Word: tyburn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...even these last indignities, could he have foreseen them, would not have led him to approve the revenge taken by followers of Charles II years later. The body of Lord Protector Cromwell was dug up after the Restoration, drawn through the streets, hanged and buried under the gallows at Tyburn. His head was stuck on a pike and exhibited at Westminster Hall. No fewer than ten Cromwellians were hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross as regicides; they died well, too-so well that Author Williamson felt obliged to temper his story with an epilogue that concludes: "For posterity...
...Rector Gates, the 17th century's Harvey Matusow, infiltrated Catholic circles, spun a yarn about a Papist plot aimed at the assassination of Charles II, was exposed as a liar after a hue and cry both in and out of Parliament, was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate to Tyburn for his pains-and to everyone's dismay, lived to lie another...
...heady days of the Restoration and Charles II, directed that his body be disinterred and hanged. The cadaver dangled on a gibbet all day long on the twelfth anniversary of Charles I's execution, then was cut down and decapitated; the body was buried under the gallows at Tyburn (near London's present Marble Arch), the head stuck on a pike and displayed atop Westminster Hall. When a high wind blew it down after long exposure, a soldier carried it home...
...betrayed by a woman scorned or an accomplice deceived. A few of them escaped from prison (William Nevison, for instance, who hired a quack to spot him with bluing and declare him dead of the plague), but almost all were recaptured and bravely took the long cart ride to Tyburn Tree...
...Gratified Public. The sight of crowds stoning the swinging bodies pleased even Dr. Samuel Johnson. Thundered Johnson, in 1783, when there was talk of abandoning the execution procession from Newgate to Tyburn: "No, Sir! ... executions are intended to draw spectators . . . The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?" Twenty years before public hangings were finally abolished (in 1868), Charles Dickens begged to differ: "I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity...