Category Archives: Daily Doubles

Daily Double: Revolutionary Justice

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The revolutionary year 1794 has made unsurprisingly regular appearances in these pages.

The French Revolution was going great guns, and giving the National Razor near-daily workouts here at the height of the Terror. But France wasn’t the only revolutionary game on the continent.

On these next two dates, in Europes west and east, tribunals of the people soon to be overthrown by events meted out their revolutionary justice to their enemies.

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Daily Double: The Merciless Parliament

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“Politics is a blood sport.”

–Aneurin Bevan

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

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

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

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

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

Now that is politics as bloodsport.

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Daily Double: Throwback Executions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Daily Double: John Hothams

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

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

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

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

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Daily Double: Lesser War Criminals

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

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

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

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

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Daily Double: Agincourt

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

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

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

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Daily Double: Turkey’s “left-wing coup”

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

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

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

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Themed Set: Unruly Britannia

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The United Kingdom came out on the winning side of World War II, but its hold on its globe-spanning territorial dominions was irrevocably weakened. As its own imperial offspring, the United States, took up the hegemon’s place, British colonies started breaking free — and those social and political sunderings frequently brought violence.

The next two days’ executions were true calendar neighbors, merely hours apart in 1942, as an empire at the end of its run fought for its survival.

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