Capital Punishment

Capital punishment was accepted as part of God's great design, and no attempt was made to ban it by any right-thinking Christian. In the Middle Ages capital punishment was inflicted for religious offences. Examples included robbing a church, sacrilege, eating meat during Lent, cremating the dead, and omitting to be baptised*. Petty vandalism against Church property also attracted the death penalty. Churchmen advocated not only the death penalty but also a range of accompanying horrors. Criminals were hanged in chains. Sometimes bodies were gibbeted, i.e. they were coated in tar to preserve them, then hung high up on a post, often in sight of their family home, where the birds and the weather would destroy them only after months or years. Some victims were hanged, drawn, and quartered, after which their heart would be held up to the crowd, and their severed head would be stuck on a spike and left in some prominent place for everyone to see. Here is a typical sentence :

You shall be drawn upon a hurdle through the open streets to the place of execution, there to be hanged and cut down while yet alive, and your body shall be opened, and your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off, and thrown into the fire before your eyes; then your head to be struck off, and your body divided into four quarters, to be disposed of at the King's pleasure.... *

Quartering

On God's behalf, English churchmen confirmed in the early nineteenth century that it was perfectly acceptable to tear out the heart and bowels of condemned but still living men. Some clergymen advocated hanging whether the accused was guilty or not. One argument was that capital punishment was a deterrent for the criminally inclined, so the guilt or innocence of the individual on trial was irrelevant*. Another was that all sins are equally damnable in the eyes of God, so the extreme penalty was appropriate for all*.

The heads of the Gunpowder Plotters, hanged, drawn and quartered in 1606.. After quartering, the heads of those found guilty of treason were stuck on spikes and dispayed in busy public places, usually untill they rotted away and fell apart. Denying criminals a Christian burial was a common element of punishments for impious crimes under Christian laws.

Support for capital punishment provided a rare example of ecumenical concord. As one modern cleric who made a study of the topic, put it:

Orthodoxy, Reformed as well as Catholic, identified itself closely with the secular power, supported the sword of the secular arm, and benefited from it. God and the gallows together kept society secure, anarchy at bay, and heresy suppressed*.

St Thomas Aquinas had justified the death penalty, and the Roman Church followed him. The death penalty was not merely permitted by God: for certain crimes it was required by God. Other authorities surpassed him in their zeal. Martin Luther criticised the practice of the executioner asking forgiveness of his victim, since the executioner, like the magistrate, was an instrument of God*. According to this view, the Christian officials responsible for inflicting the death penalty had no more say in the matter than the axe or rope or stake. The Church of England enshrined its acceptance of the state's right to kill in Article 37 of the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church. The full flourishing of the code regarding capital punishment in western Europe coincided with the Protestant ascendancy. The ultimate penalty was imposed in England for such offences as destroying certain bridges, impersonating a Chelsea pensioner, associating with gypsies, stealing letters, and obstructing revenue officers.

In the American colonies, Christians passed capital laws based on biblical injunctions.

The details are interesting - for example Articles 13 and 14 both allow the execution of children, but 13 applies to daughters while 14 does not. The Christians who framed these laws clearly had no concept of the Old Testament having been abregated by the New, but they did add mitigating factors (as in 14). Note that 15 has no biblical reference, presumably because the biblical penalty was a small fine, and considered wholly inadequate by 17th century Christians.

The Roman Church carried out countless thousands of executions and continued to sanction its own secret executions well into the nineteenth century. Other denominations also approved of capital punishment. Methodist ministers took children to watch public executions, such scenes being considered "improving". Wesley himself had been keen on gibbeting and had wanted to extend the practice to suicides. Calvinists concurred. A leading nineteenth century minister styled the "Champion of the Sacred Cause of Hanging", was critical of the exercise of mercy in capital cases. As he pointed out, God himself had tried mercy with Cain, and everyone knew how badly that had turned out.*

"Execution of Breaking on the Rack", illustration by William Blake in John Gabriel Stedman's The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). John Gabriel Stedman relates that: "The third negro, whose name was Neptune, was no slave, but his own master, and a carpenter by trade; he was young and handsome, but having killed the overseer of the estate Altona, in the Para Creek, in consequence of some dispute, he justly forfeited his life.... he was sentenced to be broken alive upon the rack, without the benefit of the coup de grace or mercy-stroke. Informed of the dreadful sentence, he composedly laid himself down on his back on a strong cross, on which, with arms and legs expanded, he was fastened by ropes: the executioner, also a black man, having now with a hatchet chopped off his left hand, next took up a heavy iron bar, with which, by repeated blows, he broke his bones to shivers, till the marrow, blood, and splinters flew about the field; but the prisoner never uttered a groan nor a sigh. ... He then begged that his head might be chopped off; but to no purpose. At last, seeing no end to his misery, he declared, “that though he had deserved death, he had “not expected to die so many deaths: however, (said he) you christians have missed your aim at last ..." He lived on for some three hours.

