolve so that it applied just to the vicinity of the gallows. The original Tyburn district possessed a small church dedicated to St John the Baptist near the present Oxford Street and was built in 1200. It was in a lonely, low-lying and watery spot not far from where hangings were already taking place. By 1400 this church had become ruinous and the neighbourhood notorious for robberies. It was replaced but a further church was built around 1740 and this was known as St Mary’s-of-the-Bourne or by-the-Bourne which is probably how ‘Marylebone’ evolved. St Mary’s church became inadequate as the population of the area grew rapidly. After some delay a new church was opened in 1817 close to the present Oldbury Place and Marylebone Road. The Tyburn flows nearby and the bend at the north end of Marylebone High Street indicates its approximate course. The earlier St Mary’s was demoted to the status of ‘Parish Chapel’ and demolished in 1949. As late as 1720, the area north-east of the gallows remained well wooded and largely rural. Several monarchs, including Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I, are said to have enjoyed the thrill of the hunt in the area. What is now Marylebone High Street contained scattered rural hovels, some of them thatched and picturesquely decorated with climbing roses. This rustic idyll was about to change for ever.

  In 1710 the manor of Marylebone was bought by the Duke of Newcastle whose only daughter married Edward Harley. In 1711 Harley was created Earl of Oxford, from whom the names of Harley Street and Oxford Street are derived. He embarked on large-scale quality housing development which meant that the old manor of Marylebone had 577 houses in 1739 and 2,600 in 1795.

  After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, many Huguenot refugees settled in the area around Marylebone and they opened a ‘French Chapel’ close to Marylebone Lane. This is depicted in Hogarth’s engraving ‘Noon’, the second of his engravings in the series The Four Times of the Day, published in 1738 and caricaturing French manners and customs. A pleasure ground known as the French Garden opened up in an area now covered by Devonshire Place, Beaumont Place and Devonshire Street. At first used largely for the playing of bowls, by the 1740s these grounds had become known as Marylebone Gardens, providing firework displays, fashionable social events and an assembly hall doubling as a theatre. The music in these gardens was at one time under the direction of Dr Thomas Augustine Arne (1710–78) who composed ‘Rule, Britannia’. New works produced by Handel in his later days often had their first British performance at Marylebone. The criminal fraternity is always attracted to places where the rich assemble. Pickpockets, footpads and highwaymen flocked to the area. Many of the drunken revellers were easy game as they left the gardens and wandered home befuddled. So common were the attacks on its patrons that the manager of the gardens was forced to provide mounted guards to escort patrons to their homes. The history of pleasure gardens in London is one of decline from the initially smart and ultra-fashionable through the raffish to the simply tawdry and disreputable. So it was with Marylebone Gardens. Its owner gave up the unequal struggle in 1778 and closed the gardens down. By this time Marylebone was largely built over and the presence of the gardens had helped to give the area a notoriously bawdy and boisterous character. It became renowned for cock-fighting, bear-baiting and prize-fighting. A number of pubs such as the Queen’s Head and Artichoke, the Yorkshire Stingo and the Farthing Pie House were all located close to the Tyburn and helped to give the area a reputation for drunkenness, violence and general debauchery.

  ‘Tyburn’ or Marylebone is rich in historical associations. Lord Byron was baptised in the parish church and Horatia Nelson’s name can be found in the parish register. Interestingly, her entry is the only one which does not show the parents’ occupations. Dr Johnson at one time resided at 38 Castle Street and Mrs Thrale, later Mrs Piozzi, with whom he was well acquainted, lived at 33 Welbeck Street. His biographer, James Boswell, lived not far away at 122 Great Portland Street and doubtless found much to please him in the raffish character of the place. Charles Dickens resided at 1 Devonshire Place. Many great artists lived in the district, including J.M.W. Turner, George Romney, John Flaxman and Sir Edwin Landseer. Captain Edward Marryat, author of Mr Midshipman Easy, was a resident as was Charles Wesley, the poet, Methodist and father of hymnology. He once preached an open-air sermon at York Gate, near the north end of Marylebone High Street and next to the Tyburn. He is buried in the yard of the old St Marylebone Church where his illustrious neighbours include George Stubbs, well known for his paintings of horses and other livestock.

