October 14 is the original feast date* and alleged martyrdom date of early Christian saints Gervasius and Protasius.
Reputedly the twin sons of two othermartyrs, their iconographic devices are the scourge, the club, and the sword, all of which implements were rudely employed by Nero’s (or possibly Domitian’s) executioners
Although put to death in Ravenna, their relics repose in macabre magnificence at Milan’s Basilica of Saint’Ambrogio; for this reason, the Roman church considers them patron saints of that city, and keeps their feast date on June 19, the anniversary of their relics’ translation. The Orthodox still mark the October 14 feast, which, being the execution date, is of considerably more interest to these grim annals.
Remains of Gervasius and Protasius at Milan’s Basilica Sant’Ambrogio, along with the remains of the cathedral’s builder and namesake, Saint Ambrose. (cc) image from BáthoryPéter.
Although in these pages we most typically notice the details of the crime, our surviving account from Newgate Prison’s Ordinary draws our attention instead to the spiritual struggle of the condemned … or perhaps better to say, of the condemned’s minister.
James Collins and James Whem were two of the hanged men: they were off-duty soldiers caught red-handed after committing a violent mugging in a field near King’s Road.
Sarah West was knocked down by COLLINS with his fist while he held a drawn sword in the other hand, with which he threatened her life if she made a noise; mean time another of them robbed Mr Sykes, and a third [Collins and Whem had a third accomplice who was not captured -ed.] robbed Mr. Halm, of their money and watches; the former being knocked down, was dangerously wounded with a sword, in the forehead, and the latter was also knocked down.
When the Ordinary went to minister to them he found them amenable to his approaches: “Collins lamented that he could not read; Whem said he was a presbyterian; we had some conversation on the principles common to christians, to which he agreed; after which he never refused to join with us, but came constantly to chapel, which was made ready in some sort by next day, where by the help of some directions and daily instructions, each of them behaved tollerably well.”
John Kello,* by contrast, was condemned for forging a thousand-quid note. He scrupulously fought the charge, to no avail; in his turn, he would also fight the Ordinary’s scruples.
Unlike his ruffian brethren in the condemned hold, the mannered and educated Kello felt himself too good for the Ordinary’s devices.
After conviction, when he was applied to, as he lay in bed in his cell, with some words of condolence and exhortation, he answered coldly: “Your advice is very good, and becoming your office to give, but I have some particular opinions of my own” to which it was replied, you will I hope attend the chapel, and give me an opportunity of conferring with you on those opinions, perhaps we may be able to remove and change them for the better: he answered, with an air of superior knowledge and resolution, that “his opinions were not to be changed.” But if they have misled you into your present sad situation, is not this a proof of the unsoundness of them; and that it is high time to quit and renounce them, and take up such as may relieve and support you in this hour of distress and anguish?
he answered, “he never should quit his present sentiments either in this life or after it.” But how if they prove contrary to the received and well-tried opinions of wise and good men? This he denied they were. Being asked if he would permit me to pray with him and the other convicts in his cell, he desired to be excused. He was again asked whether he would come to chapel when called upon at any time hereafter? this he also refused and kept to his resolution next morning and so forward, till a message from Mr. A—n (without any application of mine) by some of the runners made him think proper to attend. Before this visit ended, it was added, I came to offer you the best assistance in my power, if you refuse it, the blame and consequence will fall on your own head. He answered in some slighting manner, as if he set light by this and all such threats, as a mere bugbear, and engine of my office.
The Ordinary found this attitude in a 26-year-old condemned felon quite unsuitable and did not shy from complaining about the haughty youth to his audience.
his behaviour and language was that of a stranger to the oracles of God, and a despiser of them — of a diligent dabler in those dear-bought books which scatter the seeds of scepticism and immorality, of doubt and misbelief, in those weed-bearing soils that are prepared for, and most susceptible of them; which God in his anger suffers to take root and grow in the soul of the sluggard, who is indisposed either to seek, to find, or to follow the ways of found wisdom and instruction. This reminded me of an observation and precept of a celebrated poet.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the pierian spring.
For shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
But drinking deeply sobers us again.
Take that, you brat.
The Headsman is not clergy but might have conceived from the pews that as the reverend was the character proffering wisdom, experience, and perspective, and moreover was the one who was not slated for hanging, it did not well become him to confide to typeface every distinct shade of his scorn for the other man’s resistance.
