Amazing True Stories of Execution Blunders

by Abbott, Geoffrey

  Meanwhile Balmerino had been escorted to a small room in the house adjoining the scaffold, where he sipped some wine and nibbled a piece of bread. He was dressed in his regimental uniform, the blue coat with red facings he had worn in the Pretender’s Army, and beneath the uniform he wore a woollen shirt which, he said, would serve as his shroud. When the officer in charge delivered the usual speech and concluded with the customary ‘God save King George!’ Lord Balmerino immediately contradicted the salutation by exclaiming ‘God bless King James!’, the man he had fought unsuccessfully to place on a Scottish throne.

  Another chronicler described how, on being escorted out of the house, ‘he saluted the company gathered there and hastened to the scaffold, which he ascended with so undaunted a step as to surprise every spectator.’ Once there, he walked around it, bowed to the crowd and read the inscription on his coffin which had been placed at one side in readiness. Then, taking out his spectacles, he read out a paper in which he declared his unshakeable adherence to the House of Stuart, sheer force of habit then causing him to breathe on and wipe them before putting them away in their case. Only then did he turn to the executioner who, dressed in white and wearing a white apron, was waiting nearby. The executioner was John Thrift, a man with a highly nervous disposition; indeed so nervous that he had had to be given a glass of wine before his victim appeared.

  As custom demanded, Thrift started to ask Lord Balmerino for forgiveness, but was interrupted, his victim saying that there was no need. However, another custom required that the executioner be paid. Balmerino apologised and, giving him three guineas, said, ‘Friend, I never had much money. This is all I have – I wish it were more for your sake. I am sorry I can add nothing else but my coat and waistcoat.’

  Taking the garments off, he laid them on the coffin and, calling for the yeoman warder who had been his guardian and companion while he had been imprisoned in the Tower, he gave the man his periwig, replacing it with a nightcap of Scotch plaid, then took the axe from Thrift and, after feeling the edge, returned it to the executioner before finally approaching the block. There, he knelt down, but got to his feet again almost immediately to go round the other side and assume the kneeling position again, where he uttered his last prayer: ‘O Lord, reward my friends, forgive my enemies, bless and restore the King, preserve the Prince and the Duke of York [meaning the princes of the House of Stuart] and receive my soul.’ Victims were expected to signal their readiness for execution and Balmerino was no exception; throwing up one arm as if charging the enemy in battle, he braced himself for the blow.

  Lord Balmerino Beheaded On Tower Hill

  What happened next was recorded by General Williamson:

  ‘Lord Balmerino’s Fate was otherwais than Kilmarnock’s, for tho’ he was a resolute Jacobite and seemed to have more than ordinary Courage and indifference for death, yet when he layd his head on the block and made his own Signal for decollation [decapitation] he withdrew his body a little.’

  By this time Thrift was almost in a state of collapse. The object of all eyes, he somehow managed to raise the axe, trembling as he did so; feebly he brought it down, Balmerino only sustaining a flesh wound. The General then reported that ‘the bystanders were forc’d to hold his body and head to the block while the Separation was making.’ At the shout of horror from a thousand or more throats, again Thrift raised the crude weapon, but again the Scot’s head remained attached to his body. Filled now with panic borne of desperation, the executioner raised the axe aloft once more, to bring it down more accurately – the block, indeed the scaffold itself shuddered with the force of the blow – and Lord Balmerino’s head finally fell onto the piece of red baize which had been spread out in readiness on the sawdust-strewn boards.

  Ironically enough, after his trial at Westminster, Balmerino, ‘keeping his spirits up, showed Lord Kilmarnock, who had also been found guilty of committing high treason, how he must lay his head on the block; bade him not to wince lest the stroke should cut his skull or his shoulders, and advised him to bite his lips. He also begged that they might have another bottle together soon, as they should never meet any more till . . .’ and pointed significantly to his neck.

