Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (30 page)

On the scaffold, as the executioner stood ready with his axe, More’s last words were true to his complex nature:
“I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”

English Crime and Punishment: Death by Pyre—A More Seemly Death for Women?

by Teresa Thomas Bohannon

D
eath by pyre was a frequent method of punishment in the barbarous days of many nations. In Britain it was used by the Anglo-Saxons as the penalty of certain
crimes, and, as the standard punishment of witchcraft, it was maintained throughout the Middle Ages.

The laws of Athelstan, (the first king of a unified England, 927 A.D.) brutally decreed that a female slave convicted of theft was to be burned alive by eighty other female slaves. In addition, being burnt at the stake was from early times the recognized method of dealing with heretics of all classes and many different religions.

What is perhaps lesser known is the fact that death by fire was commonly used to punish women for civil offenses...as a more seemly death than hanging, since they did not need to be displayed naked as they would if drawn and quartered. This practice was considered by the framers of the law as a commutation of the sentence of hanging, and a concession made to the sex of the offenders.

“For as the decency due to the sex,”
says Blackstone,
“forbids the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies, their sentence is, to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burnt alive.”
He adds:

the humanity of the English nation has authorised, by a tacit consent, an almost general mitigation of such part of these judgments as savours of torture and cruelty, a sledge or hurdle being usually allowed to such traitors as are condemned to be drawn, and there being very few instances (and those accidental and by negligence) of any persons being disemboweled or burnt till previously deprived of sensation by strangling.

The annals of King’s Lynn tells us that, in the year 1515, a woman was burnt in the market-place for the murder of her husband. Twenty years later, a Dutchman was burnt for reputed heresy. In the same town, in 1590, Margaret Read was burnt for witchcraft. Eight years later, a woman was executed for witchcraft, and in the year 1616, another woman suffered death for the same crime.

In 1791, at King’s Lynn, the landlady of a public-house was murdered by a man let into the house at the dead of night by a servant girl. The man was hanged for committing the crime, and the girl was burnt at the stake for assisting the murderer to enter the dwelling.

On 25 May 1537, Lady Ann Bulmer was convicted of high treason and burned at the stake by Henry VIII for her role in Bigod’s Rebellion.

In 1681, under English Colonial law, a slave named Maria tried to kill her owner by setting his house on fire. She was convicted of arson and burned at the stake at Roxbury, Massachusetts, and following suspected slave revolt plots in 1708, one woman was burnt alive in New York.

There is an account of a burning at Lincoln in 1722. Eleanor Elsom was condemned to death for the murder of her husband, and was ordered to be burnt at the stake. She was clothed in a cloth, “made like a shift,” saturated with tar, and her limbs were also smeared with the same inflammable substance, while a tarred bonnet had been placed on her head. She was brought out of the prison barefoot, and, being put on a hurdle, was drawn on a sledge to the place of execution near the gallows. Upon arrival, some time was passed in prayer, after which the executioner placed her on a tar barrel, a height of three feet, against the stake. A rope ran through a pulley in the stake, and was placed around her neck, she herself fixing it with her hands. Three irons also held her body to the stake, and the rope being pulled tight, the tar barrel was taken aside and the fire lighted.

The details in the
Lincoln Date Book
state that she was probably quite dead before the fire reached her, as the executioner pulled upon the rope several times whilst the irons were being fixed. The body was seen amid the flames for nearly half-an-hour, though, through the dryness of the wood and the quantity of tar, the fire was exceedingly fierce.

An instance in which the negligence of the executioner caused death to be unnecessarily prolonged is found in the case of Catherine Hayes, who was executed at Tyburn, November 3, 1726, for the murder of her husband. She was being strangled in the accustomed manner, but the fire scorching the hands of the executioner, he relaxed the rope before she had become unconscious, and in spite of the efforts at once made to hasten combustion, she suffered for a considerable time the greatest agonies.

Two paragraphs, dealing with such cases, are in the
London Magazine
for July, 1735, and are as follow:

At the assizes, at Northampton, Mary Fawson was condemned to be burnt for poisoning her husband, and Elizabeth Wilson to be hanged for picking a farmer’s pocket of thirty shillings.

Among the persons capitally convicted at the assizes, at Chelmsford, are Herbert Hayns, one of Gregory’s gang, who is to be hung in chains, and a woman, for poisoning her husband, is to be burnt.

In the next number of the same magazine, the first-mentioned criminal is again spoken of:

Mrs. Fawson was burnt at Northampton for poisoning her husband. Her behaviour in prison was with the utmost signs of contrition. She would not, to satisfy people’s curiosity, be unveiled to anyone. She confessed the justice of her sentence, and died with great composure of mind.

