Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree

by Alan Brooke

  By the middle of the eighteenth century it seems evident that there was concern that the carnivalesque nature of the journey from Newgate to Tyburn and the rituals that were enacted there were detracting from rather than enhancing the awfulness of the law. Reformers like John Howard were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and argued that existing forms of punishment were arbitrary, barbaric and largely ineffective in countering crime. Reforms were needed which, by letting potential offenders know that they were much more likely to be caught and punished, actually deterred people from committing crime. The punishment for each crime should be consistent. It should act as a deterrent and should suit the crime committed and where custodial sentences were concerned, should try to limit future offending through a regime aimed at reforming the offender’s character. Ideas along these lines were adopted in the century after hangings ceased at Tyburn.

  The ultimate punishment for City of London and Middlesex criminals was public hanging at Tyburn. This provided an unequivocal statement of the state’s legal monopoly of violence within civil society. The hanging of a malefactor was a carefully stage-managed affair. Since the vast majority of those hanged had offended against laws protecting property, each hanging was intended to send out a clear message that property and the law should be respected. Only few people possessed any significant wealth and so the use of this deterrent was evidence of the conflict of interests between the rich and powerful and the poor and disenfranchised. Additionally the very existence of judicial hanging staged in this fashion is evidence of the potency of myths. Was hanging really a deterrent when pickpockets employed their skills to profitable effect in the crowds around the gallows at Tyburn?

  It could be argued that the use of punishment by the state is about maintaining power and social control. The form it takes depends not on abstract concepts such as mercy or compassion but on the strength of the forces of government and authority at any particular time and their ability to maintain control over society in the easiest and most economical way. The barbaric physical punishments that were a feature of England in earlier times were replaced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because the state was confident that it no longer needed to use such openly ferocious ways in order to maintain its power and to safeguard property and the status quo.

  Hangings at Tyburn ended not on account of increasing humanity or compassion on the part of those, rich and poor, who had previously thronged to watch and enjoy the dying agonies of London’s convicted felons. They ceased because the well-heeled and influential occupants of the new and extremely prestigious residential areas adjacent to Tyburn objected to the noise, the revelry and the frequently drunken and violent behaviour of the huge crowds drawn to Tyburn Fair. In today’s language, this was a case of ‘Not in my back yard’. Tyburn attracted the riff-raff on hanging days and the rich folk of London’s emerging West End did not want to be reminded of their existence. More than that, these crowds and the festivities associated with Tyburn Fair disrupted the business life of London as many as eight times a year. Additionally, these crowds always posed the threat of running riot and getting out of control. The transfer of hangings to the more confined surroundings of Newgate assisted the authorities to manage a public spectacle which, at this time, they presumably still thought deterred potential criminals.

  SIX

  Tyburn from the Restoration to 1700

  The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 inaugurated a very different period from the preceding decade. It saw, for example, the reopening of the theatres, the granting of a charter to establish the Royal Society in 1660 dedicated to the propagation of scientific experimentation and knowledge and the return to the throne of the ‘Merry Monarch’ from over the waters. There was a conscious repudiation of what was seen as the joyless austerity of the recent past. However, the initial heady euphoria soon gave way to business as usual. Tyburn would witness more criminal executions in addition to the execution of some of the regicides. Moreover, an increasing number of commentators would visit, write about and illustrate the gallows at Tyburn.

  After 1660 there was a marked desire to break with the memory of the two previous decades of civil war, revolution and republicanism. To symbolise that break the regicides who had been responsible for the trial and execution of Charles I had to be brought to account. Of the fifty-nine men who had signed Charles’s death warrant, forty-one were still alive and of these fifteen had fled the country. Those who had ended up in Europe were believed to hold an annual celebration at a tavern in Charing Cross and were known as the ‘Calves’ Head Club’: on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, members of this club toasted the regicides and banqueted on calves’ heads.

  Three of the regicides who escaped at this late stage were John Okey, a London chandler, Miles Corbet who had reached Holland, and John Barkstead, son of a London goldsmith, who was living in Hanau near Frankfurt. All three were tracked down after being betrayed by a collaborator, George Downing, who had been chaplain in Okey’s regiment. Downing turned Royalist when he deemed it the best way of serving his interests and subsequently pursued a career in the Foreign Office as well as serving as the King’s representative in Holland. He went on to be knighted and in 1680 to build a cul-de-sac of rather plain brick terraced houses which became famous as Downing Street. Downing’s star may have risen but Okey, Corbet and Barkstead were not so fortunate and all three were executed at Tyburn in April 1662. Okey displayed much penitence on the gallows and his severed quarters were allowed a decent burial. Corbet’s head, however, was displayed over one of the City’s gates and Barkstead’s was spiked above Traitor’s Gate at the Tower. Barkstead’s death generated more interest than most because it was believed that he had hidden treasure in the form of gold packed into barrels somewhere within the precincts of the Tower. Many people, including Samuel Pepys, searched for this in vain.

  Two years later other regicides met their fate at Tyburn. Colonel Daniel Axtell and Francis Hacker were brought to the gallows in October 1660. Axtell spoke briefly and Hacker stated that ‘God hath not given me the gift of utterance’: he then read out a paper stating that his conscience was clear (Hill 1984: 73). He and Axtell prayed for some time and then Axtell went on to be quartered and Hacker to be hanged. Condemned prisoners such as traitors and regicides were expected to confess their guilt and express remorse for their crimes and in so doing it was hoped that the theatrical aspects of their public execution would endorse a sense of law and order. However, this did not always go according to official plans. Roger L’Estrange who acted as a censor during Charles II’s reign, commented somewhat querulously that ‘Scarce any one regicide or traitor has been brought to public justice since your Majesty’s blessed return whom either the pulpit has not canonised or the press recommended to be a patriot or a martyr’ (Hill 1984: 75). Dying at a public execution was usually before large crowds and in the seventeenth century it was increasingly being widely reported elsewhere in the developing media. It was important for a traitor or a regicide to die bravely: gushing outbursts of contrition on the scaffold hardly reflected well on the cause for which one was being required to die.

  The most eminent of the regicides and the man associated with both the Civil War and the period of republicanism was the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, although he had died in September 1658 nearly two years before the restoration of the monarchy. Historians have long argued about the causes of Cromwell’s death. At the time their explanations included ague and pneumonia although some modern medical historians assessing what is known of his symptoms contend that the cause of death was pyelonephritis (inflammation of the kidneys and renal pelvis) resulting in uraemia, complications with a vesical (bladder) stone and tertiary malaria. A recent view suggests that Cromwell was poisoned by his physician Dr Bate who was part of a plot to restore the throne to the Stuarts (McMains 1999). Cromwell was seen at the time as instrumental in the act of regicide and despite his earlier death, it was felt that along with other leading regi
cides, revenge should be extracted on 30 January 1661, the anniversary of the death of Charles I.

  Almost twelve years after the execution of King Charles, the exhumed bodies of the regicides Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton who was his son-in-law and John Bradshaw, the judge at the King’s trial, were brought to the Red Lion at Holborn to rest overnight on their way to Tyburn. John Lewis, a mason, is said to have been paid 15s to carry out the exhumations. Some writers, including Howard MacMains, support the view that Cromwell’s remains were in such an awful condition that they were secretly interred in Red Lion Square, possibly with the collusion of the poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell. McMains believes that the corpse identified as that of Cromwell at the Tyburn gallows was actually that of an ordinary soldier. If this theory is correct then it throws doubt on the idea that the head that was buried in 1960 at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was actually that of Cromwell.

  On 30 January 1661 a fast was declared to commemorate the execution of Charles I. The crowds that turned out to rejoice at the restoration of the monarchy would doubtless have contained many who had cheered Cromwell on his triumphal way only a few years before. That this was likely to happen was obvious to Cromwell himself, who earlier had prophetically declared that what were then adulatory republican crowds would even more readily turn out for his execution. At approximately ten in the morning of the fast, the three bodies were publicly hanged on the ‘Triple Tree’ at Tyburn and displayed until sundown when they were cut down, decapitated and, according to some accounts, thrown into a nearby pit. The Mercurius Publicus for 31 January to 7 February recorded that the day (30 January) was observed not only by the fast but also by the ‘public dragging of those odious carcasses’. The Mercurius added that the carcasses were taken from their coffins and placed ‘at several angles of that triple tree where they hanged till the sun was set’. Later that day, according to this account, the bodies were flung into a pit beneath the gallows at Tyburn. Cromwell and Ireton had been embalmed but Bradshaw’s body was in a grisly state evident from the green seepage passing through his white funeral cloth. Another account tells us that Cromwell was covered in a green cloth and looked very freshly embalmed and Ireton, who had been buried since 1651, was hung like a ‘dried rat’. One description spoke of Bradshaw’s body casting ‘a most odious scent all the way it went’ (Pearson and Morant 1935: 45–6). In addition to the indignities heaped on the mortal remains of these three men, the bodies of Admiral Blake and John Pym, a leading Parliamentarian spokesman between 1640 and 1643, were removed from Westminster Abbey and thrown into a pit nearby.

  Although the actual site of the Tyburn gallows is disputed, Connaught Place at the southern end of Edgware Road is thought by some to be its location and there have long been rumours that Cromwell’s ghost haunts the house and garden of 1 Connaught Place. During rebuilding of the area in 1820, large numbers of human remains were discovered there.

  Many found reason to celebrate or justify Cromwell’s fate in 1661. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, was one of the many radicals who felt betrayed by Cromwell. He stated in his Journal that before the battle of Dunbar in 1650 Cromwell had ‘promised to the Lord that if he gave him victory over his enemies he would take away tithes’. The abolition of tithes had been a consistent demand of many radicals. Clearly Cromwell did not stick to his promise and Fox writes that they ‘took him up and hanged and buried him under Tyburn, where he was rolled into his grave with infamy … I saw his words justly come upon him’. The modern song of Tyburn Fair also comments on the bones of Cromwell at Tyburn:

  To Tyburn Fair

  On a Saturday

  Across the road a beam of wood.