  What of the area around the notorious ‘fatal tree’ where so many wretches met their deaths over the centuries? There is considerable doubt about the exact site or sites of the gallows at Tyburn. It is possible that Tyburn was first used as a place of execution in 1196. In 1222, Henry III ordered the erection of two gibbets for the purpose of hanging thieves and malefactors in the place where the gallows were formerly situated – ‘The Elms’. ‘The King ordered two permanent gallows to be built on the basis that there were no more suitable trees’ (Barker 1970: 45). In 1393 a ‘Tyburn Gallows’ in the parish of Paddington is mentioned. In 1478 the site of the gallows is given as being in the Manor of Hide. Two fields are mentioned with the names of ‘Galowmede’ and ‘Galowfield’. These were close to where Marble Arch now stands and suggest a place of execution.

  The earliest identification in graphic form of Tyburn as a site for executions seems to be the map which appears in the first edition of Camden’s Britannia dating from 1607. This shows the gallows situated at the junction of the present Edgware Road, Oxford Street and Bayswater Road. One suggestion is that in much earlier times there was a gallows close to Stratford Place and adjacent to where the Tyburn crossed Tyburn Road, later Oxford Street. The Tyburn River formed the west boundary of the old ‘Tyburn’ or ‘Marylebone’ district. It may be that the gallows moved from here some time late in the fourteenth c
entury but that when it was re-erected somewhat to the west, the old name Tyburn stuck. The issue is made more confusing by the fact that there was a district sometimes called Tyburnia which approximates with Bayswater and from which a small stream called the Tyburn Brook emerged to flow south to join the Westbourne and thence to make its way through to the Thames.

  The gallows are depicted in a number of illustrations from the seventeenth century and these allow a picture to be built up of the site and its immediate surroundings while making due allowance for artistic licence. An illustration of 1680 shows preparations being made for an execution. A pair of ladders is propped against the gallows, on the top of which are three men who have been getting the rope ready. The condemned man stands in a horse-drawn cart beneath the gallows with the rope around his neck. The prison Ordinary or chaplain, also standing in the cart, reads prayers to the prisoner. A man stands by the head of the horse ready for the command to pull the horse away and leave the prisoner suspended. There is another horse and cart waiting in the foreground which contains a coffin ready to receive the body. In the distance stands a large crowd.

  Despite the expansion of London, particularly to the west of the City, Tyburn’s rural location can still be seen depicted, as it appeared at the time of the last execution in 1783, by the Norwich-born artist William Capon. The scene looks towards Hyde Park from the last house in Upper Seymour Place. In the forefront on the right-hand side is a wooden viewing gallery from which spectators could get a grandstand view of the executions. Over twenty years later Capon reworked this sketch into a watercolour which emphasised Tyburn’s earlier rural nature. It gives a very strong sense of a location well beyond the urban sprawl. Interestingly, Capon’s painting does not show the gallery but there is a shadow cast in the right foreground where the gallery had been on his original drawing.

  Even if the exact spot where the first executions took place cannot be identified, there remains the question of why the Tyburn district was chosen in the first place. The answer probably lies with its rural location. Tyburn had gibbets as well as the gallows. It was the practice to display the remains of certain criminals in gibbets or open cages after they had been executed and removed from the gallows. They were intended to act as a mute warning to the living of the wages of sin. At times there would have been an accumulation of dead bodies poisoning the air and while viewing the bodies may have been a popular diversion, no one wanted to live too close to the stench that would have been created (Marks 1908: 62). At Tyburn, at least until the eighteenth century, the sight and smell of these corpses were some distance from major human habitation. However, London was no stranger to smells or the poisoning of the air. Noxious aromas emanated from breweries, slaughterhouses, dung-heaps, vinegar works and other commercial premises and from waste and refuse piled in the streets or thrown unceremoniously into open watercourses.

