Showing posts with label Beheadings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beheadings. Show all posts

Sunday, November 4, 2018

Ding-dang Ruthless Justice by Katherine Pym





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Cromwell's Death Mask
Over the centuries, public executions were entertainment. Crowds gathered en masse to watch these events. They brought their children and baskets of food. They picnicked and laughed.



Justice would not allow a guilty person to escape his sentence. One such fellow condemned to be hanged found a way to escape when brought to the gallows.



As the magistrates hauled the poor fellow to the hanging tree, his legs shackled, the condemned man dodged a guard and scampered away. The crowd impeded the goalers from catching him. He ran down the hill and jumped into the river. The weight his restraints pulled him under and he drowned.



Not content to have the prisoner die before being properly hanged, the authorities hauled him sopping wet and completely dead, back to the noose, and there hanged him with his fellow prisoners. They did this during the French Revolution, too, threw a dead person in the tumbril to suffer the same fate as those around him. Guillotined, the most humane way to go, or so it is reported.

Enter Oliver Cromwell, who succumbed to what experts feel was malarial fever on the proverbial dark and stormy night in Whitehall, Sept 3rd, 1658. His enemies described the storm as the devil dragging the great saint to hell.


John Bradshaw
Cromwell’s men wanted a sumptuous funeral that would rival King James I’s. They gutted and embalmed him, his coffin filled with spices, but for some reason his body rapidly decayed. It was reportedly so putrid that the body ruptured, leaving a horrendous miasma which leaked through the seams of the coffin.


Henry Ireton
This left no opportunity for Cromwell to lay in state or be paraded through the city. He was buried quickly in Westminster Abbey alongside England’s kings and queens. Later, to appease the populace, an effigy replaced the body for viewing. An empty coffin was hauled through the city streets.

In 1660, King Charles II returned from exile. He did not seek utter reprisal, but he could not let those who killed his father escape without some sort of comment.


Tyburn Gallows


Of the 59 regicides who signed the death warrant, 39 were alive at the Restoration. Of these, several were in self-exile, a few exonerated. Of those executed, some met a grisly end.



Really horrible so I won’t bother telling the details but I’ll tell you the following:



Three high on the list to meet justice were Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, & John Bradshaw, all dead and buried in Westminster Abbey. Their bodies were ordered exhumed, hanged and beheaded.


King Charles I at his trial
January 30th, 1661 (Gregorian calendar), they were pulled from their resting places and dragged to Tyburn. Since Cromwell’s burial had been so regal, his body wrapped in a thick shroud, it took several strikes of the axe to behead him. The three dead men swung from the gallows, then beheaded, their bodies shoved in unmarked graves beneath Tyburn. Their heads were impaled on pikes and set on the roof of the Westminster, where they remained for 20-30 years. One night, during another dark and stormy night, Cromwell’s head was struck by lightning, which fell to the ground and was spirited away.



There are several stories about where the head bounced. 
In the ensuing years, Cromwell’s head was considered a conversation piece put on display. Men of knowledge considered the head more than likely genuine. It is rumored someone finally put it in a biscuit tin and buried it. One source states it was interred in 1960 in Cromwell’s old college chapel, its exact location concealed. 

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Many thanks to Wikicommons, Public domain &



















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