Garrotting

The garrote was the preferred device used for capital punishment in Catholic Spain for hundreds of years. Originally the convict would be beaten to death with a club (a garrote in Spanish). This later developed into a method of strangulation. The victim was tied to a wooden stake, with a loop of rope placed around his neck. A stick was placed in the loop and twisted by an executioner, causing the rope to tighten until it strangled the victim to death. In time the method was refined so that the victim sat on a stool attached to a stake, to which the victim was bound, and the executioner tightened a metal band around the victim's neck with a crank.

The design of a basic garrote	Detail of Le garrot, by Velasquez, c 1810 Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille.

Around 1810 the earliest known metal garrote appeared in Spain. In 1828, this garrote was declared the sole method for executing civilians.

Garrot vil, by Ramón Casas, painted in 1894, Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid Garrotting was generally carried out in public, and attended by Christian ceremony. Note the number of Catholic officials in black costumes within the cordon at this garrotting in Barcelona

In May 1897, the last public garroting in Spain was performed in Barcelona. After that, all executions were performed inside prisons.

A mass garrotting. Christian priests were an integral part of the ceremony surrounding capital punishment, including garrotting.

Garrotting a woman

At the prompting of the Catholic Church, the right-wing Spanish legislature enacted laws against Freemasons. Under these laws, 80 Freemasons were garroted to death in Málaga, and many more in other towns. With the help of Catholic priests like Father Jean Tusquets and Franco's own chaplain, some 80,000 men were executed as Freemasons, (even though there had probably been around 5,000 Freemasons in Spain at the time).

Priests were always available to validate the proceedings in the name of God

Two men were garrotted in Spain in 1974, a year before the death of Franco. The garrote was abolished in 1978, soon after the Catholic Church lost its influence over Spanish government.

Le Progres Illustre, 21 February, 1802, reporting the execution of anarchists at Xeres

Where the USA took over Spanish colonies, they kept the Spanish of capital punishment, at least for a while. American military authorities in Puerto Rico used the garrote to execute at least five convicted murderers in 1900. American authorities also kept the garrote in the Philippines after the colony was captured in 1898. The garrote was abolished in 1902 (Act No. 451, passed September 2, 1902).

A version of the garrote incorporated a metal spike fixed into the stake and directed at the skull or spinal cord. The spiked version, called the Catalan garrote, was used as late as 1940.

An execution by garrotting in 1901

This Catalan Garrote is designed not only garrote the victim, but also drive a spike into the back of the victim's head as the garrote is tightened

The Papal States

Since God not only approved capital punishment, but required Christian rulers to apply it to their subjects. It followed that as sovereign of the Papal States, the Pope was required to execute wrongdoers. A succession of hundreds of popes therefore evolved methods of capital punishment, none of them noticeably more humane than those of other Christian monarchs.

In extreme cases, those condemned would be hanged, drawn and quartered. For others popes developed a particularly gruesome method of method of public execution. Churchmen were reluctant to shed blood, which explains why monks were forbidden to carry out surgery, why bishops used maces when fighting in medieval wars, why witches and heretics were burned alive, and perhaps why popes favoured the Mazzatello as a method of execution.

A Mazzatello is a large, long-handled mallet, used to smash in the victim's skull. The victim would be led to a scaffold in a public square of Rome, accompanied by a priest. already installed on the scaffold was a coffin and a masked executioner, dressed in black. The executioner would swing the mallet to gain momentum, and bring it down on the head of the victim. The fist blow was rarely fatal. (A variation of this method appears in Alexandre Dumas' novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, as la mazzolata, when a prisoner sentenced to execution is bludgeoned on the side of his head with a mace.)

The papal Mazzatello does not survive, but would have looked something like this. This mazzatello was used by Catholic Ustaška guards to crush the skulls of non-Catholic prisoners (including Serbs, Jews and Roma) at Jasenovac in Croatia, accounting for some of the tens of thousands killed there between 1941 and 1945.

According to one author, the mazzatello constituted "one of the most brutal methods of execution ever devised, requiring minimal skill on the part of the executioner"*. Another cites mazzatello as an example of an execution method devised by the Papal States that "competed with and in some instances surpassed those of other regimes for cruelty".*

The mazzatello was used within the Papal States from the late 18th century up until 1870, when the French army seized the papal states and stopped the practice of hammering people to death in public.

