Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (30 page)

HANGED AT THE YARD-ARM

‘[T]he whole ship’s company was forced to watch the kicking and struggling body of their erring shipmate silhouetted against the sky as he is hoisted to the end of the yard-arm, there to writhe until death by strangulation overtakes him…’

Many were the punishments inflicted at sea for maritime crimes committed in the warships of the Royal Navy, even up to the turn of the present century. Flogging, barrel-pillory, booting, boring the tongue, the stocks, ‘kissing the gunner’s daughter’ and the whirligig were but a few of them. But on voyages in foreign oceans which could and did last many months, there was no question of simply clapping in irons those accused of serious crimes and waiting until the fleet returned to an English port before charges could be brought before the courts; the miscreant was court-martialled on board ship and, if found guilty, was hanged.

Nor was there any need to construct a gallows for the occasion; the sailing-ships of the day had their yard-arms (the sturdy cross-pieces mounted at right-angles high on the main mast), and these provided a ready-made venue.

At a court martial held on board the warship HMS
Assurance
in the North River, New York, in 1806, 20 seamen belonging to HMS
Narcissus
were charged with having made several mutinous assemblies and uttering words of sedition and mutiny. Of those found guilty, Hamilton Wood, Thomas Crandon, Josiah Marshall, Francis Rae, Owen Cooper and Thomas Split-man, were sentenced to be hanged at the yard-arms of HMS
Narcissus
until they were dead, at such time as the commander-in-chief of His Majesty’s ships and vessels at the port directed; the body of Hamilton Wood was afterwards hung in chains in the most appropriate place the commander-in-chief thought proper to direct.

Of the others, Robert Wisely received 500 lashes and Peter Delaney received 200 lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails on their bare backs, the remainder of the men being acquitted.

The grim ceremony itself was carried out with strict naval discipline and in accordance with regulations in force at the time. John M’Arthur’s
Principles and Practice of Naval and Military Courts Martial
described such a scene:

‘The fatal morning is arrived – the signal of death is already displayed – the assembly of boats, manned and armed, surround the ship appointed for the execution. The crews of the respective ships are arranged on deck and, after hearing the Articles of War read, and being made acquainted with the crime for which the punishment is inflicted, wait with silent dread and expectation, the awful moment. At length a gun is fired, the sign to rouse attention, and at the same time the unhappy victim, who has violated the laws of his country, is run up by the neck to the yard-arm, the whole spectacle being intended as a warning to deter others from the commission of similar crimes.’

And an unparalleled deterrent it undoubtedly was, as the whole ship’s company was forced to watch the kicking and struggling body of their erring shipmate silhouetted against the sky as he was hoisted to the end of the yard-arm, there to writhe until death by strangulation overtook him – there being no neck-breaking drop involved.

The ships’ logs of the eighteenth century make for grim reading: 15 seamen of HMS
Namur
were hanged for desertion on 21 January 1758, as were John Curtis and John Murphy of HMS
York
on 6 August 1759. Seaman Richard Chilton of HMS
Seahorse
was hanged on 3 November 1762, having been found ‘guilty of indecent practices’. Seaman John Mitchell of HMS
Chaser
was executed in the same manner on 18 August 1783 for ‘writing a seditious and mutinous letter’, while Seaman John Cumming of HMS
Trusty
was ‘hanged at the fore yard-arm for striking Daniel Ford, Boatswain of the said ship’.

The penalty was last exacted on 13 July 1860, when Private John Dallinger of the Royal Marines was found guilty of two attempted murders and was hanged from the yard-arm of his ship, HMS
Leven
, while it was at anchor in the Yangtze River, China.

HANGED, DRAWN AND QUARTERED

‘“Behold, the head of a traitor! So die all traitors!” The gory trophy was then taken to Newgate Prison to be parboiled before being exhibited on London Bridge…’

If a man committed murder, he was hanged or, if an aristocrat, he was beheaded. The only offence worse than that was high treason, the equivalent of murdering one’s country by killing, or plotting to kill, its sovereign lord, the King. Because it was a worse crime, it was axiomatic that the penalty had to be more severe than a standard execution. And those charged with deciding what could possibly meet that criterion came up with the perfect answer: the traitor would simply be carved into pieces, anatomically demolished, as it were, while still alive.

The process is best exemplified by the case of Major General Thomas Harrison, one of the regicides who had sentenced Charles I to death. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he and others were tried, the sentence passed at the Old Bailey being:

‘That you be led to the place from whence you came, and from thence be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution, and then you shall be hanged by the neck and, being alive, shall be cut down, and your privy members to be cut off, and your entrails be taken out of your body and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and head and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s majesty. And the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

This was duly carried out two days later at Charing Cross in the presence of a multitude of sightseers, which included Charles II, the son of the executed King. Harrison was allowed to swing from the gallows for but a matter of minutes. Half-choking, he was then stretched on the boards for the executioner to slit open his stomach and pull out his entrails. Whereupon, it was reported, the appallingly mutilated Harrison leaned forward and hit the executioner across the head. Within seconds his own head had been deftly removed and his intestines thrown on the blazing fire near the scaffold. Retribution had been seen to be done.

The word ‘drawn’ in the dread phrase has caused some confusion, as it has a dual application: that of being ‘drawn’ on a hurdle, and also ‘drawn’ as a chicken is prior to cooking. More accurately, then, the details were: drawn on a hurdle; hanged, but only briefly enough to cause partial strangulation; drawn, disembowelled (sometimes preceded by castration, to symbolise that the traitor could thereby never propagate any future traitors), the bowels and entrails then burned; beheaded and quartered, the torso being hacked into four portions and displayed on the city gates as a warning to all.

This butchery ended with the executioner holding the head up high at each corner of the scaffold and exclaiming: ‘Behold, the head of a traitor! So die all traitors!’ The gory trophy was then taken to Newgate Prison to be parboiled before being exhibited on London Bridge as a deterrent. The parboiling, or part-boiling, was necessary to deter the voracious appetites of the seagulls, and was achieved by boiling the head in salt water and cumin seed in a large cauldron, this procedure taking place in a Newgate room called Jack Ketch’s kitchen.

For over 600 years there was only one bridge spanning the Thames in London, this being the route for travellers entering the city from the south of the country and the Continent. It was therefore the obvious place at which to warn all visitors of the dire fate that awaited lawbreakers; what could be more realistic than the heads of those who had failed to take heed?

To prevent invaders crossing the bridge and attacking the city, the structure incorporated a drawbridge which, when opened, abutted against a stone gateway. And what particularly gripped the attention of the visitor was seen on raising his eyes above the gate’s battlements, for there, leaning at all angles, were a dozen or more long poles, the majority of them bearing aloft a human head. And among these hideous objects could generally be seen a quarter of an individual who had been hanged for treason.

This spectacle was often remarked on by eminent personages coming to London. Jakob Rathgeb, private secretary to Frederick, Duke of Württemberg, praised London Bridge, ‘with its quite splendid, handsome and well-built houses, which are occupied by merchants of consequence’, going on to refer to ‘about 34 heads on the gateway of persons of distinction who had in former times been condemned and beheaded for creating riots’.

Joseph Justus Scaliger noted in 1566 that ‘in London there were many heads on the bridge... I have seen there, as if they were masts of ships, and at the top of them, quarters of men’s corpses’. And in 1602 the Duke of Stettin wrote in his diary about his journey through England, remarking that while the bridge had become of little importance in a military sense, its gateway continued to warn the public of the autocratic powers of the Tudors, ‘for near the end of the bridge, on the suburb side, were stuck up the heads of 30 gentlemen of high standing who had been beheaded on account of treason and secret practices against the Queen’.

Treason did not simply mean plotting to kill the sovereign, as Thomas Douglas found out in 1605. He conspired with James Steward in forging the King’s signature in an attempt to procure the Great Seal of England, with which they could then acquire land held by the Crown. The plot was discovered and Steward was executed, but Douglas was not implicated and, undeterred, counterfeited the King’s Privy Signet and used it to endorse letters sent to six princes of Germany, in which he sought money and employment.

This too misfired and, as reported by the historian Stow, ‘today, 27 June 1605, he was drawn on a hurdle into Smithfield and there hanged and quartered. At his death he acknowledged all to be true, and protested before God that there was not any one person so much as accessory in any of his treasons’.

Among the many whose heads adorned the battlements of the bridge were those of Sir Thomas More, rebel leaders Jack Cade and Wat Tyler, Fr Henry Garnett, William Wallace, the paramours of Queen Catherine Howard, Dereham and Culpepper, Lord Simon of Sudbury, together with a quarter of Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland.

Shocking as it may seem, even the heads of executed women were spiked on the bridge, one of them being that of Elizabeth Barton, known as the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’. A domestic servant at Aldington, Kent, she later entered a convent in 1527, and there became prone to religious trances. In those superstitious times her fame spread far and wide, her prognostications being tolerated until it was announced that Henry VIII intended to marry Anne Boleyn. At that, Elizabeth predicted that if he married her during the lifetime of his divorced wife Catherine of Aragon, he would die within a month.

In the Parliament that sat in January 1534 the matter was brought up, the conclusion being that, together with other clerics, she was obviously conspiring against the King. The outcome was inevitable and, as recorded by the chronicler Stow:

‘The 20 Aprill 1534 Elizabeth Barton, a nunne professed, Edward Bocking and Iohn Dering, two monks of Christs church in Canterburie, and Richard Risby and another of his fellowes of ye same house, Richard Master, parson of Aldington, and Henry Gold, priest, were drawne from the Tower of London to Tiborne, and there hanged and headed, the nuns head set on London bridge, and the other heades on gates of ye citie.’

Among the many who objected vehemently to Henry’s claim to be supreme head of the Church were several Carthusian priests, one of them being Fr Houghton of the London house. In 1535 he was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn and, after praying and forgiving the executioner for the deed he had to do, he mounted the gallow’s ladder. Then, it was recorded in the Catholic archives:

‘On the sign being given, the ladder was turned and so he was hanged. But one of the bystanders, before his holy soul had left his body, cut the rope, and so falling to the ground, he began for a little space to throb and breathe. Then he was drawn to another adjoining space where all his garments were violently torn off, and he was again extended naked on a hurdle, on whom immediately the bloody executioner laid his wicked hands.

Then he cut open his belly, dragged out his bowels, his heart and all else, and threw them into a fire, during which our blessed Father not only did not cry out on account of the intolerable pain, but on the contrary during all this time until his heart was torn out, prayed continually, to the wonder not only of the presiding officer but of all the people who witnessed it. Being at his last gasp, and nearly disembowelled, he said to his tormentor while in the act of tearing out his heart, “Good Jesu, what will you do with my heart?” and saying this, he expired. And lastly his head was cut off and the beheaded body was divided into four parts, the remains thrown into cauldrons and parboiled, and put up at different places in the city. And one arm of our Father was suspended over the gate of our Carthusians’ house.’

Even as comparatively recently as the early nineteenth century, the fearsome sentence was pronounced, albeit in a modified form. In 1817 riots took place in Derbyshire, brought about by unemployment and bad social conditions, and in order to quell the disturbances three of the ringleaders were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, although this was reduced to one of being hanged until dead and then decapitated.