The Theatre of Death: Rituals of Justice from the English Civil Wars to the Restoration

By P J Klemp

This book discusses some rituals of justice—such as public executions, printed responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s execution speech, and King Charles I’s treason trial—in early modern England. Focusing on the ways in which genres shape these events’ multiple voices, I analyze the rituals’ genres and the diverse perspectives from which we must understand them.

The execution ritual, like such cultural forms as plays and films, is a collaborative production that can be understood only, and only incompletely, by being alert to the presence of its many participants and their contributions. Each of these participants brings a voice to the execution ritual, whether it is the judge and jury or the victim, executioner, sheriff and other authorities, spiritual counselors, printer, or spectators and readers. And each has at least one role to play. No matter how powerful some institutions and individuals may appear, none has a monopoly over authority and how the events take shape on and beyond the scaffold. The centerpiece of the mid-seventeenth-century’s theatre of death was the condemned man’s last dying utterance. This study focuses on the words and contexts of many of those final speeches, including King Charles I’s (1649), Archbishop William Laud’s (1645), and the Earl of Strafford’s (1641), as well as those of less well known royalists and regicides. Where we situate ourselves to view, hear, and comprehend a public execution—through specific participants’ eyes, ears, and minds or accounts—shapes our interpretation of the ritual. It is impossible to achieve a singular, carefully indoctrinated meaning of an event as complex as a state-sponsored public execution.

Along with the variety of voices and meanings, the nature and purpose of the rituals of justice maintain a significant amount of consistency in a number of eras and cultural contexts. Whether the focus is on the trial and execution of the Marian martyrs, English royalists in the 1640s and 1650s, or the Restoration’s regicides, the events draw on a set of cultural expectations or conventions. Because rituals of justice are shaped by diverse voices and agendas, with the participants’ scripts and counterscripts converging and colliding, they are dramatic moments conveying profound meanings.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Oct 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781644530313

Book preview

The Theatre of Death

The Theatre of Death

Rituals of Justice from the

English Civil Wars to the Restoration

P. J. Klemp

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2016 by Paul Klemp

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-031-3 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-032-0 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Klemp, P. J., author.

Title: The theatre of death : rituals of justice from the English civil wars to the Restoration / Paul Klemp.

Description: Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016030540 (print) | LCCN 2016043913 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Public executions—Great Britain—History—17th century. | Executions and executioners—Great Britain—History—17th century. | Great Britain—History—Stuarts, 1603–1714.

Classification: LCC HV8532.G7 K54 2016 (print) | LCC HV8532.G7 (ebook) | DDC 364.660941/09032—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030540

For David Jacob and Alexander Jonathan

List of Figures

Preface

Large audiences in early modern England were drawn to three main events—plays, sermons, and executions. Perceived in a variety of ways, ranging from forms of pedagogy to entertainment, these public moments offered relief from an unthinkably long work week for many and a sense of community for all. Even the middling sort of citizen could afford the theatre, and attending a church service or a beheading was free. The community tacitly recognized that plays, sermons, and beheadings were traditional rituals, each based on a conventional genre and performed in an established setting with an explicit focal point, roles assigned to its participants, and many scripts inherited by them. Although settings were stable, at all of these events the various spectators, actors, notetakers, and authority figures could follow, ignore, or revise their scripts, whether they were in the form of a tragedy by Thomas Kyd, a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, or the execution of James Stanley, the Earl of Derby. The theatre of death in early modern England, with its emphasis on ritualized scripts, the verbal centerpiece of the victim’s last dying words, and very name, shares many of the theatre’s and sermon’s most significant features. Like other public performative genres, the execution ritual uses those features to articulate a community’s values. The cast, clothing, props, logistics, timing, sequence, security, audibility, and record-keeping all contribute to the execution day’s visions of justice.

When scripts change, genres are altered. Yet those who shaped these living, breathing events were not motivated by a single vision or intention and did not share a single, uniform understanding of their meanings. The authorities worried that public performances of plays represented opportunities for traitors, heretics, and prostitutes to lure the innocent. In church, a number of Jacobean preachers commented from the pulpit that the congregation was less interested in edification than in gossip and news. Sites of executions, such as Charing Cross, Tyburn, and the Tower, witnessed both the dignified orderliness that should accompany a man’s[1] death as well as jokesters in loud audiences, sober reflection, and drunken shouts. Thomas Laqueur argues for the importance of the crowd as the central actor[2] in English executions, a view I share and illustrate in the following chapters. Though the evidence of the crowd’s behavior—physical and verbal—at these events is frustratingly scanty, it is important because it often articulated a range of values, from those expressing approval and cooperation to antagonism and rudeness. Ideally, from the state’s perspective, the theatre of death should assert the power of hierarchy and everyone’s place in it, whether as law-abiding citizen or traitor facing the axe. The traitor may not agree, though the concept of interpellation, which drew him to embrace values and events that ran contrary to his own, was frequently apparent. Sometimes he disrupted the proceedings by physically altering the script of his expected movements; sometimes he subverted the authorities’ wishes by manipulating the conventions of the genre of the last dying words. I argue throughout this study that the theatre of death, negotiated in an arena filled with diverse ideologies and voices, was a ritualistic drama with multiple and fluid meanings.

