Category Archives: Public Executions

1242: William de Marisco, pirate knight

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On this date in 1242, the knight, outlaw, and pirate William de Marisco was drawn by a horse to Coventry and put to the pains of disemboweling and quartering — albeit only after he had already been hanged to death.


Illustration of William de Marisco’s execution by the amazing 13th century chronicler Matthew Paris.

He’d eventually be damned as a kingslayer but Marisco’s doom began with the 1235 murder of a messenger of King Henry III named Henry Clement, slain at the very gates of Westminster “to our no small dishonour and scandal of the realm.” Suspicion settled on the Mariscos, who might have been motivated by Clement’s boasting of having helped recently lay in his grave the Earl of Pembroke, a magnate and great rival to the king.*

Marisco, whose architectural legacy for us is Coonagh Castle, County Limerick in Ireland, fled the scene of the crime and took refuge on Lundy Island, a gorgeous and remote fingerbone in the westerly Bristol Channel that had once been granted to the Knights Templar.**

There, as our chronicler-illustrator Matthew Paris describes, he made his way thereafter by piracy.

Whilst these occurrences were taking place, William Marsh [“de Marisco” means “of the Marshes” -ed.], son of Geoffrey Marsh, took up his quarters on an island near Bristol, called Lundy, a place impregnable by the nature of its situation, where he lived like a pirate with a number of proscribed and wicked men, indulging in plunder and rapine, and, attended by his companions, traversed the places on the neighbouring coast, despoiling the inhabitants of their property, especially wine and other provisions. By sudden incursions lie frequently carried off vast booty from the country lying near the island, and in many ways injured the kingdom of England both by land and sea, and caused great loss to the native and foreign merchants.

William de Marisco would manage seven years on the lam, seizing victuals and booty and ransomable hostages as he could from his island fastness. He’d been dispossessed of his lands in Ireland and nursed against King Henry the personal grudge of an aggrieved nobleman.

Such injuries were known to heal over time, and amid the tangle of authority and kinship among medieval Europe’s bluebloods, today’s rebel might become tomorrow’s hand of the king. But in 1238, William cut the roads behind him and made himself permanently anathema by allegedly sending an assassin after Henry III. Matthew Paris, again, with a story that will easily bear the interpretation that Marisco’s name was put into a deranged regicide’s mouth by his torturers:

on the day after the Nativity of St. Mary, a certain learned esquire, as it is said, came to the king’s court at Woodstock, pretending that he was insane, and said to the king, “Resign to me the kingdom, which you have unjustly usurped, and so long detained from me;” he also added, that he bore the sign of royalty on his shoulder. The king’s attendants wanted to beat him and drive him away from the royal presence, but the king prevented those who were rushing on him from violence, saying, “Let the insane man rave as becomes him, for such people’s words have not the influence of truth.” In the middle of the night, however, this same man entered the king’s bedchamber window, carrying an open knife, and approached the king’s couch, but was confused at not finding him there, and immediately began to look for him in the several chambers of his residence. The king was, by God’s providence, then sleeping with the queen. But one of the queen’s maids, named Margaret Biseth, was by chance awake, and was singing psalms by the light of a candle (for she was a holy maid, and one devoted to God), and when she saw this madman searching all the private places, to kill the king, and frequently asking in a terrible voice where the king was, she was greatly alarmed, and began to utter repeated cries. At her dreadful cry the king’s attendants awoke, and leaped from their beds with all speed, and running to the spot, broke open the door, which this robber had firmly secured with a bolt, and seized the robber, and, notwithstanding his resistance, bound him fast and secured him. He, after some time, confessed that he had been sent there to kill the king, after the manner of the assassins, by William Marsh, son of Greoffrey Marsh, and he stated that others had conspired to commit the same crime.

Paris has evident contempt for William, but he does note that “William boldly denied all these charges, yet he did not obtain any credit, nor was he listened to; he therefore, however unadvisedly, betook himself to out-of-the-way places, and became a fugitive and an outlaw.” It is not clear to this author that outlawry is “unadvisable” vis-a-vis standing to the judgment of a king who is certain you have attempted his life; nevertheless, it is usually little better than the temporary expedient for the doomed.

On the feast of St. James, by the king’s order, the said William, with sixteen of his accomplices taken with him, was tried and condemned, and, by the king’s order, was sentenced to an ignominious death. He was, therefore, first dragged from Westminster to the Tower of London, and from thence to that instrument of punishment called a gibbet† suspended on which he breathed forth his miserable life. After he had grown stiff in death, his body was let down and disembowelled; his entrails were immediately burnt on the spot, and his wretched body divided into four parts, which were sent to the four principal cities of the kingdom, that the sight of them might strike terror into all beholders.

