the two places of execution. Tyebourne has been ingeniously derived from the two words "Tye" and "bourne," the last a bourne or resting-place for prisoners who were taken bound. Pennant gives the derivation "Tye," the name of a brook or "bourne" which flowed through it.
In Loftie's "History of London" he points out that the Tyburn of earliest times was a bleak heath situated at the end of the Marylebone Lane as we know it, and which, as it approached the town, had two branches. He suggests that the brook or "bourne" also divided into two, hence the name "Teo Burne," or two streams. Mr. Waller gives the same derivation, and in one of the earliest mentions of the Tyburn, an ancient chapter at Westminster, dated 951, it is called Teoburne.
There were many Tyburns, however, and as in London the gallows were moved farther and farther westward of the building of houses, so the name of Tyburn travelled from Marylebone Lane to Edgeware Road. As time passed on it came to be the generic name for all places of execution, and was used at York, Liverpool, Dublin, and elsewhere. Tyburn was a kind of Golgotha, a place of infamy and disgrace. When Colonel Blood seized the Duke of Ormond in St. James's Street it was with the avowed intention of carrying him to Tyburn, there to be hanged like a common criminal.
The exact position of the Tyburn gallows has been a matter of some controversy. Mr. Robins
places the Elms Lane as the first turning to the right in the Uxbridge Road after getting into it from the Grand Junction Road opposite the Serpentine. In Smith's "History of Marylebone," he states that the gallows stood on a small eminence at the corner of the Edgeware Road near the turnpike. Other authorities fix the place in Connaught Square; because in a lease of one of the houses, No. 49, granted by the Bishop of London, the fact that the gallows once stood on the site is expressly mentioned in the parchment. It was commonly reported that many human bones were exhumed between Nos. 6 and 12, Connaught Place, as well as in the garden of Arklow House, which stands at the southwest angle of the Edgeware Road. But Mr. Loftie states as a matter of fact that no such discovery was ever made. A careful but fruitless search at the time Connaught Place was built produced a single bone, probably part of a human jaw-bone, but nothing more. As to Arklow House, the report is distinctly denied by the owner himself. It is, however, pretty certain that at a later date the gallows were kept at a house at the corner of Upper Bryanston Street and the Edgeware Road, in front of which they were erected when required.
A detailed account has been preserved of the execution of Colonel John Turner in 1662, which presents a strange picture of the way in which the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in those days. The scene of the execution was not Tyburn
but a place in Leadenhall Street at Lime Street end, a spot near the place where the deed for which Turner suffered was perpetrated. An immense crowd had gathered, as usual, to witness the convict's death. Pepys was there of course, as he tells us; "and after sending my wife to my Aunt Wright's, to get a place to see Turner hanged, I to Change." On his way he met people flocking to the place of execution, and mingling with the crowd, somewhere about St. Mary Axe, "got to stand upon the wheel of a cart for a shilling in great pain above an hour before the execution was done: he delaying the time by long discourses and prayers one after another in hopes of a reprieve, but none came."
Turner was drawn in a cart from Newgate at eleven in the morning, accompanied by the ordinary and another minister with the sheriffs, keeper of the gaol, and other officials in attendance. On coming to the gibbet he called the executioner to him, and presented him with money in lieu of his clothes, which his friends desired to keep. Then standing in the cart, he addressed the crowd with great prolixity. He dwelt on the cardinal sins; he gave a circumstantial account of his birth, parentage, family history; he detailed his war services as a loyal cavalier, with his promotions and various military rewards. With much proper feeling he sought to lessen the blame attached to his accomplices in the murder, and to exonerate the innocent
accused. At intervals in this long discourse he was interrupted now by the sheriffs with broad hints to despatch, now by the ordinary as to the irrelevance and impropriety of such remarks from a man about to die. Again the keeper of Newgate taxed him with other crimes, saying, for example, "Pray, Colonel Turner, do you know nothing of a glass jewel delivered to the Countess of Devonshire in room of another?" or "How about the fire in Lothbury, or the mysterious death of your namesake Turner, who died in your house?"
The condemned man discoursed at great length upon these various points, and was again and again reminded that it would be better for him to prepare for his approaching end. Still he continued his harangue and took a new departure when he remembered the condition of the condemned hold of Newgate, into which he had been cast after coming from the sessions. This hole, as it was called, he characterizes as "a most fearful, sad, deplorable place. Hell itself in comparison cannot be such a place. There is neither bench, stool nor stick for any person there; they lie like swine upon the ground, one upon another, howling and roaring—it was more terrible to me than this death. I would humbly beg that hole may be provided with some kind of boards, like a court of guard, that a man may lie down upon them in ease; for when they should be best prepared for their ends they are most tormented; they had better take them and hang