This study’s introduction addresses the foundational concept of capital punishment as an assertion of power. Not just an aberration, capital punishment is a cultural universal, something practiced by all societies, and I explore some of its assumptions and practices from early modern England to contemporary England and America. Capital punishment, as David Garland explains, is a complex that is manifested in the totality of discursive and nondiscursive practices through which [it] is enacted, represented, and experienced.[3] This definition informs my understanding of capital punishment throughout, including the introduction’s focus on the role of the death penalty as an instrument of justice in Western cultures and the trials and executions for heresy during the Marian campaign of the mid-sixteenth century. All points of origin are arbitrary, but I begin with the gospellers’ trials and deaths under Queen Mary because that is when one form of the execution genre assumed a stable shape and the victim developed a limited sense of agency, as his last dying words were first documented in some detail in England. The introduction closes with an assessment of the early modern evidence about the theatre of death that is available to scholars in manuscripts, printed texts, extant props, and buildings, and particularly of their reliability and value.

The first and last chapters focus on brief but dramatic periods of turmoil and the ways in which justice was administered and received. During the English Revolution’s political executions of 1641 to 1658 and the Restoration’s equally political but exceptionally personal executions of 1660 and 1662, the state’s apparent omnipotence crushed opponents, leaving them largely without voice or identity. But the state was far from all powerful, the victim not entirely passive or acquiescent. My discussions of these executions, and all others in this study, are based on the premise that the theatre of death represents a collaborative event whose multiple participants, wittingly or not, inevitably possess multiple intentions and produce multiple interpretations. Sarah Covington describes the most productive perspective for studying an execution ritual that is polyvocal and polyvalent: the reader or scholar should take not one side but many, placing oneself in the middle of the action from a confusing perspective that shifts from the stage to the audience and back again.[4] The flexibility and fluidity of that perspective correspond to the nature of the ritual. Like all genres, particularly such performative ones as the drama and sermon, the execution ritual is simultaneously conservative and conventional, having been acted out in a fairly consistent form by many individuals over many years, and unstable and flexible, subject to revision and even subversion by participants who have the vision, courage, or spontaneous good fortune to reshape the genre. The first and last chapters of this study give a voice to the most ignored of those individuals, the royalists and regicides who were executed in the mid-seventeenth century. Their strong presence as martyrs and their articulate suffering bodies and voices define a form of heroism that is also displayed by Jesus in Milton’s Paradise Regained­—because Milton’s character and the early modern victims frequently turned to New Testament martyrs for models of words, action, and inaction. On their way to death, early modern martyrs revised the genre of the execution ritual—its structure and its meanings—over the course of one century.

The middle chapters are, in a sense, case studies about three high-ranking men in the theatre of justice. Though the value of such a focus is apparent, I have a divided view about this approach. On one hand, I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of devoting so much attention to so few individuals, particularly ones who, in varying degrees, have been the subject of many historians’ studies. On the other hand, voluminous evidence surrounds the trials and executions of the Earl of Strafford, the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, and King Charles I, and their appearances in the theatre of death highlight, by way of analogy or contrast, the less visible figures who were executed in the Marian campaign or in the English Revolution and Restoration. The trials and executions of Strafford, Laud, and Charles were made up not only of speeches but also of other individuals acting out conventionally choreographed roles, whether they were assigned to the victim, family, notetaker, executioner, spiritual comforter, sheriff, soldiers, or crowd. Since each had a role, each had the potential to make contributions in the form of words or a material presence. The Articles of Impeachment drawn up for Strafford’s trial in 1641 joined the charges against Laud and Charles as ideological assertions of power that ignored precedent and proper legal procedure to reach a generally predetermined end. Accusations and exculpatory explanations flew around as Strafford and Laud dealt with the newly fabricated crime of cumulative treason, and Charles spoke eloquently in Westminster Hall, and occasionally on the scaffold, about the charge of treason leveled against him, a charge that had no legal or traditional application to a monarch’s conduct. The words spoken during the trials and executions of Strafford, Laud, and Charles created the events’ powerful polyvocal atmosphere.

The texts of most speeches from 1555 to 1662 cited in this study exist in multiple states characterized by variant readings large or small. Strafford’s final speech, as chapters 2–3 explain, pointedly avoided meeting some demands of the genre of the last dying words. Hence it was printed in multiple versions, some revised to be more conciliatory than others. After chapter 4 analyzes the collaborative nature of Archbishop Laud’s final hours, chapter 5 continues the theme of collaboration in a discussion of the two texts of Laud’s last dying words. I do not know whether this is a unique case, but it is remarkable because the manuscript text and the oral version of Laud’s speech were both printed. There are hundreds of variants between them; the substantive ones reflect the rhetorical distance between a manuscript created by an angry man in the privacy of the Tower and the shorthand notes taken while he spoke in a somewhat more accommodating way to one hundred thousand hostile spectators on Tower Hill. In the theatre of death and soon after in the bookshop, a dying man’s last words were neither stable texts nor sacrosanct parts of his legacy.