  The bones of Cromwell

  Dangle in the fog,

  The Maid of Kent last stood

  At Tyburn Fair …

  Despite the many and varied theories as to what really happened to Cromwell’s body, it is likely that his eventual resting place was indeed a pit near to the gallows, a fate similar to that of many much less illustrious victims of ‘Tyburn Tree’. A.J. Beresford who lived at the south-west corner of Edgware Road wrote to The Times on 9 May 1860 commenting on the excavations that had taken place in the area and which had uncovered many human bones. He added his opinion that these were ‘obviously the relics of unhappy persons who were buried under the gallows’.

  Remnants of the radical forces and groups that had emerged in the previous decades persisted after 1660 even though it was no longer very advisable to declare beliefs in republicanism or Puritanism too loudly. The Fifth Monarchists were a millenarian group who had been active, particularly in London, during the 1650s and even had a number of representatives in the short-lived Barebones Parliament of 1653. They believed that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and saw it as their duty to create the conditions out of which Christ would rule for a thousand years. Their reaction to the Restoration was marked by an outburst of protest which saw one of their supporters, John James, a coal trader, executed at Tyburn. It is clear that James evoked some sympathy at his execution as the sheriff and the hangman allowed him to die by hanging before they proceeded to disembowel and quarter him. His head was placed on London Bridge and then moved to Whitechapel (Cobbett 1809 vi: 67–120). Little was heard of the Fifth Monarchists after the death of James.

  A last attempt to resurrect the Commonwealth failed in 1662 when four men were accused of plotting to capture the Tower and Whitehall Palace and to seize the King. Thomas Tonge, George Phillips, Francis Stubbs and Nathaniel Gibbs were drawn to Tyburn on 22 December and hanged, beheaded and quartered with their heads set on poles on Tower Hill.

  Tyburn continued to receive many notorious thieves and a growing number of highwaymen during this period. One such was ‘Sawney’ Douglas, a Scotsman born at Portpatrick in Galloway. Having served many years in the army, after the Restoration he took to highway robbery. His robberies were perpetrated over a very wide area but ended when his attempt to rob the Earl of Sandwich failed and he was arrested, tried, sentenced to death and housed in Newgate awaiting the next hanging day at Tyburn. The Newgate Calendar, a publication by no means averse to embroidering details, related that at St Sepulchre’s on 10 September 1664, ‘Sawney’ shouted at the crowd that he would rather be hanged twice over without ceremony than once after this superstitious manner. He refused the Prayer Book but rather curiously carried The Ballad of Chevy Chase in his hand all the way to Tyburn. When he arrived at Tyburn, he ignored the clergyman and told the hangman to be speedy. At the age of fifty-three – old for a highwayman – ‘Sawney’ Douglas was duly hanged and buried close by.

  Restoration London is strongly associated with death and destruction. While London was no stranger to visitations of plague, in 1665 an outbreak of unprecedented virulence occurred which started in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, associated with Tyburn as a stopping place for prisoners on their way to the gallows. London was reeling from the horrors of plague when a devastating fire broke out which destroyed much of the City including eighty-seven churches as well as St Paul’s Cathedral and over thirteen hundred houses. Tyburn, still a rural spot west of the City, was untouched directly but it did claim a victim or, more appropriately, a scapegoat for the starting of the fire.

  Many Londoners believed that Catholics, in league with the French, were responsible for starting the Great Fire. Robert Hubert, a French silversmith and watchmaker, became a convenient scapegoat when he confessed to starting the fire. It is difficult to accept that the judges at the Old Bailey believed Hubert was guilty but they sentenced him to be hanged at Tyburn. A curious twist came about a month after the Great Fire. The famous astrologer William Lilly was ordered to appear in the Speaker’s Chamber of the House of Commons to give testimony before the special committee which was set up to examine the cause of the fire. It was claimed that Lilly had predicted its outbreak over a year before. Lilly persuaded the committee that there was nothing sinister in this prediction and that it had never been meant to be pr
ecise. He was allowed to go free and the unfortunate Hubert alone bore the brunt of London’s cry for vengeance. However, the execution of a scapegoat did not silence rumours and anti-Catholic hysteria continued. ‘Priests and Jesuits’ were ordered to leave the kingdom or face penal sanctions. When further fires broke out in 1676, Catholics were suspected of starting them. In 1671 the Monument was erected to commemorate the Great Fire and it bore an inscription explaining that the fire was begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Catholics.

  When it became clear that the Duke of York, the future James II, had become a Catholic by 1673, the spectre of ‘popery’ again became a real threat and a major issue in domestic politics. Various attempts to exclude James from the succession all failed and he became King in 1685. Three years later, in 1688, James was in exile in France and his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange succeeded to the throne as William III. In December 1688, London witnessed increasing disorder. The atmosphere was highly charged and anti-papal sermons, propaganda and rumour contributed to unsettle the population. The execution of six Catholics at Tyburn in September 1690 saw the condemned defiantly drinking the health of King James and making an appeal to the crowd to support his return.