When King Charles II. came back “to his own” in 1660, the triangular gallows at Tyburn was evidently a structure of respectable antiquity. Already it was known to all the populace by its nickname of the “Triple Tree,” which it kept for more than a century. Death was a common state at Tyburn; it was, however, reserved for this strange, easy-going, good-natured voluptuary to hang men who were already dead there.
Amid all the horrible scenes enacted at Tyburn, none are more ghastly than the stupid, purposeless indignities wreaked by Charles and his licentious Parliament, a year after his restoration, on the bodies of the regicides, whom death had withdrawn from his active vengeance. The story is briefly told in the little weekly sheet which served the purpose of a newspaper in those days:[3]
“This day, Jan. 30, (we need say no more but name the day of the Moneth) was doubly observed, not onely by a Solemn Fast, Sermons and Prayers at every Parish Church, for the precious of our late pious Sovereign King Charles the First of ever glorious Memory; but also by publick dragging those odious carcasses of Oliver Cromwel, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw, to Tyburne. On Monday night, Cromwel and Ireton were drawn to Holborn from Westminster, where they were digged up on Saturday last, and the next morning Bradshaw. To-day they were drawn upon Sledges to Tyburne; all the way (as before from Westminster) the universal out-cry and curses of the people went along with them. When these three carcasses were at Tyburn, they were pull’d out of their Coffins, and hang’d at the several angles of that Triple Tree, where they hung till the Sun was set; after which, they were taken down, their heads cut off, and their loathsome trunks thrown into a deep hole under the gallows.”
So the mutilated corpses of Cromwell, of Ireton, his statesmanlike general and brother-in-law, and Bradshaw, the president at the trial of Charles I., drawn in their shrouds from their tombs in the quiet of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel at the Abbey, gibbeted until sundown as objects for the ridicule and derision of a demoralised mob, and then decapitated, were flung “into a deep hole under the gallows.” And there they may remain until this day. Who knows? The cemetery for the unnamed dead, which extended from the fatal tree towards the Marble Arch, was dug up when hangings ceased on this spot, and it is probable that the unrecognised bones of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were in that process swept into oblivion. The heads had been spiked on poles in front of Westminster Hall.
The grave has gone; the remains have perished. No vestige of the honoured dead survives; in spite of Cromwell’s gorgeous funeral, his remains are not even located.
That is just where history awakens us from musings to the unexpected reality of things. Of all the vanities of life, assuredly the love of funeral pomp and show is the most vain; and that strange vanity Cromwell—hard, narrow, cold though he might be—seems to have shared to an extravagant degree. He had arranged for himself a gorgeous funeral, and one glances with amazement at the documents of the year 1658, when the burial of the Protector had to be put off from 9th November to 23rd November (he died on 3rd September) as the elaborate arrangements for the event could not be completed by the earlier date. During the short Protectorate of Richard Cromwell, sums were voted to the amount of £18,600 for expenses and mourning, and so many claims were brought forward for settlement, that nearly a year later, on 4th July 1659, a Committee was appointed to inquire into the money still owing. They reported that £19,303, 0s. 11d. was the properly audited account, and this merely for baize, cloth, velvet, and fringes. This sum represents about £80,000 of our present money; so that an estimate of £150,000 can hardly be too large for the expenses of Oliver Cromwell’s funeral.
Apart from these outrages on the dead, Tyburn witnessed the final scenes in the lives of two military officers, Hacker and Axtele, who had guarded Charles I., and of at least three of the judges, Okey, Barkstead, and Corbet, who had pronounced sentence upon him. Others of the regicides were done to death at Charing Cross, with all the barbarous additions of drawing, decapitating, and quartering. It seems singular that these revolting scenes, relics of an earlier and, one would have thought, a more brutal age, occasioned no condemnation from the finer spirits of the day. Old Pepys, amiable and gossipy on whatever subject passed under his notice, was only led by the executions to a pious and somewhat inapposite reflection, “Wonderful are the ways of Providence!” And the courtly Evelyn, who had the grace to secretly disapprove of them, contents himself with writing in his Diary:
“I saw not the executions, but met their quarters, mangled, cut, and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows on a hurdle.”
In 1908 one of the former victims of Tyburn was canonised, a fact that brings the past and to-day into close proximity. The history of Oliver Plunket—a name well known in Ireland—is both romantic and sad.
Celebrated as a high-minded and high-living Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunket ended his days at Tyburn in 1681, a victim of the “Popish Plot.” After spending more than two and a half years in dungeons, first in Dublin and then in Newgate, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered. His body was buried in St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields by Father Corker, who had been his companion in Newgate. His head was sent to Rome to Cardinal Howard, and brought back to Ireland in 1722, and is preserved in the Convent of Drogheda, which was founded by his great-niece. In fact, all honour was paid to his remains as relics. When Father Corker buried the body he cut off the arms, one of which was long preserved in Herefordshire, and one in the Franciscan Convent at Taunton. This priest afterwards sent the body to Germany, but when the English monks were expelled from that country in 1803, Plunket’s body was brought back to England, and buried at St. Gregory’s Monastery, Downside, Bath.