Those textual events form only part of the record of the public event called the theatre of death. Chapter 6 explores the attacks on Laud in yet another theatre of justice, the public forum of print, where opponents issued assaults not only on his personality and policies but also on his last dying words. A number of printed animadversions generously quoted Laud’s execution speech, refuting it point by point. In keeping with the textual nature of midcentury trials and debates, opponents continued the beheading of the archbishop by tearing his words to pieces; they then recreated him as an entity that was, like his policies and religion, exclusively manmade and textual. Though Laud was the only one of the three men examined here subjected to a series of animadversions, spirited debate—usually mean-spirited debate—appeared in printed texts following the deaths of Strafford, Laud, and Charles.

Chapter 7 counters the view that Charles arrived at his trial, a unique theatre of justice because of the defendant’s identity as a monarch, without a defense strategy. I argue instead that he had a paradoxical strategy: to use his trial to deny the High Court of Justice the opportunity to try him. The defendant’s performance, like so many others that he had acted and read, turned the proceeding into a meta-trial whose focus and subject was the trial itself—its procedures and vision of justice—rather than the charge that he was a Tyrant, Traytor, Murtherer and Publique Enemy of the Commonwealth. That his execution was imminent Charles knew from his first moments at the bar, if not earlier; that he could put the trial on trial and display the ritual’s illegal, unprecedented nature to all was his bold rewriting of the conventions of the treason trial.

Chapter 8 constructs a family tree of sorts that includes the king and his two trusted advisers. Walking to his execution on Tower Hill in 1641, Strafford passed the window of Laud, also being held prisoner. Comments by Laud strongly suggest that he read the printed text of Strafford’s last dying words. From them, he learned ways to deny some of the authorities’ wishes or generic expectations about what an execution speech should say. After Laud was executed at the same site four years later, the manuscript of his speech, containing the words that demonstrated how he had revised the genre, was sent to Oxford, where the king and his court were in exile. Charles, the recipient of Laud’s lessons and, through them, Strafford’s (it is likely that Charles also read Strafford’s speech), used these strategies when he spoke from the scaffold. Just as he subverted the genre of the treason trial, he deflated the genre of the execution speech.

In addition to words, material evidence about the events of the 1640s is extant. Numerous illustrations were made of Charles’s execution, for example; each contains significant errors, but the errors differ from one illustration to another. The hall where Charles’s trial took place is open to the public, as is the site of Laud’s beheading. Kept in museums and libraries are such artifacts as the lead-lined hat that John Bradshaw wore for protection during Charles’s trial and the sky-blue sash that Charles removed moments before placing his head on the block. And volumes of contemporary manuscripts and printed documents survive. Each of these pieces of evidence exists in tension with the others, creating ambiguities and complicating our ability to comprehend the theatre of justice. Rather than view all of these as a means to create a definitive understanding of the execution ritual from 1555 to 1662, I have tried to respect the ways in which they reinforce, qualify, and contradict each other in a delightfully dissonant chorus of multiple interpretations. The evidence encourages us to embrace multiple perspectives and to reach conclusions that are incomplete, provisional, and sometimes contradictory.

Notes

1. One caveat about this study’s focus: all the victims I discuss are male; concerning the experiences of women in execution rituals, Frances E. Dolan has published a fine study, one characterized by a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of these events (‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680, Modern Philology 92, no. 2 [1994]: 157–78).

2. Thomas W. Laqueur, Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868, in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 309, 322.

3. David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 14.

4. Sarah Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 157.

Acknowledgments

I have not a sadistic bone in my body. During the past decade, I have thus been somewhat surprised by the response of colleagues, family, and even the officials who check passports when, asked about my scholarly interests, I identified my current area of research as the execution ritual in early modern England. They focused on one moment—the beheading or hanging—and expressed revulsion. While I share their reaction to that moment, it has been far from the focus of my reading and thinking about the hundreds of people who were persecuted in England during the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century. The courage of their convictions, the strength to participate in a public ritual that led to their deaths, and the ability to offer their final words—these held my interest as I studied accounts of the persecution of the gospellers under Mary, royalists under parliament, and regicides under Charles II. Rather than dealing exclusively or even primarily with these martyrs’ moments of death, I sought to place their fortitude in its religious, political, legal, biographical, and cultural contexts. That meant that the victims and their last dying words had to share the stage, as the cast of characters grew, soon including authority figures, family members, spiritual counselors, executioners, lawyers, craftsmen who constructed the scaffold, note-takers, printers, and the all-important spectators. Each death, however great its magnitude for the victim and his family, was but one part of a large ritual that was a collaborative cultural production.

The gravity of this subject forced me to confront some difficult issues as I researched and wrote this book. My lifelong view of capital punishment, characterized by equal parts of waffling and fence-sitting, did not survive the years of research and writing that went into this project. Although I spent those years in the company of three distinctly dislikable men (disliked by many then and since, though for different reasons and in different degrees)—the Earl of Strafford, Archbishop William Laud, and King Charles I—even my antipathy to them was tempered. Admirable they are not, and one who has spent his life reading Milton faces a considerable obstacle when attempting to work up any warmth toward this prelate and this monarch. However, when presented with abundant evidence that Black Tom Tyrant (Strafford), Sathans second childe (Laud), and the man of blood (Charles) were mistreated by the judicial process and given excessive sentences, I found it increasingly problematic—even grossly unfair—to perpetuate the injustice by passing unrelentingly negative judgments on these men and their practices. The contemporary courtroom, scaffold, and pamphlet-writers (as well as many historians) did not give these men their just deserts. On the other hand, spending time in the company of such principled men as Solicitor General John Cook, the prosecutor at Charles’s trial, and Gerrard Winstanley, the period’s lone advocate for the abolition of capital punishment, was instructive and inspiring.

