Tyburn Tree: Its History and Annals

Gregory was succeeded by his son Richard, famous as the executioner of Charles I.

After him came Lowen, an obscure hangman, known only by mention in the account of an execution.[69]

Later came Edward Dun, known as “Esquire Dun,” mentioned in Butler’s “Hudibras” (pt. iii. c. ii. l. 1534). He was followed by the most famous of all the hangmen of Tyburn, Jack Ketch, hangman from about 1663 to 1686. In January of this year he was for a time superseded by Pascha Rose, a butcher, who was hanged at Tyburn, on May 28th, when Ketch resumed office. Ketch is twice mentioned in Dryden, in the epilogue to the Duke of Guise:—

and again in “The Original and Progress of Satire”:—

Dr. Murray’s Dictionary attributes something of Ketch’s fame to his introduction into the “puppet-play of Punchinello introduced from Italy shortly after his death”: but Cunningham quotes from the Overseers’ Books of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields entries of sums “received of Punchinello the Italian popet player, for his Booth at Charing-cross,” in March, 1666. But something of his notoriety was due to his bungling in the executions of Lord Russell in 1683, and of the Duke of Monmouth in 1685. As to Lord Russell, “Ketch the executioner severed his head from his body at three strokes, very barbarously.”[70] It was worse with Monmouth:—

As recorded in the Annals, John Price, the Tyburn hangman, was executed in Bunhill-Fields for murder in 1718.

In August, 1721, John Meff was executed at Tyburn. At a previous date, not mentioned, he had been condemned to death for housebreaking, but, as he was going to Tyburn, the hangman, bearing the generic name of “Jack Ketch,” was arrested. What became of him is not told, but he probably came to a bad end.

In May, 1736, “Jack Ketch,” on his return from doing his office at Tyburn, robbed a woman of 3s. 6d., for which he was committed to Newgate. History is silent as to his fate.

In 1750, the hangman, John Thrift, was condemned for killing a man in a quarrel. His sentence was commuted to one of transportation for fourteen years. He was finally pardoned, and in September “resumed the exercise of his office.” “‘Old England,’ September 22, hints, that having become obnoxious to the Jacobites, for his celebrated operations on Tower-Hill and Kennington-Common, he was pardoned in terrorem, and to mortify them.”[72]

In 1780, Edward Dennis, the hangman, was condemned for taking part in the No Popery riots. He was respited. Dickens has introduced Dennis as a personage in his story of “Barnaby Rudge.”

It will be seen that out of the few hangmen of Tyburn whose names have come down to us, several ended their useful lives on the gallows, having failed to profit personally by the lessons they were employed by the State to teach.

There was a strange superstition connected with the gallows: what it was will be understood from the following:—

This case is not the only one of its kind on record.[73]

Tyburn is responsible for a few slang expressions. “A Tyburn ticket” was a certificate exempting from parish duties the successful prosecutor of a malefactor. “A Tyburn blossom” was a young pickpocket. “A Tyburn check” was a rope. “A Tyburn tippet” was a halter. Latimer did not disdain to use this word in his great sermons.

The gallows was known as “Deadly Never-green,” the “Three-legged Mare,” the “Three-legged Stool.”

AFTER TYBURN.

What became of the bodies of those done to death at Tyburn? Some were quartered, parboiled, and stuck up on the gates of the city or elsewhere, as the king might direct. These would be but few out of the great total. For two centuries there was regular provision for the decent burial of executed persons, in the circumstances mentioned by Stow.

Stow tells how, in 1348, Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London, bought a piece of ground, called “No Man’s Land,” which he enclosed with a wall of brick, and dedicated for burial of the dead: this was Pardon churchyard. In the following year Sir Walter Manny bought thirteen acres of land adjoining, and here were buried more than fifty thousand persons who died of the frightful pestilence then raging, known as the Black Death. In 1371 Sir Walter founded here the Charterhouse, giving to the monastery the thirteen acres, and also the three acres adjoining, which “remained till our time by the name of Pardon churchyard, and served for burying of such as desperately ended their lives, or were executed for felonies, who were fetched thither usually in a close cart, bailed over and covered with black, having a plain white cross thwarting, and at the fore end a St. John’s cross without, and within a bell ringing by shaking of the cart, whereby the same might be heard when it passed: and this was called the friary cart, which belonged to St. John’s, and had the privilege of sanctuary.”[74]

“It remained till our time,” says Stow, and this is one of those passages telling what Stow had seen—passages that give so vivid an interest to his story of London.

