Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree Read online

  The size of the crowd varied enormously and it seems that it was not necessarily those whose crimes or executions have been well documented or who have otherwise been remembered who drew the largest numbers. It is likely that there were huge crowds for some criminals now hardly known and that this reflects the dynamic complexity of public executions in the culture of the time. While the responses of the crowds may seem capricious, even inexplicable to us today, they probably made perfect sense in the context of the times.

  In 1616 the Catholic priest Thomas Maxfield drew a crowd of just 4,000 at his execution. However, on the evening before his death the gallows at Tyburn were adorned with garlands and flowers and the ground strewn with bay leaves and sweet herbs, a mark of respect or reverence which does not seem to have been extended to other martyrs. Very large numbers were attracted to the execution of an apprentice, Nathaniel Butler, in 1657. His case generated enormous interest at the time and even while he was in prison many pamphlets were published dealing with it. In the condemned cell, he was visited by many Puritan divines who converted him on the strength of hopes of salvation and forgiveness. The Puritans then carefully stage-managed his appearance and performance on the gallows and used it as evidence of divine intervention. At Tyburn, Butler’s speech described his fall from grace, his sense of redemption after conversion and ended with an appeal to the members of the crowd urgently to reform their own manners.

  Crowds around the gallows were by no means always tolerant of expressions of pious contrition or other religious exhortations from condemned prisoners about to die. When a prisoner engaged in lengthy sessions of prayer or gave long admonitory sermons, the patience of the crowd could wear distinctly thin. John Nelson was heckled during his prayers with shouts of ‘Away with thee’ while the supplications of William Sherwood and Thomas Woodhouse were interrupted by cries of ‘Hang him, hang him’.

  Were such catcalls evidence of disapproval by the crowd of the religious beliefs of those on the gallows? It is likely that the demeanour of the prisoner on the gallows counted for more than protestations of religious conviction. V.A.C. Gatrell has drawn attention to the way in which the crowds could be won over by the defiance, the courage or the modesty of the condemned man. He also argues that during the periods of religious persecution, some last speeches had a telling effect. For example, the Venetian Ambassador described Henry Garnet as a man of ‘moving eloquence’ and said that the power of his speech could ‘produce just the reverse of what they desire’ (Gatrell 1994). However, while some individuals elicited sympathy and moral support by giving a good performance in the very public theatre of Tyburn, even where contentious religious issues were involved, the crowd could respond with mockery or hostility to signs of cowardice or arrogance on the gallows.

  While the procession over the years of the nameless poor to Tyburn went largely unrecorded, crime in high places has always attracted interest and extensive coverage and the murder of Richard Overbury in 1613 was one such case. A writer and poet, courtier to James I and mentor to one of James’s favourites, Robert Carr, Overbury became involved in writing love letters for Carr, who had fallen in love with Frances Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. There was a snag. Frances was already married to the Earl of Essex. Howard, with Carr’s approval, attempted to get a divorce but Overbury objected. Carr was displeased and when James offered Overbury a prestigious foreign appointment, he perfidiously advised Overbury to refuse it. Carr then reported Overbury’s refusal of the offer to the King and suggested that Overbury had rejected it with contempt. Overbury was seized and thrown into the Tower. Carr had not done with Overbury. With the assistance of some prison guards, he made sure that Overbury was fed with some tarts and jellies laced with poison mixed by a pliant physician called Franklin. The plan was successful and Overbury wasted away and died. The wished-for divorce went ahead and Carr, who became the Earl of Somerset, was married three months after Overbury’s murder. However the plot was leaked by the physician’s assistant. The outcome was the hanging of Richard Weston, the under-keeper of the Tower, at Tyburn in October 1615 followed, perhaps rather unfairly, by that of a Mrs Turner who had delivered the sweetmeats to the unsuspecting Overbury. The physician Franklin was executed at St Thomas a Waterings for his part in the murder.

  A year later, Frances Howard and Carr were tried for murder but acquitted. There was much speculation about favouritism and inequality before the law and whether the King had intervened in the judicial process. Carr’s position as a favourite of the King went into decline and he was overshadowed by the rise to eminence in the King’s favours of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whose later assassination was to play an indirect role in the history of Tyburn.