The Anglican Church

The Anglican Church had supported capital punishment since its foundation, continuing its historical inheritance from the Catholic and ultimately the Orthodox Church. No Anglican movement for abolition was so much as considered for many centuries. Christian Evangelicals like the nineteenth century politician Anthony Ashley-Cooper (later seventh Earl of Shaftesbury) advocated the traditional view that God not only permitted capital punishment but also demanded it*. Judges pointed out to those found guilty of certain crimes that God required them to die.

Churchmen claimed that the deterrent effect of capital punishment was enhanced by due solemnity, mystery and awe. The Church therefore buttressed the ceremony of execution, and surrounded it by ritual. In England a chaplain was on hand in court to intone Amen to the judge's sentence of death. A prison chaplain might hold a service before the execution with a coffin displayed in the presence of the congregation and the condemned prisoner. After English executions were confined to prisons in 1868, a black flag was hoisted over the prison on execution days; a bell would toll; and the chaplain would intone the burial service as he accompanied the condemned prisoner to the gallows*. The Church was involved throughout, into the twentieth century, validating the procedure on behalf of God. It was generally accepted that the main business of prison clergymen was to break the spirits of capital convicts so that they would offer no physical resistance to the hangman*. Sometimes the chaplain himself gave the signal to carry out the execution.

Time and time again bishops and archbishops opposed the abolition of capital punishment. In 1810 the Archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops helped defeat a bill that would have abolished the death penalty for stealing five shillings from a shop. Capital punishment was so much part and parcel of the Christian faith that bishops would go to almost any lengths to keep it. When secularists advocated the abolition of the death penalty, the bishops rushed to its support. When it looked like public revulsion at public executions might force Parliament to abolish capital punishment in the mid-nineteenth century, zealous Christians pressed for hanging to be carried out inside prisons. The idea was that, once removed from the public gaze, executions could continue without fuss or popular revulsion. This plan was advocated for example by Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford*. So it was that in 1868 public executions ceased in England and private ones began. As the bishop had hoped, pressure for abolition subsided.

Well into the twentieth century most English bishops were in favour of capital punishment and used their votes in the House of Lords to oppose abolition. For example the bench of bishops helped defeat the Criminal Justice Bill of 1948 during its passage through the House of Lords. In the 1950s it looked again as though Parliament might abolish the death penalty. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, was alarmed that this attempt might succeed. He therefore adopted a similar technique to that adopted by Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce in the previous century. This time public sentiment was opposed to the death penalty, even behind closed prison doors. In order to retain capital punishment the Archbishop advocated classifying degrees of murder. In this way he hoped to retain the death penalty for at least some crimes. The Christian line was that it was better to hang some offenders rather than none at all. Fisher was not keen to have his traditionalist views opposed: "Anyone who says that it is unchristian to hang puts himself out of court" he wrote* Other Churches held similar views. When abolition of the death penalty was again being considered in Britain in the 1960s, Cardinal Godfrey appeared on television to advocate the traditional Roman Catholic line. As he said, the state had not merely the right, but the duty to exact the death penalty whenever, in its own judgement, the life of the community was threatened by a particular sort of crime*.

The first stirrings of opposition to the death penalty in Britain, in the early nineteenth century, came principally from those who rejected the prevailing Christian consensus. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham, reputedly an atheist, and the poet Shelley, an avowed atheist, both opposed capital punishment, supported by Quakers*. They were opposed by all right-thinking organised Churches*. As we have seen, in the House of Lords the bishops consistently supported capital punishment. The loudest parliamentary voices raised in the Lords against the death penalty in the nineteenth century belonged to men like the godless Lord Byron, as outside the Lords they belonged to atheists like Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891), Annie Besant (1847-1933) and George Holyoake (1817-1906). Holyoake wondered why the Archbishop of York could find time to condemn sensationalist novels but not to utter a word against public execution*.

Execution of Doctor Crippen, in Le Petit Journal illustré, 4th December 1910. From the French Revolution onwards the French considered hanging barbaric and made much of the attendent religious ceremony and the role of the anglican priest in Britain.

The Churches could have demolished the moral case for capital punishment, but instead they bolstered it:

In a Christian country, such as England was, a death penalty devoid of religious sanction could not have survived. It was an issue over which the church could have exercised a moral hegemony and failed to do so. It shadowed public opinion rather than led it. It left the moral high ground to Quakers, lapsed Jews, maverick Christians of all denominations, and men and women of none*.