  Other explanations of the origin of Tyburn’s location suggest that the prominent group of elms growing in the area would have been used regularly for executions before the later invention of the gallows (Baker, 1989: 190). It may also have been significant that they were located at, or close to, a crossroads. In many cultures, crossroads have been seen as a place of supernatural significance symbolising a portal, gate or door providing a transition from this life to the next. Additionally, crossroads have often been thought of as the meeting places of witches or demons. It is probably no coincidence that in Christian countries, crosses and statues of saints or other objects of reverence were often established at crossroads.

  For the ancient Greeks the elm was a symbol of death and for the Normans it was the tree of justice. An early name given to Tyburn was ‘The Elms’ but this is not particularly illuminating because there were other locations known by the same name including Smithfield, the precincts of Westminster (Dean’s Yard) and the abbey lands at Covent Garden. Was ‘The Elms’ a generic name for places of execution? Particular confusion surrounds Tyburn and Smithfield, which were both places where executions took place from early times. For example, different accounts claim Tyburn and Smithfield as the places which witnessed the deaths of both FitzOsbert in 1196 and William Wallace in 1305.

  An iron plaque is set in the pavement opposite the end of Edgware Road about 50 yards west of Marble Arch, claiming to mark the spot where the gallows stood. Exactitude, however, is probably unachievable, because the claims of 49 Connaught Square are advanced as also are those of the junction of Edgware Road and Bryanston Street, both sites being a little to the north of Marble Arch. It may well be that the site changed from time to time. In 1759 a movable gallows was erected as and when needed, the site of the old triangular gallows being required for the toll house built to serve the new turnpike. Although the toll house was demolished in 1829, its site is shown on old maps and should provide a pretty exact location for the ‘Triangular Tree’.

  When the turnpike was removed the site of the gate was recorded in a monument on the south side of the road, somewhat to the east of Marble Arch. It consisted of a slab of cast iron with a gable top bearing on both sides the legend ‘Here stood Tyburn Gate 1829’, this being the year in which Tyburn Turnpike was abolished. This monument made no pretence at showing the position of the gallows and itself succumbed to road improvement works early in the twentieth century.

  Today, standing among the fumes and the constant roar of the traffic around Marble Arch, it takes a considerable effort of the imagination to bring to the mind’s eye the vast crowds, many of them drunken revellers, for whom Tyburn Fair provided a free, regular and welcome diversion from the everyday tedium of life in the metropolis.

  TWO

  The King’s Gallows: Death at Tyburn in the Middle Ages

  It is difficult to establish whether any executions took place at Tyburn before 1196. Capital punishment is said to have been abolished by William I but reinstated under Henry I (r. 1100–35) so it is possibly during that time that the first executions were staged at Tyburn. Records of criminal activity and punishment are sparse but certainly in 1177 in the reign of Henry II a large gang of rich and well-connected young men carried out a series of attacks and robberies on private houses. One of the gang was John Senex, a Londoner who was caught and possibly executed at Tyburn.

  William FitzOsbert, also known as ‘Longbeard’, is frequently identified as the first person to be hanged at Tyburn, the year being 1196 and his crime sedition, but Smithfield is also claimed as his place of execution (Richardson 2000: 23; Ackroyd 2000: 57). FitzOsbert led a revolt of merchants and artisans against taxes resulting from the ransom paid for the retrieval of Richard I. On his return from the Crusades in 1193, Richard had been captured on his way through Austria by Duke Leopold who, clearly a shrewd businessman, sold him to the Emperor, Henry VI. Ransom was set at 150,000 marks and the burden of paying this fell largely on better-off Londoners. They got poor value for money for Richard only briefly touched English shores before hastening off abroad once more in an attempt to consolidate his continental possessions. He never returned. FitzOsbert’s insurrection was quickly and ruthlessly put down and William was seized in the church of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside where he and some of his supporters had taken refuge. The accounts of FitzOsbert differ according to the prejudices of the chronicler. Matthew Paris views him with some sympathy calling him the ‘defender of the poor against the royal extortioners’. William of Newburgh, however, claims that FitzOsbert’s motives were base.