And also:

Margaret Onion was burnt at a stake at Chelmsford, for poisoning her husband. She was a poor, ignorant creature, and confessed the fact.

We obtain from Mr. John Glyde, jun., particulars of another case of burning for husband murder (styled petty treason). In April, 1763, Margery Beddingfield and a farm servant, named Richard Ringe, her paramour, had murdered John Beddingfield, of Sternfield. The latter criminal was the actual murderer, the wife being considered an accomplice. He was condemned to be hanged and she burnt, at the same time and place, and her sentence was that she should
“be taken from hence to the place from whence you came, and thence to the place of execution, on Saturday next, where you are to be burnt until you be dead: and the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
Accordingly, on the day appointed, she was taken to Rushmere Heath, near Ipswich, and there strangled and burnt.

Coining was, until a late period, an offense which met with capital punishment. In May 1777, a girl of little more than fourteen years of age had, at her master’s command, concealed a number of whitewashed farthings to represent shillings, for which she was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be burnt. Her master was already hanged, and the faggots but awaiting the application of the match to blaze in fury around her, when Lord Weymouth, who happened to be passing that way, humanely interfered. Said a writer in the
Quarterly Review
,
“a mere accident saved the nation from this crime and this national disgrace.”

In
Harrison’s Derby and Nottingham Journal
, for September 23, 1779, is an account of two persons who were several days previously tried and convicted for high treason, the indictment being for coining shillings in Cold Bath Field, and for coining shillings in Nag’s Head Yard, Bishopsgate Street. The culprit in the latter case was a man named John Fields, and in the former a woman called Isabella Condon. They were sentenced to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, the man to be hanged and the woman burnt.

Phœbe Harris, in 1786, was burnt in front of Newgate.
The Chelmsford Chronicle
of June 23, 1786, gives an account of her execution. After furnishing particulars of six men being hanged for various crimes, the report says:

About a quarter of an hour after the platform had dropped, the female convicted
[Phœbe Harris, convicted of counterfeiting the coin called shillings]
was led by two officers of justice from Newgate to a stake fixed in the ground about midway between the scaffold and the pump. The stake was about eleven feet high, and, near the top of it was inserted a curved piece of iron, to which the end of the halter was tied. The prisoner stood on a low stool, which, after the ordinary had prayed with her a short time, being taken away, she was suspended by the neck (her feet being scarcely more than twelve or fourteen inches from the pavement). Soon after the signs of life had ceased, two cartloads of fagots were placed round her and set on fire; the flames presently burning the halter, the convict fell a few inches, and was then sustained by an iron chain passed over her chest and affixed to the stake. Some scattered remains of the body were perceptible in the fire at half-past ten o’clock. The fire had not completely burnt out at twelve o’clock.

The last instance on record is that of Christian Murphy, alias Bowman, who was burnt on March 18, 1789, for coining.

The barbarous laws which permitted such repugnant exhibitions were repealed by the 30th George III., cap. 48, which provided that, after the 5th of June, 1790, women were to suffer hanging, as in the case of men.

English Queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard (wives two and five of Henry VIII), were both condemned to burn at the stake; however, their sentences were commuted to beheading. His sixth wife, Lady Catherine Parr, was also to be condemned to the tower with the same intention; however, she avoided her fate by soothing his temper along with his ulcerated leg. Lady Jane Grey was also condemned to burn at the stake for attempting to usurp her cousin Mary’s throne; she, however, was beheaded despite the fact that her cousin later became known as “Bloody Mary” for burning so many Protestants at the stake during her five year reign.

In Thomas Mallory’s
Le Morte d’ Arthur
, Queen Guinevere was also sentenced to burn at the stake, but was literally rescued at the last moment by Sir Lancelot, thus presaging the beginning of the end for the glory of Camelot.

One of the more dramatic scenes in my historical fantasy,
Shadows in a Timeless Myth
, concerns a ritual burning at the stake (auto-de-fé) of thirteen victims and a rescue attempt during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

Little Ease: Torture and the Tudors

by Nancy Bilyeau

O
n a March night in 1534, a man and woman hurried past a row of cottages on the outer grounds of the Tower of London. They had almost reached the gateway to Tower Hill and, not far beyond it, the city of London, when a group of ye
omen warders on night watch appeared in their path, holding lanterns.

In response, the young couple turned toward each other in what seemed a lovers’ embrace. But something about the man caught the attention of Yeoman Warder Charles Gore. He held his lantern higher and within seconds recognized the pair. The man was a fellow yeoman warder, John Bawd, and the woman was Alice Tankerville, a condemned thief and prisoner.

So ended the Tower’s first known escape attempt by a woman.

But Alice’s accomplice and admirer, the guard John Bawd, was destined to enter the Tower record books too, and for the grimmest of reasons—he is the first known occupant of a peculiar torture cell used during the reigns of the Tudors and early Stuarts.

