Hanged, drawn and quartered

To be hanged, drawn and quartered was a method of torturous capital punishment used principally to execute men convicted of high treason in medieval and early modern Britain and Ireland.

The convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn behind a horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered.

Although some convicts had their sentences modified and suffered a less ignominious end, over a period of several hundred years many men found guilty of high treason were subjected to the law's ultimate sanction.

"[5][nb 1] He was apparently sent by William de Marisco, an outlaw who some years earlier had killed a man under royal protection before fleeing to Lundy Island.

[8][9][5][nb 2] Following the capture of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, Edward proclaimed that the "treacherous lineage" (House of Aberffraw), and princes of that "turbulent nation" (Wales) were now his prisoners.

There he was hanged for "killing English noblemen" until losing consciousness, then revived, disembowelled, and made to watch as his entrails burned before him for "sacrilege in committing his crimes in the week of Christ's passion" (Easter).

[14] These and other executions, such as those of Andrew Harclay, 1st Earl of Carlisle,[15] and Hugh Despenser the Younger,[16] which each occurred during Edward II's reign, happened when acts of treason in England, and their punishments, were not clearly defined in common law.

Attempts to undermine the king's authority were viewed with as much seriousness as if the accused had attacked him personally, which itself would be an assault on his status as sovereign and a direct threat to his right to govern.

[28][nb 5] It also applied to subjects overseas in British colonies in the Americas, but the only documented incident of an individual there being hanged, drawn, and quartered was that of Joshua Tefft, an English colonist accused of having fought on the side of the Narragansett during the Great Swamp Fight.

[33] This allowed a defendant counsel, witnesses, a copy of the indictment, and a jury, and when not charged with an attempt on the monarch's life, to be prosecuted within three years of the alleged offence.

"[38] Sharma is not the only historian to support this viewpoint as the phrase, "hanged until dead before being drawn and quartered", occurs in a number of relevant secondary publications.

In an essay published on his website, he writes that the separate mention of evisceration is a relatively modern device, and that while it certainly took place on many occasions, the presumption that drawing means to disembowel is spurious.

William Wallace was whipped, attacked and had rotten food and waste thrown at him,[42] and the priest Thomas Pilchard was reportedly barely alive by the time he reached the gallows in 1587.

According to Samuel Clarke, the Puritan clergyman William Perkins (1558–1602) once managed to convince a young man at the gallows that he had been forgiven, enabling the youth to go to his death "with tears of joy in his eyes ... as if he actually saw himself delivered from the hell which he feared before, and heaven opened for receiving his soul.

[44] While these speeches were mostly an admission of guilt (although few admitted treason),[45] still they were carefully monitored by the sheriff and chaplain, who were occasionally forced to act; in 1588, Catholic priest William Dean's address to the crowd was considered so inappropriate that he was gagged almost to the point of suffocation.

Such contrition may have arisen from the sheer terror felt by those who thought they might be disembowelled rather than simply beheaded as they would normally expect, and any apparent acceptance of their fate may have stemmed from the belief that a serious, but not treasonable act, had been committed.

The aim was usually to cause strangulation and near-death, although some victims were killed prematurely, the priest John Payne's death in 1582 being hastened by a group of men pulling on his legs.

Conversely, some, such as the deeply unpopular William Hacket (d. 1591), were cut down instantly and taken to be disembowelled and normally emasculated—the latter, according to Sir Edward Coke, to "show his issue was disinherited with corruption of blood.

The regicide Major General Thomas Harrison, after being hanged for several minutes and then cut open in October 1660, was reported to have leaned across and hit his executioner—resulting in the swift removal of his head.

"[67] Such remains were typically parboiled and displayed as a gruesome reminder of the penalty for high treason, usually wherever the traitor had conspired or found support.

In 1602 the Duke of Pommerania-Stettin emphasised the ominous nature of their presence when he wrote "near the end of the bridge, on the suburb side, were stuck up the heads of thirty gentlemen of high standing who had been beheaded on account of treason and secret practices against the Queen.

"[70][nb 9] The practice of using London Bridge in this manner ended following the hanging, drawing, and quartering in 1678 of William Staley, a victim of the fictitious Popish Plot.

The cap was then drawn over their eyes, during which the Colonel was observed again to fix the knot under his left ear, and, at seven minutes before nine o'clock the signal being given, the platform dropped, and they were all launched into eternity.

After hanging thirty-seven minutes, the Colonel's body was cut down, at half an hour past nine o'clock, and being stripped of his coat and waistcoat, it was laid upon saw-dust, with the head reclined upon a block.

[81]At the burnings of Isabella Condon in 1779 and Phoebe Harris in 1786, the sheriffs present inflated their expenses; in the opinion of Simon Devereaux they were probably dismayed at being forced to attend such spectacles.

[82] Harris's fate prompted William Wilberforce to sponsor a bill which if passed would have abolished the practice, but as one of its proposals would have allowed the anatomical dissection of criminals other than murderers, the House of Lords rejected it.

[86] He managed to repeal the death penalty for certain thefts and vagrancy, and in 1814 proposed to change the sentence for men guilty of treason to being hanged until dead and the body left at the king's disposal.

Home Secretary Spencer Horatio Walpole told the commission that executions had "become so demoralizing that, instead of its having a good effect, it has a tendency rather to brutalize the public mind than to deter the criminal class from committing crime".

"[96] The practice of executing murderers in public was ended two years later by the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868, introduced by Home Secretary Gathorne Hardy, but this did not apply to traitors.

The death penalty for treason was abolished by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, enabling the UK to ratify protocol six of the European Convention on Human Rights in 1999.