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Executions @ the Museum of London Docklands

For over 700 years London was the scene of public executions, a practice which wove itself into the city’s history and popular culture. This excellent and imaginatively designed exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands explores all aspects of public executions in London, using a combination of artifacts, letters, informative videos, songs and voices, paintings, engravings and caricatures, and some really gruesome exhibits.

Above all, it is amazingly comprehensive – it touches on all the aspects of the subject I’d expected beforehand but goes on to explore all kinds of nooks and crannies I’d never have thought of. I’d never thought about the effort some condemned prisoners put into being well dressed for their trip to the gallows. Well, the exhibition tells the stories of condemned men and women who went to great lengths to look their best on their death day, and even has the fine dress and fancy suit worn by a female and male executionee:

  • on the left, the ‘white muslin gown, a handsome worked cap and laced boots’ worn by Eliza Fenning who was hanged for attempting to poison her employers
  • to the right, the ‘superb suit of white and silver, being the clothes in which he was married’ worn by Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, was hanged on 5 May 1760 for the murder of his steward John Johnson, whom he shot in a rage

Final clothing section in the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

(The door on the right of this photo is one of the three doors you had to pass through to enter Newgate Prison. The architect George Dance thoughtfully positioned swags of chains and shackles over the main entrance door at Newgate to terrify and intimidate new prisoners.)

I’d never thought about what happened to the bodies of the hanged after their execution. Turns out that from the mid-16th century the bodies of executed criminals were given to the Company of Barber-Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection and medical research. The thought of being dissected filled the condemned with horror. Fights could break out at executions as friends and family of the deceased would attempt to stop the surgeons claiming bodies. In the same spirit I had no idea that life sized casts of the heads of the executed were often made – there’s a selection of them on display here, which, as the nineteenth century progressed, were used to study ‘criminal’ physiognomy. Alternatively, the casts of notorious criminals were kept in a special display at Newgate where they could be viewed by visitors, who included Charles Dickens.

Death masks at the ‘Execution’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I knew that broadsheets and leaflets were often sold at executions which claimed to give the last speech of the condemned man, along with a ballad poem describing his fate – but I’d never had the opportunity to read some of these before. Ditto the last letters condemned men wrote to their loved ones. There’s not only letters but rings and coins sent by those condemned to transportation instead of execution in the mid-nineteenth century.

I knew that prisoners in gaol were often shackled but I don’t think I’ve seen a collection of the different types of handcuffs, shackles and ‘waist belts’ used for this purpose on display before. Apparently the weight of shackles prisoners were manacled with sometimes meant they could barely move. As well as direct punishment of the prisoner, the sound of all this metalwork clanking through the echoing vaults of the grim prisoner had a demoralising and terrifying psychological effect on other inmates. The practice of routinely keeping prisoners shackled in irons ceased in the 1820s.

Shackles and handcuffs used in Newgate Prison at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I’ve certainly never seen a real actual gibbet before and I didn’t know that they didn’t come in a standard size, but that a gibbet ‘tailor’ took the corpse’s measurements and built the gibbet to perfectly fit. In line with the state of the art interactivity of the exhibition, the display of this real-life gibbet had a gruesome audio soundtrack with the noise of flies buzzing round the rotting corpse.

Wrought iron gibbet cage from ‘Executions’ at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I was at first puzzled why the gibbet was so elaborate but realised that a lifeless body would flop in all directions unless its limbs were very strictly compassed and controlled. The effect can be seen in this illustration of the body of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd.

Captain Kidd, gibbeted near Tilbury in Essex, following his execution in 1701

More criminals were gibbeted in the greater London area than elsewhere in the country. The bodies of murders and highwaymen were gibbeted on heaths located on the outskirts of London and main highways into the capital, especially on the wide open Hounslow Heath which became famous for the number of gibbets.

Capital punishments

Between the first recorded execution at Tyburn in 1196 and the last public execution in 1868, there were tens of thousands of executions in London. Nobody knows the precise number because records weren’t kept before the 18th century.

Right at the start there’s a wall-sized video which shows a scrolling list of all the offences which carried the penalty of capital punishment. By the end of the 18th century some 200 crimes were punishable by death in a list which became known as the ‘Bloody Code’. London’s courts condemned more people to die than those in the rest of the country combined.

Scrolling list of capital offences at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

Types of execution

Most ordinary criminals were hanged. More florid ways of being despatched were reserved for VIPs.

1. Drawing, hanging and quartering

An ancient punishment for treason, the prisoner was ‘drawn’ or dragged from prison to the execution site, hanged until they were nearly dead, then castrated, disembowelled, beheaded and cut into quarters. Thee practice continued into the 19th but by then prisoners were hanged first and then beheaded.

there’s a vivid engraving of the fate of the Gunpowder Plotters who, after being found guilty in 1606, were publicly executed over two days in St Paul’s Churchyard and Old Palace Yard, Westminster, where they were dragged by horses through the streets, hanged, castrated, disembowelled and cut into pieces.

2. Burning

In 1401 an Act of Parliament made burning the punishment for heresy. It aimed to ‘strike fear into the minds’ of people who questioned the teachings of the church. Women convicted of murdering their husbands or counterfeiting could also be burned to death. By the 18th century they were strangled first.

The exhibition features illustrations of the Protestant martyrs burned at the stake at Smithfield. Over 280 religious dissenters were burned at the stake during the five-year reign of Mary I, known as ‘Bloody Mary’. Besides Smithfield others were burned to death at Stratford-le-Bow, Barnet, Islington, Southwark, Uxbridge, Westminster and throughout England.

