THE RIDE TO TYBURN.
—“And where didst meet him?
Upon mine own freehold within forty feet of the gallows, conning his neck verse.”
—Jew of Malta.
—“Who doth (Time) gallop withal?
With a thief to the gallows; for though he goeth as softly as foot can fall, he thinks himself too soon there.”
—As You Like It.
At the house of the sheriff in Deptford, Anne waited many long days for Bame to appear with her father. No news of Bame’s arrest reached her ears, and no answer came to her message to Marlowe. At length an opportunity arose to send another messenger to Canterbury, this time by no circuitous route; but, despite its delivery, Manuel Crossford did not appear to secure her liberation. The wished-for reconciliation between father and daughter did not take place until many months later; but before the month of June had passed, the aid which Anne had sought from those nearest to her through blood and family ties, came in the person of a maid in the house of the sheriff. This maid had been deputized to attend upon the fair prisoner. As might have been expected she was easily won over, and on a dark night an escape was effected through unbolted doors, and a boat which lay ready on the Thames. The maid had enlisted the services of a lad who would have crossed the sea at her bidding, and by him they were conveyed up the river to London, where, in a quarter at some distance from her former home with her aunt, and in ignorance of what was transpiring with Bame and Marlowe, we must leave her and return to those characters who had become involved in a web from which there was no possible extrication.
The boy Pence had been set at liberty. His companions, Pento and Badly, had suffered capital punishment. Bame would have immediately met the same fate, but an extra effort was made in his behalf.
Eliot’s attempts to learn something of Tamworth, and of his companion whose name was still unknown, proved fruitless. With their disappearance, all hope of a new trial for Bame was extinguished. But a writ of error was taken, and the case, after swinging back and forth between the courts, was finally determined adversely to the appellant. Bame was resentenced, and the day fixed was December 6th, 1594. It had at length dawned in the streets of London.
Bame saw the morning only through bars never gilded by sunlight, and this was the last daybreak he would ever witness. It had not aroused him from sleep, for he had walked the cell for eighteen hours without an intermission of rest, except as he had paused for a bite at the bread or for a swallow of water handed in by the turnkey. No death watch had been in the corridor; for prisoners awaiting execution in those days were too numerous to command any particular attention. Thus his meditations had been undisturbed, except by the hourly passing by the guard, whose footsteps only diverted his thoughts of the approaching last hour, to the momentary apprehension that it was at hand. At such times he would pause in his walk; glance at the window to see if the night had passed, and failing to recognize any difference between the gloom within and the gloom without the bars, would brush the sudden beads of perspiration from his brow and await the dying away of the disturbing footsteps.
Amid all the thoughts of the coming ordeal, there was one consolation that remained. It was in the mode of his prescribed death. The victims, of whose untimely fates he had been the prime spring, had met death in bitter agony at the stake; he was to be hung. While he had not gloated over the tortures of the condemned free-thinkers, he had deemed these tortures merited, and, as a late witness of the agonies of martyrs, he had at times fairly smiled at his own sentence.
There was one man amid the dense crowd, thronging the front of Newgate on that morning, who waited with something more than vulgar curiosity to see the condemned felon come forth. At an early hour, this man had mounted the stone block which stood on the edge of the street directly before the gates of the prison; and neither the threats of the approaching storm, nor its furious presence had driven him under shelter. Under the livid colored clouds, which still obscured the sky after the passing of the tempest, he maintained his position of vantage. It gave him a commanding view on all sides, and likewise made him a conspicuous figure. The tumbril bearing Bame would pass close before him. He could not fail in his accost of the condemned to secure his attention, and for this purpose he held this position. What was his ultimate design could not be read in the expression of his face or his demeanor. It might be that he intended by the fervor of devout utterance to strengthen the tried soul of the man entering the valley of shadow, or, on the contrary, to exhibit to the latter a gloating visage and hurl an execration in his face.
Whoever in the idle crowd questioned the design of this heavy man in leathern doublet who stood above them, remained only a short time in ignorance. The heavy gates swung open, and three men flourishing halberds cleared the way for a horse and open cart. Behind the cart came four armed riders, and the hangman in rough cassock and black hat. The cart bore two men. One was the driver. The other was a man in manacles who stood erect for the moment while the wheels run over the smooth pavement. As evidence of innocence, he wore a white cockade in his hat, and an expression of forced resignation appeared on his face. The crowd was silent for a moment, and then cheered him as they noticed his erect posture and the white cockade.
The horse had been reined in at the edge of the street for a moment while the crowd was being thrust back by the guard. Bame silenced the cheering by his effort to be heard above this demonstration. He repeated his words twice, and then they heard him.
“I have committed no crime,” he cried, “My death will be a judicial murder.”
