Category Archives: Gruesome Methods

1388: Thomas Usk, leaving “The Testament of Love”

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On this date in 1388, royal retainer Thomas Usk was convicted in a one-day trial of treason and immediately drawn, hanged and beheaded at Tyburn.

The man’s end was savage: cut down alive to savor his beheading, which took nearly 30 strokes of the sword. And by all odds, this minor character’s demise would have had scant legacy as one more drop in the ocean of Albion’s blood long-ago spilt.

It was Usk’s misfortune to enter the political arena during a violently evolving political crisis in the 1380’s, when the boy-king Richard II and the English nobility struggled for power. A self-taught scrivener, Usk comes to posterity’s notice in the train of London mayor John Northampton. He was arrested for this association, and having no aspiration to become “a stinking martyr,” obligingly switched to the king’s side and informed on his former master.

This act of faithlessness made Usk (among many others) a marked man when the nobles’ faction gained a decisive upper hand after the Battle of Radcot Bridge and sat in what history records as the Merciless Parliament. Many were executed or forced into exile.

Usk would number among the victims, but before being launched into eternity — as the euphemism went — with the rope, he touched eternity from his prison cell by writing The Testament of Love (several versions linked here).

Long attributed wrongly to Usk’s contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, the Testament — regrettably not available in anything like its original form — consists of the imprisoned author’s dialogue with Love, who descends as a spirit into his dungeon to counsel him as he pines for the affection of the (presumably) symbolic woman “Margaret”. The work is reminiscent in its dialectal style of that produced by another client of the executioner — Boethius‘ Consolation of Philosophy.

ALAS! Fortune! alas! I that som-tyme in delicious houres was wont to enjoye blisful stoundes, am now drive by unhappy hevinesse to bewaile my sondry yvels in tene! … witless, thoughtful, sightles lokinge, I endure my penaunce in this derke prison, caitived fro frendshippe and acquaintaunce, and forsaken of al that any word dare speke.

Part of the Themed Set: The Written Word.

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1838: Andrea Rondola but not Peppino

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On this date in 1838, in The Count of Monte Cristo, the title character witnesses two men brought to the scaffold for public execution in Rome.

In Alexandre Dumas‘ classic, the count is really Edmond Dantes, wrongly imprisoned years before, who has escaped and enriched himself with a discovered treasure, purchasing thereafter his ennoblement. This date’s execution occurs shortly after Dantes has surfaced publicly as the count. He witnesses it with two young friends — goading one of the reluctant youths by remarking, “when you travel, it is to see everything. Think what a figure you will make when you are asked, ‘How do they execute at Rome?’ and you reply, ‘I do not know’!” — and the naked brutality with which the Count greets a scene horrifying to his more genteel companions prefigures the pitiless revenge he will soon visit on his onetime persecutors.

The scene is laid on the first day of Carnival — the concealed identities among the crowd and the tension between its celebratory state of mind and the public butchery played out before it both serving the novel’s themes.

The prisoners are: a murderer, executed by the unique (and error-prone) Roman method of mazzolatura, in which the prisoner is incapacitated with a blow from a mallet before being finished off with a knife; and, a young man wrongly condemned to the guillotine for banditry, who will be reprieved thanks to the protagonist’s intervention further to the latter’s designs of vengeance.