John Kello consented to come up to chapel, and by way of apology for his past behaviour, said he was bred a dissenter. A Dissenter in deed! But don’t you believe the Bible to be of divine authority? to this he would give no answer, but pretended to be acquainted with all Religions, as well if he had studied the dictionary on that subject; and yet when asked a few questions, seemed quite ignorant of the first principles both of natural and revealed religion. His notions of the obligations to truth and justice, were so imperfect and loose, that he still boldly declared himself innocent of the crime he stood convicted of, and that if he were to die this day he was prepared to answer before his great judge, to whom he referred himself for the truth of his plea.
AND WOULD YOU BELIEVE THIS, GENTLE READER?
For the present, concerning the duty of confession of sins; to whom? and in what cases to be made, the introductory sentences of holy writ prefixed to the daily service of the church, with the confession and absolution founded thereon, were explained to him; together with a general scheme of the tenour, meaning and rationality of the other parts of the service of the church England. These he was warned not to come to hear, as a spy or a scoffer, but rather, as best befitted his circumstances, as an humble penitent. Notwithstanding this, he rather heard the service, than joined in it, for he refused to make responses, or kneel, being in his opinion a matter of indifference, and no reason or authority could convince him to the contrary. This was the less excuseable in him, as he boasted himself free from the errors of education. When after prayers I offered him the use of some good tracts, among which was that excellent, clear and rational view of the sum and substance of Christian faith and practice, the late Bishop of Sodor and Man’s Instruction for the Indians, he first objected to it, as being merely practical; he then said he had met with it abroad in Virginia, and had seen that subject treated in a more masterly manner. He was answered, that the clearness, ease, and condescension of the stile to every capacity, as well as the practical manner in which it is handled, are proofs of the masterly performance. He then said he was a sufficient guide to himself, from what he had within him, and would accept of none of my books.
And on top of everything, he continued to insist upon his innocence, to the fury (and verbose rebuttal) of the tilted vicar.
Our man kept at it, picking out choice Biblical passages for obstinacy, and diligently logging for posterity their (usually ineffectual) impressions. Kello even blew off the help of an outside minister who hewed more to his “dissenting” milieu.
Kello never did submit so far as to favor the Ordinary with a confession, nor did he ever fully participate in a Church of England service. But on the fatal morning, they came to some sort of accord, or at least a sense of mutual exhaustion. Having got Kello to affirm that he was indeed a Christian, and not one of those horrid deists, the Ordinary “contented myself with advising him at least to join in the Litany and other prayers, and to be present at the administration; to this he complied, and behaved himself with attention (and perhaps mental devotion also) while the other prisoners prayed and communicated with some other serious persons who joined with us.” And they found a way to comport themselves to each other’s satisfaction at the gallows.
They were all three carried out in one cart about nine, and brought to the place of execution about ten; where a numerous mixt multitude were met to see them suffer. Being tied up they were again applied to, to declare if they had any thing to confess. Mr. Kello now at last declared his sorrow for all his offences against God: he was reminded to add, for every injury done to his neighbour, which he assented to. The two others continued to say they had nothing more to confess; nor did any of them think proper to speak a word of warning to others, against the fatal steps which brought them to this sad lot; but they desired the people to join in prayers for them, which they did. At a proper pause, Kello was asked whether he would join in confessing and repeating the creed? to this he agreed; but as he did not speak out, either in this or in the prayers, his joining could only be internal. He was further asked whether he was not grieved for not being admitted to the holy communion? he answered, that he had joined with us in his heart, and spirit, as far as he could. This gave me good hope of some better dispositions within him, now at last, than we could hitherto discover by his outward behaviour. He was again desired to declare he forgave his brother; he answered, that his brother knew his sentiments in that respect, by his behaviour and conduct towards him, refering to some secrets between themselves. He added, “As far as humanity can, I forgive him;” to which I subjoined, “may the grace of God help all your human infirmities;” he thanked me for this, and other offices of the like kind. About this time, finding his hands loose, he called to the executioner to tie them; but first he took out of his pocket four small letters folded but not sealed, which he humbly desired I would forward, giving me a direction to one gentleman to whom three of them were to be inclosed and sent by the pennypost. As these letters were a deposit, and have no connection with the crime for which he suffered, nor can give any satisfaction as to his guilt or repentance, the publick, it is hoped, will not desire nor expect to see them.
But in deference to the publick, this much may be said, That they speak the language and thoughts of a man anxious in his last hours to do particular acts of justice and good offices, where due, to the utmost of his power; and that expressed in a stile and turn of sentiments, such as would make one heartily wish the writer had deserved a better fate.
The two soldiers, we hope, enjoyed a compensation in the hereafter for their pious submission that they did not receive in the form of column-inches. Nevertheless, the Ordinary leaves the last word to their case, a noble principle that in truth is but rarely observed in the breach.
Collins having a small book of devotions in his hand desired it to be given to one of his brother Soldiers, whom he call’d by name out of the croud, and who came and received it: a considerable number of the foot-guards being present, behaved decently, were much affected, and some wept. May these examples of justice be a warning to them all to avoid every act and degree of violence to his Majesty’s subjects, whom it is their duty to protect and defend against injuries of every kind. May they ever remember that they are paid and maintained for that purpose; and therefore, that injuries offer’d by their hands are highly aggravated, and can rarely, if ever, hope for, or admit of mercy from the sovereign protector of his people.
* Our white collar whippersnapper is not to be confused with a more renowned denizen of the executioners annals, John Kello, the Parson of Spott
John Byrns (aka Francis Burns), John Bennet, Daniel Cronan, John Ferguson (aka John Taylor) and John Logan* hanged in Philadelphia on this date in 1789.
The offenders were “wheelbarrow men,” which in the idiolect specific to late 1780s Pennsylvania denoted prisoners who were detailed, in order “to correct and reform offenders, and to produce such strong impressions on the minds of others as to deter them from committing the like offences,” to suffer “continued hard labour publicly and disgracefully imposed.”
As its own text declares, the 1786 statute creating this class was a part of Pennsylvania’s avant-garde move towards a penitential penal philosophy, with a corresponding reduction in capital sentences for property crimes: Pennsylvania had hanged about 40 people for mere robbery or burglary in the preceding decade. As explained by Louis Masur’s Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (which is also our source for the count of hanged thieves), “in 1786, most almanacs in Philadelphia and elsewhere included the proverb that industry promoted virtue.”
It became readily apparent, however, that the “wheelbarrow law” neither reformed the prisoners nor prevented vice. Indeed, it seemed to many that the convicts became even more licentious and that unprecedented amounts of criminal activity infested the community.
Such prisoners were “subjects of great terror, even while chained” given these walking spectacles’ notorious dissolution, and still worse their propensity for fleeing their wheelbarrows to become desperate fugitives. Pennsylvania newspapers from this era have an alarming quantity of notices published by gaolers warning of escaped wheelbarrow men … and not a few reports of actual or suspected crimes committed by them. For example …
Philadelphia Mercury, Oct. 23, 1788.
New-Hampshire Spy, Dec. 2, 1788.
By the time full 30 wheelbarrow-men escaped on a single night in October 1788, elite opinion had turned solidly against this disastrous experiment, and the law would be repealed by 1790 — substituting for public shaming the penitential benefits imposed solitude. But before the wheelbarrow men had disappeared into historical curiosity, our five of them in September 1789 robbed and also murdered a man named John McFarland in his home on Philadelphia’s Market Street.
On this date in 1871, Eugen Kvaternik and a number of companions were shot as rebels.
A patriot who had long aspired to detach Croatia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kvaternik (English Wikipedia entry | Croatian) found enough traction to give it a go during the late 19th century’s rise of swirling nationalist rivalries.
His Rakovica Revolt, named after the village where Kvaternik announced the Croatian People’s Republic on October 7, 1871, was speedily crushed, however. Kvaternik’s rebels routed on the 10th with the appearance of a federal army and the arrests began forthwith.
On October 11, a military tribunal sentenced Kvaternik and various comrades to death — sentences that were implemented immediately by musketry. Today, there are streets and city squares in independent Croatia named to Kvaternik’s honor.
The Killings of Rakovica (Death of Eugen Kvaternik), by Oton Ivekovic.
French Revolutionary Claude Javogues was shot on this date in 1796.
The son of an ancien regime royal castellan, the barrister Javogues would have the opportunity in the revolutionary Convention to vote the death of the old man’s boss, and he did not miss his chance.
Pour préserver les âmes pusillanimes de l’amour de la tyrannie, je vote pour la mort dans les vingt-quatre heures. (“To preserve pusillanimous souls from the love of tyranny, I vote for death within twenty-four hours.”)
