The hated Titus Oates stands in the pillory.
One of the most extreme displays of hostility came in 1810 against a group of men known as the Vere Street Coterie. Amos (alias Fox), James Cooke, Philip Ilett, William Thompson, Richard Francis, James Done, and Robert Aspinal were indicted for conspiring together at the White Swan, ‘for the purpose of exciting each other to commit a detestable offence’. The events unfolded when a ‘Molly House’, the White Swan on Vere Street, which runs off Oxford Street, was raided by Bow Street police on Sunday 8 July 1810 and twenty-three people, described as being of a ‘most detestable description’ were arrested. Many of these customers were men from respectable society and of high rank who were more than happy to mix sexually with those of a lower class.
News of the raid spread quickly and very soon a mob of people began to congregate around Bow Street, where the accused had been taken. In total, twenty-seven men were arrested, but in the end the majority of them were released and only eight were tried and convicted. The men had to face the hostility of the crowd who kicked, punched and threw mud at them as they tried to leave the police station.
Over the course of the following week, six of the convicted men were found guilty of attempted sodomy and were pilloried in the Haymarket. Amos was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and to stand once in the pillory. Cooke, Ilett, Thompson, Francis and Done were each sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and the pillory, and Aspinal was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment.
The Times reported that the concourse of people that turned out ‘was immense... even the tops of the houses in the Haymarket were covered with spectators’. It was estimated that there were about 40,000 people gathered. It was also a very violent and unruly crowd who had to come to vent their anger and were equipped with various objects to throw. The article noted that the women were particularly vicious. So large was the mob that the City had to provide a guard of 200 armed constables, half who were mounted and half on foot, to protect the men from even worse mistreatment.
The men were conveyed from Newgate to the Haymarket in an open cart. They all sat upright but could not help but look on in fear and dread as they saw the sight of the spectators on the tops of the houses hurling a cacophony of hisses and boos, accompanied by a volley of mud which made the men fall flat on their faces in the cart.
An old watch house near the Old Bailey.
The mob formed a gauntlet along Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street, the Strand and Charing Cross, and they lost no time in pelting the men with their assortment of projectiles. By the time they arrived at the Haymarket at one o’clock in the afternoon, the pillory would only accommodate four, so two men were taken to St Martin’s Watch House to wait their turn. Once a space was formed around the pillory, a number of women were admitted to commence the proceedings. With great vigour they rained down a shower of dead cats, rotten eggs, potatoes and buckets filled with blood, offal, and dung, which had been brought by butchers’ men from St James’s Market. During the next hour of agony the men walked constantly round the pillory, which was on a fixed axis and swivelled.
The two remaining prisoners, Amos and Cooke, were then placed in the pillory, and were also pelted till it was scarcely possible to recognize a human shape. The cart then conveyed them through the Strand and to Newgate, the mob continuing to pelt them all the way. By the time they reached Newgate some of them were cut in the head and bled profusely.
The famous pillory at Charing Cross.
The Morning Chronicle blamed foreigners for such a crime committed by the prisoners:
We avoid entering into the discussion of a crime so horrible to the nature of Englishmen, the prevalence of which we fear we must ascribe, among other calamities, to the unnecessary war in which we have been so long involved. It is not merely the favour which has been shown to foreigners, to foreign servants, to foreign troops, but the sending our own troops to associate with foreigners, that may truly be regarded as the source of the evil.
Two men, forty-two-year-old John Newbold Hepburn, formerly an officer in a West India regiment, and eighteen-year-old Thomas White, a drummer boy, were convicted of the act of sodomy despite not being present at the White Swan during the night of the raid. Both of them received the death sentence and were executed at Newgate on 7 March 1811.
7
Religious Sanctions
Before the Reformation and the break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, England had been for centuries a Catholic nation. However, there were many sects and individuals who challenged Church doctrine. Such views were considered heresy and heretics (those who challenge or propose change to an established system of belief) found themselves sentenced to death by burning.
The Burning of Lollards
At the end of the fourteenth century the Church came under attack from John Wycliffe (1324-1384), a Yorkshireman educated at Oxford. Wycliffe was one of the first recognised critics of the Church and his supporters, the Lollards, rejected the Roman Catholic Church, arguing that the Bible was the supreme authority, that the clergy should hold no property and that there was no basis for the doctrine of transubstantiation (the doctrine that the taking of bread and the wine changes into the substance of the body and blood of Christ during the Eucharist). The Lollards consisted mainly of itinerant preachers and Wycliffe wanted a reformation of the Church, arguing that it should give up all its worldly possessions.
Not surprisingly, the Lollards were vulnerable for advocating such dangerous ideas. Wycliffe was condemned as a heretic in 1380 and again in 1382. Fortunately for Wycliffe, he did not suffer the torments that were inflicted on many of his supporters as he died in 1384.
By the time of Henry IV’s reign (1399-1413), the Crown and Church united against the Lollards and anti-heresy legislation was passed in 1382, 1401 and 1414, which gave legal authority to the burning of heretics. Execution by burning consisted of heaping faggots around a wooden stake, above which the prisoner was attached with chains or iron hoops. In the event of a small fire, the condemned would burn for a few minutes until death came from heat-stroke or loss of blood plasma. Victims might also die from suffocation.
The first Lollard Protestant martyr in England is thought to be William Sawtrey, who was burned at the stake in 1401 (although some accounts state that it was at Smithfield and others St Paul’s Cross). Other Lollards followed and were executed in various places in London. John Badby, a tailor from Evesham, was convicted of heresy in 1410 after he refused to recant his beliefs.
The burning of Lollards at West Smithfield continued and included London merchants Richard Turming and John Claydon in 1415, and William Taylor, a priest, in 1423. John Claydon was accused of having seditious books in his house. William Taylor was accused of heresy but recanted and received absolution. Having gone through the ritual of forgiveness, Taylor pushed his luck and was caught a year later in 1419. After a long imprisonment, he was brought to Smithfield in March 1423, and burned at the stake.
Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, both secular and ecclesiastical authorities made efforts to stamp out the Lollards, although the repression became less intense. The Lollards became an underground movement and passed down their beliefs within families and through trade contacts. During the reigns of Henry VII (r.1485-1509) and Henry VIII (r.1509-1547), there were at least twelve Lollard trials, which included that of eighty-year-old Joan Broughton, the first woman to suffer martyrdom in England. Joan was burned at Smithfield in April 1494, along with her daughter.
By the sixteenth century West Smithfield had become increasingly populated with a maze of crowded lanes surrounding the area as well as large tenements, inns, brewhouses and pens for livestock ready for the market.
Throughout the reign of Henry VIII, Lollards and heretics continued to be burned. These included William Succling and John Bannister in October 1511 and John Stilincen in September 1518. Stilincen had previously recanted but was brought before Richard Fitz-James, Bishop of London, and condemne
d as a heretic. Amidst a vast crowd of spectators, he was chained to the stake and burned to death. James Brewster from Colchester followed him in 1519.
Carry On Executing
Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s began a process of religious change that led to the execution of both Protestant and Catholic martyrs. Elizabeth Barton, along with four of her promoters, was one of the first victims of the English Reformation. In April 1535, bishops were ordered to imprison clergy who continued to accept papal authority. The next month the cause célèbres of the age, the executions of London Carthusians Thomas More and John Fisher, took place.
The Carthusian monks Robert Lawrence, Augustine Webster, and Father John Houghton were executed at Tyburn. Maurice Chauncy, a Charterhouse monk, wrote that they were thrown down and fastened to a hurdle and were dragged at the heels of the horses through the city until they arrived at Tyburn. The journey from the prison was made over a road that was rough and hard in places, and wet and muddy in other parts. When they came to the gallows, where many thousands had gathered, the executioner bent his knee before the condemned and asked forgiveness. The monks prayed before the ladder was moved away and then the rope was cut and the body of Houghton fell to the ground where it began to ‘throb and breathe’. He was moved to an adjoining place where his garments were removed and he was laid naked on the hurdle. The executioner cut open his stomach and ‘dragged out his bowels, his heart, and all else, and threw them into a fire’. His head was finally removed and his body was divided into quarters. The other monks followed and were subjected to their fate, ‘all of their remains were thrown into cauldrons and parboiled, and afterwards put up in different places in the city’.
Other monks followed, such as William Exmew on 19 June 1535 along with Humphrey Middlemore, for being ‘obstinately determined to suffer all extremities rather than to alter their opinion’ with regard to the primacy of the Pope. They were made to stand in chains, bound to posts and were left in that position for thirteen days. They all suffered the sentence of being hanged and quartered.
A significant reaction to Henry’s religious changes and the Dissolution of the Monasteries was the Pilgrimage of Grace, the name given to the religious rising in the north of England in 1536. Concerned by this event, Henry VIII responded decisively by executing the leaders as well as crushing the rising. In May 1537, two months after twelve Catholics had been brutally executed at Tyburn, Lord Darcy, Sir Henry Percy and several others involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, together with the Abbots of Fountains, Jervaulx and Sawley, met a similar end.
The 1530s were a politically sensitive period and to speak out against Henry and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was treasonable. One particular victim of this legislation was Elizabeth Barton, a maidservant from Aldington in Kent known as the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’. Since 1525 Elizabeth had suffered from a form of epilepsy which gave rise to trances. Consequently, she was credited with having some form of second sight. When Henry had divorced Catherine of Aragon in 1533, Elizabeth Barton was so outraged she prophesied that Henry would die within a month of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. This was considered to be more than a wild prediction and Elizabeth was arrested on grounds of treason. She was taken to the Tower and tortured, and the following year, in April 1534, she was condemned to hang at Tyburn. Barton was executed with Edward Bocking, John Dering and two monks from Canterbury, Richard Risby and Henry Gold. It is reputed that her head was the only one of a woman to be spiked and exhibited on the Drawbridge Gate of London Bridge. One of the first things that people would see as they came into London from Southwark over London Bridge was the Gatehouse, which was adorned by the spectacle of the heads of the executed, dipped in tar and displayed for all to see.
One high-profile execution was that of Bishop and Cardinal John Fisher (1469-1535). Fisher was executed by order of Henry for refusing to accept him as Head of the Church of England. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 22 June 1535. His body was stripped and left on the scaffold till evening, when it was taken on pikes and thrown naked into a rough grave in the churchyard of All Hallows, Barking, although it was removed two weeks later and buried within the Tower of London. Fisher’s head was stuck upon a pole on London Bridge, where it caused huge congestion on and around the bridge because of the numbers of people clamouring to see it.
The rack.
Also in this decade, Richard Byfield was thrown into prison and whipped for supporting Protestant doctrines. Byfield was flogged on a number of occasions and eventually taken to the Lollard’s Tower in Lambeth Palace where he was chained by the neck to the wall. In 1532 he was led to Smithfield to face the same fate as other heretics. John Forest, who had been a chaplain to Catherine of Aragon, was given the same treatment as poisonous cook Richard Rose in April 1538: he was sentenced to death at Smithfield where he was roasted alive for two hours in a cage over a log fire before he died. Another roasting came in 1542 when Margaret Davy was boiled to death for the crime of poisoning.
Title page of gory English classic Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
For Protestants who read banned copies of William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible the penalty was severe, as John Tewkesbury discovered. Tewkesbury was pinioned ‘hand, foot, and head in the stocks’ for six days without release. He was then whipped and had his eyebrows twisted with small ropes so that the blood spurted from his eyes. This was not the end, as he was then sent to the Tower and racked until he was nearly lame.
Similar agonies were meted out on Andrew Hewit and John Frith in 1533. Frith had come to England and distributed copies of Tyndale’s Bible but was caught when the concealed books were found in his bag.
The fate of the unfortunate Anne Askew reflected the religious turmoil of the times. Anne, a Protestant, came to London where she was arrested for distributing leaflets. She was then subjected to such severe torture that she had to be carried to the stake at Smithfield; there she was burned in a chair with three other heretics.
The Marian Martyrs
More Protestants martyrs would find their place in John Foxe’s eponymous classic during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558). Within two months of Mary becoming Queen, Protestants were being arrested on the flimsiest of charges. Many others fled abroad. In 1554 the medieval heresy laws were revived which led to the burning of 283 Protestant martyrs between February 1555 and November 1558 (including fifty-six women).
Burning at the stake during Mary’s reign took on a particular significance. Persecutions began in January of 1555 when a number of eminent Protestants were subjected to hostile examination by a commission of leading bishops. Public executions were guaranteed to draw large crowds and the burning of the first Protestants under Mary was to be no exception. The first Protestant to be publicly burned at Smithfield in Mary’s reign was John Rogers,Vicar of St Sepulchre’s at Newgate. Rogers was asked to revoke his doctrines but refused, thus assuring his place as a martyr. On 4 February 1555 he was led the short distance from his prison to Smithfield through the large crowd. Among the mass of people who came to see the execution were his eleven children and his wife, who was holding their baby at her breast. Rogers was ‘burnt to ashes, washing his hands in the flame as he was burning’. Other martyrs who had appeared before the commission were executed elsewhere, many in the places where they had preached.
John Roger, Protestant martyr burned at Smithfield.
Memorial to the Marian Martyrs at Smithfield.
The martyrs came from diverse backgrounds and included butchers, barbers, drapers and weavers. One such weaver was Thomas Tomkins from Shoreditch who was burned at the stake at Smithfield in May 1555.
John Philpot, Archdeacon of Winchester, was taken to Smithfield at eight o’clock in the morning on 17 December 1555. When he arrived the ground was so muddy that two officers offered to carry him to the stake – an offer he declined. During the winter of 1555-56 more Protestants were arrested in London – John Tudson, Thomas Whittle, John Went, Thomas Brown, Isabel
Foster, Joan Lushford and Bartlet Green. In January 1556 all seven were burned together at Smithfield. Three years into Mary’s reign eighty-eight heretics had been burned, sixteen at Smithfield.
The burnings continued, and in April 1558 over forty men and women were arrested for attending a Protestant meeting in a field at Islington. Twenty were detained and sent to Newgate where they were promised a pardon on condition that they attended Mass.
By late 1558, at the age of forty-two, Queen Mary was dying at St James’s Palace in Westminster. She requested to see Elizabeth in order to ask her to maintain the Catholic faith – but this was to be another lost cause. On 17 November 1558 Mary died and was succeeded by Elizabeth, much to the rejoicing of her Protestant subjects. Out of 283 Protestants burned during Mary’s reign, seventy-eight had died in London and fifty-six at Smithfield.
Catholics at Tyburn
The reign of Elizabeth continued to witness religious persecutions – but this time it was mainly Catholics who would be executed and hailed as martyrs. Missionary and Jesuit Catholics who sought to convert people back to the faith found themselves condemned for treason. (The Elizabethan regime insisted that it executed Catholics as traitors and not for their religious opinions, whereas in Mary’s reign Protestants had been executed as heretics.) Once identified as traitors, Catholics could be subjected to the dreaded penalty for treason: hanging and quartering. The English State, proud of its religious tolerance, demanded the execution of Catholics because they would not swear an oath accepting the Queen as Supreme Governor of the Church.
Olde London Punishments Page 9