His sixteen accomplices were all dragged through London at the horse’s tail, and hung on gibbets. The said William, after his condemnation, when about to imdergo the sentence pronounced upon him, invoking the divine judgment to witness, boldly declared that he was entirely free and guiltless of the crime of treason imputed to him, and likewise of the murder of the aforesaid clerk Clement; he also asserted that he had betaken himself to the aforesaid island for no other reason than to avoid the king’s anger, which he had always above all things wished to pacify by submitting to any kind of trial, or by any other humiliation; but that, after he had taken refuge as a fugitive in the said island, he was obliged to prolong his miserable life by seizing on provisions wherever he could find them. He then poured out his soul in confession before God, to J. de St. Giles, one of the brethren of the Preacher order, and confessed his sins with contrition, not excusing himself and giving vent to evil words, but rather accusing himself. This discreet preacher and confessor then administered gentle comfort to him, and dismissed him in peace, persuading him that he underwent the death to which he was doomed by way of repentance. And thus, as before mentioned, horrible to relate, he endured not one, but several dreadful deaths.

Readers of Latin can peruse the transcript of the trial, which has surprisingly survived the ravages of century, in this 1895 English Historical Review article.

* Pembroke’s brother and heir was also suspected initially, but was able to clear himself; however, he was later made to take a vow no longer to protect William de Marisco, suggesting that Pembroke was at least in simpatico with the hit. Both William and Geoffrey de Marisco had been fined previously for adhering to the Pembroke side in a fight with the king.

** The Templars at best barely possessed Lundy and the Mariscos who claimed it opposed those banker-knights’ stake, successfully.

† Paris’s unfamiliar marking of the term “gibbet” is interesting here; according to dictionary.com it was during the 13th century that this word for gallows entered Middle English from French.

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1587: George Gaspar, an English heretic in the Inquisition

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We have noted previously the progress of the Spanish Inquisition on the Canary Islands in the early 16th century. We turn here to another auto de fe it authored there in 1587 from the same source, The Inquisition in Spanish Dependencies, available free from Google books here.

By this time, the Canaries boasted a population of some 35,000* — half or so on Tenerife, where this auto took place — and had become an important entrepot in the growing traffic to the New World. For the same reason these isles became a theater in the running (albeit undeclared) Anglo-Spanish War, the conflict of which the Spanish Armada forms the most scintillating chapter. English privateer Sir Francis Drake raided the Canary Islands repeatedly in the 1580s. Between commerce and war, English, Irish, and Flemish sailors began to turn up in Spanish prisons on the Canary Islands where holy inquisitors could begin to take an interest in them.

There was another auto, celebrated July 22, 1587, in which there were burnt three effigies of a remnant of the Lanzarote fugitives.** There was also the more impressive relaxation of a living man — the first since that of the Judaizers in 1526. This was an Englishman named George Gaspar who, in the royal prison of Tenerife, had been seen praying with his back to a crucifix and, on being questioned, had said that prayer was to be addressed to God and not to images.

He was transferred to the tribunal, where he freely confessed to having been brought up as a Protestant.

Torture did not shake his faith and he was condemned, a confessor as usual being sent to his cell the night before the auto to effect his conversion. He asked to be alone for awhile and the confessor, on his return, found him lying on the floor, having thrust into his stomach a knife which he had picked up in prison and concealed for the purpose.

The official account piously tells us that it pleased God that the wound was not immediately mortal and that he survived until evening, so that the sentence could be executed; the dying man was carted to the quemadero and ended his misery in the flames.

It bears noting here that the beheading in February of that same 1587 of Mary, Queen of Scots might have inflamed continental Catholic sentiment against an Englishman at this moment; and, the aforementioned Drake had famously harried Spanish shipping during that spring. Nevertheless, the steely Gaspar presents an atypical case. More usually, an ounce of discretion could buy the life even of a heretic of a hostile power, and most preferred to pay the torturer in that coin.

Another Englishman was Edward Francis, who had been found wounded and abandoned on the shore of Tenerife. He saved his life, while under torture, by professing himself a fervent Catholic, who had been obliged to dissemble his religion, a fault which he expiated with two hundred lashes and six years of galley service.

Still another Englishman was John Reman (Raymond?) a sailor of the ship Falcon; he had asked for penance and, as there was nothing on which to support him in the prison, he was transferred to the public gaol. The governor released him and, in wandering around he fell into conversation with some women, in which he expressed Protestant opinions. A second trial ensued in which, under torture, he professed contrition and begged for mercy, which he obtained in the disguise of two hundred lashes and ten years of galleys.

In addition there were the crew of the bark Prima Rosa, twelve in number, all English but one Fleming. One of them, John Smith, had died in prison, and was reconciled in effigy; the rest, with or without torture, had professed conversion and were sent to the galleys, some of them with a hundred lashes in addition.

* Source

** In 1569, a Morisco merchant named Juan Felipe, catching wind that the Inquisition meant to arrest him, took to the seas with about thirty fellow Muslim converts and escaped to Morocco. These refugees were punished in auto de fe effigies in 1569, 1581, and the present case.

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1683: Andrew Guilline, Covenanter accessory

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On this date in 1683, Andrew Guilline (several different spellings of his surname are possible) had his hands chopped off and then his head too, for his part in the Covenanter assassination of the hated Archbishop Sharp four years earlier.