Woodcut depicting John Rogers, the first of the ‘Marian martyrs’, being burned at the stake in Smithfield (1555)

3. Boiling

Death by boiling was a rare punishment. In 1531 a cook named Richard Roose poisoned the porridge of the household of Bishop John Fisher, causing two deaths. Henry VIII was so disgusted he declared this crime treason and Parliament passed the ‘Acte for Poysoning’ ordering those who murdered by poison to be boiled to death. Roose was boiled at Smithfield. Eleven years later Margaret Davies suffered the same fate for poisoning four people. Edward VI abolished this execution method in 1547.

4. Beheading

Members of the nobility condemned for treason were often beheaded out of respect for their high status, rather than suffering the agony and humiliation of drawing, hanging and quartering. Most beheadings took place in public on Tower Hill before a large crowd.

5. Hanging

Most ordinary criminals were executed by hanging. There appear to have been two methods. Initially the condemned were placed under a gallows (in the very early period just a tree) standing on a cart. A rope was noosed round their neck and the cart slowly pulled away by horses or oxen till the condemned fell off the back of it and was left dangling. This could be a fairly slow, excruciating death. Laster the ‘short drop’ method was introduced, where the condemned stood on a raised platform and, with the flick of a handle, a trapdoor opened underneath them, dropping them through and making it more likely their neck would snap with the sudden ratchet of the noose. But both methods were far from foolproof and family members or the executioner often pulled the legs of the hanged person to speed up their death.

Places of execution

In the City of London you are never more than 500 metres from a former place of execution. London was packed with them. Early on in the exhibition there’s a useful wall-sized video, with a bench to sit and watch it, which shows maps of London from early medieval times onwards, showing not only ow its street plan grew and developed (interesting in itself) but where the ever-growing number of places of execution were sited (indicated on the maps by entertaining ochre blotches of blood).

1. Smithfield

In the medieval and Tudor periods Smithfield was used for various public purposes, including a livestock market, fairs and executions, as in the burning of the Protestant martyrs mentioned above.

2. Tyburn

Tyburn stood slightly to one side of the current position of Marble Arch at the north-east tip of Hyde Park. It served as London’s principal site of execution for around 600 years. The earliest account records the execution of William FitzOsbert in 1196. Until the late 18th century it was a semi-rural location, easy to get to and easy for crowds to assemble and watch the spectacle.

A huge amount of popular tradition and iconography grew up around the public hanging of criminals at Tyburn. The exhibition contains umpteen engravings and pictures, stores and facts, not least about the carnivalesque atmosphere which reigned along the route of carts transporting convicted criminals from Newgate Prison, via St Giles’s-in-the-Fields church and then along what is now Oxford Street. Many of the condemned went to their execution drunk, in fact it became customary for the cart to stop off at a pub at St Giles where the executioner and victim shared a last pint of beer. This became known as ‘the St Giles Bowl’.

Bernard Mandeville wrote that ‘all the way from Newgate to Tyburn, is one continued Fair, for whores and rogues of the meaner sort.’

In 1961 construction began on new pedestrian subways by Marble Arch and the excavators found large quantities of human bones around the site of the Tyburn gallows which archaeologists presume are the remains of the executed who were buried where they died.

Execution at Tyburn by Thomas Rowlandson (1803)

A lot of slang and catchphrases grew up about the place. The scaffold was known as ‘the Tyburn tree’. To ‘take a ride to Tyburn’ (or simply ‘go west’) was to go to one’s hanging. The ‘Lord of the Manor of Tyburn’ was the public hangman while ‘dancing the Tyburn jig’ was the act of being hanged because of the wriggling, dancing movement of the hanged in their last moments.

The last execution at Tyburn was of John Austin, a highwayman, on 3 November 1783.

3. Newgate

With the closure of Tyburn London’s public executions moved to the open space in front of the rebuilt Newgate Prison. This was to be London’s principal site of public execution for the next 85 years until public executions were discontinued in 1868.

The move meant the end of the great public procession from Newgate to Tyburn. It was an assertion by the authorities of their control over the timing and atmosphere of the executions. The Newgate scaffold featured two beams with capacity for up to 12 hangings.

Newgate Prison itself closed in 1902. The demolition of one of London’s most iconic buildings aroused considerable public interest and relics of the prison were sold at auction. A keystone from the main doorway is on display here, as is one of the heavy wood-and-metal doors (see first photo).

4. Horsemonger Lane

Public executions at Horsemonger Lane in Southwark took place on the roof of the gatehouse, making them highly visible to spectators.

5. Tower Hill

A small number of noble men and women, soldiers and spies were privately executed within the walls of the Tower of London. Many more – at least 120 between 1388 and 1780 – were executed in public on Tower Hill. Beheadings and hangings, were common enough for the ‘posts of the scaffold’ to become a landmark. It was here that Thomas, Earl of Strafford, a key ally of Charles I, was executed on 12 May 1641, as part of the political divisions which opened up before the outbreak of civil war the following year.

6. Execution Dock

On the Thames near Wapping, Execution Dock was used for more than 400 years to execute pirates, smugglers and mutineers who had been sentenced to death by Admiralty courts. The ‘dock’ consisted of a scaffold for hanging. The last executions there took place in 1830. Just up the river at Blackwall Reach where it bends bodies of convicts were gibbeted so as to be more visible to boats entering the city.

7. Charing Cross

Public executions took place at Charing Cross in the 16th and 17th centuries. A pillory that locked the head and hands of a criminal into a wooden frame for public humiliation was later erected at the site.

8. New Palace Yard and Westminster Hall

The area around the Palace of Westminster was used for public executions, the display of body parts and pillorying criminals.

9. Kennington Common

From at least 1678 until 1800 Kennington Common was the principal execution site for the county of Surrey.