It was the first time Franz had ever seen a guillotine, — we say guillotine, because the Roman mandaia is formed on almost the same model as the French instrument. The knife, which is shaped like a crescent, that cuts with the convex side, falls from a less height, and that is all the difference. Two men, seated on the movable plank on which the victim is laid, were eating their breakfasts, while waiting for the criminal. Their repast consisted apparently of bread and sausages. One of them lifted the plank, took out a flask of wine, drank some, and then passed it to his companion. These two men were the executioner’s assistants. At this sight Franz felt the perspiration start forth upon his brow. The prisoners, transported the previous evening from the Carcere Nuovo to the little church of Santa Maria del Popolo, had passed the night, each accompanied by two priests, in a chapel closed by a grating, before which were two sentinels, who were relieved at intervals. A double line of carbineers, placed on each side of the door of the church, reached to the scaffold, and formed a circle around it, leaving a path about ten feet wide, and around the guillotine a space of nearly a hundred feet. All the rest of the square was paved with heads. Many women held their infants on their shoulders, and thus the children had the best view. The Monte Pincio seemed a vast amphitheatre filled with spectators; the balconies of the two churches at the corner of the Via del Babuino and the Via di Ripetta were crammed; the steps even seemed a parti-colored sea, that was impelled towards the portico; every niche in the wall held its living statue. What the count said was true — the most curious spectacle in life is that of death. And yet, instead of the silence and the solemnity demanded by the occasion, laughter and jests arose from the crowd. It was evident that the execution was, in the eyes of the people, only the commencement of the Carnival. Suddenly the tumult ceased, as if by magic, and the doors of the church opened. A brotherhood of penitents, clothed from head to foot in robes of gray sackcloth, with holes for the eyes, and holding in their hands lighted tapers, appeared first; the chief marched at the head. Behind the penitents came a man of vast stature and proportions. He was naked, with the exception of cloth drawers at the left side of which hung a large knife in a sheath, and he bore on his right shoulder a heavy iron sledge-hammer. This man was the executioner. He had, moreover, sandals bound on his feet by cords. Behind the executioner came, in the order in which they were to die, first Peppino and then Andrea. Each was accompanied by two priests. Neither had his eyes bandaged. Peppino walked with a firm step, doubtless aware of what awaited him. [i.e., a pardon] Andrea was supported by two priests. Each of them, from time to time, kissed the crucifix a confessor held out to them. At this sight alone Franz felt his legs tremble under him. He looked at Albert — he was as white as his shirt, and mechanically cast away his cigar, although he had not half smoked it. The count alone seemed unmoved — nay, more, a slight color seemed striving to rise in his pale cheeks. His nostrils dilated like those of a wild beast that scents its prey, and his lips, half opened, disclosed his white teeth, small and sharp like those of a jackal. And yet his features wore an expression of smiling tenderness, such as Franz had never before witnessed in them; his black eyes especially were full of kindness and pity. However, the two culprits advanced, and as they approached their faces became visible. Peppino was a handsome young man of four or five and twenty, bronzed by the sun; he carried his head erect, and seemed on the watch to see on which side his liberator would appear. Andrea was short and fat; his visage, marked with brutal cruelty, did not indicate age; he might be thirty. In prison he had suffered his beard to grow; his head fell on his shoulder, his legs bent beneath him, and his movements were apparently automatic and unconscious.

“I thought,” said Franz to the count, “that you told me there would be but one execution.”

“I told you true,” replied he coldly.

“And yet here are two culprits.”

“Yes; but only one of these two is about to die; the other has many years to live.”

“If the pardon is to come, there is no time to lose.”

“And see, here it is,” said the count. At the moment when Peppino reached the foot of the mandaia, a priest arrived in some haste, forced his way through the soldiers, and, advancing to the chief of the brotherhood, gave him a folded paper. The piercing eye of Peppino had noticed all. The chief took the paper, unfolded it, and, raising his hand, “Heaven be praised, and his holiness also,” said he in a loud voice; “here is a pardon for one of the prisoners!”

“A pardon!” cried the people with one voice — “a pardon!” At this cry Andrea raised his head. “Pardon for whom?” cried he.

Peppino remained breathless. “A pardon for Peppino, called Rocca Priori,” said the principal friar. And he passed the paper to the officer commanding the carbineers, who read and returned it to him.

“For Peppino!” cried Andrea, who seemed roused from the torpor in which he had been plunged. “Why for him and not for me? We ought to die together. I was promised he should die with me. You have no right to put me to death alone. I will not die alone — I will not!” And he broke from the priests struggling and raving like a wild beast, and striving desperately to break the cords that bound his hands. The executioner made a sign, and his two assistants leaped from the scaffold and seized him. “What is going on?” asked Franz of the count; for, as all the talk was in the Roman dialect, he had not perfectly understood it. “Do you not see?” returned the count, “that this human creature who is about to die is furious that his fellow-sufferer does not perish with him? and, were he able, he would rather tear him to pieces with his teeth and nails than let him enjoy the life he himself is about to be deprived of. Oh, man, man — race of crocodiles,” cried the count, extending his clinched hands towards the crowd, “how well do I recognize you there, and that at all times you are worthy of yourselves!” Meanwhile Andrea and the two executioners were struggling on the ground, and he kept exclaiming, “He ought to die! — he shall die! — I will not die alone!”

“Look, look,” cried the count, seizing the young men’s hands — “look, for on my soul it is curious. Here is a man who had resigned himself to his fate, who was going to the scaffold to die — like a coward, it is true, but he was about to die without resistance. Do you know what gave him strength? — do you know what consoled him? It was, that another partook of his punishment — that another partook of his anguish — that another was to die before him. Lead two sheep to the butcher’s, two oxen to the slaughterhouse, and make one of them understand that his companion will not die; the sheep will bleat for pleasure, the ox will bellow with joy. But man — man, whom God created in his own image — man, upon whom God has laid his first, his sole commandment, to love his neighbor — man, to whom God has given a voice to express his thoughts — what is his first cry when he hears his fellow-man is saved? A blasphemy. Honor to man, this masterpiece of nature, this king of the creation!” And the count burst into a laugh; a terrible laugh, that showed he must have suffered horribly to be able thus to laugh. However, the struggle still continued, and it was dreadful to witness. The people all took part against Andrea, and twenty thousand voices cried, “Put him to death! put him to death!” Franz sprang back, but the count seized his arm, and held him before the window. “What are you doing?” said he. “Do you pity him? If you heard the cry of `Mad dog!’ you would take your gun — you would unhesitatingly shoot the poor beast, who, after all, was only guilty of having been bitten by another dog. And yet you pity a man who, without being bitten by one of his race, has yet murdered his benefactor; and who, now unable to kill any one, because his hands are bound, wishes to see his companion in captivity perish. No, no — look, look!”