  James was succeeded in 1625 by his son who became King Charles I. His marriage to the French Catholic, Henrietta Maria, was one of the factors in the growing tensions between the King and those who felt that the country was lurching back to Roman Catholicism. Henrietta Maria did nothing to allay these fears when on 26 June 1626 she visited Tyburn to offer prayers and devotions to the Catholic martyrs who had died there. The Queen had assembled a large entourage of courtiers, many of them French, and had agreed to the suggestion that she walk barefoot to the gallows to honour the souls of the martyrs. This gesture and indeed the whole affair sparked an immediate row. A commission set up to inquire into the incident stated that the courtiers had abused their influence on the Queen by leading her to a place where it was customary to execute infamous malefactors and criminals. The French Ambassador, Marshal de Bassompierre, declared grumpily that the Queen had not even been within fifty paces of the gallows. An attempt was made to clear the Queen’s name and show her to have been the dupe of scheming courtiers but, given her commitment to the Catholic faith, it is unlikely that she needed much persuading to undertake the walk to Tyburn. A diplomatic incident occurred when the French courtiers were sent back to France, this in turn evoking an angry response from the French King.

  Charles inherited his father’s advisor and favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was described by the measured critic and great nineteenth-century historian S.R. Gardiner as being among the most incapable ministers of the seventeenth or any other century. Buckingham’s rapid accumulation of power and wealth made him a deeply unpopular figure, an unpopularity exacerbated by his intimate relationship with James I and the fact that he was accused of dragging England into war with Spain and France during the early part of Charles’s reign. In August 1628, Buckingham went to Portsmouth to see an expedition set sail for La Rochelle. Suddenly out of the crowd ran a naval officer, John Felton, who plunged a knife into Buckingham’s chest, inflicting mortal injuries. Felton, whose grievances stemmed from failure to gain promotion, gave himself up and was brought to the Tower. He made a full confession and stated that he wished his right hand to be cut off as a testimony of his remorse. However it was discovered that Felton carried a letter of justification for the murder sewn into his hat because he feared he would be killed after the assassination. In it he stated that ‘by killing the Duke he should do his country great service’. In November 1628, Felton was carted to Tyburn where he was hanged. Later his body was taken to Portsmouth and suspended in chains. While few mourned Buckingham and indeed crowds turned out in their thousands to cheer his funeral procession, Felton became a national hero and the political furore surrounding the case created something of a republican cause célèbre (Holston: 2000).

  Two years after Buckingham’s assassination an intriguing case brought together a number of sensitive issues concerning sexual abuse, rape and buggery. Mervin Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, was denounced by his son James and was subsequently imprisoned in the Tower in December 1630. In the following April a grand jury brought three indictments against Castlehaven: accessory to rape against his own wife and two cases of buggery with his menservants. In relation to the charges of buggery, the Attorney-General denounced Castlehaven for rejecting God and giving himself over to lust. He was tri
ed by twenty-seven of his peers, found guilty and executed at Tyburn in 1631 despite the fact that he claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy (Cobbett 1809 iii: cols 402–18).

  The case, with its detailed accounts of orgies at Fonthill Gifford in Wiltshire, excited much salacious interest. However, it is the case of the two servants who had testified against Castlehaven which is more pertinent to the history of Tyburn. Their names were Lawrence Fitzpatrick and Giles Brodway and they were brought to trial in June 1631 despite earlier assurances that they would be immune from persecution. Fitzpatrick was accused of buggery and Brodway of rape. Giving evidence against Brodway was the Countess of Castlehaven, who declared that he had carnally known her and had entered her body. Fitzpatrick argued that the evidence that he had already given was for the King against Castlehaven and that he felt no obligation to offer any more. This counted for little and Fitzpatrick was charged with committing buggery. The Lord Chief Justice declared that Fitzpatrick was a voluntary prostitute who should have known better and that with his age and strength he should have resisted Castlehaven’s advances (Cobbett 1809 iii: cols 419–26).