The execution and embowelling of Jacobite rebels on Kennington Common mid to late 18th century)

10. Cheapside

Temporary gallows were erected on several occasions at Cheapside between the 14th and 17th centuries. They were in place for over 100 days in 1554 following the execution of two rebels involved in a Protestant uprising against Mary I.

Ordinary criminals and reprieves

The exhibition contains the story of what feels like 50 or so ordinary criminals, whose names are preserved for some or other aspect of their crime or their trial or their plea for pardon or the way they died. One by one their pitiful stories build up into an upsetting profile of the generally poor and wretched who committed often petty crimes and went to their deaths miserably.

As the number convicted of capital offences rose in the later 18th century the number of reprieves increased, if only to manage down the number of executions which threatened to swamp the system. The exhibition features letters written by the condemned, their friends and relatives and influential contacts. I like the story of the Dane Jørgen Jørgenson, who was convicted in 1820 of robbery but managed to get a letter to the Duke of Wellington for whom he had worked as a during the Napoleonic wars. The exhibition includes a letter from the Duke pardoning Jørgenson on condition he ‘transports’ himself out of the country.

The most famous victim: Charles I

Probably the most famous execution ever to take place in London was not of a common criminal or aristocratic traitor but of the king himself, namely Charles I, brought to trial by the Puritan junta and found guilty of treason against his own people. The exhibition devotes a large case to his execution, on 31 January 1649, with several contemporary illustrations and a number of artefacts said to be linked to it, namely a pair of royal gloves he was said to have taken with him, and even the silk undershirt he insisted on wearing to prevent him shivering with cold (it was January in London) which, he told his attendant, Sir Thomas Herbert, might be misinterpreted as fear.

Later on in the exhibition there are several objects pertaining to the punishment of his killers. 59 leading Puritan generals and MPs signed the king’s death warrant and so came to be known by their enemies as the ‘regicides’. On his Restoration in 1660, Charles II had special agents arrest any of the regicides living in England and track down those who had fled abroad and assassinate them.

Three of the leading regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton, had already died of natural causes and been buried at Westminster Abbey, but in 1661 Charles’s Cavalier Parliament ordered their bodies to be exhumed, executed and decapitated. Their heads were displayed on poles outside Westminster Hall. Cromwell’s head remained there until 1685.

The most famous criminal: Jack Sheppard

John ‘Jack’ Sheppard was convicted of robbery in 1724, aged 22. Sheppard was one of London’s greatest criminal heroes. Notorious for escaping multiple times from Newgate, he became a symbol of freedom for London’s working classes. An apprentice carpenter, Jack fell into a life of thieving, reputably led astray by ‘bad company and lewd women’. Although eventually executed at Tyburn at the age of 22, his effrontery and skill in challenging authority ensured his story was recounted in popular books and plays for generations. The artist James Thornhill paid one shilling and sixpence to visit him in his cell to draw this portrait.

Portrait of Jack Sheppard by Sir James Thornhill (1724)

In the 1850s the campaigning journalist Henry Mayhew discovered that ‘chapbooks’ recounting Sheppard’s exploits were hugely popular in low lodging houses, where they were read aloud to illiterate youths. He interviewed 13 boys who confessed to thieving in order to pay for a theatre ticket for the  current play about Jack’s life.

The most famous executioner: Jack Ketch

In 1685, the Duke of Monmouth, illegitimate son of Charles II, led a rebellion to seize the throne from his uncle, James II. The rebellion was defeated, Monmouth was captured, condemned for high treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. Despite asking to be killed with one clean blow, Monmouth’s executioner, Jack Ketch, made a right monkeys of the procedure, failing to despatch the Duke after two strikes with an axe and being forced to resort to a knife to cut through the neck while the Duke made a grim effort to rise from the block to the horror of onlookers. As a result of this heroic failure Ketch’s name became infamous and, eventually, became a byword for public executioners, who, by and large preferred to keep their identities secret.

Transportation

A final section of the exhibition explains how crimes which had previously resulted in execution were amended to ‘transportation’ to the colonies, generally meaning Australia. In fact the first convicts transported out of England had been despatched as long ago as 1718, when they were sent to America to supply plantations there with labour. Thus Moll Flanders, heroine of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel, is convicted of a capital offence but gets it commuted to transportation to British America.

Transport to America ended when that country became independent in 1776 but, as luck would have it, just a few years earlier (in 1770) Australia had been discovered and provisionally mapped by Captain James Cook. Between 1788 and 1868 over 160,000 convicts were sent to Australia from England and other parts of the Empire.

The exhibition includes a few paintings of the first settlement, which are fairly predictable – but I had never heard about ‘convict tokens’ before. Apparently, convicts awaiting transportation presented loved ones with smoothed coins engraved with messages of affection. Often created by prisoners skilled in metalwork, for a fee, the tokens could be highly decorative and became known as ‘leaden hearts’. Half a dozen examples are on display here.

A convict’s love token from the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

The campaign to abolish public executions

The advent of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 marked a sea change in social attitudes. The young queen consciously rebelled against the louche morals of her rakish predecessor, William IV. She wanted a chaste, sober court and her high moral tone and sincere Anglicanism set the style for the new reign among the aristocracy and aspiring upper middle classes. There was a general wish to make all aspects of public life more respectable and, in time, the new mood extended to the utterly disreputable practice of public executions, with all their opportunities for immorality of every description which this exhibition has chronicled.

In 1840 William Makepeace Thackeray attended the execution of the Swiss valet François Courvoisier, executed for murdering his master, Lord William Russell. He wrote that ‘I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight…I came away…that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.’