The windowless cell measured 1.2m (4 square feet) and bore the faintly prim name of Little Ease. The prisoner within it could not stand nor sit nor lie down but crouched over, in increasing agony, until freed from the suffocating, dark space.

Torture and the Tower of London have long had an uneasy relationship. The echoes of those screams are part of the walled fortress’ allure, along with the X marks the spot of Queen Anne Boleyn’s and the Lady Jane Grey’s decapitations and the tales of the travails of inmates Ralegh, Cranmer, Fisher, and More.

Today’s visitors see for themselves, in well-curated exhibits, the replicas of the rack and other devices fashioned for pain. Tower publications are emphatic: torture only took place during a brief span in its near 1,000-year history. Which is true. But it happened, and with an intensity that cannot be denied.

In 1215, England outlawed torture through the passage of Magna Carta, except by royal warrant. The first king to authorize it, reluctantly, was Edward II. He submitted to intense pressure from the Pope to follow the lead of the king of France and demolish the Order of the Knights Templar, part of a tradition begun during the Crusades.

King Philip IV of France, jealous of the Templars’ wealth and power, charged them with heresy, obscene rituals, idolatry, and other offenses. The French knights denied all, and were duly tortured. Some who broke down and “confessed” were released; all who denied wrongdoing were burned at the stake.

Once Edward II had ordered imprisonment of members of the English chapter, French monks arrived in London bearing their instruments of torture. In 1311, the Knights Templar
“were questioned and examined in the presence of notaries while suffering under the torments of the rack”
within the Tower of London as well as the prisons of Aldgate, Ludgate, Newgate, and Bishopgate, according to
The History of the Knights Templar, the Temple Church, and the Temple
, by Charles G. Addison. And so the Tower—principally a royal residence, military stronghold, armory, and menagerie up until that time—was baptized in torture.

Did the instruments remain after the Knights Templars were crushed, to be used on other prisoners? We cannot be certain as there is no record of it.

The next mention of a rack within the Tower is a startling one—an unsavory nobleman made Constable of the Tower pushed for one to be installed. John Holland, third duke of Exeter, arranged for a rack to be brought into the Tower. It is not known if men were stretched upon it or if it was merely used to frighten. In any case, this rack is known to history as the Duke of Exeter’s Daughter.

It was in the 16th century that prisoners were unquestionably tortured in the Tower of London. The royal family rarely used the fortress on the Thames as a residence; more and more, its stone buildings contained prisoners. And while the Tudor monarchs seem glittering successes to us now, in their own time they were beset by insecurities: rebellions, conspiracies, and other threats both domestic and foreign. There was a willingness at the top of the government to override the law to obtain certain ends. This created a perfect storm for torture.

“It was during the time of the Tudors that the use of torture reached its height,”
wrote historian L.A. Parry in his 1933 book
The History of Torture in England
.

Under Henry VIII it was frequently employed; it was only used in a small number of cases in the reigns of Edward VI and of Mary. It was whilst Elizabeth sat on the throne that it was made use of more than in any other period of history.

Yeoman Warder John Bawd admitted he had planned the escape of Alice Tankerville
“for the love and affection he bore her.”
Unmoved, the Lieutenant of the Tower ordered Bawd into Little Ease where he crouched in growing agony. The lovers were condemned to horrible deaths for trying to escape. According to a letter in the State Papers of Lord Lisle, written on March 28, Alice Tankerville was
“hanged in chains at low water mark upon the Thames on Tuesday. John Bawd is in Little Ease cell in the Tower and is to be racked and hanged.”

Today no one knows exactly where Little Ease was located. One theory: within the nooks and crannies of the White Tower. Another: in the basement of the old Flint Tower. No visitor sees it today; it was torn down or walled up long ago.

Besides Little Ease, the most-used torture devices were the rack, manacles, and a horrific creation called the Scavenger’s Daughter. For many prisoners, solitary confinement, repeated interrogation, and the threat of physical pain were enough to make them tell their tormentors anything they wanted to know.

Often the victims ended up in the Tower for religious reasons. Anne Askew was tortured and killed for her Protestant beliefs; Edmund Campion for his Catholic ones. But the crimes varied.
“The majority of the prisoners were charged with high treason, but murder, robbery, embezzling the Queen’s plate, and failure to carry out proclamations against state players were among the offenses,”
wrote Parry. The monarch did not need to sign off on torture requests, although sometimes he or she did. Elizabeth I personally directed that torture be used on the members of the Babington Conspiracy, a group that plotted to depose her and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. But usually these initiatives went through the Privy Council or tapped the powers of the Star Chamber. It is believed that in some cases, permission was never sought at all.