Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree

by Alan Brooke

  Peter Ackroyd argues that women in sixteenth-century London played a subordinate role to men in a markedly hierarchical and patriarchal society. In a ‘city of power and business, they retain a supportive invisible presence’ (Ackroyd 2000: 628). Be that as it may, their largely invisible presence was often made visible on the scaffold at Tyburn, as with a formidable beldame and cutpurse who was executed in 1557, but not before she had greatly entertained the crowds by directing at the legal authorities one of the most sustained outbursts of obscene invective ever heard at Tyburn. Women certainly appeared before the courts less than men at this time. The legal system of early modern England very much reflected this male-dominated society and they were not permitted, for example, to serve as jurors or, of course, as magistrates. In fact their involve-ment, except sometimes as suspects, was largely limited to the examination of other women for evidence of pregnancy or marks which would indicate that they might be witches. They might also be called upon in investigations where female corpses needed to be examined for evidence of violence (Gaskill 2000: 256).

  As London continued to expand, particularly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, substantial numbers of women migrated there to seek work. Many of them were widowed, deserted or unmarried mothers. They were a very vulnerable group as is evident from the lives of some of those who ended their days at Tyburn. Peter Linebaugh’s analysis shows that of ninety-two women executed at Tyburn between 1703 and 1772, two-thirds were born outside London and ten had been convicted of infanticide (Linebaugh 1993: 148). Women were employed in large numbers in unskilled and low-paid work in the sweated trades and in domestic service. Their employment was particularly at risk at times of economic slump when it was all too easy for them to drift into prostitution and its concomitant, crime.

  However not all the women who died at Tyburn fell into the category of the unskilled and underprivileged. In 1523 Lady Alice Hungerford was hanged at Tyburn and afterwards buried in Greyfriars. John Stow mentions a monument there to ‘Alice Hungerford hanged at Tiburne for murdering her husband’ (Stow 1999: 305). Although her name was given as Alice, it was in fact Agnes. She was the second wife of Sir Edward Hungerford, an influential West Country landowner and sheriff but it was her first husband, John Cotell, whom she was found guilty of murdering. This was a curious case because nobody suggested that she had committed the murder herself: those who actually carried it out were William Mathew and William Inges. After strangling Cotell, they had burnt his body in the furnace of Farleigh Castle kitchen. Agnes was charged with receiving, comforting and aiding the two murderers some months later when the incident came to light. William Inges, who was a servant of Agnes, pleaded benefit of clergy but this was not allowed. Her elevated social status did not prevent Agnes being found guilty, incarcerated in the Tower and eventually dying horribly at Tyburn.

  The 1530s were a politically sensitive period and to speak out against Henry and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was regarded as treason. One who did so was Elizabeth Barton, a maidservant from Aldington in Kent who was known as the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’. Since 1525 Mary had suffered from a form of epilepsy which gave rise to trances. For this reason she was credited with having some form of second sight and this ‘divine gift’ made her famous. Elizabeth entered the Benedictine nunnery of St Sepulchre at Canterbury in 1527 where Catholic priests made use of her condemnation of Luther’s ideas. When Henry had formally divorced Catherine of Aragon in 1533, Elizabeth was outraged and was foolish enough to have predicted publicly that Henry would die within a month of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Considering that it was Elizabeth, who was already well known, who had made this prediction, such an outburst could not be ignored and she was arrested for treason. She was taken to the Tower and tortured and hanged at Tyburn in April 1534. It is reputed that hers was the only female head ever to be spiked and exhibited on the drawbridge gate of London Bridge.

  Another woman who died at Tyburn was Margaret Ward who helped a priest named Watson to escape from prison. She was flogged and suspended by her wrists for such a long time that she was crippled and temporarily paralysed. She was executed on 30 August 1588. We can be fairly certain that as well as the small number of recorded women who died at Tyburn, there must have been many others whose deaths scarcely warranted a mention. There is likely to have been a continuous procession of anonymous victims such as the ‘five men and four women executed for theft’ in June 1562 (Nichols 1848: 285).

