Author Archives: Headsman

1726: Thomas Craven and William Anderson, reluctant autobiographers

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For this date’s post we return to one of our favorite sources, James Kelly’s Gallows Speeches: From Eighteenth-Century Ireland.

We have noticed via Kelly the unscrupulous competition between broadside publishers for any claim on privileged access to a doomed criminal, to the extent that they would pass off fake “last speeches” from men who had never spoken to them.

Posterity has reason to appreciate this vulturous commerce as we see from today’s entries, whose short autobiographies they profess to have composed simply to preempt the circulation of fabulisms.

THE LAST SPEECH AND DYEING WORDS OF
THOMAS CRAVEN AND WILLIAM ANDERSON

who is to be Executed this present Saturday being the 29th of the Instant January 1725-6, near Kilmainham.

Good Christians,

I had no thought at first to make any Speech, but being told if I would not, that Some Printers would, and I thereby made more blacker than I am, and the Publick impos’d on by a parcel of Lyes and Nonsence; in order to prevent the same, I have sent to the Printer hereof, to whom I related the whole truth of my past Life and Conversation, which is as follows, viz.

I drew my first Breath at a place call’d Ballgee, in the County of Meath, of very honest Endeavouring Parents, but so Poor, that they could not give me either Learning or Trade, but growing up to Years and Strength, I went to live with one Mr. Boylan a Miller, living at a place call’d Moorehead in the said County, with whom I liv’d for the Space of five or six Years, during which time I behaved my self true and honest, as many in them parts can tell, but leaving him about some few Months ago, took upon me to go to Dublin, but unfortunatly [sic] meeting with Mr. Elisha Charles at a place called Swords, and he having three Cows that he bought, desired me to drive them to his House, and I being one that always bore a good and honest Name, took no thought of me, but left me to my self, thinking that I would leave them at home, but he no sooner left me, but I turn’d the Cows and drove them to Dublin, and thought to have sold them the next Day; but Mr. Charles thinking I stay’d too long, he made an Enquiry about me, and being inform’d that I went to Dublin with the Cows, he took Horse and rid after me, and got me selling the Cows in Smithfield, for which he had me Apprehended and committed to Kilmainham Goal, and now must justly Dye for the same, and now as I am a dying Man this is the first fact that ever I Committed. Haveing no more to say but beg the Prayers of all good Christians, I dye a Roman Catholick and in the 36th Year of my Age, and the Lord have Mercy on my poor Soul, Amen.

The Speech of William Anderson

Good people,

I Seeing my Fellow Sufferer giving his Speech to be Printed, I thought it would be proper, since we are to dye together, that I should do the same which I did, and is as follows, viz.

I was Born in the County of Cavin, of very honest Parents, who brought me up very tenderly till I was able to go to a Trade, and then they bound me to a Courier, to whom I serv’d seven Years true and honest, being out of my Time, I wrought at my Trade, and by it got good honest Bread, but my time being so short, that I shall not trouble the reader with any long stories, but tell you the cause of my Death. I being acquainted in the House of Mr. Tyerer in St. Patrick Street, went there when I thought they were all a sleep, and went to the Window and took down the Glass and so got in, but got nothing for my pains but a small silver Cup, but indeed I thought to get a good parcel of Mony, but cou’d not, by reason they paid it away.

Having no more to Say, but begs the Prayers of all good Christians, I dye a Roman Catholick, and in the 27th Year of my Age, and as this is my first Fact, I hobe [sic] my God will forgive me my Sins, and receive my Soul in the Hour of my Death, and I hope all good Christians will say Amen.

Printed at the Rein Deer in Montrath Street, 1725-6.

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1886: The leadership of the Proletariat Party

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A quartet of revolutionary socialists were executed by the tsarist authorities at Warsaw Citadel on this date in 1886.

Poland’s first socialist party of any consequence, the Proletariat was founded in 1882 by Ludwik Warynski.

“Small in number and very young in age,” were these founding socialists, “sons and daughters of a shattered class and a defeated nation.” But Moscow had long feared the diffusion of revolutionary ideologies in Poland, for as an 1873 Russian security brief observed, “of all the lands belonging to his Imperial Majesty the Kingdom of Poland more than any other constitutes a favorable ground for the Internationale.” (Both quotes from The Origins of Polish Socialism: The History and Ideas of the First Polish Socialist Party 1878-1886.)

The Proletariat Party went some way to vindicating the fears of the secret police by gaining several hundred members in its first years and conducting some successful protest campaigns in Warsaw. Naturally this invited state violence on the heads of the leadership; Warynski was in irons by the end of 1883, and would die in prison six years later.

This in turn brought new and more implacable men to the fore of the movement, like one of our day’s principals Stanislaw Kunicki (English Wikipedia entry | Polish) — who better inclined to ally the Proletariat Party with the anti-autocrat terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). Eventually in the course of the 1880s crackdown

several hundred members of Proletariat were arrested, of whom twenty-nine from the industrial areas of Poland were selected as being principally responsible for the direction of the party. The trial of 23 November to 20 December 1885 produced its first socialist martyrs. In the end the Russian Piotr Bardovsky, Stanislaw Kunicki, the shoemaker Michal Ossowski and the weaver Jan Petrusinski were hanged on 28 January 1886.


A plaque at Warsaw Citadel commemorates the Proletariat martyrs ((cc) image by Mateusz Opasinski.

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1597: Jaakko Ilkka, Cudgel War victim

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On this date in 1597, Jaakko Ilkka, leader of a great Finnish peasant rebellion called the “Cudgel War”, was put to death at at Old Isonkyron Church.

This evocatively named disturbance broke out in the last days of 1596, so the reader will perceive that the cudgels didn’t have much by way of legs; it took place in a Finland which was then still a part of Sweden. In a typical peasant rising pattern, they won a few early encounters wrong-footing the nobility before heavy soldiery was properly mobilized and smashed the revolt.

While the peasants had usual peasantry grievances, most notably crushing levies to fund fruitless wars with Russia, they might also have been somewhat goaded into insurrection as an outgrowth of the schism then opening up between rival claimants to Swedish rulership within the royal family: Finnish lords, who were remaining loyal to exiled King Sigismund, had blocked some appeals that the farmers attempted to advance to the Swedish court of Sigismund’s usurping uncle Duke Charles. When Sweden’s parliament denied Charles funding for a punitive war against his disobedient Finnish lords, he made some public remarks musing about what a good thing it was that the lords’ subjects still had the right to take matters into their own hands. Clearly the man missed his calling as a Twitter troll.

A wealthy landowner from the city of Ilmajoki, Ilka (English Wikipedia entry | Finnish) found his way into a leadership position though he might not have been anything like an moving spirit. No matter, his was the name on the marquee by the end which meant his was the minimum sacrifice necessary for a laying down of cudgels. He was bludgeoned to death at Old Isonkyron Church and his body gibbeted on a breaking-wheel.

Famous to Finns, Ilkka has been interpreted by a wide variety of literary and dramatic efforts.

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1796: Jerzy Procpak

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On this date in 1796 the Polish outlaw Jerzy Procpak was executed. Anticipate Polish in all links to follow.

It takes a stretch to reckon this avaricious cutthroat as a social bandit; nevertheless, he’s chanced to a fair measure of historical renown as an exemplar from the dying age of highwayman. He supposedly turned to crime after being punitively thrown in prison for shooting a grazing heifer he had mistaken for a deer. Thereafter he gathered around him a crowd of army deserters and other rough men who prowled the southern borderlands of Silesia, Moravia, and Slovakia.

The “forest Adonis” was celebrated in folk song, and in folk legend which became practically indistinguishable from his biography.

Captured in November 1795, the brigand admitted without recourse to torture to a charge sheet more than ample to take his life: some 60 highway robberies and 13 murders. We have a description of his costume preserved from those same records: “hat with band sewn on, blue caftan lined red, trousers of the same blue paint, sewn with twine, brown leather moccasins, a thin white tunic and sleeves with beautiful cuffs, a brass pin at his throat …”

Throughout January of 1796, ad hoc courts tried upwards of 200 of his alleged associates in ad hoc tribunals in the Silesian towns of Wieprz, Zywiec, and Milowka. Overall, twenty-one were condemned to death and apart from one man, Blazej Solczenski, saved by intercession of a parish priest, all these death sentences were carried into immediate execution.* Several others from the deserter demographic were returned to the hands of the Austrian army for punishment up to and including death by musketry.

* I assume that this reprieve is the source of the confusion among different texts reporting that Procpak was one of twenty robbers executed, or that those executed numbered Procpak plus twenty other robbers. The former is correct, although the executions were scattered across different days and sites; this source (Polish, like everything else) has the breakdowns with names and dates.

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1358: Perrin Mace, de-sanctuaried

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On this date in 1358 — during the height of the great peasant rebellion known as the Jacquerie — a bourgeois named or Perrin Mace or Perrin Marc was summarily hanged in Paris.

Just the day before, January 24,* he had in broad daylight assassinated Jean Baillet, longtime treasurer to the dauphin who would become King Charles V. Mace/Marc then fled to the a church, attempting to assert the unreliable right to sanctuary.

The dauphin found the idea that a man could murder a minister of state with impunity just by winning a footrace to a church door as ridiculous as we would in modernity, so he ordered his marshal to bash in said doors and extract the assassin that very night for immediate execution come daybreak.

But this was also an attack on the prerogatives of the church, which provoked a furious response by the bishop — who had the assassin’s remained honorably interred. Still more was it an affront to the Parisian populace whose demands for reform were being frustrated by the dauphin and which accordingly was coming to support his rival Charles the Bad during a general political crisis.

Accordingly, the provost Etienne Marcel on February 22 led a popular march upon the dauphin’s palace, fronted by heralds crying out the grievance:

Pray for the soul of Perrin Mace, a bourgeois of Paris, unjustly executed!

John Baillet, the treasurer of the Regent, had borrowed in the name of the King a sum of money from Perrin Mace.

Mace demanded his money in virtue of the new edict that orders the royal officers to pay for what they buy and return what they borrow for the King, under penalty of being brought to law by their creditors.

John Baillet refused to pay, and furthermore insulted, threatened and struck Perrin Mace.

In the exercise of his right of legitimate defence, granted him by the new edict, Perrin Mace returned blow for blow, killed John Baillet and betook himself to the church of St. Mery,** a place of asylum, from where he demanded an inquest and trial.

The Duke of Normandy, now Regent, [i.e., the dauphin -ed.] immediately sent one of his courtiers, the marshal of Normandy, to the church of St. Mery, accompanied with an escort of soldiers and the executioner.

The marshal of Normandy dragged Perrin Mace from the church, and without trial Mace’s right hand was cut off and he was immediately hanged.

Pray for the soul of Perrin Mace, a bourgeois of Paris, unjustly executed.

Marcel’s protest invaded the royal palace and murdered several of his counselors in front of his eyes — “so close to the dauphin, that the royal dress was sprinkled with their blood,” as this history puts it. Charles survived the encounter but found himself virtually a prisoner and it would be months before he had the satisfaction of pacifying the city (and of seeing Etienne Marcel assassinated in his own turn).

French speakers might enjoy this detailed review of events (pdf).

* There are several January 1358 dates in circulation for these events on this here Internet. My authority for this one is the chronicle Chronique des règnes de Jean II et de Charles states in no uncertain terms that Baillet was assassinated on January 24, Mace was hauled from sanctuary that same night, and he was executed on the morning of the 25th.

** Some other sources give it as the church of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, “Saint James of the Butchers” — named to distinguish it from Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas elsewhere in Paris. This church, dating to the 11th or 12th century, was later rebuilt in Gothic style but pulled down during the French Revolution; only its tower, known as Saint-Jacques Tower, survives.

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1887: Georgette and Sylvain Thomas, guillotine couples act

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Georgette Thomas was guillotined on this date in 1887 at Romorantin, followed moments later by her husband Sylvain.

This farming couple had burned to death Georgett’s mother Marie Lebon six months previous, aided by Georgette’s brothers Alexander and Alexis who both caught life sentences for their participation.

Lebon’s offense? The family had become convinced that mom was a sorceress on the strength of a compounding series of rural disasters: lost hay, failed harvests, sickness striking down horses and chickens and even the human kids.

To exorcise her infernal influence, they doused her with oil and holy water, set her ablaze, and forced her into the farmhouse fireplace … right in front of those kids she had bewitched.

Some two thousand people crowded the public square for this rare spectacle of a husband-wife joint marital severing. So shocking was the execution of the struggling Georgette Thomas in particular — and so distressed was that veteran taker of heads Louis Deibler, who asked out of any female chops in the future — that France never again publicly guillotined a woman.

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1945: Angelo Chiappe

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French Nazi collaborator Angelo Chiappe was shot on this day in 1945.

A right-wing legislator and adherent of the fascist Action Francaise movement before the war, Chiappe copped an appointment as the Vichy prefect of the Gard department. There he made himself hateful to the war’s eventual winners by his enthusiasm for hunting French Resistance members, communists, and Jews for forced labor and deportation and worse.

Captured in August 1944, he was shot January 23, 1945 before the gorgeous Roman arena of Nimes.

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1892: A day in the death penalty around the U.S. South

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All five of the people executed on January 22, 1892, and all four of the victims associated with their various homicides, were African-Americans.


From the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, Jan. 23, 1982.

Robert Carter, hanged in the Camden, Alabama, jail on January 22 for murdering his wife, a crime he admitted.

“The murder was most brutal,” wrote the newsman under the headline pictured above, indulging a touch of anatomical hyperbole. “He followed his wife into the woods from the field where both were working and beat her to death, crushing almost all the bones in her body.”

Less certain was the case of the adulterous lovers Jim Lyles and Margaret Lashley hanged in Danville, Virginia, that same January 22 for slaying Lashley’s husband George.

Lashley asserted her innocence from arrest to execution, and her trial jury had recommended her for mercy. The day before execution, Lyles made a full confession in which he claimed sole responsibility for the crime, exonerating his paramour; Lashley’s bid for an eleventh-hour clemency on the basis of was nevertheless denied.

They died together, “displaying not a semblance of weakness” after “the prayer and song service, which lasted thirty minutes, both principals rendering, in strong harmonious voices, the hymns selected for the occasion.” (Columbia, S.C. State, Jan. 23, 1892)

Lucius Dotson hanged in Savannah, Georgia, on the same morning, for the murder of Jeff Goates.

Even at the late date of 1892, Dotson’s brother, “fearing that medical students had captured Lucius’s carcass, had the coffin opened at the depot … and was surprised to find his broken-neck brother in it.” (Charleston, S.C., News and Courier, Jan. 24, 1892)

The last woman ever hanged in North Carolina, Caroline Shipp died on a Dallas, North Carolina gallows before a crowd of some 3,000 souls.

A woman of “barely 20 years old”, condemned for poisoning her infant child. Under the noose, she “displayed great coolness” and “talked eight minutes, re-affirming her innocence, and declared a man [her lover -ed.] named Mack Farrar committed the crime.” The drop of the rope hit her with what a local paper called “a soul-sickening jerk”; it took her 20 minutes to strangle to death.

The event has proven to have a durable hold on Gaston County’s memory, and Shipp’s claim of innocence continues to interest latter-day researchers.

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1867: Ciosi and Agostini, at the Polygone of Vincennes

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From the London Times, Jan. 23, 1867, under a January 22 dateline:

The two soldiers (Corsicans) who committed a murder and robbery some time since at Neuilly, and were sentenced to death by court-martial, were shot yesterday morning, in presence of a large crowd, at the Polygone of Vincennes. One of them, [Jean-Baptiste] Agostini, was so exhausted that he had to be tied to a post to keep him from falling to the ground. The other, [Jean-Antoine] Ciosi, was more courageous, and, having addressed the shooting party to this effect, — “Dear comrades, on my conscience, I committed the crime for which I die, but I committed no robbery. I ask pardon of God, and of you. Farewell!” he himself gave the word to fire. The troops marched past the bodies as they lay on the ground. The interment took place in the burial ground of Vincennes, under the supervision of the chaplain of the fort.

A longer French-language account of the crime and execution — including the necessity of a brain-splattering coup de grace to complete the sentence — can be found here. There’s some fuzziness with the date cited in different places but French press reports (for instance, from Le Figaro on January 22) unambiguously place it on Monday the 21st.

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2012: 34 in Iraq

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From news.un.org (here’s a comparable story from CNN, and here from Reuters):

The United Nations human rights chief said today she was shocked at reports that 34 people were executed in Iraq in a single day last week and called on the country to institute an immediate moratorium on the use of the death penalty.

“Even if the most scrupulous fair trial standards were observed, this would be a terrifying number of executions to take place in a single day,” High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated in a news release.

“Given the lack of transparency in court proceedings, major concerns about due process and fairness of trials, and the very wide range of offences for which the death penalty can be imposed in Iraq, it is a truly shocking figure,” she added.

The 34 individuals, including two women, were executed on 19 January following their conviction for various crimes, according to the UN human rights office (OHCHR).

The total number of individuals sentenced to death in Iraq since 2004 is believed to stand at more than 1,200. The total number actually executed since then is not known, although at least 63 individuals are thought to have been executed in the past two months alone.

The death penalty can be imposed in Iraq for around 48 crimes, including a number of non-fatal crimes such as — under certain circumstances — damage to public property.

“Most disturbingly,” said Ms. Pillay, “we do not have a single report of anyone on death row being pardoned, despite the fact there are well documented cases of confessions being extracted under duress.”

She called on the Government to implement an immediate moratorium on the institution of death penalty, noting that around 150 countries have now either abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, or introduced a moratorium.

The High Commissioner also urged the Government “to halt all executions and, as a matter of urgency, review the cases of those individuals currently on death row.”

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