The Tudor Law of Treason (Routledge Revivals) by John Bellamy

Author:John Bellamy [Bellamy, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Modern, 16th Century
ISBN: 9781134672165
Google: Sc6NAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-18T15:59:12+00:00

5

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To the Gallows and after

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Few persons in Tudor England who had been convicted of treason spent any length of time in gaol after their trial. There were, it is true, one or two notable exceptions, like the seminary priest John Pybush, who was tried and found guilty on 1 July 1595 but executed only on 18 February 1601, and the earl of Arundel, who was tried in April 1589 and died a natural death in the Tower of London on 9 October 1595, but in general governmental policy was either to execute convicted traitors forthwith, or release them fairly soon after arraignment. (1) This had also been the practice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Only when, through seditious words or failure to report traitorous conspiracy, the accused had been found guilty of misprision was the punishment of perpetual imprisonment inflicted. (2)

Those found guilty, whom the government was determined to execute, were returned to a regime in gaol that was often more strict than the one they had endured before being tried. The priest Thomas Woodhouse in 1573 was sent back not to the Fleet, where he had been incarcerated hitherto, but to the harsher climate of Newgate, where he was placed in a most dismal part of that gaol. The priest James Fenn, after being convicted in the queen's bench of treason in February 1584, was not returned to the Marshalsea, but taken to the Tower, fettered, and put in ‘the pit’, where he remained for six days until execution. (3) Except when the convicted person was of relatively high social rank, he was likely to be kept in irons until the time of execution, as were, for example, Edmund Campion, Luke Kirby, and Alexander Briant. It was in reference to Briant that William Allen wrote that ‘when he was condemned, yrons were commaunded upon him and the rest, as sone as they came home to the Tower, and they were never taken off, till they were fetched furth to be martyred.’ Richard White, the catholic schoolmaster, from the day his trial began until the day he was put to death was ‘coupled fast and chained with an huge iron chain and horse-lock, and warded diligently day and night with a band of men’. (4)

The reasons for this treatment were several. Obviously the king did not wish to lose the person who was to be the principal performer at the forthcoming execution through escape or successful attempt at suicide. In fact, as in the later Middle Ages, there were few escapes and apparently only a single post-trial suicide. On 19 December 1583, while in Newgate awaiting execution, John Somervyle, who had planned to shoot the queen and been convicted of it at the London Guildhall three days previously, managed to strangle himself. (5) Another cause of the severe nature of renewed imprisonment was a hope that the condemned man might be persuaded to give additional information about fellow conspirators who were still at large, or even about other plots concerning which they received information while in confinement.

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