Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (8 page)

Despite all the precautions taken in the prison he, with the aid of his cellmate, a mason, managed to make a hole in the sewer gallery beneath the floor. Falling in the water, they waded to the end of the gallery and, removing a large stone, emerged in the cellar of a greengrocer’s. In the shop itself they disturbed the man’s dog, its barking raising the alarm, and although the greengrocer would have allowed them to flee four policemen, alerted by the uproar, arrived and recognised Cartouche by the short lengths of chain still attached to his wrists and ankles.

Because of this escapade, Cartouche was transferred to the dreaded Conciergerie prison and sentenced to be tortured and then broken on the wheel. Charles Sanson, as his duty demanded, visited his client, and later commented that Cartouche’s head was extraordinarily developed; his hair was thin and shaggy and the eyes were not wanting in malice. He also expressed his surprise that a man so ugly should have been reputedly such a ladykiller.

On 27 November Cartouche was tortured in the brodequins but refused to divulge the names of his accomplices. Meanwhile, carpenters were preparing the scaffold. But let Barbier’s Journal take up the tale:

‘All night long, on Thursday 26th, nacres [four-wheeled cabs] carried passengers to the Place de Grève, until it was jammed with people all waiting for the event. Windows facing the square were lit all night. The cold was biting, but the crowd lit fires right in the square and local merchants sold food and drink. Everyone was laughing, drinking, singing. Most of the spectators had had their places reserved for over a month...’

About four o’clock on execution day, Sanson, accompanied by his assistants, went to the Conciergerie, where the clerk, having first read out the sentence to the prisoner, handed him over to them. Cartouche was very pale, but neither the sufferings he had endured nor the prospect of his approaching death had made any impression on him: he was buoyed up by the prospect of being acclaimed a public hero once the crowds saw him on the scaffold. Once there, he was bound to the St Andrew’s Cross. As the spectators crowded nearer, the iron bar descended, methodical blows shattering shin and thigh, lower and upper arm, the voice of Cartouche growing fainter as agony overwhelmed him.

As serious as his crimes were, he had been granted the privilege of retentum, to be strangled after a certain number blows. But this had been omitted from the warrant, and Sanson later commented that, to his surprise, Cartouche was only strong enough to endure 11 blows of the club but actually lived for 20 minutes after first being placed on the wheel.

In 1705, during the persecution of the Huguenots, plotters against the government held a meeting at the house of a certain M. de Boéton de St-Laurent d’Aigorse in the town of Milland in France. Some time later Boéton waiting, with his customary trust in God, for the day when the plot was due to be put into operation, was suddenly aroused by armed troops and placed under arrest. Faithful to his peaceful creed, he held out his hands and submitted to being pinioned. He was taken in triumph to Nîmes, and from there to the citadel of Montpellier.

Meanwhile, the scaffold had been erected on the Esplanade, and on it the St Andrew’s cross waited, its four arms having had hollows scooped in them so that only the elbow and knee joints of the victim’s limbs would rest on the timber. This fearsome modification meant that the rest of his arm and leg bones were entirely unsupported, thereby allowing them to be more easily shattered. At one of the corners of the scaffold a small carriage wheel hung on a pivot, the upper edges of it having been cut in a serrated fashion resembling a saw. Upon this bed of agony the victim would be stretched after having had his limbs shattered, so that the spectators would be able to watch his final convulsions.

Boéton was taken to the Esplanade in a tumbril, surrounded by drummers so that his exhortations could not be heard. When the cart reached the scaffold, the officers had to assist him to ascend for, like previous victims, his legs had been lacerated in the brodequins. As soon as he stepped on to the scaffold he voluntarily stretched himself on the cross, but the executioner told him he must undress. Rising again, he allowed the assistant to remove his doublet and trousers; as he wore no stockings, but simply the linen bandages wrapped around his wounded legs, he removed the bandages then turned back the sleeves of his shirt to the elbow. As he resumed his position on the cross, the assistant bound him tightly to its wooden arms.

A grim silence fell over the crowds surrounding the scaffold as the executioner approached, holding a square iron bar about 3 feet long, 1½ inches square, with a rounded handle. On seeing it Boéton started to sing a Psalm, but almost immediately interrupted it with a faint cry as the executioner broke the bone of his right leg.

He resumed his singing, however, an instant later, and kept it up without stopping, although the executioner proceeded to break, one after the other, the right thigh, the other shin and thigh, and each arm in two places. He then detached from the wheel the shapeless, mutilated trunk, still living and singing the praises of God, and, picking it up, laid it on the small wheel, with the poor, mangled legs folded beneath the body, so that the heels were touching the back of the head. Through the whole atrocious performance the victim’s weak and tremulous voice never for one instant ceased to sing the praise of the Lord.

So appalled were those watching the savage suffering which was being inflicted that the magistrate, M. de Baville, ordered the victim to be put out of his misery. Accordingly, the executioner stepped forward and, as a few inarticulate sounds of prayer came from the shattered being on the wheel, he used the iron bar and with all his strength brought it down on the victim’s chest. Boéton’s head fell back and, with a sigh, he died.

The year 1788 saw the last time that the wheel was in action, and ironically enough it was also the first time it had ever resulted in a happy ending. No treasonable plots were involved, no assassins or martyrs had to be dispatched. It all started with a family quarrel.