Because no good deed should go unpunished, I have a number of debts that I must acknowledge, even if I can never repay them. My accomplices include unfailingly professional and resourceful guides to various libraries and archives. I am grateful to the staff at the British Library, Bodleian Library, Parliamentary Archives, and Lambeth Palace Library, with particular thanks due to Ms. Emma Stuart (Windsor Palace Library) and Mr. Robin Wiltshire (Sheffield Archives). Geoffrey Robertson QC, who has written so well about John Cook and the legal case against Charles, offered enthusiasm about this project when I needed a nudge.

Without the support, financial and beyond, of my academic institution, I would not have had the resources to explore a number of libraries’ and archives’ rich holdings and the time to write about them. For the many kinds of generosity they showed, I am grateful to the former dean of my college, Michael Zimmerman; the current dean, John Koker; and the university’s provost, Lane Earns.

The generous permission of various institutions has allowed me to use many documents that were crucial for explaining the theatre of death’s workings. I thank the British Library Board for permission to cite MS Add 34363, MS Add 37719, MS Egerton 3383, and MS Sloane 1467; the president and fellows of St. John’s College, Oxford, for permission to cite Simon Foster’s fascinating account of Laud’s execution in MS 260; Lambeth Palace Library for permission to cite MS 943; and the Director of Communities, Sheffield City Council, for permission to use material from the Strafford Papers in the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments. The Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments have been accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government and are allocated to Sheffield City Council. I am grateful to the following journals for allowing me to use my essays that originally appeared in their pages: The Seventeenth Century (chapter 1), The Review of English Studies (chapter 4), and English Literary Renaissance (chapter 5). Figures 2.1, 2.3, and 7.1 are taken from Google Images. The others come from Early English Books Online.

Three friends and colleagues who are experts in nineteenth-century American women’s literature, rhetoric and World War I Irish poetry and history, and creative writing have been supportive of this book since its start. Respectively, Noelle Baker, Marguerite Helmers, and Pam Gemin provided not just the sense that this project was worth doing but also the pesky questions—about the reception of execution speeches in person and on the page, about printing and fonts, and about the writing process—that stimulated our conversations and my thoughts. Margaret Hostetler, a medievalist, read my favorite chapter and subjected it to rigorous criticism that improved it. Liz Bannenberg brought her technological expertise and patience to this project. At the University of Delaware Press, Dr. Julia Oestreich copyedited meticulously and taught me a few things about my own writing. At Rowman & Littlefield, Chris Fischer efficiently and calmly supervised all the important production details. Alison Teske, my research assistant, labored over the manuscript with focus and an eye for detail. I am grateful to all of these co-conspirators.

Edward Jones, the editor of Milton Quarterly and a genuine archival researcher, has been a guiding force in my career for almost three decades. Not only did he read and critique substantial parts of the manuscript, but also he has always been a role model and supporter of my scholarly projects. No amount of thanks will suffice.

Finally, a few words about Kevin Sharpe, someone I met only once. Writers need to have a keen awareness of their audience, and—as I wrote to Professor Sharpe shortly before his untimely death in 2011—his books are constantly on my desk and I always see him as my ideal reader. The citations in the following study only begin to hint at the influence he has on my thinking about early modern England.

Introduction

Capital Punishment in Early Modern England

Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

—Thomas Pynchon

Gravity’s Rainbow

The implementation and perceptions of the death penalty in Western cultures have been remarkably stable for centuries. In recent decades, however, the execution ritual has faded into a distant memory for Europeans while remaining a contentious issue for Americans, as state after state in the United States abolishes it. The ritual, defined by a complex field of institutional arrangements, social practices, and cultural forms,[1] has thus not become a relic of history. A broader perspective, one that recalls vivid newspaper headlines from Texas or brutal forms of popular entertainment in early modern England, reminds Europeans of the currency of capital punishment and Americans of the ways in which it is deeply embedded in some cultures as a judicial imperative not to be questioned. As the words theatre of death imply, a performative and ritualistic institutional practice, one whose stakes involve life and death, is at the core of the following study.

The mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century, two periods of concentrated ideological conflict, saw the development of this theatrical practice or publicly enacted genre. As a genre, the execution ritual was an arrangement of procedures and sequences of words and actions that were based on precedent. It was thus conservative by nature, not subject to serious modification because of whim, and its significance was also largely conservative. The theatre of death’s structured behavior, whether closely or loosely supervised by authorities, conveyed a sense of order and stability on the scaffold, even when the victim’s head was severed from his body. Spectators, on the other hand, were often a good deal more disorderly. All rituals have a meaning—or meanings, as I will argue—within their culture. Depending on one’s perspective as sheriff, clergyman, victim, executioner, spectator, notetaker, or otherwise, the event’s meaning and purpose were open to a wide range of interpretations: it could have symbolized the administration or miscarriage of justice; an afternoon of employment, entertainment, or sadistic torture; the deterrence of treason, encouragement to feign submission but remain silent; or loyalty to powerful authorities. That is, while the authorities largely succeeded in managing the theatre of death’s procedures and bloody conclusion, regulating what it meant was impossible, in person or in print.