  The dean of St Paul’s, Ralph of Diceto, and Gervase of Canterbury both offer contemporary accounts of FitzOsbert’s execution. Gervase states that FitzOsbert was suspended by his feet from the neck of a horse, where he ‘was drawn from the aforesaid Tower through the City to the Elms … bound by a chain … he was hanged in company with his associates and perished’. Gervase does not mention Tyburn but refers to the Elms which might have been Smithfield and this clearly confuses the issue of the location of this execution. However, Ralph of Diceto comments that FitzOsbert, ‘his hands bound behind hi
m, his feet tied with long cords, [was] drawn by means of a horse through the midst of the City to the gallows near Tyburn [where] he was hanged’ (Gomme 1909: 5): a clear reference to Tyburn by a contemporary writer.

  Another source of confusion between the Elms at Tyburn and those at Smithfield concerns an execution that took place in 1222. Two different accounts record a civil disturbance in London. One states that it resulted from a wrestling match that got out of hand and led to an armed confrontation between the citizens of Westminster and those of the City. The other suggests that there were strong disagreements over the succession to the throne of Henry III. At that time, London and much of south-east England was in the hands of the French Dauphin, Louis, while much of the north was controlled by rebellious barons. One of the Dauphin’s supporters, Constantine FitzAthulf, who had been a sheriff of London in 1197, caused a riot at a tournament when he proclaimed his allegiance to Louis. FitzAthulf was subsequently executed at the Elms. It is not clear whether this refers to Smithfield or Tyburn. We know that FitzAthulf was sent by water to his place of execution, which was not an uncommon practice when there was a fear of popular intervention. A condemned person could be taken to Tyburn by water from Westminster or the Horseferry, or to the vicinity of Smithfield via the Fleet River. Knowing that Henry III ordered the sheriff of Middlesex to build two good gibbets at Tyburn, the royal gallows, it could be that Tyburn has a strong claim to be the place of FitzAthulf’s death. These were to replace older and presumably decaying ones, which suggests that punishment and execution were well established at Tyburn by that time.

  The punishment of drawing the condemned on a hurdle pulled by horses to the place of execution, hanging the prisoner and taking him down before death, disembowelling, beheading and then cutting into quarters, appears first to have been recorded for an execution in 1241. A later case in 1242 concerning William de Marisco, or William Marsh, highlights the brutality of this particular form of punishment which featured so largely in the history of Tyburn. Marsh, who was the son of Geoffrey, Justiciar of Ireland, was accused of murdering Henry Clement, a messenger sent by the Irish peers to the King. He was also accused of attempting to assassinate Henry III. Having protested his innocence, Marsh fled to Lundy Island off Bideford Bay where he resorted with other fugitives to robbery and piracy. Marsh and sixteen of his men were eventually captured and thrown into the Tower. Gregory’s Chronicle (Camden Society 1876: 65) records that ‘William Marche was drawe and hangyd at Tyburne.’ Marsh is depicted in a contemporary illustration being drawn by a horse from the Tower to Tyburn to suffer his punishment. He was hanged, disembowelled and then his bowels were burnt. His body was quartered and the parts were despatched for display in four provincial cities. Prior to his death, Marsh confessed his sins to a friar, John of St Giles, who told him to suffer his punishment with patience as a means of penance (Luard 1890: iv 193–6). It is not known whether Marsh found this advice helpful under such trying circumstances. The confessing of sins by the condemned was to take on a much more public, ritual and ideological significance during the period from the sixteenth century.