Some of the many Executions in Tudor and Stuart London

Plaque outside Tyburn Convent

December 10^th – On this day in 1541, Charles Wriothesley wrote in his Chronicle:

“Rafe Egerton, … one of my Lord Chancellor’s servants, and … Thomas Herman, sometime servant with Fleetwood, one of my Lord Chancellor’s gentlemen, were drawn from the Tower … to Tyburn, and there hanged and quartered for counterfeiting the King’s [Henry VIII’s] Great Seal”.

Tyburn Convent

And on this day in 1610, the Roman Catholic Priest – and since 1970 Saint – John Roberts was taken to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn for contraventing the “Act Forbidding Priests to Minister in England”.

In the event, the crowd, who revered him for the work he had done among them during an outbreak of  the plague in 1603, saw to it that he died by hanging and was spared  the suffering of drawing  and quartering.  What could be  salvaged of…