  The sixteenth century saw a great increase of trials and executions for witchcraft, especially after the Witchcraft Act of 1563. There then followed about a century during which this activity was widely prevalent. Middlesex and London did not have a Quarter Sessions and Assizes. Sessions of the Peace were held twice a year as well as Sessions of Inquiry. Hence those charged with witchcraft in Middlesex could be tried in the Session of Peace for Middlesex or Westminster, the Sessions of Gaol Delivery of prisoners from Newgate or the Old Bailey.

  Among those hanged at Tyburn for witchcraft were Margaret Hackett in 1585, Anne Kerke in 1599, Elizabeth Sawyer in 1621 and Joan Petersen in 1652. Margaret Hackett, from Stanmore, was the servant of William Goodwinne and her case is recorded in the contemporary pamphlet The Severall factes of Witch-crafte where she was described as ‘this ungodly woman … this witch’. She was a 60-year-old widow who had been accused of causing a series of incidents which were said to have brought misfortune on a number of her neighbours. Anne Kerke of Broken Wharf in the City was alleged to have used her skills in witchcraft to kill several children. When, in 1599, she attended the funeral of one Anne Taylor for whose mysterious death she had been blamed, she was offered no share in the traditional doles for the poor for which she was apparently ‘sorely vexed’ and in consequence is said to have directed her magic against a member of the family (Thomas 1971: 664). At her trial, in order to disprove the idea that a witch’s hair could not be cut, the justice took some hairs from her head. However, a ‘serjeant attempting to cut [the hairs] with a pair of scissors, they turned round in his hand, and the edges were so battered, turned and spoiled, that they would not cut anything’. When this was followed by an attempt to burn the hair, it was said that the fire flew away from it (Purkiss 1996: 126).

  Elizabeth Sawyer was the subject of the play The Witch of Edmonton, first performed in 1621 at the Cockpit in Drury Lane. Her case is interesting because it throws light on the attitude of the courts to cases of witchcraft and also shows how an accusation could become distorted and fictionalised through popular ballads that were sold at the execution. Elizabeth was accused of causing the death of a neighbour by witchcraft. Curiously, the court seemed unsure how to proceed until a local magistrate, Arthur Robinson, intervened and told them that Elizabeth had a mark on her body which would confirm the suspicion that she was indeed a witch. The justices then ordered officers of the court to bring three women to conduct a body search of Elizabeth. The women reported that they had found a teat longer than a finger and this was considered to be sufficient evidence on which to find her guilty and condemn her to death. Elizabeth was visited by the Revd Henry Goodcole, the part-time Ordinary of Newgate, who not only wanted her to confess in order to shrive her soul but obviously hoped to pick up some juicy information which would sell well when Elizabeth’s ‘last dying confession’ was put onto a broadsheet and touted round the crowd at Tyburn. Elizabeth cared little for co-operating with Goodcole, who had to admit that her confession was extracted with great labour. In fact it was said that she was constantly swearing, cursing and blaspheming, something which would only have confirmed in the minds of many that she was most certainly a witch. Her fame or notoriety went before her and assured a large turnout at Tyburn where several different versions of her last dying confession were circulating among the crowd. Henry Goodcole was seriously put out by the appearance of these alternative accounts and he compared his own account with ‘the most base and false ballads, which were sung at the time of our returning from the witch’s exec
ution’ (Purkiss 1996: 233).

  In April 1652, Joan Petersen, the ‘Wapping Witch’, was hanged at Tyburn. Joan had been asked to provide an alibi for a complex series of deceits involving the mysterious death of Lady Powell. Joan refused to be involved but found herself arrested anyway. Her house was searched and despite any very convincing evidence, she was charged with using witchcraft to kill Lady Powell. Joan vehemently denied the charges and declared that she had never even met the murdered woman. At her trial Joan was searched and, predictably, was found to have a ‘teat … in her secret parts’ (Ewan 1929: 274). It seems that the trial was rigged because defence witnesses failed to appear, possibly because of intimidation, while prosecution witnesses may have been bribed to testify against her. Joan vigorously protested her innocence even when she was offered a pardon if she confessed. In fact, her response to this offer was perhaps not the best one in the circumstances – she hit an officer of the law and made his nose bleed. The Ordinary or chaplain who travelled with Joan to Tyburn was so unrelenting in his attempts to make her confess that even the executioner asked him to desist.