To refresh the reader, Sharp was a former Presbyterian minister who accepted King Charles II’s appointment to be the face of Stuart religious policy in Scotland, thus earning himself a comfortable state pension and permanent lodgings in Hibernian galleries of villainy. The Covenanters who made so many martyrs in these years were so known for their demand that the king honor his pre-restoration “covenant” to promulgate Presbyterianism; that Sharp associated himself with the sovereign’s volte-face made him a traitorous figure in their eyes.

He’d been subject to assassination bids for years.

And our man Guilline was present on the afternoon of May 3, 1679 when one finally succeeded.

On that occasion, a party of Covenanters intercepted Sharp’s carriage near Magus Muir and — after suffering the prelate a last prayer — slashed and sabered him to death. Covenanter hagiographies of Guilline insist this man was a mere incidental to events, the bystander into whose hand the killers slapped their horses’ reins while they went about their business — that Guilline even objected as the assassination unfolded. (Evidence given by the Archbishop’s daughter, who witnessed the murder, confirmed that “one of the traitors standing some paces off called to the rest, Spare those gray hairs.”)


The Murder of Archbishop Sharpe on Magus Muir near St. Andrews, 1679, by William Allen (c. 1840).
A faithful martyr here doth lie,
A witness against perjury;
Who cruelly was put to death,
To gratify proud Prelate’s wrath;
They cut his hands ere he was dead,
And after that struck off his head.
To Magus-muir then did him bring,
His body on a pole did hing.
His blood under the altar cries,
For vengeance on Christ’s enemies.

-Guilline’s funerary inscription.

Be that as it may, Guilline was also immediately sought as a conspirator. He found it prudent to up stakes from Magus Muir and take his weaving business elsewhere.

In 1683, he caught the eye of a minister at Cockpen, near Edinburgh, on account of shirking his legal duty to attend the official church services. It was behavior characteristic of Covenanters, and during the years since Sharp’s murder the persecution of Covenanters had sharply intensified. The sniffing around that ensued uncovered his more infamous association, and it was this that Guilline was charged and condemned for, his sentence augmented with a demonstrative pre-execution severing of his heretical hands.

Guilline met his fate as befits a martyr, brandishing the spurting stump of his right hand after it had been clumsily severed and announcing to the multitude, “As my blessed Lord sealed my salvation with His blood, so I am honoured this day to seal His truths with my blood.”

There is a great confluence come here at this time; I wish with all my heart they would get good by their coming. I am come here to lay down my life. I declare I die not as a murderer, or as an evil doer; although this covenant-breaking, perjured, murdering generation lay it to my charge as though I were a murderer, on account of the justice that was executed on that Judas [i.e., Archbishop Sharp] that sold the Kirk of Scotland for 50,000 merks a year. And we being bound to extirpate Popery and Prelacy, and that to the utmost of our power, and we having no other that were appearing for God at that day, but such as took away his life; therefore, I was bound to join with them in defending the true religion. And all the land, every man, was bound in covenant, when he had sold the Church they were bound, I say, to meet him by the way, when he came down from London, and have put him presently to the edge of the sword for that heinous indignity done to the holy Son of God.

But it is (alas!) too apparent that men have never known God rightly, nor considered that He is a holy God. Oh! terrible backsliding, they will not believe that God will call them to an account for what they owed to God. But assure yourselves; as He is in heaven, He will call every one to an account, how they have stood to that Covenant and work of Reformation. I need say no more; but I would have you consider, that in breaking the Covenant, we have trampled under foot the precious truths of Jesus Christ.

Now, being straitened of time, I must leave off writing. Wherefore, farewell holy Scriptures, wherewith my soul hath been many a day refreshed. Farewell sweet societies with whom I have been, whose company was only refreshful to me. Farewell my mother, brethren, sisters, and all other relations. Farewell all earthly pleasures. Farewell sun, moon, and stars. Welcome spirits of just men made perfect. Welcome angels. Welcome Father, Son, and Holy Ghost into whose hands I commit my spirit!

Sic subscribitur,

ANDREW GUILLINE.

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1450: Jack Cade posthumously quartered

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On or around this date in 1450 the body of the rebel Jack Cade was posthumously beheaded and quartered.

He’s one of England’s first names in rebellion, and Cade’s Kentish rising indexed England’s catastrophic breakdown under the weak king Henry VI, a milepost between the waning Hundred Years’ War and the onrushing Wars of the Roses.


Panel of a 1964-1965 ceramic mural in Peckham, by Polish artist Adam Kossowski. (cc) image from Peter Gasston.

And for all of these, Cade included, Henry was the chaos-making variable.

He had just about finished squandering the entire French patrimony so gloriously won for him by the sword-arm of his doughty father Henry V, and defeated troops fleeing French advances in Normandy compounded, as they tramped up the southeast beaten and looting, the general fury at the king’s unpopular marriage to the French princess Margaret of Anjou. With shambolic governance allied to a slumping economy, corrupt taxation, and mounting public debt, things were coming unglued.

Like many kings, Henry benefited from the instinct to target overt blame away from the sovereign himself and towards the aides and counselors who surround him. One of the very most hated of those counselors was the man who had negotiated that French marriage — giving away to the French crown the hard-won provinces of Anjou and Maine as its price. William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, was so near to being attainted or lynched around London that King Henry exiled him for his own safety to France. But Suffolk didn’t make there: instead, he was captured at sea and murdered.