The command was needless. Franz was fascinated by the horrible spectacle. The two assistants had borne Andrea to the scaffold, and there, in spite of his struggles, his bites, and his cries, had forced him to his knees. During this time the executioner* had raised his mace, and signed to them to get out of the way; the criminal strove to rise, but, ere he had time, the mace fell on his left temple. A dull and heavy sound was heard, and the man dropped like an ox on his face, and then turned over on his back. The executioner let fall his mace, drew his knife, and with one stroke opened his throat, and mounting on his stomach, stamped violently on it with his feet. At every stroke a jet of blood sprang from the wound.

This time Franz could contain himself no longer, but sank, half fainting, into a seat. Albert, with his eyes closed, was standing grasping the window-curtains. The count was erect and triumphant, like the Avenging Angel!

The Count of Monte Cristo is available free at Project Gutenberg. This day’s scene occurs in chapter 35. (An announcement in chapter 34 establishes the date.)

* The executioner plays no part in the novel, but presumably it would be the prolific Mastro Titta.

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1803: Edward Marcus Despard, a patriot without a nation

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On this date in 1803, during an era ruled by an Empire’s rough assertion of security against instability abroad, Britain hung its liberal-minded former governor of Belize — along with six others — for treason.

Book CoverThis ought-to-be-memorable occasion lies half-lost in time’s shifting sands, retrieved in part only by the oddity of being the last sentence of drawing and quartering handed down in Britain. (The sentence was moderated to simple hanging and posthumous beheading.)

But there was much more to be said about Despard than his sentence. Today, Executed Today is pleased to feature Col. Edward Marcus Despard as remembered by his biographer, Mike Jay.

Guest-posted here with permission is the prologue to his The Unfortunate Colonel Despard. (A chapter on Despard’s remarkable marriage to a black woman is also available on MikeJay.net.) Following the prologue is an Executed Today interview with the author.

The day Colonel Edward Marcus Despard was executed was one of the most dramatic, and strangely forgotten, in British history. In this, as in much else, his death mirrored his life.

He was to be publicly hung, drawn and quartered for high treason, a punishment which had barely been carried out in London within living memory. Its most vivid associations were still with the Jacobite rebellions over fifty years before: the days when the British state’s greatest fear had been that a Catholic monarch might seize the throne. Those days were now long gone and, many thought, the old ceremony with them; Despard, as it turned out, would be the last person on whom the sentence would ever be passed. As specified by the Lord Chief Justice, the Colonel and his six confederates were ‘to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are quite dead, then to be cut down and your bowels taken out and cast into the fire before your faces; your heads to be taken off and your bodies quartered’.

Intimations of the drama had already begun to transform the city the day before: Sunday 20 February 1803. At first light, carpenters had begun to assemble scaffold and gallows, large enough to accommodate the seven men, on the roof of Surrey County Jail in Horsemonger Lane, just south of the Thames in Southwark. The jail was a plain barracks-style building, recently constructed to replace the old prison which had been torn down in the Gordon Riots some twenty years before. The roof had been built flat for precisely this purpose, and this was the first occasion for its use. The main gates of the jail opened to admit seven plain wooden coffins.

According to contemporary witnesses, even as the preparations began, ‘vast multitudes of people immediately began to assemble’. It was noted that the throng consisted ‘chiefly of the lowest of the vulgar’, but that, unusually for a public execution, ‘a considerable number of persons of genteel appearance were observable’. The forces of law and order, too, were out in unprecedented force. Every single member of the Bow Street police patrol, the other London patrols at Queen Street, Marlborough Street and Hatton Gardens, and a ‘numerous tribe’ of petty constables from the outlying London boroughs, were placed on duty. The jail and its surrounds were emphatically staked out, surrounded by a cordon two officers deep. All ‘the public houses and other places of resort for the disaffected’ bristled with police. A detachment of mounted Horse-Guard cavalry clopped into Horsemonger Lane; all the infantry regiments in the city, at the Tower of London and Knightsbridge Barracks, were placed on the highest alert. The head keeper of the jail was issued with six sky rockets, each containing a pound of explosives, ‘to be let off as a signal to the military, in case of any disturbance’. London’s entire martial forces were instructed not to leave their posts until the danger was past.