  Anti-Catholic rhetoric was a feature of English society after the death of Mary in 1558. It was frequently presented in a way which tried to make Catholicism synonymous with criminality and also, more loosely, it was often used to demonise women and others who could be regarded as threats to authority and order. The pursuit of so-called ‘witches’, some of whom died at Tyburn, involved both Protestants and Catholics and was a part of this process. It was a response, frequently violent, by those in power to prevent social, economic and political changes which they thought were undermining and threatening the status quo. They were absolutely right because processes were evolving which over a period of two or more centuries would make Britain the crucible of a new order, an urbanised and industrial society. However, most of those who died at Tyburn in this period, both female and male, did not analyse or attempt to explain the circumstances in which they found themselves. They were unwitting victims in a process of historical change.

  The majority of those executed in the period under review were not religious offenders but nameless felons. For example, Machyn records in his diary that in 1556 ten thieves were hanged for robbery, sixteen felons were hanged in 1590 and nineteen in 1598. He mentions also in 1598 that a hangman with a ‘stump-lege’ was executed for theft and it was noted with some glee that he had ‘hangyd many a man and quartered many and beheaded many a noble man and other’ (Nichols 1848: 109). There is brief mention of other felons such as Thomas Green, a goldsmith, executed in 1576 for clipping and coining and in 1598 of Richard Ainger who was executed for the murder of his father at Grays Inn. The body was found floating in the Thames and Ainger, after being placed in manacles and tortured, was hanged at Tyburn.

  Many felons were found guilty of coining and clipping and appeared at the ‘Triple Tree’. The shortage of coin by the late fourteenth century led to widespread clipping and counterfeiting which became particularly prevalent in the early modern period. Laws against coining were harsh and it was considered serious enough to be a treasonable offence. In 1540 four felons died at Tyburn for clipping gold coins, two men were executed in 1554 for the ‘coining of naughty money’ and three more in July 1555. Other coiners are recorded as dying at Tyburn in 1572, 1576 and 1586. The anonymity of these offenders suggests that their crimes and their characters made no great impact at the time.

  FOUR

  Religion, Civil War and Restoration: Tyburn in the Seventeenth Century

  During the reign of the Stuarts between 1603 and 1714, London’s built-up area was expanding westwards, particularly into the neighbourhoods of Bloomsbury, Marylebone and Mayfair, and advancing steadily and apparently inexorably towards Tyburn which, however, remained a predominantly rural location at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The ‘Triple Tree’ continued to bear its gory fruit. Among the many felons executed at Tyburn there was a continuing presence of Catholics dying for their beliefs even if the state designated them as traitors.

  One such victim was Anne Line, disowned by her family for embracing Catholicism. She became the housekeeper of premises in London owned by Father John Gerard, a leading Jesuit. He had been arrested and placed in the Tower but had managed to escape in 1597. When the authorities began to suspect Anne’s involvement with clandestine Catholic activities, she moved to another house which became a rallying point for recusants. On 2 February 1601 a group of Catholics was about to celebrate Mass in her house when the pursuivants or priest-catchers broke in. The altar prepared for the ceremony was all the evidence that was needed for the arrest of Anne, who was indicted for harbouring a priest. On 27 February 1601, she was taken to Tyburn and hanged with the Catholic priests Mark Barkworth and Roger Filcock. She continued vigorously to declare her faith right until the end.

