Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree

by Alan Brooke

  Tyburn and the stories surrounding it have left an indelible mark on the history of London. When they think of London, many people call to mind St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower, Buckingham Palace and perhaps today the Millennium Wheel. These attractions draw tourists in vast numbers. The traffic bedlam of Marble Arch does not encourage visitors to tarry. For all that, it is still a place of brooding memories and deserves to be recognised as such.

  Appendix: Tyburn in Literature

  Tyburn doth deserve before them all

  The Title and addition capital,

  Of Arch or great Grand gallows of our Land,

  Whilst all the rest like ragged Lackeys stand.

  John Taylor (1578–1653)

  Tyburn’s significance was reflected in a wide range of literature particularly from the sixteenth century. That it left its mark on the popular consciousness is evidenced through the growth in the availability of ballads and cheap prints which refer to its events. Some ballads not only described the life and crimes of the condemned but could be sung because they were accompanied by music. An example was published in 1594 entitled The lamentable lyfe and death of John Sturman who suffered at Tyburne the 24 of Januarie (Palmer 1988: 122).

  A well-known ballad was that of Jack Hall, executed at Tyburn in December 1707. Hall, a pickpocket and housebreaker, had been arrested and branded on the cheek, before he was sentenced to death for burglary. Jack had been a chimney sweep in his youth and the ballad dwells on this:

  O my name it is Jack Hall, chimney sweep, chimney sweep …

  I have twenty pounds in store, that’s no joke, that’s no joke …

  And my neck shall pay for all, when I die, when I die …

  O I rode up Tyburn Hill in a cart,

  O I rode up Tyburn Hill in a cart.

  O I rode up Tyburn Hill, and ’twas there I made my will,

  Saying, the best of friends must part, so farewell, so farewell.

  Up the ladder I did grope, that’s no joke …

  Up the ladder I did grope, and the hangman spread the rope,

  O but never a word I said coming down, coming down.

  (Palmer 1988: 124)

  In 1647 the Charing Cross was destroyed. This was one of several crosses that had been erected by Edward I to mark the overnight resting places of the body of his first wife, Eleanor, as it made its way south from where she had died at Harby in Nottinghamshire in 1290. The Charing Cross marked her last resting place before her burial at Westminster Abbey, but in 1643, Parliament ordered its demolition as well as that of some of the other crosses. The popular ballad, ‘The Downfall of Charing Cross’, makes reference to Tyburn:

  Methinks the common-council shou’d

  Of it have taken pity,

  ’Cause, good old cross, it always stood

  So firmly in the city.

  Since crosses you so much disdain,

  Faith, if I were as you,

  For fear the King should rule again,

  I’d pull down Tiburn too.

  (Palmer 1979: 20)

  One of the earliest references to Tyburn in literature appears in the fourteenth-century poem by William Langland, Piers Plowman, in the B and C texts. The former dates from about 1377 and contains an allusion to the advantages of learning so as to gain from benefit of clergy:

  Wel may the barne blisse that hym to boke sette:

  That lyuyne after letterure saved him lyf and soule!

  Dominus par hereditatis mee is a meri verset,

  That has taken fro Tyboune twenty stronge theves:

  There lewed theves been lolled up loke how thei be saves!

  Tyburn found its way into the writings of a wide range of literary figures such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden, Boswell, Fielding and Pepys. Shakespeare mentions hanging or uses the popular oath ‘go hang’ in several of his plays. For example, the durability and strength of the scaffold are well depicted in Hamlet (Act V, sc. i):

  CLOWN. What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?

  OTHER. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.

  In Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act IV, sc. iii), specific reference is made to Tyburn:

  BIRON. I could put thee in comfort. Not by two that I know: Thou makest the triumviry, the corner-cap of society, The shape of Love’s Tyburn that hangs up simplicity.

  In King Henry VI (Part 2, Act II, sc. iii), Henry reflects on the class distinction of punishment as discussed earlier in the case of Bolingbroke:

  KING HENRY VI. Stand forth, Dame Eleanor Cobham, Gloucester’s wife:

  In sight of God and us, your guilt is great:

  Receive the sentence of the law for sins

  Such as by God’s book are adjudged to death.