The impending execution had dominated the news all week. The Times had led its news pages with testy dismissals of the rumours which were spreading around the city: that Despard and his confederates were being cruelly chained together, that they were being tortured for their confessions, that a last-minute reprieve was in the air. It was beginning to dawn on the authorities that the graphic medieval ritual they had scheduled might be counterproductive, inflammatory and unpredictably dangerous. The Police Magistrate of Southwark had expressed grave concerns, pointing out that the question which had been on the common people’s lips during the week was ‘When are these poor men to be murdered?’. It had been hard, apparently, even to find labourers prepared to erect the scaffold. When the warrant for the execution was issued on the morning of 20 February, it became clear that these anxieties had led to a change in the sentence. Exercising their statutory discretion, the magistrates announced: ‘we have thought fit to remit part of the sentence, viz. the taking out and burning their bowels before their faces, and dividing the body severally into four parts’. Despard would now be drawn –- to the place of execution on a carriage without wheels –- hung until dead, and then beheaded. The Observer commented with relief that ‘the cutting out of the heart of the malefactor, quartering &c is very humanely and properly to be dispensed with’.

On the day of the execution, 21 February 1803, the pace quickened long before dawn. ‘A vast number of police officers’ were soon massively outnumbered by the spectators streaming through the bitter cold and darkness. Southwark was a hard area to police at the best of times, a hinterland to the city of London proper dominated by the unedifying activities which were prohibited across the Thames. A warren of timber shacks among the marshy waste ground and garbage landfills, it had long been a teeming red light district; in recent times it had become dominated by malodorous and insanitary industries — distilleries, tanneries and vinegar mills — which were forced south of the river by City of London edicts. It also had a long history of insurrection. In 1381, Wat Tyler had led the Peasant’s Revolt through the same streets; in 1450, Jack Cade had set up camp here with his Kentish rebel army. Despard’s sentence of high treason had more powerful resonances with this period than it did with the freshly-minted nineteenth century. Most of the crowd had never seen a treason execution; now, jostling to witness one, they were passing shops selling roller-skates, umbrellas, toothbrushes, matches, alarm clocks, condoms, Twining’s Tea and Pears’ Soap. Part of the appeal of the spectacle must have been this lurid collision of the old and the new; part, also, the uncertainty on all sides as to whether the crowd had really assembled only to stand and watch. It was widely rumoured that the execution would not take place as scheduled — or, if it did, that the main event would turn out to be an entirely unscheduled one. The people of London had rioted countless times over much less — and, given the nature of Despard’s alleged crime, there were an unknown number among the crowd who might attempt to turn a riot into a full-scale revolution.

The character of execution crowds seems, as with most crowds, to have been largely in the eye of the beholder. For many, they were simply the scum of society: crude, vulgar, leering, gawping, sadistic. For others, though, they were the salt of the earth, good men and true come to witness and legitimise the exercise of state power. Despite the rough spectacle that they presented, they were often visibly civic-minded: rescuing stranded children, or crying ‘shame’ if one of their number insulted a woman. The beholder’s view of such crowds tended to reflect their attitude to public execution itself, as the most graphic and visceral demonstration of the ultimate power of the state. There were many who were already campaigning for its abolition on the grounds, as one put it, that ‘the real effect of these scenes is to torture the compassionate and harden the obdurate’. There were many more, though, who thronged to such occasions in high spirits. Their hilarity and ribaldry –- the proverbial ‘gallows humour’ – may have been heartless mockery, but it may also have been a response to the unspoken but unmissable tension between the pomp and solemnity of the occasion and ghastly reality of the act.

This tension reached its high water mark with Despard’s execution. There had been a long observed trend in Britain towards public disrespect at hangings: the victim cheered, the executioner and officials booed and mocked. But the crime of high treason placed an unprecedented focus on the legitimacy of the act a focus sharpened still further by the fact that the majority of the onlookers believed Despard to be innocent of it. He had been accused and convicted of a shocking, cold-blooded plot to overthrow the state, an accusation which he had consistently and calmly denied. Now, at the moment of the state’s cold-blooded retribution, he had a final chance to speak the case for his defence. Part of the unique appeal of executions was always that the victims, in the moments before their death, might say anything; it was often the only time that the unspeakable could be spoken in public. But if Despard chose to speak the unspeakable, it would be more than a howl of rage, a fruity obscenity or a cheeky quip. The danger he posed might yet be far from over.

The bell of St.George’s Church began tolling at five, and continued for about an hour. By the time it finished, every conceivable vantage point was packed solid. It was estimated that there were twenty thousand people jammed into the carriageway of Horsemonger Lane and spilling onto every nearby roof and patch of open ground ‘that afforded the least prospect’. It was evident, too, that this was no ordinary gallows crowd, just as it was no ordinary hanging. The packed observers were almost completely silent: ‘no tumult, no disorder appeared among the multitude … all was stillness and expectation of the approaching event’. For the massed guards and officers, this must have been considerably more unnerving than the unruly mob which they had feared. It might be an expression of uncertainty, of a crowd unsure of the tone of the event, and too diffident to break the silence. But it could equally, and perhaps more plausibly, be read as a mute but chilling sign of pre-arranged intent.

