Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (48 page)

Even as the head rolled on to the boards, it was seized and impaled on a pike, then brandished in the air for all to see. Later it was dispatched to the Royal court in Madrid, to demonstrate to other doubters the manner in which King Philip dealt with traitors.

As in many Continental countries, death by beheading was also considered honourable by the Normans, and was introduced into England by William the Conqueror in 1076. The first recipient was Waltheof, Saxon Earl of Huntingdon, Northampton and Northumberland, the blow being inflicted by a sword. Later, that instrument was superseded by the axe, and only once since then has judicial death by the sword been meted out, that being to Queen Anne Boleyn, on 19 May 1536, on the Green within the Tower of London.

Charged with adultery and treason, she was sentenced ‘to be burned alive or beheaded, at the king’s pleasure’. Although beheading was usually administered by means of the axe, she was fortunate in being granted the privilege of execution by the sword instead.

A difficulty arose when it was discovered that none of the usual executioners was qualified in the use of such an instrument: axe, branding iron, whips, dismembering knives, yes; sword, no. The authorities were therefore compelled to look across the Channel to another English possession, Calais, wherein could be found executioners who were capable of decapitation in the manner prescribed.

On the scaffold the man selected, reportedly named Rombaud, presented a fearsome figure, for he wore a tight-fitting black suit and a high, horn-shaped hat, with a half-mask covering the upper part of his face. This outfit, bought especially for the occasion, had been paid for by the Constable of the Tower, the Record Office accounts showing that a hundred French crowns had been advanced ‘to give to the executioner of Calays for his reward and apparail’.

The doomed Queen, escorted by 200 Yeomen of the Guard and numerous officials, aldermen and councillors, approached the scaffold. Over her red underskirt she wore a loose robe of grey damask enhanced by a deep, white collar furred with ermine. Her long black hair, beneath a white coif, vas further concealed by a small black cap, and she carried a little Prayer Book bound in gold, its colour matched by the gold chain and cross she wore about her neck.

On the scaffold, ‘made at such a height that all present could see it’, the Queen prayed and declared her innocence and loyalty to King Henry VIII. Her lady-in-waiting, Mistress Lee, helped remove her cape and black cap, replacing the latter with a white cap. Her eyes now blindfolded with a linen handkerchief, Anne knelt. As she did so the executioner extracted the sword from under the straw where he had considerately concealed it, and signalled to his assistant to approach the Queen. On hearing his footsteps, Anne turned her head slightly; immediately, the sword swept down and, with one blow, severed the head.

Instantly, blood gushed forth over the scaffold boards, the spectators gasping in horror as, the executioner holding the head up high, they saw that the eyes and the lips were still moving convulsively.

Gently, her remains were placed in an old arrow chest obtained by a Yeoman Warder, no coffin having been provided; they were taken into the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, within the Tower, and, after a blessing, they were buried under the altar.

In 1876 exhumation of all those buried there took place, the excavations beneath the altar revealing the remains of a young female, ‘having a well-formed round skull, intellectual forehead, straight orbital ridge, large eyes and a square, full chin’. From these and other characteristics it was concluded that they were consistent with public descriptions of the Queen, and those portrayed in numerous pictures of royalty. Those remains, together with those deemed to be of Queen Catherine Howard and others of noble birth, were reinterred in separate thick lead coffins which, after the covers had been soldered down, were then sealed in boxes made of inch-thick oak planks, the lids being secured with copper screws.

Each outer coffin bore a leaden escutcheon with the name of the person supposedly enclosed, and were buried 4 inches below the surface of the altar, the whole area then being concreted and overlaid with green, red and white mosaic marble, the designs incorporating the names and crests of the victims.

Across the world, in Ghana, Africa, swords were also the chosen method of execution during the last century. In 1824 Sir Charles McCarthy, governor of what was then known as the Gold Coast, set out with 600 men to quell an uprising by the Ashanti tribe. Convinced that there would be little opposition, his force was suddenly surrounded by a much superior number of the natives, who forthwith attacked. With rue Victorian spirit, Sir Charles ordered the band to strike up he National Anthem and to continue playing it, which it did, but even this had no deterrent value; worse was to follow for, on opening the ammunition boxes, it was found that by some appalling mismanagement back at base, the boxes contained not the ball cartridges they so desperately needed but hard biscuits!

These were as useless in defence as was the band’s ceaseless rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’, and within a short time the brave force had been overrun, the survivors being marched to the native village. There, each one was ceremonially decapitated, the heads of the governor and his staff, adorned with gold bands and jewels, being taken to Kumasi, the capital, there to be displayed in the Royal Treasure House.

Before being exhibited, the top of Sir Charles’s skull was sawn off and, even more handsomely ornamented, was afterwards used as a drinking cup by the kings of Ashanti as a tribute to the man who, although an enemy, had fought so bravely against them.