In the Grey Friars’ Chronicle we find an instance of the burial in Pardon churchyard of persons executed at Tyburn:—

From Stow’s account of the execution, quoted in the Annals, we learn that the number of Lincolnshire men executed on this occasion was twelve.

The priory of St. John’s was dissolved in 1540, and with it went the friary cart.

After this, and also before the suppression of the friary cart, bodies were brought back by friends for interment in the parish churchyard. Here is a case in which a body so brought back was refused burial:—

One Awfield had been condemned and executed at Tyburn for “sparcing abrood certen lewed, sedicious, and traytorous bookes. His body was brought into St. Pulchers to be buryed, but the parishioners would not suffer a Traytor’s corpes to be layed in the earthe where theire parents, wyeffs, chyldren, kynred, maisters, and old neighbors did rest: and so his carcase was retourned to the buryall grounde neere Tyborne, and there I leave yt.”[76]

But many of the poor wretches hanged had no friends who would be at the charge of interment. The demands of the surgeons would be soon satisfied; with how little ceremony the residue would be treated we may learn from the narrative of Richardson, given in the Annals (1741).

We read of two priests and sixteen felons executed at the same time, in 1610, being all thrown together into a pit. The stories of bones found in the neighbourhood of the gallows may probably be referred to forgotten burial places or to pits into which, after a busy day’s work, a score of bodies would be tumbled.[77]

Strype, in his edition of Stow’s “Survey,” has a weird story of the finding of four embalmed heads in Blackfriars, in clearing away rubbish after the Great Fire of 1666:—

Through the later researches of Dr. Challoner, we now know the story relating to one of these heads. John Cornelius, or Mohun, was born of Irish parents in Bodmin. He studied at Oxford, but not adopting the new religion, went afterwards to Rheims, and later to Rome. He was sent upon the English mission, in which he laboured for about ten years. He was apprehended in April, 1594, in the house of the widow of Sir John Arundel, on the information of a servant of the house. Mr. Bosgrave, a kinsman of Sir John Arundel, seeing him hurried away without a hat, put his own hat on the priest’s head; for this he was arrested. Two servants of the family, Terence Carey and Patrick Salmon, were also arrested. Cornelius was sent to London, and there racked to make him give up the names of Catholics who had harboured him. Refusing to make any discovery, he was sent back into the country, tried, and, with his three companions, executed at Dorchester on July 2, 1594. The three were simply hanged: Cornelius, as guilty of high treason, was drawn, hanged, and quartered. His head was nailed to the gallows, but afterwards removed at the instance of the town. His quarters were buried together with the bodies of his companions. Dr. Challoner does not tell how the head of Cornelius was recovered by friends, nor does he say anything more of the others. It is probable that the three other heads of Strype’s account were those of the companions of Cornelius (“Memoirs of Missionary Priests,” part i., pp. 157-60).

The Times of May 9, 1860, contained a letter from Mr. A. J. Beresford Hope, living in the house at the south-west corner of Edgware Road, stating that in the course of excavations made close to the foot-pavement along the garden of his house, “numerous human bones” were discovered. He says: “These are obviously the relics of the unhappy persons buried under the gallows.” If this was so, they must have been the bones of Cromwell, Ireton, or Bradshaw, buried under the gallows.

ORIGIN AND SITE OF THE TYBURN GALLOWS

As has already been said, the earliest mention of Tyburn in connection with executions is in 1196, when William FitzOsbert, known as “Longbeard,” was hanged here: with probability we can refer to the site an execution taking place a few years earlier. How far back can we, in the absence of records, conjecturally place the dedication of Tyburn to executions? We can say, with a high degree of probability, that Tyburn was not established till after the Conquest, and, further, not till after the death of the Conqueror.

