The actual spot on which the scaffold was erected on the hill is marked,
in the garden by which it is now surrounded, by a square of stone paving
set in the turf just within the gate on the south-western side of the
enclosure. Happy children skip and play on this blood-stained bit of
ground; the flowers leap up in April and the birds make melody in May;
Nature has healed the sore and done lavishly to make us forget, by her
gifts, that here was the scene of angry mobs crying for the slaughter of
some of the nation’s noblest men. The block was set up on a high wooden
platform so that the ceremony of decapitation was performed well above
the heads of the dense crowd that gathered on the hill when the more
notable Tower prisoners were brought here to die. It is stated that
during the making of the tunnel that goes through Tower Hill to-day the
wooden foundations of the scaffold were discovered, and also, near by,
the remains of two victims whose bodies had been interred there. Neither
the imbedded timber nor the human bones were disturbed, and both still
lie beneath the turf to fix accurately the spot of execution. Tower Hill
seems to have possessed a gallows also, for we find frequent record of
criminals being “hanged in chains” there, either for State or other
offences. Under an oak tree that grew on the slope towards the Tower
gateway, the public stocks stood, and in the vestry minutes of
Allhallows Barking, under the date December 16, 1657, we find it
recorded that an order was given “for the erection of stocks and
whipping-post required by the statute at the churchyard corner in Tower
Street against Mr. Lowe’s, the draper’s, with a convenient shed over
them.” How Mr. Lowe, the draper, took the proposition we are not
informed, but if he expressed his feelings in forcible language he
might, perchance, have met the fate of his neighbour, Mr. Holland, who,
three years previously, on April 26, 1654, “was fined 3s. 4d. by
Alderman Tichbourne for vain oaths sworn” within the parish of
Allhallows. Tower Hill would seem, in those days, to have had a peculiar
attraction for “beggars and common vagrants.” It was a popular resort
for those who lived to beg and those who begged to live--two very
different classes of people, but both equally inconvenient. In the
middle seventeenth century the condition of affairs became serious and
gave alarm both to officials and to the annoyed inhabitants of the
district. In May, 1647, the Vestry of Allhallows “takes into
consideration the destitute condition of the poor, and it is ordered
that a collection for the poor shall be made every second Sabbath in the
month; the churchwardens shall stand at the door ... to receive the
freewill offerings of the parishioners,” and in 1654 the residents
appeal to the Lord Mayor, for “grate, grate, very grate are your
petitioners’ wants, and may it please your Honour to afford them some
relief ... without which they are unable to maintain so great a charge.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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