When his body washed up in Kent, rumors seem to have anticipated a royal reprisal against that region and in favor of the late hated favorite, perhaps the trigger for the events in this post.

Nevertheless, the “rebels” did not conceive themselves engaged in a seditious enterprise; this is apparent from the manifesto of grievances it issued, with moderating tones and language echoing complaints that the Commons was raising to no avail in Parliament.

Item. The law serves of nought else in these days but for to do wrong, for nothing is spread almost but false matters by colour of the law for reward, dread and favour and so no remedy is had in the Court of Equity in any way.

Item. We say our sovereign lord may understand that his false council has lost his law, his merchandise is lost, his common people is destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, the king himself is so set that he may not pay for his meat nor drink, and he owes more than ever any King of England ought, for daily his traitors about him where anything should come to him by his laws, anon they take it from him.

…

Item. We will that all men know we blame not all the lords, nor all those that are about the king’s person, nor all gentlemen nor yeomen, nor all men of law, nor all bishops, nor all priests, but all such as may be found guilty by just and true inquiry and by the law.

Item. We will that it be known we will not rob, nor plunder, nor steal, but that these defaults be amended, and then we will go home …

The man at the forefront is a cipher: he went by the potent alias of “John Mortimer”, the surname unmistakably linking his cause to the rival royal claimants over at the the House of York, but neither the name of “Jack Cade” by which history recalls his movement nor the antecedent experiences that thrust him into leadership can be attested with any confidence.

He appears by the half-glimpses we catch of him in the period’s chronicles to be a vigorous and intelligent character. He shied away from battle with a royal army, wisely avoiding the taint of treason that would come with entering the field against the king’s own person; but, it was an organized withdrawal that left his forces capable of ambushing and destroying the detachment from that army that the king had sent to pursue them, a testament to Cade/Mortimer’s adroit command.

Panicked when the news of this reversal resulted in his own forces taking up the rebels’ call to punish traitorous lords, King Henry beat feet for the safety of Kenilworth Castle and abandoned the stage of London to this mysterious new character.

The rebel militia seized it on the third of July that year, visiting its promised popular justice in the process upon several of those “false counsellors” detested among the populace — including the Bishop of Salisbury, the Baron Saye and Sele, and the former sheriff of Kent, William Cromer; Shakespeare gives us a bloody-minded* Cade bantering with his prey Saye and Sele in Henry VI, Part 2 — “Ye shall have a hempen caudle, then, and the help of hatchet … Go, take him away, I say, and strike off his head presently; and then break into his son-in-law’s house, Sir James [sic] Cromer, and strike off his head, and bring them both upon two poles hither.”


Charles Lucy, “Lord Saye and Sele brought before Jack Cade 4th July 1450”

Peasant risings like these are made for eventual failure, but it the unusually high water mark achieved by Cade’s rebellion before receding makes another measure of the crown’s weakness. After ceding the Kentishmen the run of London for several days, it took a desperate nighttime battle on London Bridge to finally push them out.

A general amnesty went abroad to induce the rebels to disperse, but it was not for Cade — who fled to Sussex where he was taken, and mortally wounded in the process, by the new sheriff of Kent, Alexander Iden. (A road called Cade Street now runs in the vicinity; there is a monument to his capture in Heathfield.) It was Cade’s good fortune to succumb to his injuries on the journey back to London but the pains of justice were inflicted upon his remains just the same.

Cade died on Sunday, July 12. The precise date for his posthumous disgrace is not certain from the sources available to us. Many writers report July 15, seemingly based on John Benet’s chronicle, which is a strong source and asserts the 15th unambiguously. I’m here guardedly preferring the 16th based on Gregory’s Chronicle, whose authors were clearly Londoners, and who narrated the progress of the week following Cade’s death with specificity.

And that day was that fals traytoure the Captayne of Kentte i-take and slayne in the Welde in the countre of Sowsex, and uppon the morowe he was brought in a carre alle nakyd, and at the Herte in Sowetheworke there the carre was made stonde stylle, the wyffe of the howse myght se hym yf hyt were the same man or no that was namyd the Captayne of Kente, for he was loggyd whythe yn hyr howse in hys pevys tyme of hys mys rewylle and rysynge. And thenne he was hadde in to the Kyngys Bynche, and there he lay from Monday at evyn [i.e., Monday, July 13] unto the Thursseday nexte folowynge at evyn [Thursday, July 16]; and whythe yn the Kynges Benche the sayde captayne was be-heddyde and quarteryde; and the same day i-d[r]awe a-pon a hyrdylle in pecys whythe the hedde by-twyne hys breste from the Kyngys Benche thoroughe owte Sowthewerke, and thenne ovyr Londyn Brygge, and thenne thoroughe London unto Newegate, and thenne hys hedde was takyn and sette uppon London Brygge.

Cade’s is the rebellion that gets the ink, but several other uprisings in the South of England followed in the months ahead … ill omen for the king who would soon experience the ruin of his reign and family.

The History of England podcast covers Jack Cade’s rebellion in Episode 161.