In 1849 Charles Dickens had attended the execution of Maria and Frederick Manning and wrote a furious letter to The Times criticising the ‘inconceivably awful behaviour’ of the crowd. Describing public execution as a ‘moral evil’, he doubted communities could prosper where such scenes of ‘horror and demoralisation’ could take place.

Prison reform had been an issue since the start of the nineteenth century and combined with the campaign to abolish public executions. The exhibition cites the MP Thomas Hobhouse in 1866 arguing that the spectacle, instead of instilling fear of crime and respect for the law, resulted in the crowds who became ‘hardened and literally acquired a taste for blood.’

The exhibition features a powerful satirical cartoon published in Punch magazine mocking the commercialisation of state executions. The scaffold is a theatrical stage with a sign for ‘opera glasses’ and a booth selling tickets while the mixed crowd is worked by hawkers and costermongers. ‘Ere’s lots o’ the rope which ‘ung the late lamented Mr Greenacre, only a penny an inch!’

The Trial for Murder Mania, illustration for Punch, 1850

After several attempts to move a bill in Parliament, the Capital Punishment Amendment Act was finally passed in 1868 public executions in Britain were officially banned. The last person to be publicly executed in London was the Irish republican Michael Barrett, on 26 May 1868. Three days later the practice was outlawed.

But it wasn’t the abolition of the death penalty, though. Another century was to pass before that occurred. Only in 1965 was the death penalty for murder in Britain suspended for five years and in 1969 was this made permanent. And it wasn’t until 1998 that the death penalty in Britain was finally abolished for all crimes. The last people executed in the UK were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on 13 August 1964.

Amnesty International

Things take a very earnest turn at the end of the exhibition with a large video screen showing an interview with Paul Bridges from Amnesty International. He reminds us that 55 countries still retain the death penalty (although, admittedly, many have not used it for some time). Nonetheless, Amnesty International recorded 579 executions in 18 countries in 2021.

Summary

This is an outstandingly interesting, comprehensive, thought-provoking, sometimes funny, but mostly grisly and gruesome exhibition, beautifully staged, with absorbing interactive elements. You have two more weeks to catch it.

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Posted by Simon on April 5, 2023

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The Plain Dealer by William Wycherley (1676)

‘I’ll have no leading-strings; I can walk alone: I hate a harness’
(Manly in The Plain Dealer, Act One)

William Wycherley wrote four comedies during the Restoration era. The Plain Dealer is the fourth and final one and is generally thought to be the best. It is a free adaptation of The Misanthrope (1666), one of the best-known plays of the French dramatist Moliere (1622 to 1673).

The protagonist, Manly, is a sea captain now returned to shore. His ship sank (he is said to have scuttled it after being trapped by Dutch enemy ships) and now he is back on land in lodgings. In any case, he only went to sea to get away from people, who he loathes:

You must pardon me, I cannot wish well to pimps, flatterers, detractors, and cowards, stiff nodding knaves, and supple, pliant, kissing fools

Manly prides himself on his plain-speaking and plain-dealing – in stark contrast to the society around him which he thinks is made up of fawning, lying hypocrites.

What, thou art one of those who esteem men only by the marks and value fortune has set upon ’em, and never consider intrinsic worth! but counterfeit honour will not be current with me: I weigh the man, not his title

Inevitably, his boasted plain dealing strikes others as rudeness and cruelty.

Manly has a friend or confidante, Freeman, who is the auditor of his extended soliloquies about society’s hypocrisies. Freeman is ‘a gentleman well educated, but of a broken fortune, a complier with the age’. I like that description, a complier with the age. Am I a complier with my age, I wonder.

In fact, Manly brusquely tells Freeman that the latter is not his friend; he (Manly) has only one friend, one true deep friend (and even as he says this, the reader suspects that this ‘friend’ is fated to betray him).

Manly is in love with Olivia, a wealthy woman who is tough and misanthropic in her own right. He is so confident of her love he has deposited with her some £6,000 of his fortune including a pile of jewels.

Olivia, also, purports to hate ‘the filthy world’. She has a cousin, Eliza, who is her confidante i.e. who she can confide in, and who is a sarcastic, ironic foil to her, in their first scene together listening to Olivia’s long description of how she despises the world and then, when Novel visits, embarrassingly proving that she is in fact an expert at all the hypocritical practices she has just condemned (gossiping, criticising etc).

OLIVIA: Hold, cousin, hold; I hate detraction. But I must tell you, cousin, his civility is cowardice, his good-nature want of wit; and he has neither courage nor sense to rail: and for his being always in humour, ’tis because he is never dissatisfied with himself.

Manly is beloved by Fidelia, who dressed up as a man to serve aboard his ship, won his trust and now, back on land, continues to dress as a man, all the time professing her love for Manly, declaring in an aside to the audience that she owes him her:

 love, faith, and duty to you, the bravest, worthiest of mankind

Then there’s a flotilla of secondary, comic characters, including a couple of sailors who sailed with Manly and now do him the office of doormen or bouncers, tasked with keeping all his callers at bay, plus:

  • Novel – ‘a pert railing Coxcomb, and an admirer of novelties’ who tries to woo Olivia
  • Major Oldfox – ‘an old impertinent Fop, given to scribbling’, who is wooing Widow Blackacre
  • Lord Plausible – ‘a ceremonious, supple, commending Coxcomb, in love with Olivia’
  • Widow Blackacre – ‘a petulant, litigious Widow, always in law, and Mother of Squire Jerry’
  • Squite Jerry – feeble, hen-pecked son of the Widow Blackacre

The scenes with Novel and Plausible are particularly funny. As the play progresses, so do the complications.

Act 2

Act 2 starts with Olivia explaining at length how she also despises society, and rejects company and visits, to her foil Eliza. Which makes it funny when she is promptly paid lots of visits – by the dandies and fops, Novel and Lord Plausible, and indulges in the very kind of catty gossip she has just criticised to Eliza.

