ExecutedToday.com

“Politics is a blood sport.”

-Aneurin Bevan

Not in every era do yesterday’s defeated political factions get to retire to write their memoirs or snipe from the comfort of the parliamentary minority.

Certainly not in the 1380s, when the teenage King Richard II and a confederation of nobles fought one another for control of England.

After gaining an early upper hand in 1386, Richard soon found himself defeated on the battlefield and politically encircled — leading to the memorable seating of the “Merciless Parliament”, which proceeded to attaint Richard’s advisors of treason.

A certain archbishop of York, Alexander Nevill by name, Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, Robert Tresilian, chief justice of the lord king, and Nicholas Brembre, knight and former mayor of the citizens of London, were governors and close councillors of the king, living in vice, deluding the said king, concerned neither with the king’s nor the kingdom’s business but embracing the mammon of iniquity for themselves through much wickedness.

Two of them (not the only two by any stretch) suffered accordingly these next two dates in 1388.

• Feb. 19: Robert Tresilian

• Feb. 20: Nicholas Brembre

Now that is politics as bloodsport.

Also On This Date

• 1858: Chief Leschi
• 1942: Frank Abbandando and Harry Maione, mob hitmen

This blog traffics in the the human forces that drive men and women to the scaffold: whether the implacable distant hand of History, the fickle chance of Fate, or the vulgar personal desires we have in such ample supply.

But the scaffold gazes also into thee … and sometimes, the dead stretch out to touch the living in unexpected ways.

By coincidence, Jan. 25 and 26 of 1996 saw rare uses of two anachronistic methods of execution in the United States — holdovers from executions in the Republic’s youth, before science started devising less personal, more mechanical ways to kill. In fact, these executions on consecutive days in 1996 are as of this writing the last time that either hanging or the firing squad has been used in this country.

That strange spectacles drew international news coverage, which seems to have led in turn to the accidental suicide of an Italian youth in the town of Noceto.

A 12-year-old boy hanged himself after … asking his parents “if people suffer at the gallows” … after [the family] watched one of the evening news programs, which have prominently featured the Utah firing squad and an execution by hanging in Delaware.

This blog has no answer for the boy “D.M.,” any more than it has for our usual clientele. It is even likely that one or both of the two we note here whose dates with death were scheduled will turn out not to keep their current distinctions of being the last men judicially hanged and shot in the U.S.

But then, all life is contingent and ephemeral. This theme, too, is part of the traffic of Executed Today.

• Jan. 25, 1996: Billy Bailey hanged

• Jan. 26, 1996: John Albert Taylor shot

Also On This Date

• 1795: Unspecified Robespierrists
• 1663: Nathaniel Greensmith, Rebecca Greensmith and possibly Mary Barnes, Connecticut "witches"

It was a world turned upside down.

The Stuart line was (for now) restored to the throne, and the regicides of its late king horribly if not voluminously punished.

Not so easy, though, to undo the violent social changes that had produced (and fermented in) the Interregnum.

Feudal property relations had been overthrown, religion cast into dispute; uncharted lands were discovered, the laws of nature unveiled; rulers were put to death. Danger and possibility and portent must have felt omnipresent. Even London burned down.

Marx, endlessly fascinated by the English bourgeoisie’s rise over the centuries, wrote that it “has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors.’” Into this disorder stepped a bewildering welter of ideas and models of life to contend at the frequent expense of their adherents’ lives.

From affairs of state to affairs of the heart, from the remote wildernesses of the New World to the highways of Albion, the Stuarts’ subjects risked life and limb seeking their places in this upside-down world.

• Jan. 18: Joshua Tefft

• Jan. 19: Thomas Venner and the Fifth Monarchy Men
• Jan. 20: William Drummond
• Jan. 21: Claude Duval
• Jan. 22: Mary Carleton
• Jan. 23: Robert Pollack and Robert Millar

Also On This Date

• 1803: George Foster, and thence to the reanimator
• 1985: Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, progressive Islamic theologian

This father-and-son tandem of English Civil War figures dubiously upheld the parliamentary cause at the Siege of Hull, the first major action of the English Civil War.

They would be linked all the way to the block by their waffling.

Hull was worth fighting for because of its sizable arsenal. And though the elder Hotham personally barred the gates of Hull against King Charles — Hotham had been appointed governor by Parliament in a test of authority against the king’s appointment of the Earl of Newcastle — the Hothams soon cooled on the Roundheads. They wouldn’t even be around for the very next year’s Siege of Hull.

Correspondence with said Earl of Newcastle revealing the Hothams’ negotiations to betray Hull to the Royalists fell into the wrong hands. One thing led to another … and on Jan. 2 and 3, 1645, the son and then the father lost their heads at the Tower of London.

• Jan. 2, 1645: John Hotham the younger

• Jan. 3, 1645: John Hotham the elder

Also On This Date

• 1994: Mansour Kikhia?
• 1663: Illiam Dhone

It’s the big wheels in villainy one naturally thinks of when reckoning the Third Reich’s war criminals — the Reichsprotekotors and concentration camp commandants; the Adolf Eichmanns and the Beast of Belsens.

But it’s obvious that in a conflagration as enormous as the Second World War, war crimes would not consist only in great monsters committing great monstrosities.

While this mere blog dare not join that timeless historiographical fray, that of meting out the correct measure of blood guilt throughout the German populace, its competency does extend to noticing the problem (philosophical, political, logistical) the Allies faced of establishing a workable approach to “war crimes” as the war wrapped up.

On these two dates just months after Germany capitulated, British and American military tribunals addressed themselves to two cases of atrocities that rate as forgettable in the scheme of things, by perpetrators who were thereafter forgotten.