* It is one of Cade’s subalterns in this play who supplies posterity with the immortal quip, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

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1738: Baruch Leibov and Alexander Voznitsyn, Jew and convert

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On this date in 1738, the Jewish proselytizer Baruch Leibov was publicly burned in St. Petersburg along with a convert, retired Russian naval officer Alexander Voznitsyn.

The nobleman Voznitsyn met the Smolensk merchant Leibov in Moscow and the two became friends and spiritual interlocutors. In 1737, Voznitsyn’s wife denounced him for Judaizing as she began to notice that he’d stopped wearing a cross, would pray facing the wall instead of Orthodox icons, and avoided eating certain foods. It emerged too that his Christian confessor had not heard from him in a very long time, and that he had ordered peasants on his estate to destroy some icons.

Both men denied the charges at first, but Voznitsyn’s genitalia confessed his apostasy and after an application of torture, so did Voznitsyn’s mouth.

The subsequent punishment was remarkably harsh even in contemporaries’ eyes — via the curious insistence of the Empress Anna upon severity.

A rarely-used edict from the pre-Petrine 17th century was invoked against Voznitsyn for blaspheming; in the case of Leibov, it was necessary in order to fit him into the statute to construe his having “seduced” Voznitsyn into the Abrahamic faith during the two men’s religious bull sessions. Since Voznitsyn was a seasoned and educated man with a known predilection for spiritual seeking, this finding negated the entire qualifier; if Voznitsyn was “lured” or “deceived” into Judaizing then it was officially impossible for anyone to Judaize absent deception.

But in practice, it was likely the convert’s exceptional qualities that attracted such a demonstrative punishment — “so that such ungodly deeds are discontinued, and such a blasphemer as Voznitsyn and converter to Judaism as Boruch do not dare to deceive others: for the sake of such blasphemous guilt … both to be executed and burned.”

They died together before a vast concourse of gawkers near St. Petersburg’s Admiralty building.

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1852: Louis Lullier, wife in a cask

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On this date in 1852, Louis Lullier lost his head for an Edgar Allan Poe-esque murder that was very nearly the perfect crime. He would be the the last person guillotined in Pontoise.*

The stonemason Lullier was caught out by an eagle-eyed bank manager passing a forged bill of exchange. A search of his effects revealed several other such bills under different signatures being readied for circulation … but it turned out that Lullier was laboring under much heavier sins.

“When questioned by the examining magistrate, he appeared labouring under great anxiety, and incoherent words escaped from him,” ran a report published across the channel. (here quoted in The Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser, June 12, 1852)

At length he said he had a horrible revelation to make; and he proceeded to state that nearly a year before he had strangled his wife, had thrust the dead body into a cask, and had deposited it in a cellar, which he indicated. The magistrate was for a moment thunderstruck at this statement, but the prisoner seemed greatly relieved at having made it, and he gave full details of his crime with the greatest sang-froid.

The couple had grown quarrelsome, and when his wife/victim threatened to leave him, Lullier

seized her by the throat and strangled her. He kept the body in his room for two days, and then, having stripped it, he forced it into a cask, and conveyed the cask in a wheelbarrow to a cellar in which he was accustomed to place his tools. The cellar was at some distance from his lodgings, but he wheeled the cask along the streets with the greatest confidence in open day.

No sooner, however, was the murder perpetrated than he became seized with remorse; he neglected his work, and at times stood gloomily before it with his arms folded; he broke off from his friends, abandoned his aged mother, to whom he had been very good, and treated his little child with great brutality, though he had always before shown him great attention. He also took to drinking, and spent a good deal of his time in public-houses with girls of bad character. It was observed that he was almost constantly hanging about the cellar, though no one could tell why, and he was dreadfully agitated when any one approached it.

Jump ahead a year as his last appeals are refused and the Versailles prison chaplain shakes him awake to deliver the news that his imminent beheading will decorate the country’s Bastille Day festivities and a pensive Lullier muses, “I did not think the news could have affected me so much.” (The Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, July 23, 1852)

* Birthplace — just his luck — of Francois Villon.

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1807: Richard Faulkner, scared straight

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On this date in 1807 at Wisbech, 15-year-old Richard Faulkner hanged in a truly repentant frame of mind — as described by the Norfolk Chronicle of August 1, 1807:

At Ely assizes, held at Wisbech, there was but one prisoner for trial; viz. Richard Faulkner, convicted of the murder of George Burnham a lad about 13 years of age, at Whittlesea, on Sunday, the 15th of February last, by cruelly beating him to death, for no other cause than to revenge his (the deceased) mother’s having thrown some dirty water upon him.

The prisoner himself was not 16, but so shockingly depraved and hardened, that after condemnation he repeatedly clenched his fist, and threatened to murder the clergyman who attended the gaol, or any one who dared to approach him.

Indeed he was so ferocious that the gaoler found it necessary to chain him hands and feet to his dungeon, where he uttered the most horrid oaths and imprecations on all who came near him; and from the Friday to Saturday night refused to listen to any religious advice or admonition.

At length to prevent the termination of his existence in this depraved state, the expedient was devised of procuring a child about the size of the one murdered, and similar in feature and dress, whom two clergymen unexpectedly led between them, by the hands, into his cell, where he laid sulkily chained to the ground; but on their approach he started and seemed so completely terrified, that he trembled every limb, cold drops of sweat profusely falling from him, and was almost momentarily in such a dreadful state of agitation, that he intreated the clergymen to continue with him, and from that instant became as contrite a penitent as he had before been callous and insensible.

In this happy transition he remained till his execution on Monday morning the 13th inst. having fully confessed his crime and implored by fervent prayer the forgiveness of his sins from a merciful God!

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1408: Konrad Vorlauf, Vienna Burgermeister

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Konrad Vorlauf, late the mayor of Vienna, was beheaded on this date in 1408 with two other councillors.

The patrician Burgermeister was a casualty of the dynastic civil war between brothers Leopold IV and Ernest the Iron, which manifested in Vienna — a rising city on the brink of becoming (in 1440) the Habsburgs’ permanent residence — as a conflict between the city’s merchant oligarchs (allied to Ernest) and her artisan craftsmen (allied to Leopold).

It was a violent conflict even within city walls: in January of 1408, Vorlauf had seized five Leopold-friendly guild leaders and had them beheaded on the Hohenmarkt. (See this public-domain history of Vienna, in German)

During a subsequent truce, Vorlauf along with fellow Vienna grandees Hans Rock, Rudolf Angerfelder, Stephan Poll, Friedrich von Dorffen, Wolfhardt Schebnitzer, Niklas Untermhimmel and Niklas Flusthart went to a confabulation called by Leopold under his safe conduct, only to be seized on their return by knights allied to his cause and held to ransom.

Vienna duly paid it up but perhaps might have done better to keep the cash. Somewhere around this time Leopold imposed himself in Vienna itself, and when the artisan class caused a ruckus over new taxes, the prince was pressured to seize Vorlauf along with the aforementioned Hans Rock and another councillor named Konrad Rampersdorfer. Their beheading — in the city’s Pig Market, for added disgrace — proceeded under no color of law. The aged Rampersdorfer asserted his seniority for the privilege of dying first, saying

I have hitherto been a precursor to all others, and I have not earned the death penalty, but I have stood always for the natural rights of my prince. Therefore I offer to my fellows my own example, not to fear a righteous death, but to submit to it voluntarily.

With the childless death of Leopold a few years later Ernest became the uncontested chief of the Leopoldian line, and his martyred Viennese compatriots celebrated as municipal patriots — eventually exhumed from their graves and reburied with honor in St. Stephen’s Cathedral. They were fortuitously allied, as events would transpire, to the imperial glory conquered by Ernest’s descendants in what became the chief Habsburg dynastic line (the mighty Maximilian I was Ernest’s grandson).

Today, the place of the mayor’s execution is called Lobkowitzplatz; it’s marked by a plaque paying tribute to the men who bled there in 1408.


Commemorative plaque honoring Vorlauf and the others beheaded with him.

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1835: Ruel Blake, “often seen among negroes”

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On this date in 1835, Ruel Blake hanged in Livingston as one of the white instigators of a supposed slave uprising.

Blake was an foreigner to Madison County, a Connecticut carpetbagger who (according to the vigilance committee’s proceedings) “could claim but few or none as friends” as he was “of a cold, phlegmatic temperament, with a forbidding countenance; kept himself almost aloof from white society, but was often seen among negroes” and “was noted for cold-blooded revenge, insatiable avarice, and unnatural cruelty.” He worked as a wheelwright and carpenter, and had only a single slave, Peter.

But not everyone in Livingston had it in for the guy. As the excitement first began to bubble up as June turned to July, Captain Thomas Hudnall, a wealthy plantation owner gave Ruel Blake money and a horse and sagely suggested he lay low somewhere else while the storm passed. Blake had not yet been accused by anyone, but he’d aroused the ire and seemingly the suspicion of his neighbors when his own slave was accused and Blake administered an unconvincing and pro forma flogging — “he did not wish to hurt [the slave], occasionally striking a hard lick to keep up appearances.” Eventually other white citizens forcibly relieved him of the job, and Blake had the effrontery as he saw his man being thrashed to “[rush] through the crowd to where his negro was, and swore, if he was touched another lick, they would have to whip him first,” a threat that brought him to blows with the man wielding the whip.

Hudnall rightly anticipated that his neighbors’ presumption of “mere” excess sympathy for the slave would soon take a much darker turn: Blake blew town on July 1, and with the arrival into Livingston the very next day of the fantastical slave revolt claims from nearby Beatties Bluff, a $500 reward for his capture soon went nipping at Blake’s heels. In the ensuing panicked days, Blake along with the “steam doctors” Cotton and Saunders — all strangers come to Mississippi, all of them socially marginal and noted for fraternizing with black people — came to be acclaimed as the chief white conspirators, accusations that became self-affirming as men under the lash or in fear of the gallows repeated the names, knowing from their torturers’ leading questions who was already condemned by acclamation.