  In 1606 Robert Drury was offered his life if he would only take the new oath drawn up under the rule of James I which required him as a Catholic to swear allegiance to the King as Head of the Church of England. Pope Paul V condemned the oath ‘as containing many things contrary to the Faith and Salvation’. Drury felt that his conscience would not permit him to take the oath and he died a martyr at Tyburn on 26 February 1607. It was declared that he and other prisoners were to be

  Laid upon a hurdle and so drawne to the place of execution … then to have their secrets cut off and with their entrails thrown into the fire before their faces, their heads to be severed from their bodies, which severally should be divided into four quarters.

  (Harleian Misc. 1809: 46)

  For the occasion of his public demise Drury wore a new black cassock and shoes. He declaimed somewhat unctuously from the gallows that he had never told a lie but then added, after a pause pregnant with second thoughts, ‘not willingly’. A year later Thomas Garnet was also offered his life if he would take the oath but he refused. He was executed with several coiners but casting aside the slight to his religious beliefs that this involved, on the gallows he announced that he was ‘the happiest man this day alive’. In 1610 John Roberts, a Benedictine priest who was found guilty of illegally ministering in England, was hanged and quartered at Tyburn with sixteen other prisoners who had committed a range of criminal offences and was supposedly buried with them in a common grave, although the story is that his remains were later recovered and eventually reinterred at Douai.

  Although accounts of the last dying speeches and the actions of the condemned on the gallows were used by officialdom for propaganda purposes, they sometimes offer useful insights into the interaction between the prisoners, the officials and the crowd. John Roberts had used the gallows to preach a valedictory sermon which so impressed the sheriff that he rebuked hecklers in the crowd who wanted him to stop. The sheriff had made it clear that Roberts would be permitted to say anything that he wanted ‘so long as he speaketh well of the Kinge’. Such concessions could be abused. In 1612 when the priest John Almond was about to be hanged, the sheriff was at first inclined to prevent him from speaking but on receiving an assurance from Almond that he would not say anything offensive to the King or the state, he relented. Almond then annoyed keen Protestants in the crowd by stating that salvation was only to be found within the Church of Rome. Although there were protests at this comment, he finished by mentioning repentance which was regarded as a crucial aspect of any last dying speech. After he had expired, it was said that his heart had leapt into the hands of a watching Jesuit (Lake and Questier 1996).

  On the scaffold many condemned prisoners refused to confess and indeed some continued to protest their innocence right up to their deaths. Few went as far as Francis Newland who was hanged for murder at Tyburn in 1695. On the gallows he insisted on his innocence saying, ‘I am at peace with all the world … I suffer a most just reward, for my past sinful life and conversion.’ Edward Altham, executed for rape in 1688, stood on the gallows and declared his innocence so forcefully that he drew widespread sympathy from the crowd, ‘every person s
eeming to be very sorry for his untimely end’. George Goffe executed at Tyburn in 1700 provided a variation on the normal dying speech by confessing to his earlier sinfulness and adding that his fate was the result of malicious prosecution by men rather than a just judgment by God.

  Peter Linebaugh and V.A.C. Gatrell have written about the dynamics of the eighteenth-century gallows crowd but finding evidence of crowd reaction from earlier periods presents greater difficulty. It is clear, however, that the crowd’s response to an execution often depended on the character of the victim. For example in 1571 the attitude shown towards John Story was hostile because he was a known persecutor of Protestants. The crowd’s sympathies might be swayed by the way in which the condemned behaved in the procession and on the gallows and also by their last words, if any. After the priest Mark Barkworth had been quartered it was noticed that constant kneeling had hardened his knees. Someone in the crowd picked up one of his legs after he had been dismembered and not without some sympathy and admiration is said to have called out, ‘Which of you Gospellers can show such a knee?’

  The London gallows crowd was the subject of outrage and disgust voiced by various commentators and also sometimes of praise depending on the social, economic and political circumstances of the events in question. For example, the crowds who assembled around Westminster during the period prior to the Civil War in the early 1640s were described by an observer as ‘rabble … porters and other dissolute rude fellows’. However, elsewhere they were said to be ‘citizens and ‘prentices’ or comprising ‘for the most part men of good fashion … many thousand of the most substantial of the citizens’ (Manning 1978: 25).