  Some time later the date and details of Lord Balmerino’s execution were read out to him by the Lieutenant of the Tower while he was dining in his room. There with him was his wife, she having been permitted to take her meals with him during his last few days on earth, and on hearing the dread news she was not unnaturally overwhelmed with shock and horror. At that, Balmerino exclaimed angrily to the Lieutenant, ‘See, sir, with your damned warrant you have spoiled my Lady’s dinner!’

  Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex

  Good-looking, arrogant and self-assured, the Earl of Essex had been extremely popular at one time, winning deserved renown on many battlefields in France and Spain. Becoming Queen Elizabeth’s favourite and promoted to Master of the Horse and General of Cavalry, in 1599 she appointed him Governor of Ireland and ordered him to quell the rebels in that country. However, some months later, during a dispute concerning the appointment of a deputy, so insolent was his attitude towards the Queen that she boxed his ears, whereupon he laid his hand on his sword and exclaimed that it was an insult he would not have tolerated from her father (Henry VIII), much less than from a king in petticoats!

  His difficulties in Ireland became insurmountable, much to the delight of his rivals at Court, and despite Elizabeth warning, ‘We do charge you, as you tender our pleasure, that you adventure not to come out of that Kingdom,’ he returned without her permission, appearing in her presence unannounced wearing muddy boots and an unbuttoned doublet. Elizabeth suspended him from most of his offices and, resentful at his downfall from her favour, he conspired against her, even referring to her as ‘an old woman, crooked in mind and body.’

  On 8 February 1601 he led a body of three hundred fully armed men in a vain attempt to seize the Tower and the Palace of Westminster, but failed abysmally. Taken prisoner, he was charged with having plotted to surprise the Queen at her palace and take her life, to have broken out into rebellion, to have shut up the Lords of the Council, and assaulted the Queen’s subjects on the streets.

  He confessed everything, even admitting that the Queen could never be safe as long as he lived. The court found him guilty of High Treason and sentenced him to death. Elizabeth, despite her feelings towards him, realised the danger he posed and reluctantly issued the final order for his execution.

  On 25 February 1601, the 34-year-old Earl, wearing ‘a gown of wrought velvet, a black sattin suit, a felt hat blacke, with a little ruff about his neck,’ was escorted by sixteen yeoman warders from his prison in the Develin Tower (now known, appropriately enough, as the Devereux Tower) on to Tower Green. Such was his popularity with the Londoners that the authorities decided to perform the execution within the walls rather than risk a riot by the protesting public if it was carried out, as custom demanded, on Tower Hill.

  The executioner was one Derrick, whose life, coincidentally, the Earl had saved when he had been sentenced to death for a rape in Calais, and whose name was later given to a type of crane which resembled a gibbet. Essex asked the executioner whether the waistcoat he was wearing would hinder him or not, and after praying he ‘laid himself flat’ and put his head in the fatal notch (it appears that the block was very low, requiring the victim to lie prone along the scaffold boards). He then spread his arms out as a signal for Derrick to strike, saying ‘Lord, into thine arms I commend my spirit’, but the executioner suddenly noticed that the target area, the back of the Earl’s neck, was concealed by the collar of his doublet, so told his victim that he must stand up again and remove the garment. ‘What I must do, I will do!’ exclaimed Essex, and getting up again, took off the doublet and resumed his position along the boards. Once more he spread his arms wide and, as recorded in the ancient annals, ‘at three strokes the executioner stroke off his head, and when his head was off and in his executioner’s hand, his eyes did op
en and shut as in the time of his prayer; his bodie never stirred, never any parte of him more than a stone, the first stroke howbeit deadly and depriving him of all sense and motion.’

  According to a well-established story, Elizabeth had impatiently awaited the return of a ring which she had once bestowed on him with the assurance that if he were ever in danger and sent it to her, she would interpret it as a plea for pardon which she would assuredly grant. In the Tower, Essex, it seems, intended to take advantage of this royal concession for he gave the ring to the Countess of Nottingham with instructions to pass it to the Queen, but the vengeful Countess deliberately failed to do so. It was not until she lay dying that she confessed to Elizabeth what she had done – alas, too late for Essex.