  You four, from hence to prison back again;

  From thence, from thence unto the place of execution:

  The witch in Smithfield shall be strangled on the gallows.

  You, madam, for you are more nobly born,

  Despoiled of your honour in your life,

  Shall, after three days’ open penance done,

  Live in your country here in banishment,

  With Sir John Stanley, in the Isle of Man.

  In The Tempest (Act I, sc. i), the ship is tossed about in a storm and Gonzalo tries to cheer up the other passengers. In doing so, he refers to a proverb, ‘He that is born to be hanged is in no danger of drowning.’

  Within a year of the emergence of the Triple Tree, the poet John Donne was born. Donne, a metaphysical poet who later became Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, reflected solemnly on life and drew on Tyburn to reinforce his imagery:

  We are all conceived in close prison, in our mothers’ womb we are close prisoners all … our life is but a going out of the place of execution and death. Now was there ever man to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep?

  (Hertz 2001: 29)

  John Taylor (1578?–1653), known as ‘The Water Poet’, was born seven years after the Triple Tree was erected and he makes clear in his poem that Tyburn was not only the unrivalled gallows of London but the ‘Grand Gallows of our Land’. Taylor was born of humble parentage in Gloucester and later became a Thames waterman as well as a spokesman for the Company of Watermen. He took to writing popular verse to increase his earnings and this led to an appointment as a royal waterman, and contact with the royal family.

  Access to the cell of the condemned prisoners awaiting execution became common and it was by no means unusual for two or three hundred visitors to take advantage of the opportunity to pay their last respects or, in some cases, to gloat. John Taylor described his visit to the prison, paying the fee and interviewing the prisoners. His poem, ‘The Description of Tyburn’, gives some idea of the importance to contemporaries of the Triple Tree. His opening line tells us of the number of executions each year at Tyburn:

  I have heard sundry men oft times dispute

  Of trees that in one year will twice bear fruit.

  But if a man note Tyburn, ’will appear,

  That that’s a tree that bears twelve times a year.

  Nicholas Breton makes a similar comment in ‘The Madcappes Message’:

  goe tell the Swaggrers that doe use to sweare,

  Heere, or in hell, their mouths will sure be stopt:

  That Tiborne trees must once a month be topt.

  Taylor also comments on the practice of surgeons who waited at the scaffold ready to claim the body, a practice that became more common in the eighteenth century:

  I further note, the fruit which it produces,

  Doth seldom serve for profitable uses:

  Except the skilful Surgeons industry

  Do make Dissection of Anatomy

  … I find this tree …

  That what it bears, are dead commodities.

  In his reference to the famous Triple Tree he talks of those fools who ascend ‘To that Celestial
joy … more fools from thence to heaven do come, / Than from all Churchyards throughout Christendom.’ He follows the theme of the graveyard:

  But at this Tree, in twinkling of an eye,

  The soul and body part immediately,

  There death the fatal parting blow doth strike,

  And in Churchyards is seldom seen the like

  … Concerning this dead fruit, I noted it,

  Instead of paste it’s put into a pit,

  And laid up carefully in any place,

  Yet worm-eaten it grows in little space.

  The highest of praise was given when Taylor paid tribute to Tyburn as the principal place of execution in the capital:

  There are inferior Gallows which bear

  (According to the season) twice a year:

  And there’s a kind of watrish Tree at Wapping,

  Whereas Sea-thieves or Pirates are catched napping:

  But Tyburn doth deserve before them all

  The title and addition capital,

  Of Arch or great Grand gallows of our Land,

  Whilst all the rest like ragged Lackeys stand.

  Taylor’s acknowledgement of Tyburn is also reflected in Thomas Middleton’s work of 1618, The Owl’s Almanac, where he states that ‘A Faire paire of gallowes is kept at Tiburne … ’.

