tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post5733736570497081172..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: No Stopping / The End Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-14635250943618992272018-01-11T09:50:24.384-08:002018-01-11T09:50:24.384-08:00Some of those involved in the conspiracy had slipp...Some of those involved in the conspiracy had slipped away to France. The captive plotters, already very much the worse for the several hardships of their various unsuccessful escape attempts, were now subjected to "interrogation" (which included searches and questioning of wives, mothers, servants, messengers, bystanders and friends). One of the men thus "questioned", John Ballard, had been tortured so badly he could not stand, and had to be brought into court in a chair.<br /><br /> The court of treason convened on 13 September. Two days later the list of defendants was extended beyond the original seven to include another seven, charged as co-conspirators or accessories. The latter group included one of two brothers charged with harbouring the fugitives. A second brother was said to have "strangled himself" while in custody awaiting trial.<br /><br /> The executions were conducted over two days, upon a gallows constructed for the occasion, on St Giles's Fields. The doomed men were dragged through the streets on sleds en route to the show, with street rabble shouting well-oiled calls of derision and exhortations to repent.<br /><br /> Chidiock Tichboune was fourth of the seven men to be executed on the first day. The course of the executions was approximately the same from man to man, with some nuances demanded by special circumstance. A cart was drawn up, a man hung for some moments, just long enough to swing a few times, before the cart was driven away. The men, still alive were then cut down for butchering -- though the largest of them, the intensely committed John Savage, had broken the rope on his first swing, and had to be eviscerated without even the convincing theatrical appearance of being hung.<br /><br /> The executions on the next day were comparatively merciful. Those hung were left to dangle till "quite dead" -- this as a magnanimous gesture of humanity on the part of the Queen.<br /><br /> An official explanation of the change in execution methods was issued:<br /><br /> "The Queen, being informed of the severity used in the executions the day before, and detesting such cruelty, gave express orders that these should be used more favourably."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-58616015742632162342018-01-11T09:47:53.329-08:002018-01-11T09:47:53.329-08:00By the by, for those interested in "the facts...By the by, for those interested in "the facts of the case": the conspiracy was known as "The Babington Plot", and Chidiock Tichborne was never more than a bit player, sitting in with others, as pictured in Charles Nicholl's enthralling The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, at sessions of "wild talk -- heads filled with wine, with dreams of Catholic rebellion, with an overheated, cultish devotion to the imprisoned Queen Mary -- but what shape it had in terms of real action was largely provided by the government itself, whose agents infiltrated the conspiracy not so much to destroy it, as to encourage it."<br /><br /> The principal conspirators were Anthony Babington, who, it seems, had been inspired, as a page-boy in the Earl of Shrewsbury's household, by a passing glimpse of Mary; a wandering outlaw priest named John Ballard; and one John Savage, who, at Rheims, had been said to have sworn a solemn oath to kill the English queen.<br /><br /> The object of Walsingham's strategy was entrapment of supporters of Mary.<br /><br /> "In the words of a priest named Davis, who was with Babington on the night before his capture, the plot was a 'tragedy', in which 'the chief actor and contriver' was Sir Francis Walsingham. This is a partisan view, but on the evidence it is true enough. The Babington affair was classic piece of Walsingham 'projection': a piece of political theatre, conjured up for reasons of cynical expediency."<br /><br /> If as I've said the exact moment of its composition during his stay in the Tower (from his arrest on 14 August to his execution on 20 September) is unknown, it is certain that Tichborne's poem was included in the letter to his wife dated 19 September.<br /><br /> Walsingham, as Charles Nicholl persuasively argues, had deliberately kept the developing plot "in play", allowing the conspirators to further entrap themselves for some weeks (with his agent Robert Poley embedded in their midst and reporting back to him even while urging the plot on), until he came to fear that the central figure, Anthony Babington, might be about to slip away. The net was then drawn closed. One of the ringleaders, John Ballard was arrested on 4 August. The other conspirators scattered. Warrants were issued, watches set on the main roads out of London. After a few days in hiding, Tichborne, gamey leg and all, attempted with two others to travel south. They were quickly intercepted. Babington and a couple of others headed north, and joined up in the wilds of St John's Wood, where they lived rough for eight days before being captured after seeking food and refuge with a Catholic family near Harrow. When seized, they were hid in a barn, wearing coarse smocks and with hair shaved off, after the manner of itinerant labourers. Their return, under close guard, to London, was greeted by celebratory ringing of church bells, in thanksgiving for the Queen's supposed deliverance.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-50766666868960694582018-01-11T09:45:11.450-08:002018-01-11T09:45:11.450-08:00Terry,
Yes, a bit of a shiver every time.
That s...Terry,<br /><br />Yes, a bit of a shiver every time.<br /><br />That sort of exquisite brutality seems to require the foundation of an absolute authoritarian power to allow it it operate. The Tudors had by then had at least a century of practise in such businesses, before Elizabeth, with the essential help of Francis Walsingham, refined them into a dark art.<br /><br /> On the other hand, as history shows, savage persecution, originating in programmatic intolerance, and exercised as institutional policy, tends to have a kind of rebound effect, over time -- increasing rather than diminishing the resolve of the victims. No one understood this better than the last of the Tudor monarchs. After the horror show of eviscerations, hangings and drawings and quarterings dealt out to the "conspirators" in St Giles' Fields, there seems to have been a reconsideration of policy.<br /><br /> Tichborne's punishment in particular was extreme -- though, again, merely after the manner of the rough justice not uncommonly dispensed to those of his contraband faith. Still news of Tichborne's grotesque and cruelly protracted death and, worse, of the rumours it had incited, evidently affected the Queen, who "forbade the recurrence" of this particularly gruesome mode of execution.<br /><br /> The poem was first printed in 1586, shortly after the poet's death. It quietly made a martyr of its author.<br /><br /> Predictably, a Royalist poet was assigned to hammer out a response. This was done by one "TK", now speculated to be the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Kyd:<br /><br /> Hendecasyllabon TK in Cygneam Cantionem Chidiochi Tychborne<br /><br /> Thy prime of youth is frozen with thy faults,<br /> Thy feast of joy is finisht with thy fall:<br /> Thy crop of corne is tares availing naughts,<br /> Thy good God knowes, thy hope, thy hap and all.<br /> Short were thy daies, and shadowed was thy sun,<br /> T'obscure thy light unluckelie begun.<br /><br /> Time trieth trueth, & trueth hath treason tript,<br /> Thy faith bare fruit as thou hadst faithless beene:<br /> Thy ill spent youth thine after yeares hath nipt,<br /> And God that saw thee hath preserved our Queen,<br /> Her thred still holds, thine perisht though unspun,<br /> And she shall live when traitors lives are done.<br /><br /> Thou soughtest thy death, and found it in desert,<br /> Thou look'dst for life, yet lewdlie forc'd it fade:<br /> Thou trodst the earth, and now in earth thou art,<br /> As men may wish thou never hadst beene made.<br /> Thy glorie and thy glasse are timeles runne,<br /> And this, O Tychborne, hath thy treason done.<br /><br /> As to poor Tichborne's state of mind at the time of composition of his elegy for himself -- which surely occurred during his period of incarceration in the Tower, awaiting an execution whose exact parameters were hopefully still unclear to him, though it may or may not have actually been on the eve of the hideous event -- we can but guess.<br /><br /> There is Samuel Johnson's remark, quoted by Boswell, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-38407793794688977762018-01-11T06:23:56.662-08:002018-01-11T06:23:56.662-08:00Thanks, Tom. Every time I read that little masterp...Thanks, Tom. Every time I read that little masterpiece by Chidiock Tichborne I find myself moved. To have had the presence of mind to write such a clever, though heart-breaking, riddle of a poem under those circumstances is an extraordinary achievement.tpwhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05909239000589253931noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-11030571311896370912018-01-10T16:26:02.026-08:002018-01-10T16:26:02.026-08:00Boubacar Traoré & Ali Farka Touré: Duna Ma Yel...<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4-uq8cTF7o" rel="nofollow">Boubacar Traoré & Ali Farka Touré: Duna Ma Yelema</a>TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com