Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain; Executions and executioners; Tyburn gallows (London, England)
Through the later researches of Dr. Challoner, we now know the story
relating to one of these heads. John Cornelius, or Mohun, was born of
Irish parents in Bodmin. He studied at Oxford, but not adopting the new
religion, went afterwards to Rheims, and later to Rome. He was sent
upon the English mission, in which he laboured for about ten years. He
was apprehended in April, 1594, in the house of the widow of Sir John
Arundel, on the information of a servant of the house. Mr. Bosgrave, a
kinsman of Sir John Arundel, seeing him hurried away without a hat, put
his own hat on the priest’s head; for this he was arrested. Two servants
of the family, Terence Carey and Patrick Salmon, were also arrested.
Cornelius was sent to London, and there racked to make him give up the
names of Catholics who had harboured him. Refusing to make any discovery,
he was sent back into the country, tried, and, with his three companions,
executed at Dorchester on July 2, 1594. The three were simply hanged:
Cornelius, as guilty of high treason, was drawn, hanged, and quartered.
His head was nailed to the gallows, but afterwards removed at the
instance of the town. His quarters were buried together with the bodies
of his companions. Dr. Challoner does not tell how the head of Cornelius
was recovered by friends, nor does he say anything more of the others. It
is probable that the three other heads of Strype’s account were those of
the companions of Cornelius (“Memoirs of Missionary Priests,” part i.,
pp. 157-60).
The _Times_ of May 9, 1860, contained a letter from Mr. A. J. Beresford
Hope, living in the house at the south-west corner of Edgware Road,
stating that in the course of excavations made close to the foot-pavement
along the garden of his house, “numerous human bones” were discovered. He
says: “These are obviously the relics of the unhappy persons buried under
the gallows.” If this was so, they must have been the bones of Cromwell,
Ireton, or Bradshaw, buried under the gallows.
ORIGIN AND SITE OF THE TYBURN GALLOWS
As has already been said, the earliest mention of Tyburn in connection
with executions is in 1196, when William FitzOsbert, known as
“Longbeard,” was hanged here: with probability we can refer to the site
an execution taking place a few years earlier. How far back can we, in
the absence of records, conjecturally place the dedication of Tyburn to
executions? We can say, with a high degree of probability, that Tyburn
was not established till after the Conquest, and, further, not till after
the death of the Conqueror.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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