  Brodway and Fitzpatrick were both found guilty and sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn on 16 July 1631. Both men made confessions and last speeches which provided a wealth of prurient and smutty material for the spellbound audience around the scaffold. Fitzpatrick declared his allegiance to the Catholic faith but then stated that he had been entrapped by the Privy Council into declaring Castlehaven guilty of buggery. He added, almost as an afterthought, that his lordship had buggered him and that he, in turn, had buggered his lordship. Supporting his co-defendant, he said that Brodway had done nothing to the Countess of his own volition but had been pressurised to do so by the Earl. This was a reference to evidence offered at the trial in which Brodway averred that Castlehaven had instructed him to get into bed with himself and his wife. He followed this with the revelation that the Earl had held his wife by her hands while Brodway had sex with her. Towards the end of his speech and presumably providing something of an anti-climax for his audience, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that he was sorry for the sinful life he had led which had involved drinking and whoring. He ended the speech typically, by blaming his sins on his failure to go to confession. He then prayed for the King.

  Next Brodway delivered his speech. He confessed to all his sins and to breaking the Commandments in thought and deed and regretted that he had not observed the Sabbath or paid enough attention to sermons. He then read three prayers out loud, offered up another prayer and threw away his posy of flowers. The crowd, who were growing restive, perked up considerably when Brodway went on to say that he had only lain with the Countess once and only as a result of pressure from the Earl. He added that he had ejaculated but had not penetrated her body. All ears strained to hear as he added that the Earl had said to him: ‘Brodway, thou art young, lusty and well-favoured … I am old and cannot live long, my wife wholly delighting in lust, which I am neither able or willing to satisfy, thou mayest do well to lie with her, and so pleasing her.’

  After Charles had succeeded his father as King, he soon found himself in conflict with Parliament which he dissolved in 1629 and did not recall for a further eleven years. Turbulent years followed in which many Puritans and others deplored what they saw as ‘popish plots’ to restore Catholicism and the attempts of the King to rule without Parliament. The conflicts between Charles and Parliament escalated from 1640 and London played an important role in the approach to civil war. There was much support for Parliament among the citizens of London and it was the threat posed by the London crowds that made the situation unhealthy for Charles to remain. He therefore left in January 1642 and headed north. During the 1640s and 1650s London witnessed significant events including the executions of the Earl of Strafford, the King’s adviser, of William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury and, in January 1649, of course, of the King himself. None of these executions took place at Tyburn.

  The Civil War was declared in August 1642 and London was obviously a key factor in the considerations of both sides. Although the City was protected by a wall, London had expanded well beyond the boundaries of the old square mile. It was essential that London be protected so the building of fortifications began with the construction of 18 miles of trenches which connected twenty-four forts including a large bastion with four bulwarks at Hyde Park near the Tyburn gallows. The ditches and fortifications were unique in that they provided a circumvallation which united the cities of Westminster and London and extended to Hyde Park and Tyburn in the west, to the Tower in the east, Newington in the south and Hoxton in the north. These works were, however, never put to the military test.

  Executed at Tyburn in 1640 was the highwayman Isaac Atkinson. The only son of a well-off country gentleman with an estate at Faringdon in Berkshire, such was his reputation for persistent womanising and for squandering the family’s money that he was finally disinherited. Left without a legitimate source of income, he resorted to highway robbery. An early victim was the Attorney-General to Charles I. Atkinson made something of a speciality of robbing lawyers and it was alleged that in less than eight months he waylaid at least 160 attorneys on the roads of Norfolk alone, relieving them of around £3,000. While this was probably enough to make him a popular hero, a highwayman’s career was usually short-lived and so it was with Atkinson. His downfall occurred when he attempted to rob a market-woman at Turnham Green. He was interested both in her looks and her money but when he accosted her she tossed her bag of takings over a hedge and ran off. Atkinson went to find the bag but while he did so his own horse which seems to have been as lecherously inclined as its master, took off after the woman’s little mare. The woman quickly alerted the authorities and Atkinson had not gone far before he was arrested, albeit not without a struggle in which he killed four of his attackers. It was said that he behaved with ‘intolerable insolence’ during his trial and stay in Newgate. On the day of his execution he made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself with a knife. He was taken to Tyburn and hanged at the age of just twenty-six. With typical bravado he declared in his last speech, ‘Gentlemen, there’s nothing like a merry life, and a short one.’ Tyburn would witness the execution of many notorious and other less well-known highway robbers particularly after 1660.