Blake was captured after just a few days, in Vicksburg, where he posed as a boatman from upriver. Now Hudnall’s favor cut against him, for the flight from Livingston appeared to prove his guilt:

He arrived in Livingston on the 8th of July, under a strong escort, intimations being obtained that an attempt would be made by the clan [John Murrell’s bandits, the alleged nexus of the slave rising plot -ed.] to rescue him.

His appearance in Livingston created a most alarming excitement; and, but for the committee’s being in session, in all probability he would have been forcibly taken from the guard, and immediately executed. After arriving, he was immediately put on his trial before the committee … Every disclosure which was made [by previous interrogations] was replete with testimony against him.

After hearing all the evidence, every opportunity was given him to produce counteracting testimony, which he failed to do. There being no doubt on the minds of the committee, he was, by a unanimous vote, condemned to be hanged; and, just before leaving the committee-room, he requested the committee to give him time to settle his affairs.

On the 10th of July, in the presence of an immense concourse of people, he was executed. He privately commended the verdict of the committee, and said they could not have done otherwise than condemn him from the evidence before them, and publicly, under the gallows, made the same declaration. He protested in his innocence to the last, and said that his life was sworn away.

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1835: Vincent, by popular demand

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This story is transcribed from the July 27, 1835 National Banner and Nashville Whig:

From the Clinton (Miss.) Gazette.

PUBLIC EXECUTION. — On Thursday morning last,* between the hours of 10 and 11 o’clock, VINCENT, a mulatto fellow belonging to the estate of the late Robert Bell, was hung in this place, by the citizens.

Abundant evidence of his participation in the late insurrectionary movements having been furnished the Committee of Vigilance appointed by the people of Clinton, he was sentenced to receive three hundred lashes, and to perpetual banishment from the United States, after the expiration of forty days.

On Wednesday evening, Vincent was carried out to receive his stripes; but the assembled multitude were in favor of hanging him — regarding the sentence pronounced against him as insufficient for the punishment of so enormous a crime. A vote was accordingly fairly taken, and the hanging party had it by an “overwhelming majority,” as politicians say. He was remanded to prison.

On the day of execution, a still larger crowd was assembled, and fearing that public sentiment might have changed in regard to his fate, after every thing favorable to the culprit was alleged, which could be said, the vote was taken — and his death again demanded by the people.

In pursuance of this sentiment, so unequivocally expressed, he was led to a “black-jack,” and suspended to one of its branches.

We approve entirely of the proceeding. The people have acted properly. Any man, whether he be white, yellow, or black, who lends his countenance and aid to a scheme, having for its object the burning of villages and towns, and the indiscriminate butchery of men, women and children, surely deserves an ignominious death. He who robs a solitary traveller on the high-way of a few dollars, is doomed to suffer death. How much more then, is he deserving of that punishment, who concocts and matures a deep laid conspiracy against the lives of an unoffending community?

Vincent could have made important discoveries at the gallows, but obstinately refused doing so, alleging that his own death being certain, it would profit him nothing to bring others to the same fate, and that he should inform on no one.

The Clinton lawyer named Henry Foote — who in future would become Governor of Mississippi — claimed in his memoir Casket of Reminisces that the ad hoc public votes on Vincent’s life were the product of his, Foote’s, desperate attempts to prevent the lynching at the behest of the former slave’s aged mistress.

When I rode into the town of Clinton I saw a large multitude assembled on one of the most popular streets, in front of a store in which Mr. Archibald Kenney, now in Staunton, Virginia, had some years before sold merchandize. I dismounted and went to the spot. I soon learned that the vigilance committee of that vicinage, composed of some of the best citizens of the county, had been trying a mulatto man, whom I knew very well, upon a charge of being a participant in the scheme of alleged insurrection.

A considerable quantity of powder and shot had been found in his possession, which circumstance had awakened some suspicions against him. The committee had tried him, and had sentenced him to be whipped only, and they would, indeed, have discharged him altogether, as I learned from themselves, had they not dreaded the indignant rage of the population of the town, then in a very excited condition. The committee had been unfortunate enough to sit with closed doors, which gave to the imagination of those not taking part in their proceedings a wide field for unfavorable conjecture. When the sentence was announced the outsiders determined to hang their longed-for victim at any rate; and at the time I reached the place where they were assembled the preparations for the execution of the boy were going forward. The boy had been in the ownership of a venerable gentle man of the neighborhood, Captain Bell, a Virginia friend of mine of great respectability and intelligence. He had been a great favorite with his master, who had left him free. The captain had been dead about a year, and this boy, who by-the-by was nearly white, and singularly polite and civil in his manners, had been since his master’s decease a faithful protector of his family, which consisted of his widow and a single female child. This widowed lady had reached the fearful scene some minutes before my own arrival, and had been allowed, in connection with a learned and pious minister of the Gospel, Dr. Comfort, to hold a last interview with this unfortunate boy. She came forth from this interview, attended by her pious and humane protector, and advancing within the portico where most of the multitude were located, she spoke, with a voice much agitated and almost stilled with emotion, while the tears were rapidly coursing down her venerable cheeks, as follows:

“GENTLEMEN, you all knew my husband during his life, and respected him. This poor boy was his favorite servant. I know his disposition and character well. I have just catechised him most searchingly. Had he been guilty as charged I should have been able to detect his guilt. I assure you that he is innocent. Oh! gentlemen, (she wildly exclaimed,) is there not one among you who will stand up here as the representative and champion of a poor, widowed, friendless female?” I immediately rose to my feet. I looked circumspectly upon the crowd for a moment. I saw standing just before me the grim-looking face of a man notorious for his violent and blood-thirsty character, whose name was Hardwick, and whom I soon after prosecuted for a diabolical murder, for which he would certainly have been hanged if the victim of his atrocity had been a white man. I saw a new rope in this ruffian’s hands, the texture of which he was feeling with his accursed fingers, evidently for the purpose of ascertaining whether it was strong enough to do the dread office effectually for which he had purchased it. I was conscious of all the perils which surrounded my position, and I therefore proceeded with extreme caution. I spoke thus: “Gentlemen, you have heard the touching appeal of this venerable lady. I have nothing to add to her decorous and impressive address, but I have a word to say to you of a prudential character in regard to yourselves and your own future responsibilities. The excitement now raging in this community may after awhile subside. Then it may be that some officious person shall wish to institute a prosecution for murder on account of the hanging of this boy. In my judgment it will be most safe that whatever is done in this affair shall be the act, as it were, of the whole community. I am not willing that a few generous-minded young men shall be made the scape-goats of this vicinage. Let us all join in whatever act may be resolved on. Now I will take the vote of the whole assemblage upon the question of banging, if no one sball object to it.” No objection being made, I said: “All in favor of hanging this unfortunate boy will signify the same by saying aye.” Nine-tenths answered aye. I said: “Those opposed to hanging will answer no.” About eight or ten persons said no.

I determined to make one more experiment before I gave up all hope of saving a human being from a fate so dreadful as that I saw impending. The day was intensely hot. The street on which we were located was very wide and intersected with deep gullies. I said: “Gentlemen, let us settle this question more satisfactorily: All in favor of hanging will range themselves on the opposite side of the street; those in favor of mercy will remain under the shade of this portico.” Nearly all rushed across the street! I left the spot with feelings of sorrow and disgust which no words can express. The boy was swung into eternity in less than fifteen minutes from that moment.

On my way home to dinner I met that distressed widow. She was on horseback, and stopped for a moment to speak to me. She said: “Mr. Foote, you know what has taken place to-day. You were, during the life of my venerated husband, his friend and his legal adviser. Tell me what I had best do. I wish to prosecute the murderers of my servant. Will you undertake to bring them to justice? I will reward you liberally.”

“My dear madam,” I said, “We are in the midst of most unhappy circumstances and of most appalling dangers. The community in which we live is in a frenzied condition. Were you to commence such a prosecution as you mention your own life would not be safe. Let me recommend to you earnestly to bow to the imperious necessity of the hour. “She looked at me for a moment with a mingled expression of sorrow and resentment upon her countenance, and then responded to me with a grave and touching solemnity of look I can never forget: “I will take your advice. Farewell!”

* This story was republished around the country featuring only the Gazette‘s original “Thursday morning last” locution, without any contextualizing dateline, which is another compelling reason for newsfolk to abandon the chatty day-of-week convention in favor of stating an actual date. Neither does Foote trouble to date the affair.

However, in view of the infuriatingly cavalier dating of events that this calendar-interested author is forever wrestling, Joshua Rothman‘s gumshoe act on Vincent’s hanging date in Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson is nothing short of a godsend. Here’s endnote 50 to chapter 7 in its gloriously diligent entirety:

Figuring the date of Vincent’s trial requires a bit of detective work and a bit of guesswork. On July 24 the Jackson Mississippian reprinted Vincent’s story as it appeared in the Clinton Gazette. July 24 was a Friday, and while no copies of the Gazette from July 1835 survive, the paper was published on Saturdays, meaning that its article about Vincent appeared in either the July 11 or July 18 edition. The original story indicates that Vincent’s execution took place on “Thursday morning last” and suggests that his trial took place the day before that. The language here is ambiguous. If the story originally appeared in the July 11 issue of the Gazette, “last” means July 9, the Thursday immediately preceding, as there was no vigilance committee in existence in Clinton on any Thursdays prior to that one. If the story originally appeared in the July 18 issue of the Gazette, “last” could mean that Vincent’s trial occurred on July 15 or on July 8, but July 8 seems more likely for several reasons. The activities of the vigilance committees all over the state, including the one in Livingston, had slowed significantly by the fifteenth. Moreover, Henry Foote claimed to have seen what happened to Vincent when he got back to Clinton the day after seeing the beating of Lee Smith. He may have been mistaken, but an entirely plausible and consistent timeline exists in which Foote saw a mob assault Lee Smith on the afternoon of July 7, arrived in Jackson that evening, accompanied William Sharkey to Clinton on the morning of July 8, and witnessed what became of Vincent in town that afternoon and early the next day. [citing] Clinton Gazette in Jackson Mississippian, July 24, 1835; Foote, Casket of Reminiscences, 256.

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