Long before any memorials were built at Tower Hill, and close to the WW2 memorial to Merchant Seamen, Great Tower Hill was used for executions of important people. Further information about this is below, including photographs of the memorial to those who were executed. The approximate location of the scaffold is shown on the various historical maps and plans HERE.
The manner of execution depended on the status of the victim. Beheading was considered the least brutal method - though didn't always turn out that way with several accounts of botched executions. Beheading was reserved for the rich and famous; lesser people were hanged. Crimes considered the most heinous were dealt with by more appalling means such as "hanging, drawing and quartering".
Mostly it was members of the nobility that were executed at Tower Hill - usually after imprisonment in The Tower - but there were exceptions. In London most commoners were hanged at Tyburn, or later at Newgate, but there were many other locations for hangings across the country. Executions were a public event supposed to have a detterent effect. Members of Royalty, such as Henry VIII's unwanted queens, were executed in private within the Tower of London at Tower Green.
Tower Hill seems to have been on many occasions the place to dispose of those who had become "inconvenient" to the rulers of the country rather than genuine traitors. I have included information about two of these about whom I previously knew nothing at all as examples: Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, and Wiliam Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. I am sure that the stories of the others would be equally interesting and I may extend this site to cover them at a later date.
The following account of the history of execution at Tower Hill comes from the works of the Victorian Antiquarian Walter Thornbury - External Reference #15. Thornbury's work makes fascinating reading as it conjures up the spirit of the past rather than being "dry-as-dust" academic writing. His work is considered to be generally well-researched, but is rather opinionated but that does not detract from it as source material
Chapter X. The Neighbourhood of the Tower
Of Tower Hill, that historical and blood-stained ground to the north-west of the Tower, old Stow says:—"Tower Hill, sometime a large plot of ground, now greatly straitened by encroachments (unlawfully made and suffered) for gardens and houses. Upon this hill is always readily prepared, at the charges of the City, a large scaffold and gallows of timber, for the execution of such traitors or transgressors as are delivered out of the Tower, or otherwise, to the Sheriffs of London, by writ, there to be executed."
Hatton, in 1708 (Queen Anne) mentions Tower Hill as "a spacious place extending round the west and north parts of the Tower, where there are many good new buildings, mostly inhabited by gentry and merchants." The tide of fashion and wealth had not yet set in strongly westward. An old plan of the Tower in 1563 shows us the posts of the scaffold for state criminals, a good deal north of Tower Street and a little northward of Legge Mount, the great north-west corner of the Tower fortifications. In the reign of Edward IV. the scaffold was erected at the charge of the king's officers, and many controversies arose at various times, about the respective boundaries, between the City and the Lieutenant of the Tower.
On the Tower Hill scaffold perished nearly all the prisoners whose wrongs and sorrows and crimes we have glanced at in a previous chapter; the great Sir Thomas More, the wise servant of a corrupt king; the unhappy old Countess of Salisbury, who was chopped down here as she ran bleeding round the scaffold; Bishop Fisher, a staunch adherent to the old faith; that great subverter of the monks, Cromwell, Earl of Essex; and the poet Earl of Surrey—all victims of the same bad monarch.
Then in the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, in ghastly procession after the masked headsman, paced Lord Seymour; in due course followed the brother who put him to death, the proud Protector Somerset; then that poor weak young noble, Lady Jane Grey's husband, Lord Guildford Dudley; and Sir Thomas Wyat, the rash objector to a Spanish marriage
The victims of Charles's folly followed in due time—the dark and arrogant Strafford, who came like a crowned conqueror to his death; then his sworn ally, the narrow-browed, fanatical Laud. The Restoration Cavaliers took their vengeance next, and to Tower Hill passed those true patriots, Stafford, insisting on his innocence to the very last, and Algernon Sydney. The unlucky Duke of Monmouth was the next to lay his misguided head on the block.
Blood ceased to flow on Tower Hill after this execution till the Pretender's fruitless rebellions of 1715 and 1745 brought Derwentwater, "the pride of the North," Kilmarnock, Balmerino, and wily old Lovat to the same ghastly bourne. In 1746 Mr. Radcliffe (Lord Derwentwater's brother) was executed here. He had been a prisoner in the Tower for his share in the rebellion of 1715, but succeeded in escaping. He was identified by the barber, who thirty-one years before had shaved him when in prison.
Chamberlain Clarke, who died in 1831, aged ninety-two (a worthy old City authority, who has been mentioned by us in a previous chapter), well remembered (says Mr. Timbs), as a child, seeing the executioner's axe flash in the sunshine as it fell upon the neck of Mr. Radcliffe. At the last execution which took place on Tower Hill, that of Lord Lovat, April 9, 1747, a scaffolding, built near Barking Alley, fell, with nearly 1,000 persons on it, and twelve of them were killed. Lovat, in spite of his awful situation, seemed to enjoy the downfall of so many Whigs.
There is a passage in Henry VIII.—a play considered by many persons to be not Shakespeare's writing at all, and by some others only partly his work—that has much puzzled those wise persons, the commentators. The author of the play, which is certainly not quite in the best Shakespearian manner, makes a door-porter say, talking of a mob, "These are the youths that thunder at a play-house and fight for bitten apples: that no audience but the tribulation of Tower Hill or the limbs of Limehouse are able to endure." This passage seems to imply that there were low theatres in Shakespeare's time near Tower Hill and Limehouse, or did he refer to the crowd at a Tower Hill execution, and to the mob of sailors at the second locality?
Although most of the executions recorded for Tower Hill were beheadings, this was not the only way of dispatching the condemned that was employed there. It is recorded that Richard Wyche was burned at the stake for converting to Lollardrism in 1440, and that John Goose suffered the same fate for the same reason in 1475. William Collingbourne was "hanged drawn and quartered" in 1484 for "favouring the cause of Henry Tudor", likewise three unnamed persons in 1532 for "coining" - the old term for making counterfiet coins which was a treasonable offence. Sir Thomas Wyatt was both beheaded and quartered in 1554, and "five unruly youths" - unnamed - were "hanged and boweled" for causing a disturbance on Tower Hill in 1595.
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