Mathurin Louschart was an old man, living only for his work in the smithy. Set in his ways and beliefs, he was concerned when Jean, his son, expressed views of a republican nature, views that clashed severely with those of his father. Following an argument, Jean left the house, returning some nights later in the hopes of seeing Hélène, the daughter of Mathurin’s housekeeper. Hélène’s mother, however, had other plans for Hélène, hoping to marry her to the old man, a plan vehemently rejected by Hélène.

When Jean approached the house he heard screams. Entering, he found his father and the housekeeper about to beat Hélène for her intractability. At the interruption Mathurin angrily picked up a heavy hammer and attempted to strike his son, but Jean snatched it from him and turning to leave, contemptuously threw the hammer back into the room. It was not until he was arrested that he knew the hammer had struck his father and had killed him.

At the trial he was found guilty of murder. Resigned to his fate, convinced that he thoroughly deserved to die for having murdered his own father, he almost welcomed the sentence of being broken on the wheel. Public opinion, however, was strongly in his favour, appreciating that it was a sheer, if fatal, accident, and the locals decided that justice would not be done by executing the young man.

Charles-Henri Sanson, who supervised the siting of the wheel, grew nervous at the threatening attitude of the villagers, and reported to his superiors that there could be trouble on the morrow. He got little reassurance from them so he had a palisade erected around the wheel. Placing his men on guard, he decided to bring the execution forward to a time when all the inhabitants would still be in bed. Yet when he went to collect his prisoner he was shocked and surprised to find the streets lined with jeering crowds as he escorted Jean to the Place St Louis. His surprise changed to apprehension when, from the crowd, Hélène shouted goodbye to her lover, only for another onlooker to shout: ‘Not goodbye, but au revoir!’

Desperate to avoid trouble and get the execution over as soon as possible, Sanson hustled Jean on to the scaffold. But the crowd would not be cheated. Just as Sanson and his assistants secured Jean to the wheel, the villagers rushed forward. Clambering on to the scaffold, they overwhelmed the officials and, cutting the prisoner free, proceeded to demolish not only the wheel but the St Andrew’s cross and the very scaffold itself. They threw the timbers on to the fire which had been kindled to burn the broken body of the victim, while the horrified executioner watched from a safe distance.

When news of the debacle reached King Louis XVI in Paris, he pardoned Jean Louschart. Later that year, he decreed that the penalty of being broken on the wheel should be abolished. Regrettably, history did not record whether Jean married Hélène.

Across the border in Belgium, dying on the wheel was also the penalty for murder, and not only for men, either, for a young woman who had stabbed her husband to death was sentenced to be broken on the wheel.

She pleaded that she might be allowed ‘to appear on the scaffold with that decent degree of covering which may screen my naked limbs’. Permission forthcoming, she was executed wearing a jacket and pantaloons of white satin.

In 1776 John Howard, prison reformer, visited Holland, and in his State of the Prisons reported that murderers in that country were put to death by being broken not on the wheel but on a cross laid flat upon the scaffold.

By 1805, however, the wheel was back in action, five people being put to death in that manner for murdering a family in Delft.

Howard also referred to the wheel being used as a penalty in Denmark for more heinous crimes. Following confirmation of their sentence, prisoners were given from eight to fourteen days in which to prepare for death, as the chaplain attending them considered necessary. They were confined, Howard said, to their cell or dungeon at night, but were allowed to move into an upper room during the day. As if being broken on the wheel were not punishment enough, the right hands of traitors were first amputated.

It would seem that dying on the wheel was also once the practice in Russia, for Howard commented that during his visit to St Petersburg he was shown not only instruments for slitting the nostrils, and a collection of vicious-looking knouts (whips), but also ‘a machine for breaking the arms and legs’ though he was assured that it was no longer in use.

For some reason the wheel never caught on as an instrument of punishment in England, prolonged strangulation by the rope probably being considered more humane. Isolated cases did occur in Scotland, however. Reports stated that trooper Cawdor, the assassin of Lennox, the regent, was broken on the wheel in 1571. Twenty years later, on 30 April 1591, John Dickson was similarly mutilated and executed for the murder of his father. And Birell’s diary records that ‘Robert Weir was broken on ane cart wheel, in the hands of the hangman, for murdering the guidman of Warriston, whilk he did on 2 Julii 1601’.

Another country in which the wheel was widely used to administer capital punishment in the Middle Ages was Germany. Here the method varied slightly from that of France in that the wheel rested on a tripod, the top of which passed through the hub, the nave.

This facility allowed the wheel to be rotated while in use. The spectators on all sides of the scaffold were thereby afforded a good view of the suffering victim, and the executioner didn’t have to expend energy in walking around the wheel to ply his iron bar.

The height of the wheel also varied – 3 feet was the minimum – and the blows were delivered from either above or below. The punishment was more drastic than in other European countries, up to 40 blows being regularly delivered. No strangling cord was used, the coup de grâce being a blow aimed at the chest or the nape of the neck.

In the sixteenth century the Warden of the Wheel in Nuremberg was Master Franz Schmidt, the public executioner, who bestrode the scaffold from 1573 to 1617. That he was well practised in his art is evidenced by the fact that during his 44 years of service he executed no fewer than 400 law-breakers by hanging, drowning, beheading or on the wheel. Tall, bearded, well built, always sober, Franz prided himself on his professionalism, meting out the court’s sentences with dedication blended with whatever mercy was deserved, especially where female criminals were concerned.