Inside Surrey County Jail, as the prison bell struck seven, Despard was invited into the chapel for a service of last rites. He politely refused the invitation, and remained in his cell. At seven thirty, his arms were bound with ropes and he was led out into the walled and enclosed prison yard. He was still a colonel, and still entitled to wear the uniform of his rank, but he appeared instead in his favourite dark greatcoat and boots, bare-headed, without wig or powder. His solicitor was waiting for him outside his cell and, manoeuvering around his ropes, he shook hands with him ‘very cordially’.

Awaiting Despard in the prison yard was a very strange sight indeed. Two horses were harnessed to a small cart which contained two trusses of clean straw, and whose floor rested directly on the ground. Behind the cart stood the Sheriff of Surrey; behind him a fully-robed priest, and behind the priest the head keeper of the jail, Mr.Ives, solemnly holding a white wand. Behind Ives stood a line of high constables, and behind them a line of duty policemen. Bringing up the rear was the executioner, holding up a drawn sword.

The quartering and dismembering had been waived, but there had never been an execution for high treason without the victim first being drawn through the streets to the scaffold. It was integral to the ceremony, but today it was out of the question. The ritual was intended to allow the people to vent their feelings towards the traitor, to abuse him and spit on him; today, though, no-one was minded to test how the ominously silent crowd outside would react if Despard was paraded among them. Apart from anything else, the packed streets made it logistically impossible. It had hastily been decided to switch the ritual to the privacy of the prison yard.

Outside the yard, the traditional gallows humour may have been conspicuously absent, but Despard himself was unable to keep a straight face at the display of furtive pomp that confronted him. ‘Ha! ha!’, he laughed, ‘what nonsensical mummery is this?’ The solemn procession was not programmed to respond. Despard was ushered into the cart, seated backwards on the straw bales and, as the dawn spread grey over the prison walls, bumped around the cobbled yard until it was deemed that the drawing had been completed. There was to be no thwarting of justice, but neither would the ancient ritual of drawing a traitor survive that morning’s embarrassment and ridicule. Despard, though powerless against it, had nevertheless passed a sentence of death on the sentence itself.

(Click to continue reading on page 2).

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1597: The 26 Martyrs of Japan, for God and trade routes

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On this date in 1597, 26 Christians were crucified at Nagasaki’s Tateyama (“Hill of Wheat”) as Japan began to close itself against western interference.

The 26 martyrs — five Europeans of Spanish extraction, one from Portuguese India, and 20 local converts — had been marched hundreds of kilometers over a period of weeks as a warning to the populace, before they were raised up on crosses and lanced to death. They could have had their liberty at the price of renouncing Catholicism; a 12-year-old altar boy among them reputedly answered such an offer on this day with the words, “Sir, it would be better if you yourself became a Christian and could go to heaven where I am going. Sir, which is my cross?”

Martyrs always cut heroic figures. The backdrop of these deaths, however, was a struggle over power and resources in Europe’s colonial age that was far from black-and-white.

European missionaries began their contact with Japan in the waning stages of Japan’s protracted civil wars. They did not scruple to interfere, winning converts with plum trade concessions like saltpeter.

At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese interests were contending with one another for overseas trade, as the European naval powers carved the world into colonies. To greatly simplify a conflict that would continue to unfold well into the 17th century, this day’s martyrdom was suffered by Spanish-backed Franciscans pressing into Portuguese territory in a proxy contest for access conducted by their respective secular authorities.

Portugal, in essence, got there first — and Japan was (disputably) within that seafaring realm’s official sphere of influence. Since legal recognition followed facts on the ground rather than the other way around, Spain sponsored mendicant orders like the Franciscans to make its own inroads.

The late-arriving group was less attuned to the local political climate. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had unified Japan and quelled civil strife, had pronounced an edict of expulsion against Christians ten years prior. It had not been enforced — but the ruler was sensitive to a slide back into civil war and watched the progress of cleric-aided colonization elsewhere in Asia warily. The Portuguese Jesuits took care:

The Jesuits knew that, even though Hideyoshi’s tolerance of Christian propaganda was “in direct proportion to the profits he hoped to gain from the Iberian traders,” their continuous mission would be granted as long as they acted submissively toward him and did not “touch the nerve” of the dictator. … Yet, this deliberate attitude was not shared by the Franciscans, who had just arrived in the country and took Hideyoshi’s acceptance “at its face value and promptly exploited it to the utmost, celebrating Mass openly and behaving generally as if they were in Rome.” The martyrdom at Nagasaki in 1597 was a fatal consequence of this …

When a merchant rashly boasted of Spain’s dominions and claimed that priests and trading ships preceded conquest, the crackdown caught up the martyrs (three of them were Japanese Jesuits seized mistakenly).