Contrary to his expectations, the words did not revive the applause that had preceded them. This was occasioned by another voice that rang out in clear and louder accents:
“The dog lies. He should be strangled before he reaches the gallows. A public accuser! a public informer!”
Bame turned his head, and on his elevated perch he saw Gyves, the ex-constable. The crowd saw him too, and in its fickleness cheered him and then hooted and threw mud and stones at Bame. The latter was knocked into a sitting posture by the missiles where he remained trembling from fear of a more violent assault being made. Up to that moment he had prayed for death in any form, except at the hands of the hangman; but in the sudden and unexpected presence of mob violence, fierce and strong enough to crush out all life, he forgot the incentive of his prayers.
The driver’s hat had been knocked from his head, and this angered him so that he swore loudly and called vile names even at the man who picked the fallen hat from the ground and threw it into the cart. At the same time he sent the long lash of his whip cracking and smarting into the faces of the front row of the crowd. They fell back, jeering at him.
“Kill him, too!” they yelled.
“A fit mate for the felon!”
“He handles his reins like Tyburn hemp!”
“An apprentice for the hangman!”
“Take that!”
“And that!”
Another volley of stones and mud followed. Bame lay flat in the cart and escaped injury, but the driver fell back stunned, with the reins in his nerveless hands. Then there was a discharge of firearms. The guards had leveled their blunderbusses and puffs of smoke curled upwards from the wide mouths. The mob turned and broke away precipitately on all sides, leaving two who had fallen with the report of the firearms, and now lay outstretched on the stone pavement. One of them was Gyves. His late prominence and appearance as the leading spirit of the mob had made him the mark for more than one of the guards, and his body was riddled with balls. Thus was the beginning of the ride marked with death, and the end was to be no less a tragedy.
While London was under the rule of the Plantagenets, the penalty pronounced against capital offenders was inflicted amid the elms in Smithfield; but under the piteous eyes of children from the windows of the encroaching dwellings of a rapidly increasing populace, the executioner bungled so badly in his frequent task, that early in the reign of the Tudors, the distant bank of the Tyburn was selected as a more suitable spot for carrying the death sentence into effect. Here, for a few years following, the surrounding fields remained open, and none but the constant mob from Faringdon ward looked upon the unsightly object under the “Tyburn tree.” This mob followed the cart of the condemned in all seasons and under all skies. On dry roads it was enveloped in dust; the mud was beaten down by its untiring feet in stormy seasons, and while it was compact in body upon leaving Newgate it was a scattered procession in its retreat from Tyburn.
The Tyburn road started amid thick clustering buildings, but soon shaking itself free from these, it ran on, wide and firm, by bordering dwellings, tippling houses and inns, into the open country, where it straggled and seemed aimless in its purpose. But this seeming was only to quiet the thousands of wretches who were carried over its surface on their last ride. For them there were three miles of hard travel, and at the end of each intermediate mile, hope could kindle in their breasts that the ride might be only the beginning of a journey into exile. In summer they saw broad fields of grain; felt the cool shade of forests; heard the songs of birds; or, in the dead season of the year, reaped from the vision of white hills a temporary respite from brooding melancholy.
The crowd that followed the cart bearing Bame was boisterous to a degree suggestive of immediate violence. They had, with blanched faces, seen the death meted out to two of their members; and while this scene had for a time appalled and silenced them, as they drew away from the close buildings in the outer ward of the city, their ill will against the guard and its prisoner became manifest through their murmurs and demeanor. They did not blame the guard so much as they did the prisoner. The guard had done its duty, undoubtedly; it was a mere instrument, but Bame had been the cause. The result lay at his door. The driver must press forward speedily, and the hangman must be unusually expeditious if the crowd was to be pacified.
Bame realized the situation, and contrary to the usual desire of Tyburn passengers, prayed for a speedy ride. There was the inn of the White Ox on ahead. Would it ever be reached? The wheels of the cart sunk so deep in the mud that it seemed as though at every yard they would stop turning. The guard flourished its weapons at the restless mob behind it, and still the procession moved. Here was the White Ox at last, and there at the front edge of its wide porch stood the man who had actually counted seven hundred and four condemned felons ride by the White Ox during that year. He thought that he had marked them on the inner edge of the white railing against which he was leaning, but he had missed at least two score driven by on several early hours while he was sleeping off the effect of some late-at-night potations. He had reason to count, for he was the tapster, and here the executioner always stopped for a drink. It was not to steady his nerves, for apparently he had none. The tapster had it ready when the cart stopped.