Although most countries considered that decapitation by sword was an honourable and privileged way in which to executed, in China the very opposite applied, for it was deemed that the head, the principal part of the human body, should, on burial, always remain unmutilated and integral with the torso.

Those whose crimes warranted a disgraceful death were therefore decapitated by the sword, the same type of two-handed weapon used in the west. In his book
The Chinese and Their Rebellions
, T. T. Meadows describes in graphic detail a Chinese execution he and his colleagues witnessed during his travels in that country in 1851:

‘The criminals were brought in, the greater number walking, but many carried in large baskets of bamboo, each of which was attached to a pole and borne by two men. We observed that the strength of the men so carried were altogether gone, either from excess of fear or from the treatment they had met with during their imprisonment and trial.

They fell powerless together as they were tumbled out on the spots where they were to die, and were immediately raised up to a kneeling position and supported thus by the man who stands behind them. The following is the manner of decapitation. There is no block, the criminal simply kneels with his face parallel to the earth, thus leaving his neck exposed in a horizontal position. His hands, crossed and tied behind his back, are grasped by the man behind who, by tilting them up, is enabled in some degree to keep the neck at the proper level.

Sometimes, though very rarely, the criminal resists to the last by throwing back his head. In such cases a second assistant goes in front and, taking the long Chinese tail or queue, normally kept rolled into a knot on top of the head, by dragging at it, pulls the head out horizontally.

The sword usually employed is only about three feet long, inclusive of a six-inch handle, and the blade is not broader than an inch and a half at the hilt, narrowing and slightly curving towards the point. It is not thick, and is in fact the short and by no means heavy sabre worn by the Chinese military officers when on duty.

The executioners, who are taken from the ranks of the army, are indeed very frequently required by the officers to “flesh their maiden swords” for them. This is called “kae kow”, opening the edge, and is supposed to endow the weapon with a certain power of killing.

The sabre is firmly held with both hands, the right hand in front, with the thumb projecting over and grasping the hilt. The executioner, with his feet planted some distance apart to brace himself, holds the sabre for an instant at the right angle to the neck, about a foot above it, in order to take aim at a joint in the vertebrae; then, with a sharp order to the criminal of “Don’t move!” he raises it straight before him, as high as his head, and brings it down rapidly with the full force of both arms, giving additional force to the cut by dropping his body perpendicularly to a sitting position at the moment the sword touches the neck. He never makes a second cut, and the head is seldom left attached even by a portion of the skin, but is completely severed.

On the present occasion, 33 of the criminals were arranged in rows with their heads towards the south, where we were standing. In the extreme front, the narrowness of the ground only left space for one man at about five yards from us; then came two in a row, then four, five, etc.

The executioner, with the sleeves of his jacket rolled up, stood at the side of the foremost criminal. He was a well-bulk, vigorous-looking man of middle size; he had nothing of the brutal or ferocious look in his appearance, as one is led to expect, but on the contrary had good features and an intelligent expression.

He stood with his eyes fixed on the military officer who was the superintendent and as soon as the latter gave the word “pan”, punish, he threw himself into the position described above and commenced his work. Either from nervousness or some other cause, he did not succeed in severing the first head completely, so that, after it fell forward with the body, the features kept moving for a while, in ghastly contortions.

In the meantime the executioner was going on with his terrible task. He appeared to get somewhat excited, flinging aside a sword after it had been twice or thrice used, seizing a fresh one held out ready by an assistant, and then throwing himself by a single bound into position by the side of his next victim.

I think he cut off 33 heads in somewhat less than three minutes, all but the first being completely severed. Most of the trunks fell forward the instant the head was off; but I observed that in some three or four cases, where the criminals were men apparently possessing their mental and physical faculties in full strength, the headless bodies stood quite upright, and would, I am certain, have sprung into the air, had they not been restrained by the living man behind them; till, the impulse given them in the last instant of existence being expended, a push threw them forward to their heads...

Immediately after the first body fell, I observed a man put himself in a sitting posture by the criminal’s neck and, with a business-like air, commence dipping in the blood a bunch of rush pith. When it was well saturated, he put it carefully by on a pile of adjacent pottery, and then proceeded to saturate another bunch, for the saturated rush pith is used by the Chinese as a medicine.

When all the executions were over, a lad of about fifteen or sixteen, an assistant or servant, I presume, of the executioner, took a sabre and, placing one foot on the back of the first body, with the left hand seized hold of the head – which I have already said was not entirely cut off and sawed away at the unsevered portion of the neck until he had cut through it. The other bodies were in the meantime being deposited in coffins of unplaned deal boards.’

It is of interest to note the somewhat different technique adopted by the Chinese executioners to that of their counterparts in the west, in that the victim’s neck is held horizontally, the executioner then chopping almost vertically. This contrasts with the Continental style of swinging the blade horizontally at the neck of a victim kneeling upright.