If a murderess, inconceivably callous and cruel, could die with dignity, what of the countless scenes where innocence was sacrificed to ambition, and where the best and noblest blood of Europe was shed upon the block? What of the death of Conradin on a Neapolitan scaffold? In the thirteenth century, boys grew quickly into manhood, and Conradin was seventeen. He had embarked early upon that desperate game, of which the prize was a throne, and the forfeit, life. He had missed his throw, and earned his penalty. But he was the grandson of an emperor, the heir of an imperial crown, and the last of a proud race. There was a pathetic boyishness in the sudden defiance with which he hurled his glove into the throng, and in the low murmur of his mother’s name. The headsman had a bitter part to play that day, for Conradin’s death is one of the world’s tragedies; but there are other scaffolds upon which we still glance back with a pity fresh enough for pain. When Count Egmont and Admiral Horn were beheaded in the great square of Brussels, the executioner wisely hid beneath the black draperies until it was time for him to do his work. He had no wish to parade himself as part of that sad show.
In England the rules of etiquette were never more binding than upon those who were about to be beheaded. When the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Holland, and Lord Capel went to the block together, they were told they must die in the order of their rank, as though they were going in to dinner; and upon Lord Capel’s offering to address the crowd without removing his hat, it was explained to him that this was incorrect. The scaffold was not the House of Parliament, and those who graced it were expected to uncover. On a later and very memorable occasion, the Earl of Kilmarnock, “with a most just mixture of dignity and submission,” offered the melancholy precedence to Lord Balmerino. That gallant soldier—“a natural, brave old gentleman,” says Horace Walpole, though he was but fifty-eight—would have mounted first, but the headsman interfered. Even upon the scaffold, a belted earl enjoyed the privileges of his rank.
All this formality must have damped the spirits of the condemned; but it seems to have been borne with admirable gayety and good temper. Lord Balmerino, “decently unmoved,” was ready to die first or last, and he gave the punctilious executioner three guineas, to prove that he was not impatient. “He looked quite unconcerned,” says an eye-witness, “and like some one going on a party of pleasure, or upon some business of little or no importance.” Lord Lovat, beheaded at eighty for his active share in the Jacobite rising of ‘forty-five, derived much amusement from the vast concourse of people assembled to witness his execution;—an amusement agreeably intensified by the giving way of some scaffolding, which occasioned the unexpected death of several eager sight-seers. “The more mischief, the better sport,” said the old lord grimly, and proceeded to quote Ovid and Horace with fine scholarly zest. If the executioner were seldom a person of education, it was from no lack of opportunity. He might, had he chosen, have learned at his post much law and more theology. When Archbishop Laud stood waiting by the block, Sir John Clotworthy conceived it to be a seasonable occasion for propounding some knotty points of doctrine. The prelate courteously answered one or two questions, but time pressed, and controversy had lost its charms. Even so good a churchman may be pardoned for turning wearily away from polemics, when his life’s span had narrowed down to minutes, and the headsman waited by his side.
In the burial registry of Whitechapel, under the year 1649, is the following entry:—
“June 21st, Richard Brandon, a man out of Rosemary Lane. This Brandon is held to be the man who beheaded Charles the First.”
“Held to be” only, for the mystery of the King’s executioner was one which long excited and baffled curiosity. Wild whispers credited the deed to men of rank and station, among them Viscount Stair, the type of strategist to whom all manner of odium naturally and reasonably clings. A less distinguished candidate for the infamy was one William Hewlett, actually condemned to death after the Restoration for a part he never played, and saved from the gallows only by the urgent efforts of a few citizens who swore that Brandon did the deed. Brandon was not available for retribution. He had died in his bed, five months after Charles was beheaded, and had been hurried ignominiously into his grave in Whitechapel churchyard. As public executioner of London, he could hardly escape his destiny; but it is said that remorse and horror shortened his life. In his supposed “Confession,” a tract widely circulated at the time, he claimed that he was “fetched out of bed by a troup of horse,” and carried against his will to the scaffold. Also that he was paid thirty pounds, all in half-crowns, for the work; and had “an orange stuck full of cloves, and a handkerchief out of the King’s pocket.” The orange he sold for ten shillings in Rosemary Lane.
The shadow that falls across the headsman’s path deepens in horror when we contemplate the scaffolds of Charles, of Louis, of Marie Antoinette, and of Mary Stuart. The hand that has shed royal blood is stained forever, yet the very magnitude of the offence lends to it a painful and terrible distinction. It is the zenith as well as the nadir of the headsman’s history; it is the corner-stone of the impassable barrier which divides the axe and the sword from the hangman’s noose, the death of Strafford from the death of Jonathan Wild.
If we turn the page, and look for a moment at the “gallows tree,” we find that it has its romantic and its comic side, but the comedy is boisterous, the romance savours of melodrama. For centuries one of the recognized amusements of the English people was to see men hanged, and the leading features of the entertainment were modified from time to time to please a popular taste. Dr. Johnson, the sanest as well as the best man of his day, highly commended these public executions as “satisfactory to all parties. The public is gratified by a procession, the criminal is supported by it.” That the enjoyment was often mutual, it is impossible to deny. There was a world of meaning in the gentle custom, supported for years by a very ancient benefaction, of giving a nosegay to the condemned man on his way to Tyburn. Before the cart climbed Holborn Hill,—“the heavy hill” as it was called, with a touch of poetry rivalling the “Bridge of Sighs,”—it stopped at Saint Sepulchre’s church, and on the church steps stood one bearing in his hands the flowers that were to yield their fresh fragrance to the dying. Nor were the candidates without their modest pride. When the noted chimney-sweep, Sam Hall, achieved the honour of a hanging, he was rudely jostled, and bidden to stand off by a highwayman, stepping haughtily into the cart, and annoyed at finding himself in such low company. “Stand off, yourself!” was the indignant answer of the young sweep. “I have as good a right to be here as you have.”
“Nothing,” says Voltaire, “is so disagreeable as to be obscurely hanged,” and the loneliness which in this moral age encompasses the felon’s last hours should be as salutary as it is depressing. Mr. Housman, who gets closer to the plain thoughts of plain men than any poet of modern times, has given stern expression to the awful aloofness of the condemned criminal from his fellow creatures, an aloofness unknown in the cheerful, brutal days of old.
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail: