There are many reasons to want to abolish the royal family, but why not start with seven people who were brutally murdered by the monarchy for the act of rebellion. In this long read to mark the anti-Coronation, Adam Johannes takes a look at the lives of those who dared to defy kings and queens.
By Adam Johannes. Cover image, Colonel Edward Despard
For almost seven hundred years, direct ancestors of the new monarch Charles III had political enemies hanged until almost dead, cut down, castrated, disembowelled, cut into quarters, then sometimes beheaded with their heads put on spikes.
This gruesome form of torture and state execution for the ‘crime’ of ‘high treason’ was known as being ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’.
Had the common people of this island over the centuries had not defeated the once absolute power of the monarchy, then we might wonder if the organisers of this weekend’s republican protests would be hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason too.
Here are some notable names of the enemies of the monarchy and the state who would be brutally tortured and executed by the British Crown using their favoured method..
Dafydd ap Gruffydd (1283)
One of the very first people to be executed as a ‘traitor’ in this fashion by the English King Edward I was Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the last native Prince of Wales before the revolt of Owain Glyndwyr. Dafydd would be dragged through the streets behind a horse, hanged until almost dead, revived, his internal organs ripped out, which he was made to watch being burnt on a fire, before being cut into quarters. His right arm to York. His left arm to Bristol. His right leg to Northampton. Left leg to Hereford. While his head was bound with iron and fixed on a spear at the Tower of London.
William Wallace, ‘Braveheart’ (1305)
William Wallace, leader of the first war of Scottish independence, played by Mel Gibson in the Hollywood movie, Braveheart – one of the most historically inaccurate movies of all time – would spend his last hours crowned with a garland of oak by his tormentors to symbolise that he was the King of Outlaws. He defiantly responded to the English charge of high treason saying that he could not be a traitor to the English King, for he was never his subject.
Wallace would be stripped naked, dragged behind a horse for five miles, hanged till almost dead, castrated, before he had his heart, lungs, kidney and liver torn out, eviscerated with his bowels burned before him, then beheaded with his head then dipped in tar and put on a spike on top of London Bridge. His body was then cut into quarters, divided and sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth.
John Ball, Theoretician of the Peasants Revolt (1381)
In the 14th century the Black Death would kill a third of the people living between Iceland and India. The trauma would run deep in society and lead to a questioning of the entire existing order. Wages went up, as peasant survivors realised they could demand higher pay due to the shortage of labour, and they began to burst the bonds of the feudal system.
Within thirty years of the plague turning the existing world upside down, peasants with rusty swords, scythes, sticks, cudgels and longbows would try to make a revolution in England.
In 1381, sixty thousand commoners from Norfolk to Yorkshire staged the ‘great rising’ against a hated poll tax in what is now known as the Peasants Revolt. The first attempted revolution in British history.
In the years running up to the rising, a cultural revolution would ready the crops for rain. Waged by figures such as the preacher John Ball, he would famously attack class inequality in a popular slogan challenging ruling class ideology by simply asking ‘when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?’
In an incendiary sermon he elaborated, ‘From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, He would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.’
From remarks by his contemporaries on John Ball’s skill with rhyme we might also deduce he was the father of rap!
On the 14th of June 1381, the rebel leader Wat Tyler met with the King raising demands around the abolition of serfdom, land, and freely negotiated contracts between masters and servants.
The 15th of June manifesto presented the following day suddenly struck a different tone moving into uncharted waters of radical egalitarianism and ‘levelling’ – all men to be equal below the King, the abolition of lordship, redistribution of property, redistribution of church wealth and an attack on the hierarchical church which would be abolished leaving one sole prelate for the whole of England, and society’s wealth to be held ‘in common’.
Though the ‘radically levelling’ stopped short of attacking the King, during the course of the uprising a situation of potential ‘dual power’ was developing, with some evidence that the goal was the development of ‘county-Kingdoms’ with Kent reserved for Wat Tyler while ‘Kings of the Commons’ drawn from the ranks of peasant leaders were actually established in Norfolk.
A rebel leader Jack Straw is said to have revealed during his execution that the movement’s goal was nothing more than a holocaust of the entire propertied orders including the King and all the nobility as the pent up feelings of large numbers of people spending years subjected to the violence and violation of the rich exploded to the surface of society.
John Ball and many leaders of the rising would be hanged, drawn and quartered.
Guy Fawkes (1606)
Gunpowder! Treason! Plot! ‘The only man to enter parliament with honest intentions’ etc.
Colonel Thomas Harrison, Soldier of the English Revolution (1660)
Thomas Harrison was hanged, drawn and quartered for the crime of regicide, the killing of a king. Harrison had been a signatory to the death warrant of Charles I during the 17th century English Revolution. The events that unfolded at the end of the English Civil War between King and Parliament were unprecedented in Europe at the time. A King put on trial by his own people, before they executed him and quickly established a republic! The events in England caused shockwaves across the continent and every king slept less easily in his bed.