Hanging was not greatly in favour with those whom we must, in spite of objections, call the Anglo-Saxons. Various fanciful definitions of Time have been given. According to Goethe, it is on the roaring loom of Time that the Earth-Spirit weaves the living garments of God. According to Carlyle, Time is the outer veil of Eternity. These poetical definitions seem to have little or no practical value. They would convey nothing, for instance, to the time-keeper of a wharf or great warehouse. It has been reserved for our race to give a definition of real solid value: “Time is money.” The phrase, revealing in three words the soul of a people, has gone the round of the world in its native tongue, hailed from pole to pole as the final definition of Time. We might look with confidence to find in the origins of a people alone capable of making this supreme discovery instances of this practical outlook on the universe. We shall not be disappointed. The laws of our forefathers, based on this commercial view, were administered, with a strict eye to business, on the joint-stock or co-operative principle. To kill a man was mere waste, if money could be screwed out of him or out of those who could be made responsible for him. “Business is Business.” Every man—in a sense different from that in which Walpole used the words—every man had his price. Men, according to rank, were carefully appraised: a man’s “were” was so much, his “wite” so much. A murderer must pay these sums, or they must be paid by those responsible for him. And not only every man, but every part of each man had its price. One sees in encyclopædias of domestic economy, prepared for the instruction of young and thrifty housekeepers, diagrams setting out the differences in value of such and such parts of an ox, a sheep, or of “a side” of bacon. Such a chart for use by an Anglo-Saxon dispenser of justice would have had to be executed on a large scale. The human body was divided into thirty-four parts, upon each of which was placed a fixed value. It is needless to give here all the thirty-four categories; it will be sufficient to set out the prices to be paid for injuries to the arm and hand:—

The authors of a code so thoroughly commercial in spirit naturally regarded theft as the worst of crimes, and hanging was probably common for this offence, if the thief could not redeem himself. Thus we read in the laws of Æthelstan: “That no thief be spared over xii pence, and no person over xii years, who we learn, according to folk-right, that he is guilty, and can make no denial: that we slay him and take all that he has.”[79]

William the Conqueror abolished capital punishment. For this he has been highly eulogised by Mr. J. R. Green, who writes of “strange touches of a humanity far in advance of his age,” of “his aversion to shed blood by process of law.” But he omits to tell us that for the punishment of death William substituted punishments which, as Mr. Freeman justly says, “according to modern ideas were worse than death.” It is indeed “a strange touch of humanity” which prescribed the tearing out of a man’s eyes and the lopping off of his limbs. A terrible picture of a land haunted by sightless and maimed trunks is conjured up by the words of William’s law, “so that the trunk may remain alive as a sign of its crimes.”[80]

The penalty for breach of this law, confiscation of all the offender’s property, was so severe that we may well believe that capital punishment was actually abolished during the reign of William.

It appears that capital punishment was re-instituted by Henry I. in 1108, and there seems no reason for doubting the statement, though the evidence was not wholly accepted by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen.

The institution of the gallows of Tyburn probably dates from this time. The origin of Tyburn is certainly Norman; its early name, “The Elms,” testifies to this, for among the Normans the elm was the tree of justice. Here is the record of a symbolic elm so famous that its fall awakened an echo in the distant scriptorium of Peterborough:—

Something of this symbolical character was retained by the elm in France long after the name “The Elms” had been forgotten here. Rabelais (1483?-1553) speaks of “juges sous l’orme,” and, later, Loyseau (1556-1627) has a great deal to say of these “judges under the elm-tree.”[83]

“The Elms” of Smithfield came by the name in the same way, as, there is little doubt, did also “The Elms,” now Dean’s Yard, in the precincts of Westminster Abbey; “The Elms” in the abbey lands at Covent Garden, and “Homors” in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, derived, no doubt correctly, by Professor Willis, from a corruption of Ormeaux, Ormayes, Ormoies, or Ormerie, plantations of elms.[84] In like manner Elms Lane, now Elms Mews, a turning out of the Bayswater or Uxbridge Road, probably preserves the name given to the gallows which the abbat of Westminster had at “Westburn” towards the end of the thirteenth century.[85]

It would not be surprising to find more of such names, in form more or less corrupt, in connection with places in the precincts of old monastic foundations. It may even be hoped that some of the gallows of the abbat of Westminster, in addition to the gallows of “Westburn,” have bequeathed place-names still surviving.

Before introducing further evidence as to the establishment of gallows at Tyburn, reference must be made to the confusion existing between “The Elms” of Tyburn and “The Elms” of Smithfield. Maitland, and after him Parton,[86] maintained, in ignorance or oblivion of the facts, that the gallows (presumably for Middlesex) formerly stood at “The Elms” of Smithfield; that, at some date before 1413, the gallows was removed to St. Giles’s, where it continued till its removal to Tyburn. But this ignores the fact that a gallows did undoubtedly exist at Tyburn at the end of the twelfth century. There is, besides, no evidence whatever that a royal gallows ever existed at St. Giles’s, except when a gallows was erected here for a special case.[87] There may possibly have been here a local, manorial gallows, for, as has been shown, such gallows abounded. There was even another gallows at Tyburn, set up by the Earl of Oxford, who, when challenged, seems to have admitted that he had no right to erect a gallows here.[88]

The confusion will cease if we keep firm hold of the fact that Smithfield was within the liberty of the city, and that the civic gallows was here erected. There is not, so far as I know, any evidence as to the suppression of the civic gallows at Smithfield. There were in late times executions here, but so there were in many other places. Smithfield comes into notice in the second year of the fifteenth century as the place of execution, by burning, for heresy, a character which it retained so long as the punishment was inflicted.[89]

It is not at all probable that the first execution recorded as having taken place at Tyburn in 1196 was actually the first execution there. I have ventured to allot to Tyburn an execution which took place in London in 1177, nineteen years before the execution of William Longbeard. There is evidence of the existence of a gallows at Tyburn at an uncertain date, but going in probability still further back. In 1220 the king, Henry III., ordered the immediate erection of two good gibbets of the best and strongest material, for hanging thieves and other malefactors, in the place where gallows were formerly erected, namely, at “The Elms” (ad Ulmellos).[90] Strype, in his edition of Stow’s “Survey,” and, seemingly, Peter le Neve, whom he quotes in the margin, refer this order to “The Elms” of Smithfield, but this is clearly a mistake, as the order evidently concerns the royal gallows, not the gallows in the jurisdiction of the City of London.[91]

The order refers to “the place where gallows were formerly erected, namely, the Elms.” It must be taken to be an order to replace decayed gallows. We may safely allow a life of at least fifty years to the old gallows, and it results that gallows had been here from at least as early as 1170.

There is no need to follow further in this place the course of executions at Tyburn. We come now to the question of the site of the gallows.

In one of the most recent books in which reference is made to the site we find this: “It was customary to vary the position of the gallows of Tyburn from time to time, but we may roughly put its approximate position where the Marble Arch now stands.” It is to be feared that the writer would be sorely puzzled if he were asked to produce either evidence that the gallows ever stood “where the Marble Arch now stands,” or evidence of so much as a single change of position. But statements of the kind, unsupported by evidence, are constantly found in books upon London. Those who make these statements are probably misled by knowledge of the fact that in our times a gallows is brought out for the purpose of a rare execution, and then laid up against the time when it will be again required. But of old the gallows—of Tyburn, at least—was in constant requisition, and, till a date which is well known, was a permanent structure—permanent, that is, having regard to its material. The gallows of Tyburn was permanent, subject to renewal from time to time, till the year 1759, when, as will be shown, the permanent gallows gave place to a movable gallows. It is in no degree probable that the site of a fixed gallows in frequent and continuous use should be changed without some good reason.

The first information of the site of the gallows other than the vague indication “Tyburn” is found in one of the old chronicles, which tells that, in 1330, Mortimer was executed at “The Elms, about a league outside the city.”[92] The distance thus vaguely stated would apply about equally to any one of the conjectured sites from Marylebone Lane to the head of the Serpentine, at which writers have severally placed the gallows.

At first sight it may seem strange that a site so remote from the prisons of Newgate and the Tower should have been chosen. But it was usual, for a reason which will appear, to place the gallows at a considerable distance from the town. The gallows for the county of Surrey was at St. Thomas-a-Waterings, near the second milestone on the Kent Road. Loyseau shows that while the pillory, used for non-capital punishment, was always set up in the principal place or street of a town, capital punishments were carried out at a distance—“le gibet est tousiours emmy les champs.”[93] He refers to Lipsius, who in his turn cites ancient authors to prove the practice. There is, of course, good reason why the place of execution should have been fixed far from the abodes of men. In addition to its gallows, Tyburn had its gibbets, on which bodies of men hanged alive were suffered to hang till they fell to pieces. In other cases bodies were transferred, after hanging, to a gibbet—