In the second half of the twentieth century the bishops finally adopted the secularist view. Prison chaplains in Britain got round to considering the morality of the death penalty just as Parliament abolished it in 1969.

Le Petit Journal illustré (21 janvier 1923) - Une femme expie son crime "A woman expiates her crime". As usual, right up to abolition of hanging, Anglican clergymen played a prominant role in the macabre ceremonial that attended British executions.

The same pattern was followed in North America. Quaker laws proposed for Pennsylvania had been vetoed by London in the seventeenth century as they were far more lenient than the capital laws of the mother country*. The complete abolition of the death penalty was first proposed in a paper read at the house of Benjamin Franklin. This paper likened public execution to "a human sacrifice in religion"*. In the years to come the battle was largely between on the one hand freethinkers, and on the other Calvinists and other traditional Churches. In Continental Europe the abolitionist cause was espoused by independent writers like Goethe and Victor Hugo but opposed by the Churches. As in Britain and America all abolitionists were condemned as infidels.

Last public execution in the USA. Rainey Bethea was be publicly executed on 14 August, 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky. Mistakes in performing the hanging and the attendant media circus contributed to public pressure for end of public executions in the United States.

The only Christian sect consistently to have opposed the death penalty was the Quakers. Like non-Christians who led the reform movement, they regarded it as immoral. This is all rather an embarrassment now in liberal countries. Liberal churchmen would have preferred it if the Church had opposed the death penalty. In fact most Anglicans and Protestants have opposed the death penalty since the 1960s, and in 1999 they were joined for the first time by the Pope. Attachment to capital punishment is now unfashionable, so most Churches around the developed world tend to play down their traditional views. Many clergymen do their best to make out that their Church has always supported the biblical injunction Thou shalt not kill, a principle that in truth was adopted only after Western society had been thoroughly secularised. Only in places like the Bible belt in the USA do traditional Christian views still predominate. Capital punishment continues to be inflicted in such places, despite secular opposition.

More social issues:

• Slavery
• Racism
• Penal Reform
• Physical Abuse
• Treatment of Women
• Contraception
• Abortion
• Divorce
• Family Values
• Children
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• The Physically Ill
• The Mentally Ill
• The Poor
• Animals
• Ecology

from the The General Laws and Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony, 1641, Revised and Reprinted, Cambridge, Massachusetts [Samuel Green, 1672, Law Library, Rare Book Collection, US Library of Congress]

§. Capital penalties were inflicted for all of these offences under Charlemagne. Margaret Deanesly, A History of the Medieval Church, p 62.

§. The formulae varied slightly, for a few variations see Scott, A History of Torture, pp 214-6.

§. Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement, pp 86 and 210.

§. For a number of cases of clergymen supporting capital punishment in unlikely cases see Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement, pp 14-15.

§. Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p 2.

§. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, Oxford University Press (1984), p 33.

§. The champion of the Sacred Cause of Hanging was the Rev. George Barrell Cleaver of New York. See Louise Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865, Oxford University Press (New York, 1989), p 147 {HiJ p 58}.

§. Geoffrey Abbott, What a Way to Go, (Macmillan, 2007). ISBN 0-312-36656-6.

§. James J Megivern, The Death Penalty. (Paulist Press, 1997).. ISBN 0-8091-0487-3.

§. Cooper is quoted by Edwin Hodder, Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, vol. 1 (1886), p 281.

§. After 1901 the bell was rung in England only after the execution. The rule requiring a black flag to be flown was revoked in 1902. Chaplains were instructed not to use the burial service at executions in 1927.

§. Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p 18 citing Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Facts relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis (London, 1832), p 167.

§. Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 3rd series, vol. cxxxiii (15 th May 1854), cols. 311.

§. Letter from Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury to Bishop Cuthbert of Coventry, 5 th July 1956, Lambeth Palace archives {HiJ p 241}.

§. The Daily Telegraph, 25 th October 1961, reviewing the BBC programme The Death Penalty of the previous day.

§. Amongst leading Quaker abolitionists were William Allen, Peter Bedford, John Bright, Charles Gilpin, Joseph John Gurney, Elizabeth Fry, Samuel Hoare, Alfred Hutchinson Dymond and John Barry. Thomas Buxton was an evangelical with Quaker sympathies.

§. Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement, pp 62 and 224.

§. George J. Holyoake, "Public Lessons of the Hangmen", The Morning Star 16 th November 1864.

§. Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p 205.

§. Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p 32.

§. Louis Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture 1776-1865, Oxford University Press (New York, 1989), p 64.