Half-way through this scene Manly, Freeman and Fidelia arrive and, from a secret vantage point (one of the conventions of Restoration comedy) watch Olivia consorting with the fops. Manly overhears Olivia criticising him, a tone she continues once they’ve fully walked onstage and announced their presence. In fact Manly’s arrival prompts Olivia to make the shock declaration that she is married, a revelation which staggers all Manly’s hopes.

MANLY: I wish I never had seen you.

Olivia tells the assembled cast that she is married to an honourable gentleman and I, for one, immediately suspected this will be none other than ‘the one man’ Manly esteems as friend.

Manly and Olivia part with vehement curses of each other. But, during the visit, Olivia has taken a fancy to young Fidelia, dressed as a man, who was accompanying Manly.

When Lady Blackacre is announced, Freeman declares he will stay and woo her, impossible though she is, in order to inherit her money and to pay off his own debtors. Freeman’s bare-faced attempt to chat the Widow up turns into a comic scene as he competes with Lady Blackacre’s constant companion, a dried-up older man, Major Oldfox, who mostly exists to provide a comic foil to Freeman. The scene morphs into a parody of a courtroom confrontation, with either side flinging legalistic accusations at each other in order to prove their ’cause’, i.e. the widow’s hand and money.

The Widow is given a magnificent series of imaginative, long insults which match Falstaff at his finest:

WIDOW BLACKACRE: Thou withered, hobbling, distorted cripple; nay, thou art a cripple all over: wouldst thou make me the staff of thy age, the crutch of thy decrepidness?

Act 3. Westminster Hall

Manly has been summonsed there to be a witness in Lady Blackacre’s law suit. There is a touch of Jarndyce and Jarndyce about a character entirely consumed by one never-ending law suit, and it gives Manly and Freeman the opportunity for conventional criticisms of the law and lawyers.

Enter Fidelia who says she’ll do anything for him, so Manly asks her to go and win back Olivia on his behalf. Obviously, Fidelia is appalled at being given a task which runs directly counter to her own wishes.

Enter Widow Blackacre surrounded by a flock of cavilling lawyers named Blunder, Quaint and Petulant, Buttongown and Splitcause, Quillit and Quirk. When the Widow exits, Freeman takes the opportunity to chat up her poor, put-upon son, Jerry, lending him money to buy a book, encouraging his hopes.

FREEMAN: Steal away the calf, and the cow will follow you.

To which the fabulous Widow replies:

WIDOW: What sir, d’ye think to get the mother by giving the child a rattle?

Anyway, Freeman arranges for one of Manly’s sailor-servants to pinch the Widow’s bags full of years of legal papers which she had left with Jerry to guard. When Jerry re-enter to say they’re all gone, the Widow is distraught, Jerry is mortified, and Freeman gets the sailor-servant to drag Jerry off to Manly’s apartments. I smell a scam!

Manly re-enters and tells Freeman that he has managed to get into three lawsuits already, just by candidly telling some lawyers and a poet what he thinks of them, before going on to dispense with a suite of other characters, Oldfox, various lawyers, an aldermen and a City merchant with withering humour, commented on by Freeman. You realise it is a deliberate gallery of London types, of men of the world – all of them fawning cheats, in Manly’s opinion.

Act 4

Scene 1. Manly’s lodging

Dialogue between Manly and Fidelia (still dressed as a man). He hopes she has come back from Olivia’s to say she won her round to his cause. Instead Fidelia says the diametric opposite, that Olivia extravagantly insulted Manly and then took her (Fidelia) in her arms and showered her with kisses and would have done more but they were interrupted, and Olivia begged her to return for an assignation.

Manly leaps to the conclusion that Fidelia is in love with Olivia, and has made the story of her abusing him up and begins attacking her.

Freeman enters and joins in a philosophical trio about Love. Then the Widow Blackacre and Major Oldfox enter. Oldfox has penned some poetry to the Widow but she comically counters with her writs and lawyer’s letters, her preferred genre of writing.

Then Freeman enters with Jerry: he has successfully corrupted the boy, who now wants to escape his mother’s apron strings and live the London life of theatres, pubs and brothels. In a confrontation the boy demands his right to a life of his own (backed up by Freeman) – but the Widow reveals that Jerry was born out of wedlock, is a bastard and so shall not inherit her jointure

Jointures crop a lot. A jointure is: ‘an estate settled on a wife for the period during which she survives her husband, in lien of a dower.’

Scene 2. Olivia’s lodging

Novel and Lord Plausible compete with each other, claiming Olivia is vowed to them. Her servant gives them each identical letters, stating she despises their rival and loves only them… except that they swap and read them out loud and realise she is tricking both of them.They leave. Olivia enters, dispenses with her serving boy and prepares to meet Fidelia in the dark, as she had earlier arranged. Except that in the darkness a new character named Vernish arrives and embraces her, Olivia enthusiastically responding. He is, we discover, her husband!

After Olivia cleverly covers her initial mistake thinking of thinking Vernish was her secret lover, we learn that Vernish has been out of town five days; it is during that time that Manly rearrived in town i.e. after encountering the Dutch in the Channel, sinking his ship and making it back to shore; and that Olivia and Vernish have deliberately conned Manly out of his money, she persuading Manly to give her his £6,000 while he appears to have given Vernish some £1,000 guineas to be held at a goldsmith’s.

They now plan to be so cruel to Manly as to encourage him back to sea where, hopefully, he will drown. Vernish goes. Olivia soliloquises, making it clear she plans to swindle him, as well.