In a lease granted by the Prior of the Knights Hospitallers mention is made of Great Gibbet Field and Little Gibbet Field, parcel of the manor of Lilleston.[94] Mr. Loftie says, “We cannot be far wrong in supposing that the gibbets stood near the highway.” The word gibbet was formerly used so loosely that we cannot be sure that the fields did not take their name from the gallows. But Tyburn certainly had, as well as its gallows, gibbets on which were exposed bodies. But this page in the early history of Tyburn is almost a blank. The subjects on which it is most difficult to find information are precisely those of occurrence so common that it has not entered the head of contemporaries to notice them. That gibbets, as distinct from gallows, did exist in early times, there is no doubt; their use continued down to the eighteenth century or later. The old writers do not clearly distinguish between gibbet and gallows, but there is a passage in which Matthew Paris certainly means to speak of a gibbet. In writing of the execution of William Marsh, Matthew Paris leaves it doubtful whether Marsh was or was not at once fixed to a gibbet. But from Gregory’s chronicle we learn that Marsh was first hanged; from Matthew Paris we learn that the body was afterwards hung “on one of the hooks” of a gibbet.[95] In 1306 the body of Simon Fraser was hung on a gibbet for twenty days. In 1324 the king granted a petition of the prelates to permit burial of the bodies of the six barons hanged (not at Tyburn) in 1322.[96] Bodies would hang together for a much longer time. Jean Marteilhe saw, hanging on a gibbet in 1713, the body of Captain Smith, hanged at Execution Dock in 1708.[97]

Thus there must have been an accumulation of bodies swinging from the gibbets of Tyburn and poisoning the air. The French have always been more lavish in public monuments than we. The great gibbet of Montfaucon in the outskirts of Paris was a solid stone structure, with provision for hanging thereon—if we may trust the pictures given of it—at least sixty bodies; it is said that the bodies not unfrequently numbered from sixty to eighty. Under cover of the pestilential air, Maître François Villon, poet of the gibbet, and the cut-purses, his friends, rioted in security from intrusion.[98]

There is very good reason to suppose that a single gallows would not be sufficient for the work to be done at Tyburn. A gallows in the ordinary form, two uprights and a cross-beam, could hardly take more than ten victims at a time. We must suppose that the equipment of Tyburn demanded at least two such gallows. We have seen that in 1220 the king ordered two gallows. But in 1571, just in time for Elizabeth’s penal laws, a great improvement was made in the form of the gallows; a triangular gallows was introduced, capable of hanging at one time at least twenty-four men. This is the highest number recorded as being hanged at one time, but it does not follow that the capacity of the gallows was exhausted by this number. The evidence for the introduction of the triangular gallows at this time is contained in the account of the execution of Dr. Story:—

There is no earlier account of a triangular gallows. My friend, Mr. P. A. Daniel, tells me that he knows of no reference in the old drama to the triangular form of the gallows of date prior to 1571.

The earliest allusion to this form seems to be in 1589:—

Of about the same date is an allusion in Tarlton’s “Newes out of Purgatorie,” 1590:—

A third reference is found in Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour Lost,” one of his early plays:—

These references are followed at a short distance in date by a delineation showing not only the triangular form of the gallows but, roughly, its position. This is in a map of Middlesex, engraved by John Norden for Camden’s “Britannia.” It was first given in the folio edition of 1607, and reappears in the editions of 1610 and 1637. In this last it bears the number 17 in the left-hand corner. In the edition of 1695, Norden’s map is replaced by one by Robert Morden.

In the three maps of the respective editions of 1607, 1610, and 1637, the triangular gallows is shown impinging on the north-east corner of Hyde Park, with the word “Tyborne” against it. Here, then, we have evidence that thirty-six years after the introduction of the triangular gallows it still remained here, clearly a permanent structure, probably the very gallows erected in 1571.[103]

The next piece of evidence is furnished by a representation of the gallows given in the frontispiece of “The Life and Death of Edmund Geninges” published in 1614.

