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heads of Townley and Fletcher went up above Temple Bar on 12 August 1746. Incredibly, they remained there for a quarter of a century, so securely attached were they to the iron rods holding them aloft. They finally fell down during a thunderstorm in 1772. One rolled along the street until it bumped into the ankles of a passing woman. She screamed and then fainted. The gateway at Temple Bar is still standing, although it has since been moved a couple of times, and may currently be seen next to St Paul’s Cathedral.
    Times were changing and there was something quite anachronistic about different styles of execution for different classes. As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, it was clear that this whole business was an anomaly. In 1760, Earl Ferrers, a nobleman in whose family ran a streak of insanity, shot dead his steward. He demanded and received a trial by his fellow peers, which was held in Westminster Hall. Earl Ferrers pleaded insanity, but this was such a shocking and unpopular crime that the Lords found him guilty of murder. To his dismay, the Earl was sentenced to hang for this crime, just like anybody else. He petitioned to have the mode of execution changed to beheading, but to no avail. Peers were now subject to the same laws and similar penalties as everybody else. The only concession made to his noble birth was that permission was granted for him to be hanged with a silken rope, instead of the usual hemp!
    I said earlier that Lord Lovatt’s was the last case of beheading in this country, but this is not strictly true. In Chapter 7, we will be looking at the peculiarly British mode of execution known as hanging, drawing and quartering. This sentence lingered on, incredibly, until several years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing when last this ancient sentence was pronounced, on 28 April 1820. The sensitivities of Britain by that time, less than twenty years before Victoria ascended the throne, would not allow the full horrors of this form of execution to be enacted. It was commuted to hanging, followed by post-mortem decapitation.
    The Cato Street Conspirators were a bunch of hare-brained idealists who hatched a mad plot to overthrow the government. There were only a handful of them, but nevertheless, they hoped to murder the cabinet and trigger a popular uprising. There was a good deal of political unrest at that time, and so, when they were arrested, it was decided to make an example of them – hence the trial for High Treason and sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering.
    On the morning of 1 May 1820, five of the conspirators were hanged in front of Newgate Prison, on the site of the Old Bailey in London. After their bodies had been left hanging for an hour (to ensure that they were dead), the corpses were cut down and laid on the scaffold. The actual decapitations were carried out not by the executioner, John Foxton, but by a sinister figure wearing a mask. The rumour was that this was an impecunious medical student, who had volunteered to undertake this gory task for a few pounds. Another story suggested that the man removing the heads was actually a body-snatcher, who had been engaged because he had some experience of helping anatomists at their work. There was some disappointment in the crowd when it became clear that the heads of the five traitors were not to be removed with an axe, but by means of various scalpels and knives. It was a horrible business; not withstanding the fact that the men were dead, there was a great deal of blood. This led to an incident which cheered up the crowd, and made up for not seeing the swinging of an axe.
    As the masked man removed the heads, he handed them to Foxton, who then held each up for the crowd to see, proclaiming in the time honoured formula, ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ The third head was so slippery with blood that Foxton lost hold, and the gruesome object went