Hyde Park, Its History and Romance

by Mrs. Alec-Tweedie

It was the earliest custom to tie the wretched victim by the heels, attach him by a rope to a horse’s tail, and thus drag him from gaol to the place of execution. Arrived at his destination, jeered and howled at all the way, and sorely bruised as he jolted over the rough roads to his death, he was placed on the gibbet. The rope, after much fumbling, was adjusted mid the yells of the spectators, and then the prisoner was hoisted on high by the executioner and his assistant, until slow suffocation ended his misery.

Later, for humanity’s sake, a rough hurdle was utilised, to which the condemned man was bound, and on this he was dragged to the gallows. Not until Stuart times was the malefactor’s springless cart introduced.

In only too many cases, however, the dread sentence of “hanged, drawn, and quartered” was carried out with all its attendant horrors. The condemned wretch, after he had been dangled from the gallows on a short rope for a considerable time, and undergone all the horrors of death by suffocation without its merciful release, was cut down still alive. Then he was stripped, his clothes being the executioner’s perquisite, and with his knife that functionary marked off the lines he would follow in carrying out the quartering. The victim was then disembowelled, the entrails being thrown on a fire and burnt before his dying eyes. The head was decapitated. Finally, the mutilated corpse was divided into four pieces, which were sometimes salted or par-boiled, and, with the head, made five ghastly evidences of the consequences that would befall those who offended the higher powers. These “bits” were sent for exhibition in five different localities where it was supposed that such warning would be most beneficial.

Anything more horrible cannot be imagined. And yet a crowd always assembled to witness the scene. Men, women, and children scrambled for a front view, and the grand ladies and smart gentlemen of comparatively refined times did not appear to consider it degrading to watch a person hanged by the neck until he was dead. In fact, the morbid love of such horrors pursued us till a much later date, for murderers were publicly hanged outside Newgate, on a busy thoroughfare of the City of London, as recently as 1866.

Perkin Warbeck—“that little cockatrice of a king,” as Bacon calls him—was one of the mediæval victims who met his end at Tyburn in 1499. With him went to their death the servants who were found conniving at his escape from the Tower. No character in the arena of history at that period has more glamour of romance about it than that of Warbeck. Even the most unbiassed writers seem to waver as to whether he was really the Duke of York or an impostor, so readily did he tell the tale of how he, as the little prince, had escaped from the Tower, and now as a grown man came to claim his heritage. In his imprisonment he had twice made bids for freedom, been captured, and made to read a confession—on the second occasion a public avowal, standing in Cheapside—after which he was again confined in the Tower.

It has been alleged by some historians that this was a mere scheme of Henry VII. to place him in contact with the Earl of Warwick, the son of George, Duke of Clarence, and heir of the House of York, who had been kept a prisoner in the Tower until he was practically bordering on imbecility. The presence of this man would be a greater temptation to Warbeck to make another attempt to gain his freedom, and probably it would give the King an opportunity to rid himself of both these claimants of Royal descent. The Earl of Warwick was beheaded on Tower Hill, and Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn. For his end we can again refer to Stow:

“Perken Warbeke—being in holde, by great promises corrupted his keepers, named Strangwais, Blewet, Astwood, and long Roger, servants to sir I. Digby, lieutenant of the Tower (as was affirmed) intended to have slaine their Master, to have set Perken and the Earle of Warwick at large; which Earle of Warwick had been kept in prison within the Tower (as yee have heard) from the first yeere of this king to this 15 yeere out of all companie of men and sight of beasts, and therefore could not of himselfe seeke his owne destruction, but by other he was brought to his death, for being made privie of this enterprise devised by Perken and his complices, he assented thereunto: but this devise being revealed Perken and I. a Waters, sometime Maior of Corke in Ireland, were arraigned and condemned at Westminster and on the 23 of November drawn to Tiborne, where Perken read his former confession as before he had done in Cheape, taking on his death the same to bee true, and so hee & Iohn a Water asked the King forgivenesse, and tooke their deaths patiently. And shortly after Walter Blewt and Thomas Astwood were hanged at Tyborne.”

When Henry VIII. was King, Tyburn was yet more busy. The lesser victims of that monarch’s policy and ambition, for whom the axe and block were considered too good, were sent out of the Tower to the loathsome prisons of the day, to meet an ignominious end under the gallows. A long, sad procession they made, many priests among them, martyrs for the Catholic faith.

Some of the most pathetic figures were the prior and monks from the Charter House, whose execution is thus described in the Contemporary Spanish Chronicle of Henry VIII., edited by Martin Hume.

“The monks of the Charter House refused to take the oath to Henry as head of the Church (June 1535).