This incident did not close Japan against the outside world — that still lay 40 years to the future — but it was a sure step along the path. Intermittent, but more frequent, persecutions of Christians followed in the coming years, driving Japanese Catholics underground, a minuscule and secretive syncretic remnant now in ironic danger of disappearing without the cohesive pressure of persecution.

The 26 martyrs were beatified in 1627 but not elevated to sainthood until 1862 — when western powers once again pried open Japan.

They have a museum in Nagasaki, a city which today remains a (relative) stronghold of the tiny Japanese Christian population.

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1606: Guy Fawkes and other Gunpowder Plot conspirators

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On this date in 1606, Guy Fawkes, “the only man to ever enter parliament with honorable intentions,” was hanged, drawn and quartered in London with three conspirators for attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament … and the government with it.

Fawkes, a soldier, was part of the Gunpowder Plot, a Catholic attempt to assassinate the new king James I when it became clear the House of Stuart would continue its Tudor predecessors’ intolerance of the Roman church.

The conspiracy was crowded, so it was something of a miracle the secret kept for over a year while the plotters filled a rented room under the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder and waited for parliament to open. The explosion would have slain not only James, but numerous officials of the government; the conspirators’ “then what?” plan seems a little vague, but with a modern recreation confirming that the gunpowder packed under Westminster was sufficient to blow the place to smithereens, it’s safe to say something dramatic would have ensued. That “something” might easily have been a savage crackdown against Catholics.

All that remains safely in the domain of the speculative — because as the date approached, one of the conspirators felt moved to warn a Catholic Lord in writing not to attend the opening.

My lord out of the love i beare to some of youere frends i have a care of youer preseruasion therefor i would advise youe as youe tender youre life to devise some excuse to shift of youre attendance at this parliament for god and man hath concurred to punishe the wickedness of this time and think not slightly of this advertisement but retire youre self into youre contri where youe may expect the event in safti for thoughe there be no appearance of any stir yet i saye they shall receive a terrible blowe this parliament and yet they shall not see who hurts them this councel is not to be condemned because it may do youe good and can do youe no harme for the dangere is passed as soon as youe have burnt the letter and i hope god will give youe the grace to maketh good use of it to whose holy protection i commend youe.

Subtle.

Fawkes was not the leader of the conspiracy, but his wartime siege experience made him an important participant in an operation similar to undermining a castle. The affair became remembered to history under his name because he was the one caught when, once the incriminating letter was turned over to the government, yeoman guards searched the cellars.

Fawkes was tortured by express permission of the king for his conspirators’ identities, but held his tongue; those conspirators, however, went ahead with the desperate uprising that was supposed to follow the explosion, and within days they had been apprehended or killed.

Four lesser conspirators were hanged, drawn and quartered on January 30; the remainder suffered that dreadful fate today. Fawkes himself, however, managed to avoid the worst of it by leaping from the scaffold when he was strung up to be half-hung — so he was dead of a broken neck when disemboweled.

The fortuitous abortion of this stupendous act of terrorism (if we can call it “terrorism”) made November 5 Guy Fawkes Night on the English calendar, still a day of fireworks and bonfires in many of the Commonwealth countries.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

The opening lines of this 17th century poem celebrating the king’s miraculous deliverance introduce the 2006 film V for Vendetta …

… in which Fawkes’ subversive persona is pitted against a theocratic dictatorship in the dystopian near future. It’s notable for a forthright celebration, in a mass-market film, of the liberatory power of terrorism.

Today’s well-known victim also left a less obvious but more ubiquitous cultural artifact. The practice of marking Guy Fawkes Night with effigies of the traitor — “Guys” — caused the word to enter the general lexicon as slang for a strangely-dressed man, eventually coming to mean any man (or, arguably, any person regardless of gender) at all.

The House of Commons has a fact sheet (.pdf) on the affair.

Part of the Themed Set: The English Reformation.

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1775: Yemelyan Pugachev

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On this date in 1775, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great had Cossack rebel Yemelyan Pugachev chopped to pieces in Moscow for sustaining a major insurrection whose effects would haunt Russia for decades to come.

Pugachev’s Rebellion was the most spectacular specimen in populous family tree of 18th century peasant uprisings.

Most such disturbances were local and fundamentally unthreatening. Pugachev’s was neither.

The Cossack commander raised a revolt in the Urals in 1773, styling himself the long-lost tsar Catherine had overthrown a decade before.