The man in the cassock and black hat rode close to the edge of the railing and took the glass from the tapster’s hand. As he raised it to his lips, he bowed in mock cheer to the sad-faced man in the tumbril as though to say, “This is to your good health.” However, he said nothing, except to the driver whom he admonished to drive more rapidly.
About three miles from the west wall of London, on what is now Oxford street, close at the foot of a small declivity, there stood at the time of our narrative a solitary building of two stories. Near this structure was a cluster of elm trees, and from them the place had received the title of “The Elms.” The building had been designed for an inn, but the locality was in such ill favor that very few occasions arose for its landlord to welcome the coming, and speed the parting guest. One side of the steep mossed roof sloped toward the muddy road; the other side touched the top of a lofty board fence. This fence surrounded the “triple tree of Tyburn,” as the gallows was called. The obnoxious structure whereon felonies were expiated was invisible to all travelers except those coming down the hill from where the bourne of Tye found its source; but the enclosing fence was such a subject of notice and inquiry, that strangers, as well as neighboring farmers, were glad to pass quickly by it. The tenant of the Elms, however, did not depend for livelihood upon the profits of the inn bar, its table or its beds. The key to the great gates of the fence hung within the tap-room, and there was revenue to the landlord for being its custodian. In the enclosure were raised seats and on “state” occasions these were in demand at fair prices, all of which were collected and retained by the keeper. This keeper was a woman, nicknamed Mother Peter.
As usual, Mother Peter had the gates open long before the procession arrived; and so, without a pause, into the enclosure passed the stern, compact and mounted body, representative of order, and after it the loose and disorderly mob. The latter filled the space between the widely separated gate posts as it poured in, a body of ill-clad flesh, of all ages and of both sexes, with brutal and repulsive faces, and audible from jeers, curses and loud laughter.
The enclosure was one of three acres with a flat open space in the center around whose edges rose tiers of seats sloping upward and backward to the fence’s top. In the center was a triangular platform, raised twenty feet above the ground, and having at each of its three corners an upright post each with a beam extending horizontally from its top. Broad steps led up to this platform, and on it was a bench and a table. On the table was an earthen jug and beside it an earthen bowl. In the table was a Bible. From the three horizontal arms, black ropes suspended, and every breeze swayed them.
The tumbril had stopped at the foot of the broad steps. Its footboard was let down and Bame descended from it. He stood there with a guard on each side, and the crowd drawn backward to standing places on the encircling seats. A feeling of weakness pervaded him as he glanced upward at the posts and their suspended ropes so ominous of evil to himself. He partially recovered his control while the guard and executioner were attending to their horses, and then, with them, he ascended the steps to the platform.
From the raised platform Bame could see across the top of the gates of the enclosure toward London. He looked absently in that direction, and at first saw nothing because of the tumult in his mind. Suddenly the scene swept into his field of consciousness, and under a dark canopy of smoke and cloud, he saw the distant city. No sunlight lay upon the myriad of walls that formed the picture. No gilded dome, nor window in visible towers, flashed to him a welcome or a warning. In the gloom, it seemed a city of death or sleep, and he felt it to be a vision, impalpable and evanescent. The broken steeple of St. Paul, the crumbling Roman wall, the fronts of familiar buildings, brought a rush of tender memories and a flood of tears. He could not brush this evidence of weakness aside, for his hands were bound; and so with outer vision blurred, the inner, or spiritual, became the real. The fields of morning appeared, and he passed through them as with the rapid wings of an angel, catching their scents and a sweetness of life like that known only to the barefooted boy when the grass is green and the day perfect and no duties confront him. Then the fire of the period of ambition filled him, and he saw his home, the deserted bench at which he once labored, the patient face of his wife and then the figure of Marlowe as he appeared to him under the blazing lights of the chantry. Ah! was it he? Yes. “And are not the charges false?” rises the question from a thousand voices.
He recognizes them all, and he attempts to say, “Yes, and let it be so recorded!” but he finds himself without voice. There is a darkness that is never to be lifted about him. He has a faint comprehension of the reason, but it grows into no verity. Verities are beyond him, so is the world with all its falseness. There is a close cloth over his face which stifles him. He feels bungling fingers about his neck, then the scraping of a rough substance in the same place. He imagines he cries:
“Unloose! Air, air! My God, save me!”
But in fact he had said nothing, and with these unuttered words upon his burning lips, he feels a terrific jar that seems an explosion in his own brain. All the world is aflame. Was there ever such an illumination? But, O God! what thrust was that through the center of life itself? This is pain in its purity. But, wait, hold but a moment, O ye fires! It groweth dark and darker. An absolute blackness is gathering with a swiftness incomprehensible; and a roar, as mighty and continuous as the ocean at steep headlands, fills his ears, increases and then dies utterly.
Bame was hanging under the Tyburn gallows.