Many of the participants in the execution ritual, particularly the victims and the spectators, have not been heard since the day of their final performances, the prompt printing of their speeches, and the infrequent responses to them. The executions of Revolutionary England’s highly placed individuals—the Earl of Strafford, Archbishop William Laud, and King Charles I—have been narrated, some in greater detail than others, but limited attention has been given to their final hours, gestures, and words, and to how they were received by the crowd around the scaffold or by contemporary commentators in printed pamphlets. Less prominent figures have been subject to even greater neglect. The voices of captains, colonels, knights in arms, as well as majors general, a preacher, a marquess, and some earls are heard in the following pages. Most of their final words and executions receive their first detailed scholarly discussions here.

Capital Punishment as a Cultural Universal

Before assuming a position of self-righteousness because we or our cultures may not approve of the death penalty, it is important to note that for most of human history, it was what anthropologists call a ‘cultural universal,’ forming an element of every organized society.[2] From the long-term perspective, David Garland goes on to explain, not only is capital punishment the norm, not the exception, but it is also a practice that continues to hold popular appeal for the publics of virtually every nation.[3] Capital punishment has a conspicuous place in all of our histories and in twenty-first-century global life. A recognition of its place in our past and present, along with our reflections on capital punishment, makes a powerful statement about our cultural identity. A culture’s use of capital punishment is based on values that are time- and place-specific. Its practice or proscription is largely taken for granted by the members of the culture, for whom assumptions about the meaning of justice and punishment, life and death, the role of the state and the individual, and so forth form a web of ideologies that are nearly invisible and rarely in need of articulation because they make up a consensually perceived reality.

In early modern England, the execution ritual was perceived as a tragic necessity, compelled by the scheme of things, ordained by the way the world was put together.[4] Before the eighteenth century (with a partial exception made for the Civil War and Interregnum era), however, there was surprisingly little by way of public debate on the nature and objectives of punishment. . . . Usually, it would seem, the criminal law and the penalties it imposed was something which was taken for granted.[5] The clearest indication of capital punishment’s role as a tacit cultural assumption at that time is the fact that no deep controversy surrounded the state’s right to kill law-breakers.[6] The death sentence could be administered not only for murder, heresy, and treason, but also for lesser offenses, clear down to petty theft. A charge of treason could be leveled against wives who murdered their husbands and servants who murdered their employers.[7] In addition, many other offenses led to the stake or scaffold. By the seventeenth century, as Robert Zaller points out, there were some fifty categories of capital offense.[8] In the eighteenth century, a variety of punishments—such as banishment, transportation to the colonies, galley slavery, forced labor on public works projects, and above all, imprisonment[9] —often replaced execution. It is not clear that criminal activity was increasing, yet under the so-called Bloody Code, the number of capital crimes grew to more than two hundred, many of them addressing property crimes.[10]

The hierarchy of criminal offenses had a counterpart in the hierarchy of ways of dying. In Tudor and Stuart England, there was a common understanding that certain kinds of deaths were preferable: noblemen faced the axe, which produced a faster, less painful end, and those men beneath them faced the noose. During the Marian regime, nonaristocratic women, often described in Foxe’s Acts and Monvments as mad, simple, or domestics—or ludicrous in appearance—were burned at the stake. However, as Frances E. Dolan explains, there were many distinctions between different kinds of executions: In choosing the method and the venue of execution for royal or aristocratic offenders, the sovereign took the offender’s gender and social status, as well as the political ramifications of the execution, into account.[11] During this period, prisons were used almost exclusively to hold the accused while they awaited trial or the guilty while they awaited punishment.[12] When rehabilitation or conversion is not part of the penal system’s vocabulary, execution is the primary punitive option. An overview of crime and punishment from around 1550 to 1850 points to increases in the threat of capital punishment accompanied by the decreasing and inconsistent application of that threat as well as a lack of clarity about what the threat and penalty were intended to accomplish.

Over many centuries and in many cultures, the goals of capital punishment have been described variously. The practice has been viewed as the exercise of justice tempered with mercy; as an attempt at retribution, retaliation, or straightforward vengeance; as a pedagogical statement meant to deter crime; as an explicitly sadistic imposition of anger and shame, terror and fear; as an effort to expose wrongdoing and thus purge it from the community and cleanse the social order of sin; and, in an extension of the purgation theory, as a means of exorcising the demon or the Other lurking in the community’s midst.[13] In addition to being contradictory, these premises for using capital punishment do not mean that the practice actually produces the desired results. How can a punishment be seen as a means to expose and purge evil if it is applied inconsistently and selectively,[14] targeting some races and classes significantly more than others, or if it is sometimes applied erroneously, taking the innocent along with the guilty? How can it be a deterrent and a form of awe-inspiring terror if it is carried out behind closed doors, administered in a way designed to avoid cruelty and pain, and publicly consumed in today’s newspaper along with the comics and sports pages? Capital punishment makes no sense if one strives to create a judicial system governed by principles of due process of law, equity (wherein no hierarchy allows one person or institution to govern another person’s ultimate destiny), genuine deterrence, and proportionality (the punishment must fit the crime)—all admittedly large, perhaps utopian, expectations. But the usual assumptions that explain capital punishment are connected, in fact or in wishful thinking, to a single foundation value that usually remains unspoken.