  Religion continued to be a highly sensitive issue during the period of the Civil War and there were many thought to be active Catholics or sympathisers who were taken to Tyburn during this time. On 21 January 1641 Bartholomew Roe, a Catholic priest who had already been imprisoned intermittently from 1618, was executed with another priest, Thomas Greene, who was eighty years of age when he went to the gallows, having lived under sentence of death for no less than fourteen of them. Both were drawn on the same hurdle and were hanged simultaneously to demonstrations of sympathy from the crowd. Later in 1641 Edward Morgan made his brief acquaintance with Tyburn but not before he had had his ears nailed to a pillory by order of the Star Chamber, as one of its last acts. He was executed at Tyburn on 26 April 1642. Thomas Holland was a long-standing Catholic activist who made a lengthy speech accompanied by prayers at Tyburn where he died on 12 December 1642.

  On the day of Henry Morse’s execution in 1645, four horses drew his hurdle to Tyburn and the French Ambassador attended with his entire suite, as did the Count of Egmont and the Portuguese Ambassador. Morse was hanged until dead and at the quartering of his body the footmen of the French Ambassador and of the Count came forward and dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood. When Peter Wright was executed for his religious views in 1651 along with thirteen felons on Whit Monday 1651, it was said that a crowd of over twenty thousand attended.

  On 30 January 1649 King Charles I was publicly beheaded outside the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall. His execution was followed by a series of sweeping changes but Tyburn continued to require the application of the executioner’s skills. In fact within four months of the creation of the new republic on 29 June 1649 it is said that Tyburn witnessed one o
f its largest number of simultaneous executions. The source for this account, ‘A true and perfect Relation of the Tryall, Condemning of the 24 Prisoners … at Tyburn’, tells us that the condemned were executed as convicted robbers and burglars. John Mercer, one of the condemned, spoke rather unexpectedly of his desire for unity in the kingdom and the desirability of bringing Charles II home and settling him into his rightful role. The twenty-four prisoners on this occasion included one woman and they were transported to Tyburn in eight carts.

  Shortly after the upheavals of the Civil War more mundane events were taking place around the area of Tyburn. The land to the south – Hyde Park – was sold by order of Parliament in April 1652. The Park was divided into three lots, each fetching £17,000. The diarist John Evelyn recorded that the ‘sordid fellow who had purchased part of it was charging one shilling for every coach to enter and 6d for each horse’ (Weinreb and Hibbert 1983: 401).

  After King Charles’s execution republican hopes were raised that England would become a more godly and humane place. These hopes were heightened after 1653 when a number of thieves condemned to die at Tyburn were reprieved, an action which seemed to suggest that Cromwell was in accord with those who believed that the laws for trivial offences were too harsh. This optimism was unfulfilled and one Samuel Chidley wrote a letter to the Lord Protector and to Parliament expressing his disappointment at the fact that wicked laws were still taking people’s lives away for a crime as relatively trivial as theft. Chidley printed his arguments in book form and a copy of this book was nailed to a tree which stood on a bank by the side of the Tyburn gallows.

  The period between 1640 and 1660 had been a momentous one, in London and nationally. In 1660 Charles II returned to a rapturous welcome, the peeling of church bells and the joyful huzzahs of the crowds on the streets. Nonetheless, as Christopher Hill has stated, the political events which had occurred had reminded kings and archbishops that they had a joint in their necks and that in future they would have to pay due attention to the interests of the commercial and manufacturing classes in London and elsewhere. By the end of the century the traditional power structures around monarchy and religion were declining and the governing class increasingly depended on the law. Courts showed growing scepticism over evidence – appeals to dreams, the supernatural and spectral evidence were increasingly ignored. Witnesses needed to be reliable and those who were charged with offences were allowed a defence counsel. However, first and foremost scores had to be settled with those who had been complicit in the trial of Charles I and his death – the regicides.