Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain; Executions and executioners; Tyburn gallows (London, England)
Thomas Garnet was related to Father Henry Garnet, executed for the
Gunpowder Plot in 1606. Thomas Garnet was convicted on evidence that
while a prisoner in the Tower he had written in several places “Thomas
Garnet priest.” The Earl of Exeter, one of the Privy Council, present at
the execution, would not suffer the rope to be cut till the victim was
quite dead (Challoner’s Memoirs, pt. ii., pp. 17-9).
=1610.= _December 10._ John Roberts, and Thomas Somers, or Watson, or
Wilson. These were priests. Roberts was apprehended for the fifth time
at Mass and hurried away in his vestments. Somers had been deported,
together with about a score of priests, earlier in the year, but returned
to England. With Roberts and Somers were executed sixteen persons
condemned for various offences. The priests were suffered to hang till
they were dead and then bowelled, beheaded, and quartered, and buried
with the sixteen in a pit (Challoner’s Memoirs, pt. ii., p. 37).
=1612.= William Scot and Richard Newport, or Smith. These were missionary
priests who had been banished but returned to England (Challoner’s
Memoirs, pt. ii., pp. 39-44).
The burning of Protestant heretics went on through the reigns of
Elizabeth and James—“the fires of Smithfield” were not extinguished
by the death of “bloody Mary.” Anabaptists and Arians were burnt, the
printers, the distributors, even in one case the binder, of books
“seditiously penned against the Book of Common Prayer” were hanged.
It is painful to find the genial Howell writing thus in 1635:—
I rather pity than hate Turk or Infidel, for they are of the same metal
and bear the same stamp as I do, tho’ the Inscriptions differ. If I
hate any, ’tis those Schismaticks that puzzle the sweet peace of our
Church, so that I could be content to see an Anabaptist go to Hell on a
Brownist’s back (“Familiar Letters,” ed. Jacob, p. 337).
_December 5._ John Almond, condemned for having taken orders beyond
the seas and for remaining in the kingdom, drawn, hanged and quartered
(Challoner’s Memoirs, pt. ii., pp. 44-51).
=1615.= The murder of Sir Thomas Overbury is, with the possible exception
of the supposed murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a little more than
sixty years later, the greatest of all English _causes célèbres_. The
story involves many persons of high rank, including one in the highest,
King James himself; its events are extremely complicated, and some
details are of a nature requiring delicate handling in the telling.
It has been told, after the fullest study of the facts, by Mr. Andrew
Amos, in “The Great Oyer of Poisoning,” 1846, a volume of over five
hundred pages, of which indeed many are filled with digressions seriously
interfering with the narrative. It is not possible to give here more than
the barest outline of the case.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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