Catherine was slow to see the import, but this hinterlands pretender set up a state-like bureaucracy and began issuing ukases as tsar — and one can readily discern from their content why he attracted a following:

We bestow on all those who formerly were peasants and in subjugation to the landowners, along with Our monarchic and paternal compassion … tenure of the land and the forests and the hay meadows and the fisheries and the salt lakes, without purchase and without obrok, and we liberate all the aforementioned from the villainous nobles and from the bribe takers in the city–the officials who imposed taxes and other burdens on the peasants and the whole people … [T]hose who formerly were nobles living on estates are enemies to Our power and disrupters of the empire and oppressors of the peasantry, and they should be caught, executed and hanged, they should be treated just as they, who have no Christianity, dealt with you peasants.

The insurrection speedily metastasized, and by the time a force sufficient to quash it was deployed, it had stretched itself from the Urals to the Volga.

Alexander Pushkin used the story of Pugachev’s rebellion for The Captain’s Daughter (text in English | Russian), which has been adapted to film several times — most recently in 2000.

Catherine the Great, for her part, was deeply shaken by the affair, and the “enlightened despot”, while maintaining traffic with the era’s liberal intellectual ferment, decisively turned against any reform to serfdom. Catherine’s choice, reinforced by her successors, to uphold their security with nothing but repression maintained Russian serfdom until 1861 on a staggering scale — an anchor dragging down the economy just as industrializing western Europe opened a development gap whose effects persist to this day.

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838: Babak Khorramdin

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On this date in 838, Babak Khorramdin was chopped to pieces for his 20-year rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate.

A Zoroastrian son of northwest Iran’s Azerbaijan region, Babak rose to head a movement at once political and religious rooted in cultural preservation against the Arab-dominated caliphate.

Captured at last — he had spurned a guarantee of safety with that timeless insurrectionary sentiment, “Better to live for just a single day as a ruler than to live for forty years as an abject slave” — he had his hands and legs struck off in the presence of the caliph. It is said that Babak washed his face in the blood of these wounds to deprive his royal observer the pleasure of seeing his face fall pallid.

Babak remains an iconic figure in his homeland for his resistance to Arab domination, as evidenced by this Farsi-language vignette …

… and this performance of the Persian Ballet.

But he is not an unproblematic character for contemporary Iran, and not so much because of the anti-Islamic character of his revolt. Babak, whose personal ethnic composition seems to be a bone of historical contention, is also hailed an Azeri nationalist hero vis-a-vis Iran. His fortress is mountainous northern Iran still stands … and has latterly become a meeting-ground for advocates of “greater Azerbaijan” on the occasion of Babak’s birthday in July, much to the displeasure of Iranian authorities.

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1635: Ivan Sulyma

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On this date in 1635, Cossack commander Ivan Sulyma was put to death in Warsaw for razing the Kodak Fortress on the Dnieper River.

Sulyma‘s death, a footnote historically, unfolded in the rising action of Zaporozhian Cossacks‘ conflict with the Polish-Lithuanian empire then at the peak of its power.

Those famed corsairs of the steppes made their way in the world by plunder. The European powers at play around the Black Sea domains of the Zaporozhian host — Poland, Russia and the Ottoman Empire — each struggled to exploit Cossack raiders for their own ends of statecraft.

The Zaporozhian Cossacks, as portrayed by Ilya Repin

It was perhaps the misfortune of Poland to claim suzerainty during this unruly horde’s upswinging arc. The Poles endeavored to gather the Cossacks into the formal apparatus of the state, “registering” an elite corps of Cossacks inducted into the armed forces while reducing the remainder to peasantry.

The registry’s size and privileges became a permanent bone of contention, driving a cycle of uprisings through the 1620’s and 30’s that sapped Cossacks’ loyalty to the Polish crown.

Sulyma was a partisan of the militant unregistered Cossacks, fresh from war against the Ottomans. He returned to find that Poland had thrown up a fortress controlling the Dnieper, with an eye both to checking Cossack provocations against the now-peacable Turks, and to controlling internal Cossack disturbances.

Sulyma sacked the fortress, slaughtering its 200 inhabitants, but the disturbance was quickly put down and loyal registered Cossacks handed over the rebel. By the late 1630’s, Poland had imposed a peace of arms on the region … but hardly a secure one. As historian Orest Subtelny notes:

[E]ach successive uprising reflected the growing strength and military sophistication of the rebels. Their numbers grew, their tactics improved, and Cossack identification with the plight of the peasantry and the defense of Orthodoxy deepened. The decade-long Golden Peace merely masked a problem that was waiting to explode again.

It exploded in 1648. Where Sulyma had failed, Bohdan Khmelnytsky would succeed — breaking the Cossack lands permanently free of Poland.

Remembered to the modern state of Ukraine as a father of the country, Khmelnytsky’s immediate achievement was to rearrange the balance of power in Eastern Europe. Poland, ravaged by invading Swedes just as the Cossacks slipped away, fell into permanent decline — leaving a vacuum filled by Russia, which soon pulled the Cossacks into its orbit.