Capital punishment is based on power. It is, Garland explains, first and foremost an exercise of power, wherever, whenever, and however it occurs.[15] After the state publicly articulates its authority in legal codes, the death penalty and its culmination in an execution mark a claim to power, an assertion of power, and an increase of power. The state exercises its ultimate form of power by controlling when the individual takes his last breath. In early modern England, that power securely rested on a shared understanding of hierarchy, a value that had been enshrined in law for centuries. The most extreme form of the treason law was contained in the basic 25 Edw. 3, c. 2 law from 1352, which simply declared the common law by which anyone compassing the death of the chief magistrate, whether King or other, was guilty of high treason.[16] This vision of centralized power, and its manifestation in order and punishment, received its authority from scripture and the highest form of justice, divine justice. Conspicuous in this conception of treason was the lex talionis or doctrine of retributive justice that required eye for eye, tooth for tooth.[17] Supplementing this was the contemporary view of kingship and the responsibility of the king’s followers, both rooted in the Hebrew scriptures. When Abishai tells David that his enemy King Saul has been delivered to him, David responds with an awareness of authority, hierarchy, and moral obligation: Who can stretch forth his hand against the Lords Anointed, and be guiltlesse?[18] This sense of hierarchy reaches to the top: David’s loyalty is not to the king whose monarchy begins in fact with God’s displeasure but to the king who is God’s anointed.[19] These views of the monarch and his people would be contested during the English Revolution. But rarely called into sustained or serious questioning was the ideology that placed God’s omnipotence and divine justice at the center of daily experienced reality.

If the acknowledgment of a king marks a significant step in the development of cultural identity, the related formation of the state extends both that identity and the ways in which it displays power. Foucault’s link between sovereignty and capital punishment points to a broader phenomenon: the correspondence between state formation and state-sponsored executions.[20] With the emergence of nation-states—as early as the twelfth century in England, from 1400 to 1700 in much of the rest of Europe—the punishment of crime shifted from private hands exercising vendetta and vengeance and became the responsibility of the state’s authorities, whose conception of crime and punishment was shaped by laws and royal courts.[21] In J. A. Sharpe’s more precise formulation, as crime came to be viewed as an offense not against the individual but against society, the collective and monopolistic vengeance of the king’s justice was the mechanism by which power was asserted and justice imposed.[22] That mechanism required an increase in codified laws, formal procedures, and ritualized ceremony, as emerging European states from the 1400s to the 1600s used shock-and-awe tactics to impress the populace and strike fear in the hearts of enemies.[23] Lacking what Garland calls any powerful infrastructure—such as a police force, prison systems, or efficient surveillance networks—to maintain power and control over its subjects,[24] the state turned to the highly visible, explicitly violent execution ritual. That public executions were to act as retributive and deterrent forms of justice is obvious; less clear, at least during the Marian campaign of the mid-sixteenth century, is the extent to which the church and state may have been committed to reforming the heretic. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Parliament’s deadly response to treason revealed no interest in reforming the victim.

If such terms as state and society may be seen from one perspective as a convenient shorthand for powerful or propertied groups within the society in question,[25] then that body’s perceived strength or weakness, its sense of stability or insecurity from within and without, determines the extent to which control is required to maintain power. Sharpe cautions against seeking a simple cause-and-effect correlation: The criminal law and the punishment of crime do not operate in a social vacuum: rather, they operate in a full social and cultural context, and in a more or less complex interaction with a host of other phenomena.[26] Others agree and warn against models of progress and linear development that trace the Western movement of punishment from barbarism (usually described as medieval) to reform (exemplified in current practice). Instead, scholars chart a roller-coaster movement in which periods of early state formation, a society’s sense that it is under threat, or the fear of disintegrating social order often contribute to higher rates of capital conviction. An opposite movement, which occurred in England during the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, reveals periods of relative social stability corresponding with fewer executions and even penal reform.[27] But the broad view is still bleak. Brad S. Gregory estimates that, between 1535 and 1680, five thousand people in Western Europe died as political traitors or were judicially executed for religion.[28] The thousands of English men and women executed in the sixteenth century testify to a number of regimes’ fear of threats, both internal and external, during periods of initial growth or instability. Compared to those numbers, the focus of my study—the 284 Marian martyrs of the mid-1550s, the few dozen royalists executed between 1641 (when the Earl of Strafford died) and 1658 (when army officer Sir Henry Slingsby and clergyman John Hewitt died), and the thirteen regicides executed at the beginning of the Restoration—appears to be almost insignificant, a blip in the annals of penal punishment.

Once again, however, the issue is power and its manifestation in the exercise of ideological control, whether over a dozen or nearly three hundred people, and the rippling effects that their fellow Englishmen felt. The state’s punitive mechanism, trial (or summary judgment) and punishment, is intended to deliver an unambiguous message: heresy and treason have severe consequences; individuals will suffer for their misdeeds; the legal system prescribes punishment; and the community, by acting as a witness, endorses the execution and thus participates in cleansing a stain and returning to a just order. From an ecclesiastical interrogation and a legal inquiry to the violent butchery at the stake or scaffold, which brings forth sounds and odors and voyeurism, the state makes its ideological statement at every stage in the process. It values hierarchy and order, articulated publicly in the retributive and deterrent value of punishment. Andrea McKenzie notes that many scholars are interested in the execution ritual as a theatre of punishment in which the actions and words of spectators and participants can be read as a dramaturgical exposition and reproduction of power relations.[29] I will argue that, because no individual or institution has a monopoly on the voices and interpretations of a trial and an execution, the state’s intentions for staging these rituals are construed in a wide range of ways by a variety of participants and readers.