  Consort of Henry VIII, Queen Katherine Howard was found guilty of treason because of her allegedly adulterous life, and sentenced to death. She was committed to the Tower and when, on 12 February 1542, she was informed that she was to be executed by the axe the next day ‘she 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.”’

  Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots

  Executioner Simon Bull was definitely not looking forward to his next assignment, the execution of Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots who was accused of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth. Hanging was his usual line of work, but this was to be with the axe, with which he hadn’t had a great deal of practice. The execution was ordered to take place on 8 February 1587 in Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, one of the few times such an event had taken place indoors, but this was considered necessary by the Queen’s Commissioners, the Earls of Kent and Shrewsbury, in order to avoid any public unrest should it have occurred in the open. Initially those two gentlemen objected to the doomed Queen being attended by her servants, the Earl of Kent saying that ‘they would seek to wipe their napkins in some of your blood [as holy relics], which were not convenient.’ Only when she had given her word that they would not do so, was she allowed to choose three or four attendants to accompany her.

  A contemporary historian described what happened next.

  ‘After this, escorted by the lords, knights, and gentlemen, the Sheriff leading, she passed into the great hall and stepped up on to the scaffold, this being two feet high and twelve feet broad, with rails about, hanged and covered with black. She sat down on a low stool and, being thus seated, the warrant for her execution was read out. She listened unto it with as small regard as if it had not concerned her at all, and with as cheerful a countenance as if it had been a pardon from her majesty for her life. That done, the Protestant Dean of Peterborough stood in front of her and pressed his administrations, but she rejected them. But the Dean began to pray aloud, whereat she took her beads and a crucifix and said divers Latin prayers.

  Her prayers ended, the executioner, kneeling, desired her to forgive him her death; she answered, ‘I forgive you with all my heart, for now I hope you will make an end to all my troubles.’ Then, with her two women helping her up, began to disrobe her of her apparel. All the time they were so doing, she had never changed her countenance, but with smiling cheer, uttered these words ‘that she never had such grooms to make her unready, and that she had never put off her clothes in such a company!’ Then being stripped of all her apparel saving her petticoat and kirtle, her two women beholding her made great lamentation and, crying and crossing themselves, prayed in Latin. Turning to them and embracing them, she said, ‘Ne crie pas; j’ai promis pour vous.’ Then she bade them farewell, whereupon one of them, having a Corpus Christi cloth, lapped up three corner ways, kissed it and put it over the Queen of Scots’ face and pinned it fast to the caul of her head. Then she, kneeling down on the cushion resolutely and praying, groped for the block. Laying down her head and putting her chin over the block, she stretched out her arms and cried out ‘In manus tuas Dominie’ three or four times.’

  With his assistant holding her still with one hand on her back, Simon Bull brought down the axe, only to have his blow go badly off-aim, striking the knot of the blindfold and apparently stunning her. Again he struck, this time with more success, though in order to sever the head completely, he had perforce to cut through a little gristle with his knife.

  The contemporary account continued,

  ‘The executioner then lifted up the head to the view of all the assembly and bade ‘God save the Queen’ [Queen Elizabeth, of course]. Then, her dressing of lawn [the Corpus Christi cloth] falling off, her head appeared as grey as one of three-score-and-ten years old, cropped very short, her face in an instant being so much altered from the form she had when she was alive, as few could remember her from her face. Her lips stirred up and down a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off. Then one of the executioners espied her little dog which had crept under her clothes, and it could not be gotten forth except by force, yet afterwards would not depart from the dead corpse, but came and lay down between her head and her shoulders, which being imbrued with her blood, it was carried away and washed. All things else that had any blood were either burned or clean washed.’

