Tyburn

queen was ill chandos that does not hinder her from leading a very gay life with her favorite a

gay life a gay life the people while the queen laughs and the favorite is gorged this man eats silver and drinks gold the queen has given him the estates of lord talbot the great lord talbot the queen has made him earl of clan brazil and baron of dinas mondi this fabiano fabiani who says he belongs to the spanish family of penalver and who lies when he says it he is an english peer like you montague like you chandos like stanley like norfolk like myself like the king he has the garter the same as the infanta of portugal as the king of denmark as thomas percy seventh earl of northumberland and what a tyrant is this tyrant who rules us from his bed never did such a curse rest upon england and yet i have seen much i who am old There are seventy new gallows at Tyburn.

The stakes are always embers and never ashes.

The executioner's axe is sharp every morning and blunted every night.

Campion's jailer was so inspired by this, Delahaye's, that he saw this exchange that he eventually became Catholic.

So it was that on the 1st of December, 1581, on a muddy, wet morning, Campion was dragged on a hurdle to the streets, through the streets of London to Tyburn.

He was challenged various times and he replied to people, I'm a Catholic man and a priest in that faith I have lived and in that faith I intend to die.

If you esteem my religion treason, then I am guilty.

And because he and men like him refused to reduce the faith to something more manageable and private, the church in England did not die.

So blessedly, many of us will not be asked to face the rack, but we are asked constantly to make similar versions of that same choice, you know, to hold the faith visibly or quietly, whether to let it cost something in us.

or to protect ourselves in private, whether to be the kind of Catholic that Walpole before Tyburn was, you know, sympathetic, comfortable, keeping careful distance from anything too costly, or the kind that Walpole became afterwards.

I think that's the question that Campion's life raises.

And the final question.

The Tyburn Tree.

For centuries, condemned criminals were hanged at Tyburn in London on a huge triangular gallows known as the Tyburn Tree, now thought to be a haunted area.

How many people could it hang at once?

So it's a long bar, wasn't it? What

Um, in fact, when I was parish priest at Farm Street and people used to ask, um, for a tour and they would ask the question, "When was the church built? Um, could you give us the history of the church?" I'd say, "Well, it's actually synonymous with the history of Catholicism since the Reformation, but we can't start in 1849 when the church was built.

We can, we have to start way back in Elizabethan England and the, um, and the, the, the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Reformation, and the martyrdom of, um, of Campion and, St. Edmund Campion and others at Tyburn, which is very close to, um, to Farm Street in, um, in Central London in 1581." And yesterday I was indeed, Elizabeth, talking about Claude La Colombière and how, um, as, um, as a Jesuit priest, not English but a French priest, he, um, was able to steady the ship and how it cost him greatly, um, as we careered through the 17th century.

And, um, and, uh, Jesuits in particular, um, which is of course a fascination for me 'cause, um, it's, uh, because they, they are my religious order, um, how they were mist- mistrusted in England as a result of what happened with the Gunpowder Plot and the Put plot or the Titus Oates plot I spoke about yesterday, et cetera.

So by the time we get to the end of the 17th century, then it all goes, um, wrong again for Catholics, um, as, uh, William of Orange ascends the throne in 1688 and the country is once again, [clears throat] excuse me, Protestant all the way through the, the dark days of the 18th century.

St Thomas More, born in Milk Street, Lord Chancellor and author of Utopia, executed for refusing to accept Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church.

St. Edmund Campion, born in London, 1540 to 1581, the son of a bookseller, a Jesuit priest and missionary executed at Tyburn.

And St. Polydor Plasden, good name, born in Fleet Street, a Catholic priest executed during the Elizabethan persecution.

So St. John Henry Newman is the fifth City of London saint and he was baptised at the now extinct church of St. Bennett Fink.

Six of them, probably six, one of them was an alias, so we're not sure.

The six of them ended up getting executed at Tyburn.

They were hung, drawn and quartered.

And as a mark of clemency, if you can call it that, from the king, Charles II, who knew that it was just a fabricated plot.

A mason gets 15 shillings for lifting the three coffins out of the abbey floor.

On January 30th, 1661, 12 years to the day after the king's head came off outside the banqueting house, the three bodies are hanged at Tyburn until four in the afternoon.

Then they're beheaded and dumped in a pit under the gallows.

The heads then went up on 20-foot oak poles on the roof of Westminster Hall with Bradshaw in the middle, Cromwell on the right, and Ireton on the left.