Republican poet, John Milton, would write a famous pamphlet in defence of regicide The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates less than two weeks after King Charles’ execution defending the right of the people to kill kings. His tract was powerful medicine to imbibe and became a weapon for republicans across Europe.
Milton said that those who continued to support ‘the Tyrant of a Nation’ – the King – were nothing more than ‘slaves within doors’. Instead of being ‘governed by reason’, they had ‘give up their understanding to a double tyranny, of custom from without and blind affections within’. Those who submitted to royal rule no longer thought for themselves or interrogated their own political situation; they had blindly accepted the status quo rather than seeking to change it.
Thomas Harrison himself was a ‘Fifth Monarchist’, a member of a religious and political sect who took their inspiration from the four kingdoms of Daniel in the Old Testament. In the biblical prophecy the Fifth Kingdom would be the Kingdom of God and follow on the heels of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman Kingdoms.
The Fifth Monarchists believed the execution of King Charles I in January 1649 marked the end of the Roman Fourth Monarchy. Many became regicides in the belief that the killing of the king by the people would usher in the Kingdom of the Saints, the rule of the “saved”.
Arrested after the restoration of the monarchy, Colonel Harrison, would not deny his role in executing a King, but rather he defended and justified it. Having been hanged, partly strangled, then disemboweled, castrated, and shown his organs being burned, he was reported to have with his last breath leaned across and punched his executioner. This resulted in his swift decapitation.
Robert Emmett, Irish Patriot (1803)
Two of the very last men to be sentenced to death by the British Crown, in the same year, by being hanged, drawn and quartered were both Irishmen, Robert Emett and Colonel Edward Despard.
Robert Emmett, an Irish nationalist and leader of the failed 1803 rebellion in Dublin, was accused of conspiracy to provoke an insurrection against British rule in Ireland. Emmett was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death.
There is some controversy among historians regarding the method of execution used on Robert Emmet. While some claim that he was indeed hanged, drawn and quartered, others argue that he was only hanged. Either way, his execution was a brutal reminder of the lengths to which the British state would go to crush Irish rebellion and dissent. It remains a significant event in Irish history.
Robert Emmett would be remembered by a generation of Irish freedom fighters less for the defeated rebellion and more for his defiant final speech from the dock, where the romantic hero of Irish lost causes prophesied that the Irish cause would one day win,
‘Be yet patient! I have but a few words more to say. I am going to my cold and silent grave; my lamp of life is nearly extinguished; my race is run; the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom.
I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world; it is – the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my name remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.’
Colonel Edward Despard, Revolutionary Internationalist (1803)
The Irishman, Colonel Edward Despard, is now a forgotten figure in history, but one whose name merits a resurrection by modern republicans. He was executed in front of thousands because he was said to have led a conspiracy to launch an armed revolution to overthrow King George III and establish a radical republic in Britain.
In the history of ideas, often Enlightenment philosophers are portrayed as being cosmopolitan and universalists, such as the white supremacist, Immanuel Kant, and then namechecked as the forerunners of Western democracy and scientific, rational thinking, but Despard is a reminder that there was a subterranean tradition of freedom that was far richer, a tradition of those who had a far more encompassing idea of something that Despard called ‘the human race’ that was multiracial, included women, and stretched right down to the poor and dispossessed across this earth.
Despard had been a high-ranking British Army officer who would go on to be a comrade-in-arms of Lord Nelson, who would make a dramatic appearance to plead for his life at his trial for treason. Despard should have been a pillar of the establishment, but his life would take a different turn, including marrying a free black woman from Jamaica, Catherine Despard, who would go on to be a prisoner rights activist, a woman who he regarded as his equal and a political collaborator.
During his military career at some point Despard had veered dangerously off-script and began to become more and more sympathetic to the oppressed, before siding with them completely.
It was a series of life-experiences that appear to have progressively radicalised him away from white supremacy and alienated him from the British Establishment. As a young man in Ireland, he watched as English landlords drove Irish peasants off the land. As a young officer in Jamaica he was nursed by Afro-Caribbean women. In Nicaragua in order to survive a disease he had to seek help from indigenous people, and discovered a community where they lived side-by-side with runaway slaves and poor white folk in their midst. As a leading British officer in Honduras he appeared to be a maverick, fairly distributing land to men and women of colour, making sure that food prices were kept down so that the poor could have their daily bread, working and learning from the indigenous the local ecologies, having land set aside for common use, and ignoring racist laws that discriminated against Jewish merchants. This behaviour caused outrage from wealthy, local whites who accused him of what to them seemed the most heinous of all crimes: Despard treated all races equally.
Forced to return to England he would end up in prison for debts for two years. Behind bars he read Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and was astounded by the discovery that this man – perhaps the greatest Englishman of the 18th century and finest prose stylist of his generation – was theorising to the masses the ‘wild and Levelling principle of Universal Equality’ Despard had been begun to try to practice in South America.
