The Head’s-man going to take up the Head, as the Manner is, to shew it
to the People, he found he had not struck it off, and that the Body
stirr’d; with that he stepped to an Engine, which they always carry with
’em, to force those who may be refractory; thinking, as he said, to have
twisted the Head from the Shoulders, conceiving it to hang but by a
small Matter of Flesh. Tho’ ’twas an odd Shift of the Fellow’s, yet
’twas done, and the best Shift he could suddenly propose. The Margrave,
and another Officer, old Men, were on the Scaffold, with some of the
Prince’s Friends, and Servants; who seeing the Head’s-man put the Engine
about the Neck of the Prince, began to call out, and the People made a
great Noise. The Prince, who found himself yet alive; or rather, who was
past thinking but had some Sense of Feeling left, when the Head’s-man
took him up, and set his Back against the Rail, and clapp’d the Engine
about his Neck, got his two Thumbs between the Rope and his Neck,
feeling himself press’d there; and struggling between Life and Death,
and bending himself over the Rail backward, while the Head’s-man pulled
forward, he threw himself quite over the Rail, by Chance, and not
Design, and fell upon the Heads and Shoulders of the People, who were
crying out with amazing Shouts of Joy. The Head’s-man leap’d after him,
but the Rabble had lik’d to have pull’d him to Pieces: All the City was
in an Uproar, but none knew what the Matter was, but those who bore the
Body of the Prince, whom they found yet living; but how, or by what
strange Miracle preserv’d, they knew not, nor did examine; but with one
Accord, as if the whole Crowd had been one Body, and had had but one
Motion, they bore the Prince on their Heads about a hundred Yards from
the Scaffold, where there is a Monastery of Jesuits; and there they
secur’d him. All this was done, his beheading, his falling, and his
being secur’d, almost in a Moment’s Time; the People rejoiceing, as at
some extraordinary Victory won. One of the Officers being, as I said, an
old timorous Man, was so frighten’d at the Accident, the Bustle, the
Noise, and the Confusion, of which he was wholly ignorant, that he dy’d
with Amazement and Fear; and the other was fain to be let blood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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