Nigel Cawthorne Quotes
In England, the ultimate execution method for men who committed high treason was hanging, drawing, and quartering. It was considered indecent at the time to mutilate a woman’s body in this way, so female traitors were burnt at the stake.
Nigel Cawthorne, Public Executions, Arcturus Publishing, September 28, 2006
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Queen Boudicca of the Iceni tribe had revolted in Roman Britain. The Romans where particularly harsh in putting down revolts but under Emperor Nero and Caligula after him, they sunk to the deepest of barbarities,
It would have been a great shock to her that 200 years later America was among the world leaders in capital punishment and England would have abolished it.
Although this is generally followed as a legal principle in America, states like Texas have executed felons who most other jurisdictions would see as Coke’s “mad man.”
These murders were punished by burning at the stake and other gruesome forms of execution as if a king had been murdered.
William the Conqueror. This is one of the first if not the first nationwide abolition of capital punishment in history. Ironically, the two alternatives that the abolition law allowed would both be illegal and repugnant to us today even though we allow capital punishment.
Beheading, if the headsman were competent, was a mich less painful way to die than the early forms of hanging where the rope strangled the condemned. As a result, it tended to be reserved but the upper classes and aristocrats of the day unless they were guilty of treason of coradice in warfare in which cases beheading was witheld.
Although we think is grizzley and macabre that throngs of people should attend executions adn percieve the spectators to be gross and insensitive, there was a bizarre kind of morality operating in many counties. At all times in history executions tend to bet botched with terrible and unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victim. When executioners do that with drug coctails or other methods of dispatching death, we tend to make institutional complaints. But as this quotation shows, the executioner was often turned on by the mob and in some cases were actually themselves killed.
In 1938 when Hitler started his military operatiomn to overrun Europe, he abolished beheading with the axe a traditional and barbarous form of capital punishment. The two legal methods of execution in Germany after this decree were hanging and a version of the guillotine.
Livermore's argument fell on deaf ears, and the amendment was passed over the objection of a few arch-conservatives.
This document was the first organized argument against capital punishment.
The capital punishment debate was raging in Europe. Belgium and parts of Switzerland had just abolished the death penalty.
In his early career, her supported capital punishment, but changed his mind as can be seen in this quotation.
“Catiff” is a Middle English term to describe a lowly, despicable person.
He was a Protestant liberal and opposed to the English rule of Ireland and the discrimination against the Catholics. To make an example to inhibit Irish protestants from joining the Society of United Irishmen, he was accused of giving an oath to a British Soldier that he would support Irish independence. This had been made a capital crime shortly before. Actually, it was another member of the Society who administered the oath, but the prosecutor arranged for perjured testimony to convict the more prominent Orr. His execution was remembered by liberal Catholics and Protestants alike and in the rebellion the following year the rebel battle cry was “Remember Orr”.
Wade was urging the Prince to abolish the Death by 1000 Cuts {641825} and simply rely on beheading the form of execution for “lesser” crimes. Note that the Prince’s fears and arguments parallel the same given by modern proponents of the Death Penalty—without it criminals would not be controlled and instability would ensue.
The victim would be slowly cut 1000 times in ways to inflict more and more pain but not kill the victim rapidly.
Nigel Cawthorne is a British freelance writer of fiction and non-fiction, and an editor.