The guy wasn’t above getting his own hands dirty in the bloody work of revolution, either, and ran his own local revolutionary terror in his home town of Feurs. (A Chapel of the Martyrs in Feurs pays homage to the 80 victims of Javogues’s Terror.) Even so, he had his own brush with the Committee of Public Safety and stood in some danger for a time of being one of the children devoured by the revolution.
Instead, it was the subsequent Thermidorean Reaction that did for Javogues when he was suspected of complicity in the radicals’ Conspiracy of Equals.
He had the distinction in parting to be shot by a firing detail commanded by one Leopold Hugo — eventually (come 1802) the father of novelist Victor Hugo.
From The Penguin Book of Witches concerning the milestone execution of the rare Maryland “witch” Rebecca Fowler on this date in 1685; italicized text is the modern writer’s commentary.
One of the rare Chesapeake witches, Fowler was accused of being led by the Devil to injure a man named Francis Sandsbury using witchcraft and sorcery. She was hanged. Usually Chesapeake witchcraft cases were milder than their New England equivalents, often limited to bad-mouthing and rumor. Accused witches in the South were fewer in number and were usually acquitted. Fowler is thought to be the only witch executed in the Maryland colony, though a man named John Cowman was accused of witchcraft, condemned, and then begged a stay of execution.
Court Records of Rebecca Fowler
At a meeting of the provincial court on the 29th day of September, 1685, Rebecca Fowler was indicted by a grand jury.
For that she, the said Rebecca Fowler, the last day of August in the year of our Lord, 1685, and at diverse other days and times, as well before and after, having not the fear of God before her eyes, but being led by the instigation of the Devil certain evil and diabolical arts, called witchcrafts, enchantments, charms, and sorceries, then wickedly, devilishly, and feloniously, at Mount Calvert Hundred and several other places in Calvert County of her malice forethought feloniously did use, practice, and exercise, in, upon, and against one Francis Sandsbury, late of Calvert County aforesaid, laborer, and several other persons of the said county, whereby the said Francis Sandsbury and several others, as aforesaid, the last day of August, in the year aforesaid and several other days and times as well before as after, at Mount Calvert Hundred and several other places in the said county, in his and their bodies were very much the worse, consumed, pined, and lamed again the peace, et cetera, and against the form of the statute in this case made and provided.
To this indictment Rebecca pleaded not guilty. She was tried before a jury who rendered the following verdict:
We find that Rebecca Fowler is guilty of the matters of fact charge din the indictment against her and if the court finds the matters contained in the indictment make her guilty of witchcraft, charms, and sorceries, et cetera, then they find her guilty. And if the court finds those matters contained in the indictment do not make her guilty of witchcraft, charms, sorceries, et cetera, then they find her not guilty.
In view of this finding of the jury, judgment was “respited” until the court had time to further consider the case. After the court reconvened a few days later, Rebecca was again brought to the bar and the judges having “advised themselves of and upon the premises, it is considered by the court that the said Rebecca Fowler be hanged by the neck until she be dead, which was performed the ninth day of October aforesaid.”
This date’s story of the condemned killer of a child bride lodging with his own executioner comes from the recollections of Dallas, Oregon frontierswoman Mrs. Frank Collins, nee Martha Elizabeth Gilliam.
Frank Nichols, who married my sister Sarah, was the next sheriff. One of his first jobs was hanging Adam E. Wimple.
Wimple had stayed for a while at our house in 1845. He married a 13-year-old girl in 1850 and within a year killed her. They lived in Cooper Hollow, four or five miles from Dallas.
My brother-in-law, Alec Gage, and his wife stopped at Wimple’s house the morning he killed her. Mrs. Wimple’s face was all swollen and her eyes were red from crying. Wimple saw they noticed it, so he said ‘Mary isn’t feeling very well this morning.’
My brother-in-law and his wife had not gone over a mile and a half when they saw smoke rising from where the Wimple house was. They hurried back and found the house in flames. It was too late to save anything in the house.
When the fire had burned out they found Mrs. Wimple under the floor partially burned. Wimple had disappeared. He was more than double her age. She was 14 and he was about 35. A posse captured him and brought him to Dallas. I knew Wimple well, so I asked him why he had killed Mary? He said, ‘Well, I killed her. I don’t really know why.’
There was no jail so Frank Nichols took Wimple to his house to stay.
Frank swore in four guards, but Wimple got away and was gone four days before they found him and brought him back. They tracked him to the house where he had killed his wife.
I went over to stay with my sister, Mrs. Nichols, while he was boarding there waiting to be hung and I helped her cook for him.
Frank hung him early in October, 1852. Wimple sat on his coffin in the wagon when they drove to the gallows where he was to be hung. They passed the sheriff’s father, Uncle Ben Nichols, while they were on their way to the gallows. Wimple was afraid Uncle Ben would be late and miss the hanging, so he called out ‘Uncle Ben, ain’t you going to the hanging? Ain’t you coming down to see me hung?’ Uncle Ben said, ‘I have seen enough of you, Adam. No, I ain’t going.’ Uncle Ben was the only man in Polk county to receive a personal invitation and he was about the only one who didn’t take a day off to see the hanging.
The Asaba Massacre during Nigeria’s Biafran War culminated on this date in 1967 with a horrific mass execution.
Nigeria had attained independence in 1960 but still carried the legacy of its many decades under British control. Notably, the borders bequeathed to Nigeria amalgamate a coastal, Christian population in the south to an inland, Muslim population in the north — a fissure that continues to shape Nigeria down to the present day.
The ethnicity of interest for this post is the Igbo, one of those southern and Christian populations, and also a people who had been ethnically cleansed from the north in 1966 after an exchange of Christian and Mulim coups brought Nigeria to the brink of disintegration. Their homeland in southeast Nigeria — historically known as Igboland, and called Eastern Region within Nigeria — would become from May 30, 1967 the breakaway state of Biafra.
Biafra’s bid for independence triggered a devastating war with the Nigerian federal government. By the time that it ended in early 1970, perhaps as many as two million Biafrans were dead from mass starvation.
Asaba, where our massacre takes place, is a predominantly Igbo city on the western (non-Biafran) shore of the Niger River, opposite the Biafran eastern shore city Onitsha.
In the war’s opening weeks, Biafran forces actually struck out from their homeland and into Nigeria proper, crossing the Niger River. They would re-cross it in the opposite direction days before this massacre, taking bridges from Asaba to Onitsha and then cutting those bridges to frustrate the federal troops pursuing them.
Federal soldiers reaching Asaba in the first days of October took out that frustration on the city’s Igbo population, whom they robbed and abused as rebel sympathizers. Murders/summary executions for several days together comprise the Asaba Massacre or Massacres … but the single most emblematic and traumatic event took place on Saturday the 7th.
On October 4-6, soldiers occupied the town, and some began killing boys and men, accusing them of being Biafran sympathizers. On October 7, Asaba leaders met, and then summoned everyone to gather, dancing and singing to welcome the troops, and offering a pledge to One Nigeria. People were encouraged to wear akwa ocha, the ceremonial white, embroidered clothing that signifies peace, hoping that this strategy would end the violence. Although there was much trepidation, and some refused to participate, hundreds of men, women, and children assembled for the march, walking to the village square of Ogbeosewa, one of the five quarters of Asaba. Ify Uraih, then 13 years old, describes what happened when he joined the parade with his father and three older brothers, Paul, Emmanuel (Emma), and Gabriel:
There, they separated the men from the women … I looked around and saw machine-guns being mounted all around us … Some people broke loose and tried to run away. My brother was holding me by the hand; he released me and pushed me further into the crowd … They shot my brother in the back, he fell down, and I saw blood coming out of his body. And then the rest of us … just fell down on top of each other. And they continued shooting, and shooting, and shooting … I lost count of time, I don’t know how long it took … After some time there was silence. I stood up … my body was covered in blood, but I knew that I was safe. My father was lying not far away; his eyes were open but he was dead.
Exactly how many died is not clear; between 500 and 800 seems likely, in addition to many who died in the previous days. Most victims were buried in several mass graves, without observing requisite ceremonial practices. Along with his father, Uraih lost Emma and Paul; Gabriel was shot repeatedly, but recovered. The long-term impacts were profound; many extended families lost multiple breadwinners, and the town’s leadership was decimated. ()Source)
For the last time ever, Western Australia executed a woman on this date in 1909. Her name was Martha Rendell, and she had allegedly murdered up to three of her partner’s five* children.
Although they never got the legal document, we might as well call Rendell and Thomas Nicholls Morris man and wife: the two moved in after Morris’s previous marriage failed, presented themselves as one another’s spouses, and had the four kids call Rendell “mom”. They lived together in a downscale district in east Perth, steps away from an open drain fed by industrial runoff.
And if what they charged her with is true — for Rendell would always deny it and her denials have had found traction with some from her time to ours — then nasty stepmothers of fairy tales might have sued Martha Rendell for defamation of character. Indeed, her step-motherliness clearly weighed against her in the public mind.