Twelve years later, in 1626, we find evidence fixing for the first time the exact site of the gallows. On June 26th of this year, Henrietta Maria, after a day spent in devotion, went with her attendants through St. James’s Park to Hyde Park. Whether by accident or design she went towards Tyburn. Charles hated the Queen’s French suite, secured to her by treaty. Within six months of the marriage he had resolved to be rid of them. The courtiers made the most of the visit to Tyburn; it was averred that the Queen’s confessor had made her walk barefoot to the gallows, “thereby to honour the saint of the day in visiting that holy place, where so many martyrs (forsooth) had shed their blood in the Catholic cause.” The incident, thus exaggerated, brought matters to a head. Sixty of the Queen’s attendants were compelled to embark for France. The French King was naturally indignant at this violation of his sister’s rights: a war might have arisen out of the quarrel. This was averted by the skill of Maréchal de Bassompierre, sent over as Ambassador Extraordinary. Charles appointed Commissioners to discuss matters with the Marshal. The Commissioners expressed the charge in these terms: The Queen’s attendants abused the influence they had over the susceptible and religious mind of the Queen to lead her by a long road, across a park, which the Comte de Tilliers, her chamberlain, had taken measures to keep open, in order to take her to the place where it is the custom to execute the most infamous malefactors and criminals of all kinds, the place being at the entrance of a high road; an act which tended to bring shame and ridicule not only on the Queen herself, but also reproach and evil speaking against former kings of glorious memory, as though accusing them of tyranny in having put to death innocent persons that those people regard as martyrs, whereas, on the contrary, not one of them was executed on account of religion, but for treason in the highest degree.

Marshal de Bassompierre replied with remarkable frankness: “I know of a surety,” he said, “that you do not believe that which you publish to others.” He declared that the Queen had not been within fifty paces of the gallows. He repeats the description of the place as at the entrance of a high road. It is not necessary to follow the discussion further.[104]

The words “the entrance of a high road” fix definitely the spot indicated, approximately, by Norden’s map. Even without the map, then unknown to me, I felt abundantly justified in writing that the words applied to a road leading out of the road bounding Hyde Park: “This can be no other than the road now known as Edgeware Road: along the whole length of the park there is no other road to which the words could apply.”[105]

In 1626 we have also the mention of “the three wooden stilts” of Tyburn, in Shirley’s “The Wedding,” published in 1629.

In 1649, in an account of the hanging of a batch of twenty-four persons, it is said that eight were hanged “unto each Triangle.”[106]

In 1660 the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were “hanged at the several angles of the Triple-tree.”[107]

1680. Seller’s map of Middlesex shows the gallows, its form not recognisable, near the angle formed by the junction of the roads.

1697. Defoe, in his Essay upon Projects, refers to Watling Street: “The same High Way or Street called Watling Street … went on West to that spot where Tyburn now stands, and there turn’d North-West … to St. Alban’s.”[108]

1712. Beginning with this date the accounts published by Lorrain, the Ordinary of Newgate, of the behaviour of condemned criminals, show the prison of Newgate at the top, on one side, and on the other the gallows of Tyburn. The illustration is taken from the broadsheet of September 19, 1712.

1725. In this year a large map of the newly constituted parish of St. George, Hanover Square, was drawn by John Mackay. We have in it the first exact location of the gallows, shown as a triangular structure. In detailed notes on the map, describing the first “beating the bounds” of the parish on Ascension Day, 1725, it is stated that the parish boundary to the west was marked “on the S.E. Leg of Tyburn,” fully proving the permanence of the structure. The map was reproduced on a small scale in the Builder of July 6, 1901, and was described by Mr. Herbert Sieveking in the Daily Graphic of March 11, 1908.

1746 to 1757. In 1746 was published Rocque’s beautiful map of London in twenty-four sheets; this was followed by his maps of Middlesex in 1754 and 1757. In all the gallows is shown in the open space formed by the junction of the roads near the Marble Arch.

1747. In the last plate of Hogarth’s series of “Industry and Idleness,” is shown an execution at Tyburn. The gallows, a triangular structure, is in the same position (approximately) as in Rocque’s maps.

1756. In Seale’s map, published this year, the triangular gallows is shown in the same position as in Rocque’s maps.[109]

Tyburn had ceased to be “emmy les champs”; the advance of the town is shown by the inclusion of Tyburn in maps of London. So early as 1719 it was proposed to move the gallows to Stamford Hill:—