Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree by Alan Brooke, David Brandon Page B
Authors: Alan Brooke, David Brandon
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refused to acknowledge the authority of the Queen and, when taunted that he had bowed to idols, he retorted in his own language that there was a great deal of difference between the Queen and the images of saints.
Shortly after O’Rourke’s execution, Thomas Lee, an English officer fighting in Ireland, was appointed Provost-Marshal of Connaught. By August 1598, Tyrone was in open rebellion and Lee found himself being held in Dublin Castle under suspicion of treasonable communication with the rebels. Lee was in fear of his life but the case was not prosecuted and he returned, somewhat shaken, to England in February 1601 just at the time of the Earl of Essex’s ill-considered and disastrous attempt to remove Elizabeth’s councillors and install himself in their place. However, Lee seemed to have a nose for trouble and, although not a part of this particular conspiracy, he later participated in a plot to seize the Queen and compel her to release Essex, for which he was arrested and convicted in February 1601. On the gallows at Tyburn, Lee spoke up in defence of Essex but he himself seems to have been a spent force as a result of all the excitement he had endured over the last few years. With an air of weariness and resignation, he said of himself that ‘he had lived in misery and cared not to live, his enemies were so great and so many’.
The 1590s were a volatile period, characterised by high prices, food shortages, plague, heavy taxation and the wars against Spain and Ireland. In 1592 over 14 per cent of London’s population died from plague, a total of 10,675 recorded deaths. The decade also witnessed possibly the worst price inflation of early modern times culminating in 1597 in the lowest real wages ever recorded in English history. The polarisation between the wealthy and the destitute majority became ever more apparent. With continued population growth in London went an eightfold increase in convictions for vagrancy in the period 1560 to 1601. The government, concerned by the threat to law and order posed by vagrants and masterless men, issued a proclamation in 1595 entitled ‘Enforcing Curfews for Apprentices’. This reflected deep unease about disorder and potential revolt and placed the responsibility for control of troublesome apprentices on their masters. In June 1595 alone there were twelve disturbances in which apprentices, who had long had a reputation for fomenting or being involved in such incidents, had started riots against the Lord Mayor and against food prices. These riots have been described as the most dangerous and prolonged urban uprising in England from the beginning of the Tudors in 1485 to the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640 (Manning 1988: 208). The 1595 proclamation noted ‘a very great outrage lately committed by some apprentices and others being masterless men and vagrant persons, in and about the suburbs of the city of London’. London apprentices were perceived to be lawless and truculent and it is therefore not surprising that they frequently appeared as victims at Tyburn, a point illustrated in Hogarth’s famous engraving of the Idle ’Prentice on his way to Tyburn.
The associating of apprentices with prostitutes was seen as the beginning of the fall into greater sins. Prostitutes, ‘lewd women’, or nightwalkers, were blamed for leading not only apprentices but also servants and other dependent workers into immoral habits. Thomas Savage who was hanged at Tyburn in 1668 for murdering a fellow servant included the frequenting of bawdy houses as one of the reasons for his fall into sin:
The first sin … was Sabbath breaking, thereby I got acquaintance with bad company, and so went to the alehouse and to the bawdy house: there I was perswaded [sic] to rob my master and also murder this poor innocent creature, for which I come to this shameful end.
(Sharpe, 1985a:151)
Apprentices and servants made up half of the workforce in London. It is estimated that between 1640 and
Shortly after O’Rourke’s execution, Thomas Lee, an English officer fighting in Ireland, was appointed Provost-Marshal of Connaught. By August 1598, Tyrone was in open rebellion and Lee found himself being held in Dublin Castle under suspicion of treasonable communication with the rebels. Lee was in fear of his life but the case was not prosecuted and he returned, somewhat shaken, to England in February 1601 just at the time of the Earl of Essex’s ill-considered and disastrous attempt to remove Elizabeth’s councillors and install himself in their place. However, Lee seemed to have a nose for trouble and, although not a part of this particular conspiracy, he later participated in a plot to seize the Queen and compel her to release Essex, for which he was arrested and convicted in February 1601. On the gallows at Tyburn, Lee spoke up in defence of Essex but he himself seems to have been a spent force as a result of all the excitement he had endured over the last few years. With an air of weariness and resignation, he said of himself that ‘he had lived in misery and cared not to live, his enemies were so great and so many’.
The 1590s were a volatile period, characterised by high prices, food shortages, plague, heavy taxation and the wars against Spain and Ireland. In 1592 over 14 per cent of London’s population died from plague, a total of 10,675 recorded deaths. The decade also witnessed possibly the worst price inflation of early modern times culminating in 1597 in the lowest real wages ever recorded in English history. The polarisation between the wealthy and the destitute majority became ever more apparent. With continued population growth in London went an eightfold increase in convictions for vagrancy in the period 1560 to 1601. The government, concerned by the threat to law and order posed by vagrants and masterless men, issued a proclamation in 1595 entitled ‘Enforcing Curfews for Apprentices’. This reflected deep unease about disorder and potential revolt and placed the responsibility for control of troublesome apprentices on their masters. In June 1595 alone there were twelve disturbances in which apprentices, who had long had a reputation for fomenting or being involved in such incidents, had started riots against the Lord Mayor and against food prices. These riots have been described as the most dangerous and prolonged urban uprising in England from the beginning of the Tudors in 1485 to the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640 (Manning 1988: 208). The 1595 proclamation noted ‘a very great outrage lately committed by some apprentices and others being masterless men and vagrant persons, in and about the suburbs of the city of London’. London apprentices were perceived to be lawless and truculent and it is therefore not surprising that they frequently appeared as victims at Tyburn, a point illustrated in Hogarth’s famous engraving of the Idle ’Prentice on his way to Tyburn.
The associating of apprentices with prostitutes was seen as the beginning of the fall into greater sins. Prostitutes, ‘lewd women’, or nightwalkers, were blamed for leading not only apprentices but also servants and other dependent workers into immoral habits. Thomas Savage who was hanged at Tyburn in 1668 for murdering a fellow servant included the frequenting of bawdy houses as one of the reasons for his fall into sin:
The first sin … was Sabbath breaking, thereby I got acquaintance with bad company, and so went to the alehouse and to the bawdy house: there I was perswaded [sic] to rob my master and also murder this poor innocent creature, for which I come to this shameful end.
(Sharpe, 1985a:151)
Apprentices and servants made up half of the workforce in London. It is estimated that between 1640 and
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