But the notion of the state’s need for ideological control also requires qualification. For the state reduced, however slightly, the absolute nature of that control by permitting a large number of participants to contribute many voices to the execution ritual. The authorities redistributed power, but since they managed the proceedings, that meant that they relinquished only a carefully restricted amount of power. Predictability is, after all, in the nature of any ritual. It is about repeated, conventional actions and words, not wild deviations and spontaneous improvisations. Rarely if ever a failure according to the authorities’ criteria of using power to create fear and loyalty, executions could still wander from the script in limited ways. Participants in the choreographed, conventional, traditional, generically established ritual might arrive intoxicated, interrupt, tell jokes, or slightly revise their roles. The victim and his executioner might dispense with or forget a key line. Scaffolds arranged for seating might collapse and claim still more victims. In larger deviations from the script, most common in the Marian executions, flames and winds might prove uncooperative, the execution and the pain inflicted during it could be prolonged to excruciating lengths, and the effect of a martyr’s death could thereby be vastly increased. In certain ways, however, the execution ritual was hardly a contested site:[30] the victim spoke a largely conventional speech and died a conventional death; the crowd was satisfied with the performance; the authorities used symbols and symbolic actions to convey their message of power. Despite the authorities’ fears—real, imagined, or symbolic—no crowd or conspiracy ever freed a man from the stake, block, firing squad, or noose in early modern England. What McKenzie terms the normative message intended by authorities prevails with remarkable frequency.[31] The most significant way in which the site was highly contested involved how it was interpreted by many people on the day of the execution and beyond. Though interpretations are culturally shaped, to different degrees and in different ways for different people, even a culture dominated by virtually unanimous values,[32] which influenced religious, political and social orthodoxy,[33] could not completely dictate interpretive conclusions.

The Execution Ritual Complex

Scholars studying a range of subjects, including capital punishment, often turn to sociological perspectives to explain various phenomena. They share an interest in the cultural production and interpretation of meaning as revealed in texts, in the broadest sense of the word. The historian Kevin Sharpe, for example, analyzes the early modern royal image in its many forms or genres not as an aesthetic object outside history, but as a text encoding social meanings at the moment of its creation, circulation and viewings.[34] In his many studies of the symbolism of images and royal representations, Sharpe discusses medals and masques, processions and speeches, and architecture and poems.[35] Using a related approach to the field of textual scholarship, Jerome J. McGann develops a social theory of editing that reconceptualizes texts not as material things but as events produced by socio-historical conditions.[36] In his view, texts emerge from a collaborative process that occurs within some appropriate set of social institutions,[37] usually dominated by authors, patrons, monarchs, scribes, printers, editors, and audiences. David Garland’s Peculiar Institution, a study of the death penalty in America, relies on a sociological model of inquiry that has much in common with the methods of Sharpe and McGann, and those allied with them, as their shared vocabulary frequently suggests:

we can regard capital punishment not as a moral dilemma to be addressed or a policy issue to be resolved but as a social fact to be explained. And we can focus less on the death penalty as a matter of principle and more on the complex field of institutional arrangements, social practices, and cultural forms through which American death penalties are actually administered. The object of study thus ceases to be the death penalty as such and becomes instead the capital punishment complex—the totality of discursive and nondiscursive practices through which capital punishment is enacted, represented, and experienced in American criminal justice and in American society.[38]

Just as Sharpe implicitly addresses the royal image complex and McGann the textual editing complex—that is, the large constellation of social and institutional practices that produce images and texts, which in turn shape those practices—I conceive of my subject matter as the execution ritual complex.

This reconceptualization has many implications, one of which is that it offers a new perspective on the roles played by the execution ritual’s many participants. From this point of view, we are discouraged from thinking of the scaffold as the focal point from which emanated the only meaningful voice in the theatre of death—though for good reason, the central figures often asserted the significance of their last dying words. Francis Pitt, one of the earliest victims of the execution ritual in the Civil Wars, stated a contemporary commonplace when he asserted that the words of a dying man are wont to take a deep impression.[39] Furthermore, those words were sincere and truthful, as the minister Christopher Love explained in 1651: "Now I hope you will believe a dying man, who dare not look God in the face with a lye in his mouth.[40] John Gibbons, executed immediately after Love on Tower Hill, summarized the gravity of this belief: You are to believe a dying man: I am sensible what it is to die to God, to the ocean of eternity; to go to stand at his bar: Believe me, believe me; I professe before God, Angells and men, I know not what I die for this day: what ever reports do say, believe the words of a dying man. . . . Let the word of a dying man prevail."[41] Following that advice, we can still attend to the victim’s last dying words without making them our sole focus.