  As evidence that the execution had actually taken place, the late Queen’s head was carefully washed and placed on a velvet cushion, then displayed at one of the windows overlooking the vast courtyard for the benefit of the crowds assembled there.

  Simon Bull and his assistant were paid their due fees but were not permitted to claim their traditional perquisites of the victim’s clothes, thereby depriving them of the opportunity to sell them as holy relics or souvenirs.

  John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was charged with aiding and abetting treason against Henry VIII and condemned to death. The Pope, Paul III, in defiance of Henry’s decision to divorce Katherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn, promoted Fisher to cardinal and dispatched a cardinal’s hat to the prelate. On hearing of this, Henry VIII, with savage humour, exclaimed, ‘’Fore God, then, he shall wear it on his shoulders!’

  M. Rasmussen

  Execution by the axe was the method of capital punishment adopted in Denmark until 1887, when Rasmussen, the leader of a gang of highwaymen, was finally caught and sentenced to death. However, when he was escorted on to the scaffold it was discovered that the executioner, doubtless to steady his nerves for the occasion, had imbibed rather too much strong liquor, with disastrous results. Not only did the first blow go badly awry, the next one did also, and it was not until the drunken axeman had swung the weapon for the third time that the head became completely detached from the torso. So outraged were the Danish citizens at this appalling incompetence that following a judicial enquiry, King Christian IX decreed that all capital punishment, both in private and in public, should be abolished forthwith.

  George Selwyn, friend of Horace Walpole, regularly attended public executions and on being reproached for being a spectator at the beheading of Lord Lovat in 1747, riposted, ‘Well, I made up for it by going to the undertaker’s afterwards and watching it being sewn back on again!’

  William, Lord Russell

  The Rye House Plot of 1683 was a conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, near Rye House Farm, Hertfordshire, as they returned from the Newmarket races, a plot in which Lord Russell was falsely accused of being involved. The nobleman was more or less doomed from the start, for his trial was conducted by the Attorney General Judge George Jeffries, who later became known as the infamous Hanging Judge of the Bloody Assizes.

  In court Lord Russell asked for a postponement in order to await the arrival of a vital witness. ‘Postponement!’ exclaimed Jeffries. ‘You would not have given the King an hour’s notice in which to save his life! The trial must proceed.’ Thus prejudged and found guilty, the remainder of the trial was a mere formality, and Lord Russell, found guilty of committing High Treason, was
sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, though this was later commuted to just decapitation.

  Great efforts were made to save him; his father, the Duke of Bedford, offered the King the phenomenal sum of £100,000 for a royal reprieve, and Lady Russell, the condemned man’s wife, went to the court and, throwing herself at Charles’ feet, begged him for mercy, but to no avail.

  On 21 July 1683 the noble lord was escorted to the scaffold erected at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, where awaited the other equally terrifying member of the judicial duo, executioner Jack Ketch. The condemned man surveyed the large, jeering crowd surrounding the scaffold and wryly observed, ‘I hope I shall soon see a much better assembly!’

  After praying, he removed his peruke (wig), cravat and coat, then handed Ketch ten gold guineas, saying that the executioner should strike without waiting for a sign.

  Execution By The Axe

  He knelt over the block and Ketch brought the axe down, but only succeeded in inflicting a deep and penetrating wound. Determined to dispatch his victim without further delay, the executioner raised the axe high above his head and brought it down with all the force he could muster; so hard that the blade, passing through most of the victim’s neck, embedded itself in the block to such a depth that Ketch, unable to withdraw it, had to sever the head completely by using his knife before holding it high and, in accordance with tradition, shouting, ‘Here is the head of a traitor! So die all traitors! God save the King!’

  Jack Ketch subsequently blamed the peer for the fact that more than one stroke of the axe was necessary ‘because Lord Russell did not dispose himself for receiving the fatal stroke in such a position as was most suitable’ and that ‘he moved his body while he [Ketch] received some interruption as he was taking aim.’