Upon release from prison, Despard quickly became prominent in the London Corresponding Society, that body EP Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, names as the first working class organisation in Britain. The society was part of a new wave of popular radical societies drawing fire from the contemporary French Revolution, but crucially also catching flame from older traditions of English dissent. Despard also became prominent in the United Irishmen, Irish freedom fighters who wished to cast off the yoke of British rule in Ireland. He would become the go-between for French, Irish and English republicans.
It was during this period of his life that he would launch the conspiracy that would end in his betrayal, arrest and execution. The modest plan was to assassinate King George III in his carriage on his way to parliament, seize key institutions in London such as the Bank of England and Tower of London, overcome a parliament then elected by a minority of the population, in order to detonate a wider uprising across the city, if not the country.
Just before he was executed before a huge crowd early on at the beginning of a new century, the nineteenth century, Edward Despard would speak in terms that would become the language of the twentieth century. He would speak to a crowd of twenty thousand people who had come to see him die of ‘the human race’ , an electrifying new political concept, challenging the racism and nationalism of his age, and paving the way for the idea of universal human rights. To argue for universal human rights was to throw down the gauntlet to the empire and its rulers,
‘Fellow Citizens, I come here, as you see, after having served my country,—faithfully, honourably, and usefully served it, for thirty years and upwards, to suffer death upon a scaffold for a crime of which I protest I am not guilty. I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty of it than any of you who may be now hearing me.— But, though his Majesty’s Ministers know as well as I do, that I am not guilty, yet they avail themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to truth, to liberty, and to justice. Because he has been a friend to the poor and the oppressed. But, Citizens, I hope and trust, notwithstanding my fate, and the fate of those who no doubt will soon follow me, that the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice, will finally triumph over falsehood, tyranny, and delusion, and every principle inimical to the interests of the human race.’
At this point when he used the phrase ‘the human race’ the Sheriff reprimanded him for inflammatory language.
While the formal punishment for high treason was being hanged, drawn and quartered, Despard would in the end only be hanged and buried in an unmarked grave. Many years later most of Despard and Emmett’s demands are now taken for granted and most are achieved, they were wrongly executed because they posed a threat to the existing political order and were deemed dangerous to the stability of the state. Their actions were a challenge to the authority of the British state, and as a result, they were punished severely.
Within seven decades of the deaths of Despard and Emmett the punishment of being hanged, drawn and quartered would finally be removed from the statute books, amid the growing power in society of the working class who have always had more humane values than the ruling class.
Epilogue for dead heroes
The American writer Mark Twain once tried to correct people using the phrase ‘the Reign of Terror’ to refer to the few most violent months of the French Revolution by pointing out that for the majority the preceding few centuries of monarchy and feudalism was far more violent,
‘There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions.’
Why does this all matter? Why do these executions matter? After all, the modern royal family does not decapitate its political enemies, and some of the men we have just discussed lived by the sword themselves, and lived in brutal times when all sides were brutal. It matters because the real history of our ancestors and our people has been stolen from us and we are told lies and fairytales from all quarters that mystify the world around us, our place in it, and deceive us that our enemies are our friends, and our friends are our enemies.
The Royals wealth, land, power and privilege were not established as the consequence of some quaint and quirky traditions, they were first won by theft and murder. Recently a historical document was found showing that a direct ancestor of the King bought 200 enslaved Africans and owned slave plantations in Virginia. The Royals are the descendants of psychopaths.
The continuation of the monarchy relies on the suppression of the real history of our people over centuries. We have been taught to look up to the wrong people.
For there is another history, the 1381 Peasants Revolt, the Levellers, Agitators and Diggers of the English Civil War, the Chartists, the 1831 Merthyr Rising, 1839 Newport Rising and the modern socialist movement, the history of the common people rising up again and again to to get the Royals and the rich off our backs.
We won some battles, but the monarchy managed to cling on to a role. Today the monarchy is a symbol of a brand named ‘inequality’. An unelected head of state normalises the idea that we do not elect our bosses, the heads of major corporations and banks, and have little democratic control over so many institutions that shape our lives.
In a world where capital punishment has yet to be abolished in so many countries, including the United States – the earth’s most powerful state – let us work for a world without Kings and Queens, or capitalist rulers, and never forget the dark days when absolute states and absolutist monarchies had absolute power of life and death over us and our freedoms.
Long ago, in the sixteenth century, a poignant poem was written by Chidiock Tichborne shortly before his execution by being hanged, drawn and quartered for his role in a Catholic plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I. We need not identify with TIchborne’s cause, but we can identify his dignity as he faced the most degrading form of death that no state should have the power to inflict upon a human being.
Tychbornes Elegie, written with his owne hand in the Tower before his execution
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of paine,
My Crop of corne is but a field of tares,
And al my good is but vaine hope of gaine.
The day is past, and yet I saw no sunne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
My tale was heard, and yet it was not told,
My fruite is falne, & yet my leaves are greene:
My youth is spent, and yet I am not old,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seene.
My thred is cut, and yet it is not spunne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death, and found it in my wombe,
I lookt for life, and saw it was a shade:
I trod the earth, and knew it was my Tombe,
And now I die, and now I was but made.
My glasse is full, and now my glasse is runne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
