Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty by Geoffrey Abbott Read Free Book Online Page A

well-known firework, the Catherine wheel, she is the patron saint of wheelwrights and philosophers, and not only do a 170 medieval steeple bells in England bear her name, but 62 churches are also dedicated to her memory.
    As well as churches, a hospital was named after her. It was founded in 1148 by Queen Matilda, wife of King Stephen, and was situated by the River Thames, near where Tower Bridge now stands. The staff cared for travellers and the sick, inmates wearing the hospital’s symbol, a wheel, on the backs of their coats.
    Another martyr, St Clement, was secured to a wheel by the Romans, it then being rotated while his tormentors beat him with rods. And Felix, a priest, together with deacons Fortunatus and Achilleus, were each tied to the face of a wheel. Their limbs were broken with iron bars, the stumps being then intertwined with the spokes, and they were left to die in agony.
    A modification of this latter method was introduced into France in 1534 by Francis I as the punishment for no fewer than 115 crimes, but it was mainly reserved for traitors and murderers.
    The most common technique involved binding the felon, face upwards, on a large cartwheel which lay on the scaffold. An alternative device was a St Andrew’s cross, consisting of two lengths of timber nailed together in that ‘X’ shape. Once secured, the felon would be lifted so that the wheel or cross could be fixed to a post horizontally or inclined at an angle, thereby affording the spectators a clear and uninterrupted view.
    The executioner would take up his iron bar, 3 feet long by 2 inches square, or a sledgehammer if he so preferred, and, with great deliberation, slowly and accurately proceed to smash to pulp the arms and legs of the victim. Depending on the sentence, the end would be brought about either by a blow to the heart, neck or stomach or by administering the ‘retentum’, a thin, almost invisible cord passed round the victim’s throat and pulled tight, thereby strangling him.
    The more serious the crime, the greater the length of time before the coup de grâce was given. In the case of 86-year-old John Calas of Toulouse, who in 1761 was believed to have killed his own son, he was first tortured to persuade him to reveal the names of his accomplices. He was then sentenced to be broken on the wheel, but not to receive the retentum until two hours had passed; and after death his body was to be burned to ashes.
    Perhaps the most famous case in French history was the execution by the wheel of Count Antoine de Horn and his companion, a Piedmontese, the Chevalier de Milhe, in 1720. Both were accused of murdering a share-dealer in a tavern in the Rue Quincampoix in Paris. They had made an appointment to meet their prey, ostensibly to sell him shares worth 100,000 crowns, but in reality to rob the man. Surprised by a servant while attacking the dealer, they leaped from the window but were captured and committed to gaol.
    Such was the prominence of de Horn in French society that his aristocratic relatives sought to influence the judges, hoping that any punishment might be mitigated. But shock ran through the court as both were sentenced to be broken on the wheel. Petitions signed by earls, dukes, bishops, and even a prince, were raised, claiming that insanity in the de Horn family was the real cause, but these were rejected by the regent, despite his being distantly related to the condemned man through his mother, the Princess Palatine.
    Not only was pressure, subtle or otherwise, brought to bear on the regent; the man charged with performing the executions, Monsieur de Paris, Charles Sanson, a member of that redoubtable family of hangmen and torturers, was approached by the Comtesse de Parabère, the regent’s mistress, who begged him to save the life of ‘her’ Antoine – confirming the rumours in fashionable circles that the ladies of the court hesitated little before surrendering to de Horn’s overtures.
    Desperately, the comtesse