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1581: Edmund Campion, Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant

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On this date in 1581, three English Catholic martyrs were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, casualties of the bloody confrontation between religious and secular power of the English Reformation.

Edmund Campion — later sainted — was the towering figure among them and the great attraction for those that thronged the Tyburn scaffold on a rain-drenched Friday.

A brilliant Oxford scholar once tipped as a possible future Archibishop of Canterbury, Campion abjured his Anglican holy orders in favor of Rome — a mortal peril in Elizabethan England.

He slipped away to Ireland, then to the continent and safety. But at age 40, after nearly a decade abroad, the missionary zeal of the converted called him back to Albion as part of a secret Jesuit mission. Hunted from the day he set foot back in Britain, he survived a year on the run, an underground minister to an illicit faith.

Though priestly investiture alone technically made him capitally liable, a government with millions of Catholic citizens grappled for some firmer ground upon which to condemn the renowned intellectual. Since Campion succumbed neither to torture nor to blandishments, nor to the surreal interludes when he was hauled out of his dungeon and made to debate with the Crown’s theologians, he was finally convicted on the strength of made-to-order witness testimony to the effect that his mission had some vague upshot of undermining Queen Elizabeth’s hold on her subjects.

In effect, it was very much like convicting him for his faith: the Anglican-Catholic conflict had crystallized, and dozens of priests would follow the route of Campion in the years to come. Between a mutually implacable state and church, either flesh or soul must burn.

Not a few of those who trod the martyr’s path would take inspiration from the beatific Jesuit — as young Henry Walpole, whose own route to Calvary is said to have begun when he was spattered by Campion’s blood this day and come full circle to his own execution 15 years later. Walpole’s embrace of martyrdom fairly glows from his proscribed tribute to Campion:

Hys fare was hard, yet mylde & sweete his cheere,
his pryson close, yet free & loose his mynde,
his torture great, yet small or none his feare,
his offers lardge, yet nothing coulde him blynde.
O constant man, oh mynde, oh vyrtue straunge,
whome want, nor woe, nor feare, nor hope coulde chaunge.

…

Yee thought perhapps, when learned Campion dyes,
his pen must cease, his sugred townge be still.
But yow forget how lowd his deathe yt cryes,
how farre beyond the sownd of tounge or quill.
yow did not know how rare and great a good
yt was to write those precious guiftes in bloode.

That famous eloquence was Campion’s legacy, so overwhelmingly so that he presents in the lineup of men who might have written Shakespeare.

His best-know work was “Campion’s Brag”, the scornful nickname his foes gave to an apologia he produced while underground in England … and to whose steady words Edmund Campion proved true this day:

[B]e it known to you that we have made a league — all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England — cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery [to Catholicism], while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the Faith was planted: so it must be restored.

But Protestant England did withstand the enterprise. The generation to come saw Catholic ideas and writing put to withering siege, Campion’s not least among them. For all the tribute of history to the man of Christlike fortitude, it is by no means apparent that the enjoyments of Tyburn and the kindred “practices of England” did not, after all, lay a cross heavier than English Catholics could bear.

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Feast Day of St. Catherine of the Wheel

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This date annually is the feast of iconic — perhaps mythological — Christian martyr Saint Catherine, said to have been put to death in the 4th century for her faith.

St. Catherine in a 700-year-old stained glass at St. Mary’s Church of Deerhurst. Image courtesy of the Sacred Destinations Travel Guide.

One of the most popular Catholic saints, St. Catherine was reputed to have been a beautiful young maiden of Alexandria — so wise as to convert every pagan scholar sent to dispute her, so devoted as to be mystically betrothed to Christ.

Catherine was condemned by one of the last pagan rulers of Rome to torture on a breaking wheel, which shattered when it touched her — so she was simply beheaded. (The story is related in didactic iconography in this triptych.)

Despite this inauspicious debut, the breaking wheel was Catherine’s iconic attribute, by which her frequent appearances in devotional art can be recognized.

This gruesome instrument of torture was also known as the “Catherine wheel” in medieval Europe, from which English derives the deceptively winsome-sounding name of a firework.

The saint became the patron of those condemned to this horrific death as well as a diverse swath of the wider society: wheelwrights, mechanics, and other laborers who worked with wheels for apparent reasons; teachers, philosophers and scribes for her learning; girls, virgins and young maids for her purity. Single women seeking husbands still offer her supplication:

St. Catherine, St. Catherine, O lend me thine aid
And grant that I never may die an old maid.
A husband, St. Catherine.
A handsome one, St. Catherine.
A rich one, St. Catherine.
A nice one, St. Catherine.
And soon, St. Catherine.

Catholic recountings of the saint’s legend can be read here and here. More St. Catherine’s Day customs are enumerated here.

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