Enter Fidelia (still dressed as a man) trailed at a distance by Manly. Olivia instantly starts kissing her but when Fidelia asks about Manly, Olivia is crushingly honest, saying she never loved the brute, only wanted him for his money – which Manly, in hiding, hears.

Olivia says she’ll just pop into the other chamber and lock the doors. This gives Manly and Fidelia time to discuss Olivia’s treachery. Manly is initially for murdering her, which Fidelia talks him out of, but then comes round to a more savage revenge, and slips into the darkened room after Olivia, presumably to ravage her pretending to be Fidelia.

But just moments later he slips out of the room again and says his savage revenge would be pointless if no-one witnesses it. Therefore he tells Fidelia to tell Olivia that she (Fidelia) has to leave, but will return same time tomorrow night. By which time Manly will have set up his scam.

Olivia returns and Fidelia successfully feigns illness (‘the falling sickness’) and so says she must leave – but promises to return tomorrow night. But she has no sooner exited than she hurries back onstage saying a man is coming up the stairs with a candle. ‘Tis Vernish! Olivia disappears into the inner room – but Vernish catches Fidelia, thinking she is a male adulterer, draws his sword and threatens to stab her.

At which point Fidelia confesses she is a woman. Vernish pulls off her wig then squeezes her breasts. Yes, she is a woman! Still angry and puzzled, Vernish says he’ll have one final proof that Fidelia is a woman and drags her towards the bedroom, obviously to **** her. Fidelia starts screaming.

At which point a servant enters to tell Vernish that an alderman has sent his ‘cashier’ round with some money he had promised money, and the servant is is even now coming up the stairs. Forced to abandon his attempt at ravishment, Vernish gets the servant to help him push Fidelia into an adjoining room and lock the door.

Act 5

Scene 1. Eliza’s lodgings

Eliza is just telling Olivia off for the bad reputation she’s acquired when enter Vernish who promptly tells Olivia off for consorting with a woman dressed in men’s clothes.

Olivia is greatly confused, thinking Fidelia must have persuaded Vernish that ‘he’ is a woman. Then it begins to dawn on her that Vernish might be telling the truth, that Fidelia might be a woman in disguise!

Either way, Vernish lets slip that he terrified the girl by pretending he was going to ravish her – at which point Olivia finds an opportunity to accuse Vernish of being a heartless ravisher, and in the first month of their marriage, too!

So Vernish finds himself having to apologise and gives Olivia 200 of the guineas he has just received from the cashier. He then asks Eliza to accompany i.e. take Olivia home. Vernish leaves, at which point Eliza teases Olivia about this woman dressed as a man who was no doubt the lover and gallant Olivia was boasting about, and this turns into an almighty argument, with both women ending up damning each other.

Scene 2. The Cock pub in Bow Street

Fidelia is back in her costume as a man explaining to Manly how s/he managed to persuade Vernish that s/he was a woman. Manly is now desperate to know what Olivia’s husband looks like, but Fidelia didn’t get a clear view (the room was darkened). So in a bid to find out, Manly insists that Fidelia send a note telling Olivia she will visit again, tonight, at seven.

Enter Freeman who asks Manly why, now that he’s poor (he gave Olivia all his money), he doesn’t call on old friends and old obligations. This is a prompt for Manly to give an extended explanation of his misanthropy.

Disappointed in Manly, Freeman leaves to carry on his schemes re. the Widow Blackacre.

Enter Vernish to meet Manly amid a great display of enthusiasm and, sure enough, he does turn out to be the One Good Friend In The World Manly thinks he has while the audience, of course, knows Vernish is gulling and robbing him.

The conversation turns immediately to Olivia and Vernish joins in hypocritically damning her for a mercenary… Until Manly claims to have slept with her, at which point Vernish (who we know is Olivia’s ‘secret’ husband becomes genuinely angry. Manly sends him, as his best friend, to ask if Olivia will give him even a little of his money back.

The buzzing fops, Novel, Lord Plausible and Oldfox barge into Manly’s room, leading to comedy at their pretensions and foibles, namely stupid Novel insisting it is a sign of great wit to make loud noises and break windows.

This is just business to pass the time during which Vernish is supposed to have gone and asked Olivia for some of Manley’s money. Now he re-enters the room, and Manly kicks the fops out. Vernish tells Manly that Olivia told him to go to hell.

Vernish is still uncertain whether Olivia’s slept with Manly or not but, in any case, in an aside, confesses he would gladly slit Manly’s throat. Some friend!

In a scene drenched in dramatic irony, Manly laughs with Vernish about what a poor, wretched cuckold Olivia’s husband must be, about how he has been sending a go-between to Olivia who persuaded the fool he was a woman, and how he – Manly – now has an appointment with Olivia, as the time is coming up to 7.30 at night.

Vernish is confused and angry, he’s sure Fidelia was a woman, why is Manly describing him as a man? (Because Manly doesn’t yet realise that Fidelia is a woman, that’s why.) Manly goes to keep his appointment and Vernish shares his bewilderment with us, his plan to catch them at it (whatever it is) and his abiding hatred of Manly. He is a genuinely bad man.

Cut to Manly arranging with Freeman for the latter to scour all the drinkers in the pub and bring them all to Olivia’s place in half an hour precisely. Manly wants as many people as possible to witness his humiliation of her.

Scene 3. Another room in the Cock pub

Widow Blackacre suborns some professional perjurers and lying witnesses she will need in her next court case.

She has barely finished and dispatched them before Major Oldfox appears with a waiter who overcomes the widow and ties her to her chair and gags her! Is Oldfox going to rape her? No. Worse! He is going to read her his poetry!!