  Anthony Munday (1553–1633) was considered a lesser Elizabethan dramatist. He wrote ballads as well as having experience of many occupations such as stationer, actor, ‘citypoet’ and organiser of pageants. In his play, Sir Thomas More, which he wrote in the 1590s with several others, a riot has been inspired by fear of foreigners living in London and a new sheriff is given orders to execute the rioters:

  MESSENGER. Is execution yet performed?

  SHERIFF. Not yet, the carts stand ready at the stairs,

  And they shall presently away to Tyburn …

  Officers, be speedy,

  Call for a gibbet, see it be erected;

  Others make haste to Newgate, bid them bring

  The prisoners hither, for they here must die.

  Away I say, and see no time be slacked.

  John Dryden (1631–1700), the English poet and playwright, penned a commemoration on Cromwell’s death, celebrated Charles II’s restoration and converted to Catholicism on the accession of James II. After 1685 he made an appeal for justice in one of his poems:

  Oh Tyburn! could’st thou Reason and Dispute;

  Could’st thou but Judge as well as execute;

  How often would’st thou change the Felon’s Doom

  And truss some stern Chief-Justice in his room.

  (Dryden, Miscellany Poems)

  In the poem, Tyburn represents the harshness of the law and Dryden asks of the triangular gallows, ‘should thy sturdy Posts support the Laws’. Asking for some moderation in legal decisions he pleads, ‘In Matters doubtful to decide / A little bearing towards the milder side.’

  The awful circumstances surrounding the execution at Tyburn in May 1726 of Catherine Hayes, who was burnt at the stake after the incompetent executioner had failed to strangle her first, was the basis for Thackeray’s Catherine, A Story.

  Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), whose works include Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, had spent some time in Newgate in 1703. According to one account, Defoe had connections with John Applebee, the publisher of the Original Weekly Journal, founded in 1714 (Lee 1869). Applebee also specialised in publishing the lives of the criminals hanged at Tyburn. These accounts were based on the writings of the prisoners themselves or on those compiled for them by the chaplain or Ordinary of Newgate. Lee suggested that Defoe worked for Applebee and wrote many of the accounts of the condemned at Tyburn for Applebee’s journal. One such account was the ‘Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes, etc of Jack Sheppard’. It has even been suggested that Defoe disguised himself as John Applebee and mounted the executioner’s cart. The newspaper reports stated that someone had indeed mounted the cart and received a paper from Sheppard (Mist’s Journal, 21 November 1724). Whether this was Defoe or not it is impossible to establish without more evidence. Lee also puts forward the idea that Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack were written in the hope of converting criminals in the condemned cell at Newgate.

  Samuel Johnson came to personify the literary life of London in the forty years after his arrival in 1737. Among his earliest writings, ‘London’ (1738) is one of several poems he wrote about the capital at that time. He too offers a reference to Tyburn:

  Scarce can our Fields, such Crowds at Tyburn die,

  With hemp the Gallows and the Fleet supply.

  Propose your Schemes, ye Senatorian Band

  Whose Ways and Means support the sinking Land;

  Lest Ropes be wanting in the tempting Spring,

  To rig another Convoy for the K—G.

  William Blake (1757–1827), artist, engraver, philosopher, visionary and poet, comments on Tyburn as the ‘fatal tree’ in one of his best-known poems, ‘Jerusalem’ in the section ‘The Builders of Golgonooza’:

  What are those Golden Builders doing? Where was the burying-place

  Of soft Ethinthus? near Tyburn’s Fatal Tree? Is that

  Mild Zion’s hill’s most ancient promontory, near mournful

  Ever weeping Paddington?

  To the north of Tyburn lived one of London’s most famous fictional characters, Sherlock Holmes. His creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at one time had a medical practice near Baker Street. In the short story The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, Holmes and his loyal friend Dr Watson walk south from their Baker Street rooms. Watson records that

  It was twilight of a lovely spring evening, and even Little Ryder Street, one of the smaller offshoots from the Edgware Road, within a stone-cast of old Tyburn Tree of evil memory, looked golden and wonderful in the slanting rays of the setting sun.

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  (Unless otherwise stated, all titles are published in London)

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