In 1907, four of the children took ill with diphtheria. After a relapse, seven-year-old Annie died; the death certificate would put it down to “epilepsy and cardiac weakness” (both diphtheria symptoms). Her little sister Olive, still weakened by her bout with diphtheria, contracted typhoid and bled and vomited to death in August of that same year. The doctors who treated these girls didn’t suspect anything untoward but the following year when yet a third of the children (Arthur, 14) also died of apparent typhoid. Doctors on this occasion conducted an autopsy, curious to find evidence of poisoning — an autopsy that Rendell attended and ordered halted partway through, an action that would play very culpably at her eventual trial.**
Said trial was not to be triggered until the following spring, when another son, George, fled the house to the protection of his natural mother, and told a nightmare tale of the mean stepmother painting the children’s throats with hydrochloric acid and serving them suspicious bitter tea that sent them to their sickbeds.
“In hindsight George’s story seems highly implausible, the feverish imagining of a vengeful mother and stepson newly reunited,” argues a Rendell defender who situates the Morris household’s catastrophe amid a wider social panic over the corruption of Perth’s feminine mores, embracing everything from prostitution to baby farming.
The horrific caustic action of hydrochloric acid was not the sort of stealthy killer chosen by poisoners nor did it fit with the gradual wasting noted by the children’s doctor. And how could the woman have forced a youth of fifteen to submit to such cruelty? If Rendell had used diluted solutions of the acid (and it came to light after the trial that this was a home remedy used as a mild antiseptic and sometimes applied to the throat to treat diphtheria) then how had this uneducated woman calibrated the children’s dosages to create symptoms to fool Perth’s most respected doctors?
The strength of feeling bordering on mass hysteria that lay at the heart of public frenzy about this woman was exhibited in the shrill crowds of Perth women demanding her hanging and worse. Some women even invaded the Morris cottage when it was opened up to auction the contents and souvenired every household item, even the auctioneer’s hat so that only ten pounds were raised for the couple’s legal defence.
Little concrete evidence was ever produced against her — was it thanks to that aborted autopsy? — but neighbors grown prejudiced against the scarlet villainess would color remembrances of her conduct in testimony that also told on themselves as peeping toms: this time a failure to nurture and that time a glow of outright pleasure at a crying child.
Much subtext surfaced in text. The arresting officer noted her “delighted in seeing her victims writhe in agony, and from it derived sexual satisfaction.” One appalling newspaper editorial reviled her as “a type that is seldom encountered in English speaking races … she represents a reversion to the primitive stage of humanity when destructive proclivities are uppermost. Like aboriginals, the Martha Rendells of this world must kill.” It was scarcely a novel formula for anathematizing the female criminal.
It was only Arthur for whom she was formally condemned but after the five-day trial she was popularly understood as responsible for all three of her dead stepchildren. But not all the public, for a vigorous albeit unsuccessful clemency campaign specifically citing doubts about the case’s evidence grew around her during her few short weeks awaiting the gallows. Those doubts have never since been categorically dispelled.
Legend holds that Martha Rendell still haunts Fremantle Prison where she hanged, in the form of a ghostly apparition of her face peering out from a stained-glass window.
* There were five children still in the house. Thomas Morris also had four older children, making nine total.
** Martha Rendell had also fallen ill during the course of treating her children. This of course was read by prosecutors as a feint to deflect suspicion.
On this date in 1822,* General Jean Baptiste Berton (sometimes Breton) was guillotined in Poitiers.
A young junior officer during the French Revolutionary Wars, Breton/Berton scaled the Napoleonic ranks in the early 19th century and was elevated by the Corsican’s own hand to Brigadier General.
Upon Napoleon’s 1815 return from exile Breton rallied to the ex-emperor’s cause but he did not suffer the worst of it after Waterloo, instead scribbling his memoirs in enforced half-pay retirement.
This situation permitted the ex-marechal-de-camp both the time and the liberty to dabble in that era’s rife conspiracies intending the overthrow of the Bourbons — a fact which was exposed by mischance when one of the young cavalrymen he had recruited was killed in an accident with incriminating documents in his pockets. Agents provocateur baited him thereafter into a treasonable and doomed rebellion.
A patriot who had long aspired to detach Croatia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kvaternik (
The son of an ancien regime royal castellan, the barrister Javogues would have the opportunity in the revolutionary Convention to vote the death of 
A young junior officer during the