Read Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree for Free Online Page A

the ground where it apparently began to ‘throb and breathe’. He was moved away from the gallows and placed naked on a hurdle whereupon he was eviscerated by the executioner, his entrails and other organs being thrown into a fire. The others were subjected to the same horrors and ‘all of their remains were thrown into cauldrons and parboiled, and afterwards put up in different places in the city’ (Marks 1908: 136).
    On 25 May 1535 Sebastian Newdigate, the King’s Sergeant, was arrested for unwisely denying the King’s supremacy. He was imprisoned in the Marshalsea where he was kept for fourteen days bound to a pillar, standing upright with iron rings around his neck, hands and feet. He was said to have been visited by the King himself and to have been offered riches and honours galore if he would only recant. He refused to do so, an act that Henry was hardly going to overlook, and Newdigate went to the Tower briefly before being executed at Tyburn on 19 June 1535.
    Henry’s religious changes and the process of dissolving the monasteries that was embarked upon at the same time were unpopular in some parts of the country. Moreover, they occurred when there were many other issues on which discontent could easily focus. This general disenchantment led to a series of uprisings in 1536, starting in Lincolnshire and developing particularly in the northern counties, that came to be known collectively as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Henry VIII for all his braggadocio, was insecure about his kingdom but every bit as ruthless in suppressing subversive activity as his father had been and he moved quickly to arrest and execute the ringleaders and crush the rebellion. In May 1537, Lord Darcy, Sir Henry Percy and the Abbots of Fountains, Jervaulx and Sawley died at Tyburn for their involvement.
    Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves in 1540, but within months the marriage was annulled and he swiftly married Catherine Howard who was much younger and fitter and already well-versed in sexual matters. It is likely that by this time Henry was either impotent or was certainly unable to be the kind of sexual partner craved by Catherine, a healthy young woman of considerable spirit. On 13 February 1542 Catherine was executed at Tower Hill for adultery. Earlier, in December 1541, Thomas Culpepper and Francis Dereham had been executed at Tyburn. It was alleged that Dereham and Catherine had been lovers before her marriage while Culpepper had been her lover while she was married to the King. Dereham was hanged, drawn and quartered while Culpepper, by virtue of being Gentleman to the King’s Privy Chamber, was accorded the privilege of death by beheading. It is to be hoped he appreciated the honour.
    Reflecting on the late 1530s in a sermon he gave in May 1549, Hugh Latimer mentioned the large number of executions that had taken place in London at that time. He stated that there were ‘three weekes sessions at Newgate and fourthnyghte sessions at the Marshalsea’. Among the gory harvest produced by these sessions were, for example, in 1538, Sir John Allen and an ‘Irish Gentleman’ who were hanged and quartered at Tyburn as were Henry Harford, Thomas Hever and Henry Pole. In 1540 it was the turn of Thomas Empson, Laurence Cooke, William Horne, Giles Horne, Clement Philip, Darby Gening and Robert Bird. All these men had been found guilty of treason for denying the King’s supremacy. Many others, some of whom remain anonymous, died for the same offence. German Gardiner was the last martyr to die at Tyburn during the reign of Henry VIII. He was executed at the same time as John Larke and John Ireland. The latter had once been Thomas More’s chaplain. All three had their heads and quarters buried under the gallows, but a fourth condemned prisoner despatched with them, Thomas Heywood, was pardoned for recanting his opinions as he was on the hurdle being taken to Tyburn.
    Henry was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Edward VI, in 1547. There were