London, the bloody city where thousands of executions weigh in his memory

Hanging, beheading or burning. The city of London He reaped in his day the fame of being “the bloodiest of Europe” for its heavy hand with the death penalty, abolished in 1868, after being the scene of tens of thousands of public executions from which neither the aristocracy nor the Crown escaped.

Now, the stories of these convicts, with names and surnames, make up the grim story of the exhibition “Executions”, at the Museum of London Docklands, which explores almost 700 years of capital punishment from documents and objects, including the clothing that King Charles I was wearing when his throat was slit during the English Civil War.

“The year 1196 is our starting point because that’s where we have the first documentary evidence of a public execution, at Tyburn, and we felt it was really important not to make guesses or assumptions, but to study documents and evidence.”told EFE the curator, Beverly Cook, who has gathered documentation from the same collection of the museum and the National Archives.

This first execution fell on William Fitz Osbert, the “lawyer for the poor”who, after having led a popular revolt, was led to the gallows in the rural village of Tyburn -at that time at the gates of the capital-, the same ground that today so many tourists visit Marble Arch, where the busy shopping street begins from Oxford Street.

Tyburn hosted numerous hangings before audiences of 50,000 people and became a symbol of these practices, with a famous triangular-shaped gallows recreated in the exhibition, “The Tyburn Tree”, which took the lives of 1,100 men and almost a hundred women. only in the eighteenth century.

“I was completely normalized. Men, women, children, everyone who lived in London would have been aware of this,” says Cook, who points out that “even without ever expressly going to an execution”it was common to see processions of condemned men going to the gallows in the street.

London, then known as “city of gallows”fully integrated public executions into its imagery, landscape and popular culture, greasing the entertainment economy even before children’s audiences, with puppet shows that ended up being executed with a noose around their necks.

“More people were sentenced to death in London than anywhere else in Europe in the 18th century. And that was a direct result of the Bloody Code.”said Cook, referring to the set of criminal laws with more than 200 crimes associated with capital punishment, whose punishment left and right led to it being called the “Bloody Code”.

According to the historian, the context of high commercial activity in England made protecting private property paramount, with a state that fiercely punished anyone who put the socioeconomic order at risk, “becoming much more capitalist before other European countries”.

In the exhibition, open until mid-April, you can also see the original iron-clad door of one of the most notorious prisons, Newgate -demolished in 1902-, the same door that so many inmates crossed in their last hours of life. with the misfortune appointed by a judge from the Old Bailey criminal court, a few meters away.

Beheading, reserved for nobles

Press clippings, cartoons and original sentences take us back to how the judicial process unfolded, which went through a last attempt at salvation with letters requesting pardon from the monarch or the Ministry of the Interior.

It was of little use to King Carlos I to have held this power of clemency. Far from saving his own skin, he was publicly beheaded for treason on January 30, 1649, in the midst of clashes between parliamentarians and monarchists.

As it was a winter morning with low temperatures, Carlos I put on gloves and a thick dress to prevent, at all costs, the public from seeing a king tremble. Now, those clothes rest in one of the showcases, with some subtle stains on the fabric discolored by time, supposedly caused by spilled blood.

If France went down in history for overthrowing the Crown with its guillotine, England has also nurtured a past of beheadings of aristocrats with an ax or sword – the cruelty of Henry VIII, who had two of his wives beheaded, is well known.

And it is that this sharp and immediate blow was reserved for the nobility -executed, yes, but with privilege after all-, while the rest awaited the long suffering of dying boiled, burned in flames or, mostly, strangled under the shadow of the “city of the gallows”.

(With information from EFE)