But he hasn’t even started before Freeman, Jerry, three bailiffs a constable and his assistants all burst into the room. They untie the Widow, Oldfox scarpers, but they haven’t come for him, they’ve come to serve an enormous suit on the Widow for ten thousand pounds!

This has all been cooked up by Freeman who now tells the Widow there’s only one way out of it which is to marry him. But the Widow is a legal expert, and suggests instead that she pays all his debts and settle an annuity on him. Hmmm, Freeman throws in £40 a year for Jerry (and free access to the Widow’s maid’s bedroom) and it’s a deal. He has lawyers at hand to draw up a contract.

Scene 4. Olivia’s lodging

Olivia has barely welcomed Fidelia (followed silently by Manly) into her darkened chambers and is leading her to the bed, than there are sounds at the door, which is locked and starts to be forced.

Panicking that it is her husband, Olivia tells Fidelia they’ll climb out the window down a rope made of curtain.

In the dark Olivia just has time to give Manly – thinking he is Fidelia – her purse and cabinet (presumably containing all the money she took from Manly) and disappear out the window, before Vernish forces the door and charges at Manly with his sword out.

In the pitch black, Manly unswords Vernish and throws him to the floor, Olivia returns and embraces Manly thinking him Fidelia, at which point Freeman, Novel, Plausible, Jerry and Widow Blackacre all barge in carrying torches.

So it is finally revealed that Vernish, pinned to the floor – Manly’s best friend – is Olivia’s husband. Manly is appalled.

In the struggles Fidelia’s wig has fallen off and she is revealed as a woman! She makes a speech about how she has loyally loved and followed Manly everywhere. Realising the depth of her loyalty, Manly pledges his love to her, too, and gives her the cabinet and purse.

Olivia and Vernish exit after being admonished, and now condemned to live as faithless man and wife in poverty.

Fidelia announces her family name is Grey and her father left her £2,000 a year. Money money money is always the ultimate subject of Restoration comedy.

The philosophy of Love

For thousands of years writers have been anatomising, categorising and philosophising about Love. Huge swathes of these Restoration comedies are devoted to this subject of apparently endless fascination and are stuffed with sweeping generalisations about men, women and Love.

MANLY: Why, what did you hear me say?
FREEMAN: Something imperfectly of love, I think.
MANLY: I was only wondering why fools, rascals, and desertless wretches, should still have the better of men of merit with all women, as much as with their own common mistress, Fortune.
FREEMAN: Because most women, like Fortune, are blind, seem to do all things in jest, and take pleasure in extravagant actions. Their love deserves neither thanks, nor blame, for they cannot help it: ’tis all sympathy; therefore, the noisy, the finical, the talkative, the cowardly, and effeminate, have the better of the brave, the reasonable, and man of honour; for they have no more reason in their love, or kindness, than Fortune herself.
MANLY: Yes, they have their reason. First, honour in a man they fear too much to love; and sense in a lover upbraids their want of it; and they hate anything that disturbs their admiration of themselves; but they are of that vain number, who had rather show their false generosity, in giving away profusely to worthless flatterers, than in paying just debts. And, in short, all women, like fortune (as you say) and rewards, are lost by too much meriting.

I find this stuff quite exhausting to read. It is tempting to skim over this eternal opinionising about men and women and Love in order to get to the plot, where people discuss actual events and plans and schemes, and where there is a lot more comedy.

Anti-women propaganda

  • MANLY: Yes; for she is not (I tell you) like other women, but can keep her promise
  • MANLY: for women’s wants are generally the most importunate solicitors to love or marriage.
  • OLIVIA: Well, we women, like the rest of the cheats of the world, when our cullies or creditors have found us out, and will or can trust no longer, pay debts and satisfy obligations with a quarrel, the kindest present a man can make to his mistress, when he can make no more presents.
  • FREEMAN: Well, you see now, mistresses, like friends, are lost by letting ’em handle your money; and most women are such kind of witches, who can have no power over a man, unless you give ’em money: but when once they have got any from you, they never leave you till they have all. Therefore I never give a woman a farthing.

Insulting servants

Olivia calls her servant, Lettice, ‘you dowdy’, ‘insatiable creature’, you buffle-headed stupid creature you’, and the boy who serves her ‘you little unthinking fop’, ‘you heedless little animal’ and so on. Manly curses his sailor-doormen as rogues

The Widow Blackacre

Is a quite marvellous comic creation. All the scenes with her come vividly to life. Her language is supercharged with vitriol and imaginative insult. She is a kind of female Falstaff, and a magnificent invention. Voltaire, himself a playwright, considered her ‘the most comical character that was ever brought upon the stage’ (Letters Concerning The English Nation, 1733).

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The Trial of Charles I by Dame Veronica Wedgwood (1964)

I own about 50 books on the Civil Wars and am a member of the Cromwell Association, have attended lectures and visited battlefields and key Civil War sites. If you asked me what to read on the subject I would unhesitatingly recommend the ageing but brilliant trilogy of books by Dame Veronica Wedgwood (1910 to 1997):

  • The King’s Peace (1955)
  • The King’s War (1958)
  • The Trial of Charles I (1964)

The reason is simple. All the other books I’m aware of are either high-level overviews of the entire period (from the 1630s or earlier, to the Restoration in 1660) or specialist books by professional historians arguing a particular thesis or interpretation. Wedgwood’s books are the only ones I know of which give a straightforward, chronological account of what happened on an almost daily basis. This level of detail about the helter-skelter of day-to-day events, the rush and pressure of unpredictable crises and alarm, is crucial to understanding the decisions the key players made as they struggled to understand and control events.

Ten fateful weeks

Wedgwood concentrates on the 10 weeks between Cromwell’s Army, on 20th November 1648, laying before a reluctant Parliament their demands that the king be brought to trial – and the execution of the king January 30 1649. First she sketches in the background and the key political groups which had emerged during the Civil War:

The Royalists

Mostly in exile or hiding after the failed rising or ‘second civil war’ in the Spring and Summer of 1648 which had been convincingly crushed by the New Model Army. Royalists throughout the land were being repressed and, if they’d helped in the uprising, often had their land and money confiscated.

The Army

Under its brilliant commander Sir Thomas Fairfax the army had emerged victorious in the second civil war, defeating all Royalist forces. This battle-hardened army was to go on to occupy Scotland and then storm through Ireland. But the Army was divided into two faction:

  1. The Levellers During the war there emerged from the common troops, formerly uneducated men who had found a voice and confidence through their success and solidarity, a group nicknamed the Levellers, who demanded a comprehensive overhaul of the English State, starting with free elections on the basis of universal male suffrage to form a new House of Commons with a mandate to review Common Law, abolish the Church of England, abolish tithes and so on. Their most effective leader was the young, impassioned John Lilburne, once whipped through the streets of London at Charles’s order for slandering the Court.
  2. ‘The Grandees’ This was the Levellers’ nickname for the landed gentry and aristocrats who led the Army, who opposed the king on legal or religious principle but had not the slightest interest in reordering society, who were convinced that would lead to anarchy. They formed a small Council of the Army, dominated by the ruthless workaholic Henry Ireton, who happened to be son-in-law to Cromwell.

Parliament

The House of Lords

Heavily biased towards the king, most of the Royalists were abroad in exile, in hiding or dead. In the leadup to the trial sometimes as few as six Lords attended some sessions.

The House of Commons

Claiming to represent the people of England, the Commons was already diminished by up to 200 of the original members of the 1642 House. Even so it was still dominated by the Presbyterians, so-called moderate Puritans who desperately wanted to reach agreement with the king. It was these moderates that Charles had been stringing along since 1647 while he hoped against hope for further uprisings or help from a foreign government to free him.

The Army MPs

Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and some 20 others combined leadership positions in the Army with membership of the House of Commons and used their position repeatedly to get the Army’s way.

Pride’s Purge

When the Presbyterian majority in the Commons delayed debating the Army’s demand for a trial, events took a dramatic turn. On December 5th Colonel Thomas Pride stood with a small troop of soldiers outside Westminster Hall and, as each MP arrived, he only let through the ones favourable to the Army, taking into custody all those opposed. Only 45 MPs were let in. It became known as ‘Pride’s Purge’. It was in effect a military coup, ensuring that the Parliament whose rights and prerogatives Cromwell and the others took up arms to defend in 1642, now consisted of few if any Lords, and only a hard core of MPs favourable to the Army’s wishes. A rubber stamp.

The Commission

This reduced ‘Rump’ was persuaded to set up a Commission with 135 members to administer the trial and decide the king’s guilt. Of this hand-picked group rarely more than 60 attended any of the sessions. Wedgwood gives a brilliant, day by day of the trial and the central clash – between the obscure lawyer John Bradshaw chosen to run the court, who repeatedly tried to get Charles to enter a plea – and the dignified king who knew the law inside out and refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court.

The conflict

Charles I was convinced he had a God-given duty to preserve not only the laws and traditions of England, but the rights and prerogatives of the Crown, as handed to him by his father, in order to hand them on to his son. The religious zealots in the Army were convinced that Charles’s defeat in the first and second civil wars showed beyond doubt that God had decided against him, that he was guilty of starting the war in the first place, and therefore was the ‘Man of Blood’ as they called him, and deserved to die. More practical Roundheads like Henry Ireton probably Cromwell just simply realised there was no dealing with this king. One way or another they had been trying to negotiate with him since 1640 and it had led to nothing but bloodshed, political collapse, economic depression, while the king endlessly prevaricated and endlessly schemed, trying to get the Scots to invade, to raise an Irish army, to persuade the French king to aid him.

Wedgwood’s account brilliantly conveys why both sides were convinced God was on their side, and how the different interpretations of what that meant led to complete stalemate. The only way to break the stalemate was to remove one of the players.

Reactions to the execution

The execution of the king was very unpopular. Even within the Army there were protests. The Presbyterian interest in London and beyond opposed it. It prompted the Presbyterian Scots to declare war on England. Royalists sincerely considered it the most heinous act since the Crucifixion of Christ, to which it was immediately compared.

Cromwell

War in Scotland and Ireland took up Cromwell’s time over the next few years while the Rump Parliament gained a damning reputation for corruption until, in April 1653, Cromwell ejected it by force. Leaders of the Army offered Cromwell the crown. He refused but accepted the title Lord Protector in December 1653 and set about instituting the godly, fair and just government he had hoped for. But the various experiments in democracy, nominated Parliaments, and rule by military Governor-General all failed. Cromwell died in September 1658, almost ten years after he’d led the men who executed Charles I.

The Restoration

Within a year his regime had unravelled, the Protectorate collapsed, and the strongest surviving military figure, General Monk, bowing to popular demand and political realism, invited Charles II to return to Britain and take the throne.

The disappearance of Christian belief

As Wedgwood concludes, the strongest element in these events, the devout and sometimes fanatical Christian belief of all the players involved, is the one that has most faded from contemporary view, becoming almost inaccessible from our modern perspective. We fill the gap with Marxist or mercantilist or psychoanalytical, with political or biographical interpretations. But it was upon the rock of a shared Christian faith, reflected through vastly different interpretations, that all four nations in the British Isles came to bloody grief for 20 long years.

‘Cromwell before the Coffin of Charles I’ (1849) by Hippolyte Delaroche. Hamburger Kunsthalle

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by Simon on September 22, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 22, 2012

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