• Nov. 30: Heinz Wilhelm Eck, U-Boat Commander

• Dec. 1: Anton Dostler, gone commando

Also On This Date

• 1824: Henry Fauntleroy, choked on debt
• 1944: Lilo Gloeden, Erich Gloeden and Elisabeth Kuznitzky

No medieval* battle in Christendom is better-known to the present-day hoi polloi than the Battle of Agincourt, that signal upset victory when young King Henry V and his invading English yeoman archers stunned a seemingly unbeatable force of French knights by outsmarting them like Belichik versus Martz.

This battle’s interpretive palimpsest — is it a parable of nascent capitalism? of national character? of technology? — has been much-bandied in the centuries since (and must weigh against England’s subsequent reversals in the Hundred Years’ War). This site’s interest is more parochial: the presence among the casualties of those who died by execution.

• Oct. 24: Bardolph, on the eve of battle
• Oct. 25: French prisoners of war, during the battle

* If you want to call the early 15th century “medieval.” We stake no periodization claim.

Also On This Date

• 1945: Vidkun Quisling, who made his name as a traitor

These pages have noticed many women to fall under the executioner’s shadow.

We have noticed too how remarkably women’s crimes and women criminals and women’s sentences are “gendered”.

In matters of patriarchy, familial behavior, sexual incontinence and resistance … it’s unsurprising to find women marked as such.

Yet even in run-of-the-mill criminal scenarios — what would be run-of-the-mill for a man — female offenders stand to attract the prurient gaze, from breathless media to academic masturbation.

When we last paused to consider the mystique of the executed woman, we focused on political criminals whose deaths were a matter of state. (Though as we have seen, even in a political purge gender can be a weapon.)

Join Executed Today this time to consider a few women of less exalted criminality … and our own response to seeing them as scaffold-fodder.

• Oct. 8: Rachel Wall, pirate
• Oct. 9: Aileen Wournos, serial killer
• Oct. 10: Susan Newell, the last woman hanged in Scotland
• Oct. 11: Margaret Waters, baby farmer
• Oct. 12: Pauline McCoy

Also On This Date

• 1997: Ricky Lee Green

With this post, we unveil a new metadata category, the Daily Double — related executions on actual consecutive dates in the same year. (We’re also retroactively defining an old Themed Set post into this category.)

The Turkish Republic, so violently born, has endured a tumultuous past half-century or so. In keeping with the Cold War Zeitgeist, it also enjoyed its share of coups.

The first such struck in May of 1960, toppling the elected (but by then deeply unpopular with young military officers) government of Adnan Menderes. Menderes had been Prime Minister for a decade, but he and two of his ministers would check out with the distinction of being the last politicians executed in Turkey.

• Sep. 16: Fatin Rustu Zorlu and Hasan Polatkan

• Sep. 17: Adnan Menderes

• 1560: Arnaud du Tilh, alias Martin Guerre

Desperate, violent social upheaval seems to go with Russia like black bread with pickled herring.

“How can you make a revolution without executions?” Lenin once asked.

As he knew — very well he knew — that also happens to be a preferred tool of counterrevolution.

And for every successful revolution, there are dozens of abortive attempts — failed coups d’etat — empty plots that never get off the drawing board — to harvest the heads of a new order’s would-be engineers.

Russia/the USSR had flesh-rending struggles for power in the early 20th century. These are a few casualties whose revolutions didn’t take … and who, given the opportunity, would have hewed to Lenin’s own maxim with respect to the opponents who chanced to get the better of them.

• Aug. 28: Bronislav Kaminski
• Aug. 29: Zinaida Konoplyannikov
• Aug. 30: Grigory Semenov

(This “themed set” is actually a rewrite from the original — product of discovering a little too late a bad date in the database. This discovery did actually solve some editorial complications, but obviously would have been less embarrassing had it been effected before pressing “submit”. Oh, well. Blawg.

Although the text below is no longer operative, it is included for transparency, historical completeness, and because we are loathe to abandon any Lebowski reference no matter how ill-founded.)

Themed Set: They Were Russian Nazis, Dude?

Are we gonna split hairs here?

Even genocide isn’t completely black and white. Although wielded by a distinctly anti-Slavic power, fascism found collaborators among the peoples who figured to be enslaved, murdered, and exiled.

And no surprise, in the scheme of things.

The lines of battle, both literal and rhetorical, always conceal a million complex interactions between peoples meeting — for it is still a manner of meeting, through gunsights.

Whether driven by ideology or merely driven to the wall by the Hobson’s choice between collaboration and resistance in a war between two of history’s cruelest state edifices, some set of people will always be driven in a conflict to side-choosing that others find treacherous.

Maybe you. Maybe me. And maybe Executed Today’s next three.

Also On This Date

• 1807: James McLean, twice

Our tour through the world’s condemned has made the company of many a woman, but our hobby is a noticeably gendered one: whether as common criminals, fallen royals, political prisoners, war criminals, or any other subset of the execution-prone, women who face the headsmen map differently in the public conscience than men.

If the distinctions are none other than those that structure every social transactions, the dramatic tableau of the scaffold raises the stakes, sharpens the gendering, be she whore or madonna, black widow or holy maid.

Often, condemned women excite more sympathy, even romantic longing; occasionally, a crime’s inversion of femininity redoubles their opprobrium. A few criminal categories — abortion, witchcraft — are, for lack of a better term, female-gendered by default.

Though this series hardly marks the last women for these pages, three very notable cases in very different situations offer a vantage point not only on female and male through history, but on one’s own response to the spectacle of the executed woman.

• July 15: Princess Misha

• July 16: Anne Askew
• July 17: Charlotte Corday

Also On This Date

• 1685: James Scott, Duke of Monmouth