Amazing True Stories of Execution Blunders by Geoffrey Abbott Page B

amputated. Nor was the front of his face overlooked; an additional penalty required his nose to be slit down the centre. One hopes that he could see without the need for spectacles or pince-nez.
    Far from being cowed into submission, the now no longer good-looking author proceeded to publish pamphlets criticising the bishops, hardly a wise move, for once again he was brought to trial. In court a member of the bench ordered the usher to expose the prisoner’s scars. The official did so, pushing back Prynne’s flowing locks to reveal a stub of gristle protruding from one side of his head.
    ‘I thought that Mr Prynne had no ears at all,’ quoth one of the judges, ‘but methinks he hath ears after all!’ Determined to deprive him of what little remained of his sole surviving aural organ, the court sentenced him to lose the stub, to be branded and imprisoned for life – and to be fined another £5,000.
    So one fine day in 1637 the appropriately named Gregory Brandon heated two irons, ‘S’ and ‘L’, for Schismatic Libeller (heretical libeller) and applied them, one to each of William’s cheeks. Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment he must have applied one iron upside down, and so had to burn it in again but at least was compassionate enough to ask the attendant surgeon to relieve the agony by applying a plaster. That having been done, Brandon continued to carry out the rest of the court’s sentence by cutting off the residue of Prynne’s ear; such a tricky bit of surgery that in so doing, he sliced off some of Prynne’s cheek as well.
     
    In 1635, while on his way to Tyburn and execution, Thomas Witherington said to the sheriff ’s deputy, ‘I owe some money to the landlord of the Three Cups Inn a little further on and I’m afraid I’ll be arrested for debt as I go past his door, so could we detour down Shoe Lane and Drury Lane so we don’t get stopped at the inn, and so miss my appointment at Tyburn?’
    The deputy, entering into the spirit of it, said that he couldn’t alter the cart’s route, but if they were stopped by the innkeeper, he, the deputy, would certainly go bail for Thomas. And so Witherington, ‘not thinking he had such a good friend to stand by him in time of need, rode very contentedly to Tyburn.’
     
     
     
    Burned at the Stake
     
    Catherine Hayes
    At dawn on 2 March 1726 a watchman found a man’s head and a bloody bucket in a dock near Horseferry Road, Westminster. The head was taken to St Margaret’s graveyard and, having been washed of the blood and dirt, it was displayed on a pole for three days for purposes of identification, and then placed in a large glass container full of spirits and shown to anyone who wished to see it. Three weeks later it was recognised as being that of a well-to-do man named John Hayes who lived in Chelsea, and suspicion fell on his wife Catherine. She was arrested and expressed a desire to see the head; on doing so she kissed the container and begged to have a lock of the content’s hair.
    While she was being interrogated, it was reported that the limbs and torso of a man had been found wrapped in blankets, lying in a pond in Marylebone Fields near the Farthing Pie House. Further enquiries elicited the fact that at a party in the Hayes’ house, at which two other men had been present, a quarrel had started, during which Hayes was murdered with a hatchet by one of the men, Billings, whereupon Catherine had said, ‘We must take off his head and make away with it, or it will betray us.’ And she, together with Billings and the other man, Thomas Wood, cut it off with the latter’s pocket knife, put it in a bucket and threw it into the Thames. Catherine had next suggested that the body should be put in a box, taken by coach to Marylebone, and there thrown into the pond. As it was too large for the box, she then suggested that it should be cut into pieces.
    All three were confined in Newgate Prison and put on trial. Billings and Wood, found guilty