The parties on the scaffold who did not occupy center stage, including the clergyman, sheriff, executioner, and the victim’s closest friends, all shaped the event in meaningful ways and articulated a range of responses. Concerning the higher officials who made the summary judgment or arrested, judged, and sat as jurors, thus demanding justice in the form of execution, their absence calls for comment. Even from a distance, they hovered over this broad cultural moment, for execution rituals are collective affairs, dependent on all the actors involved.[42] The largest group of actors was the crowd. The spectators who surrounded the scaffold—some stood close to the execution and some far, far away, but very few heard the main actors’ words—are fascinating, particularly because the thin evidence contains tantalizing hints about their motives for attending by the thousands and thus participating in the public spectacle. In addition to noting the spectators’ presence and behavior, the records of some executions indicate that the drama of this bloody ritual altered political perspectives, a remarkable occurrence because most contemporary documents indicate that empathy, unlike vitriol, was in short supply. This phenomenon—in which some of the victim’s most bitter enemies were satisfied by the justice they witnessed, some were moved to tears and a change of heart, while others left before the axe fell—could occur only in the context of the relationships and behavior possible when a crowd converged at a public site. Everyone participated in and shared the experience of a profound event.

When the many participants’ roles were brought together in a state-sponsored execution, the result was a genre or ritual created by a collaborative rather than an individual effort. The execution ritual was both traditional and spontaneous, steadfastly displaying conventional, predictable words and actions, while giving a glimpse of the impossibility of taming them. Cultural awareness of the theatre of death’s genre and conventions brought the event into intertextual contact with earlier stagings of the same ritual. In a more immediate and personal way, execution rituals embraced difference and even contradiction by allowing many faces and voices to assume significance, even if many participants’ spotlights were dim and their public acting careers brief. Covington explains that these rituals were not simply displays of state power or set pieces for one individual’s embrace of martyrdom; they filled those roles, but only in collective affairs, dependent on all the actors involved.[43] As Lake and Questier describe public executions, an inexpungible air of dialogue hung over the proceedings.[44] The participants’ frequently stated analogies with the theatre were explicit and unavoidable, in part because one early modern meaning of scaffold was a platform or stage on which theatrical performance or exhibition takes place,[45] but also because narratives and speeches often referred to the theatre of death, the tragic performance that occurred, and its actors, the parts they played, their costumes, and props. In this place, the narrative of Sir Henry Vane’s execution states, as in a public theater,[46] the roles that the many collaborating characters performed—willingly, reluctantly, or unwittingly—were, as in any ritual, conventional. But the scripts that they followed were not completely rigid; within limits described by traditional cultural practice, the audience’s expectations, and—to a limited extent—individual agency,[47] actors could follow scripts closely, modify them, or write their own counterscripts that subverted conventional expectations. Each participant engaged with the other actors in a profusion of scripts, some of which worked in harmony and cooperation, some in conflict and competition.

The roles that people performed, on and off the scaffold, contributed to a complex production that can be understood only, and only incompletely, by being alert to the presence (and even absence) of its many participants and their contributions. Each of these actors had a voice in the execution ritual, and each had at least one role to play. However powerful some institutions and individuals might appear, none had a monopoly on authority and how the events took shape on and beyond the scaffold. To a great extent, where we, like the participants, situate ourselves to view, hear, and comprehend a public execution shapes our version of the ritual’s meaning. I am not suggesting that some version of poststructuralist sensibility emerged in these moments, during which meanings materialized and receded endlessly as the foundations of reality were radically destabilized. In a social order based on a hierarchy that culminated in the divinity, such an abyss was unthinkable. As articulated in Areopagitica (1644), written during the height of the Civil Wars’ sectarian tumult, Milton’s view of truth is instructive: Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes then one.[48] Milton acknowledges the possibility that Truth, rather than being single, simple, and clear (if not entirely graspable), like Dante’s climactic vision in Paradiso, may instead be multifaceted and accurately perceived in different forms by different people. But the broad example Milton invokes in his next sentence is too often downplayed: What else is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this side, or on the other, without being unlike her self?[49] He does not question the stability of the deity located simultaneously at the center and the foundation of seventeenth-century reality. Far from making any poststructuralist assumptions or plunging into moral relativism, Milton refers all along only to things indifferent or to adiaphora, the external things of the Law, which Christians are free to use . . . or not according to their own judgments as guided by the Holy Spirit.[50] His perspective leaves ample room for truth’s varied shapes and the necessity of viewing them in various ways.

Those varied shapes were frequently evident in the multiple versions of a given execution speech produced in early modern England’s printing shops. Although printed texts are accompanied by the assumption that they are stable and comprehensible, many of the ones containing narratives and scaffold speeches, including Strafford’s and Laud’s, succeeded in decreasing the potential for actions and words to have a single determinate meaning. The inconsistent wording in and contents of these texts were created not by their many printings but by the printers’ reliance on a variety of sources, each with a different agenda and concept of fidelity to the source material. That execution speeches were subject to appropriation by allies and opponents is apparent from their printing histories as well as the listening and reading audience’s responses. The afterlives of some speeches from the Civil War era took unusual twists and turns. Archbishop William Laud’s last words were printed in two versions and then attacked in animadversions. The substance of Eusebius Andrewes’s final speech on Tower Hill in 1650 was resurrected in one text of the last words spoken by James Stanley, Earl of Derby, some