‘I have been bred upon the Theater of death, and have learned that part’: The Execution Ritual during the English Revolution

A state can wield no greater power than to dispense death in the name of justice.1 When a royalist was found guilty of treason and executed during the English Revolution, the events of his final day formed a dramatic ritual intended to demonstrate the purging of evil and triumph of righteousness. While the state administered justice in an unemotional fashion that did not emphasise pain or revenge, the victim's role was to acquiesce and acknowledge the fairness of the proceedings. That acknowledgment, that act of being complicit in his own murder, allowed the crowd - often large and boisterous - to accept its role, not merely as witnesses, but as participants in a communal act that distributed punishment in a fair and equitable manner. This was how the authorised or conventional script ran. When a victim reached the scaffold, however, the execution ritual was not always so orderly, for counterscripts soon appeared, acted out by him, his spiritual adviser, military figures, the executioner, and the many spectators - some accepting the state's authority, some subverting it, and some instituting temporary forms of authority shaped by consensus. To see public executions either as unambiguous displays of a monolithic state power that demonstrated 'ideological control'2 or as chaotic events at which the authorities 'perpetrated the shabbiest of rituals with the minimum of authorial control'3 misses the point of what actually occurred on and around the scaffold during the English Revolution.For the execution ritual was a hybrid event that participated in both of these identities, being carefully scripted and choreographed by precedents and cultural expectations, as well as subject to violent outbursts and spontaneous moments of clownish and boorish behaviour. That public executions were perceived as ritualised dramatic events was made clear by the contemporary definition of a scaffold as 'A platform or stage on which theatrical performance or exhibition takes place'.4 Connecting cultural forms or genres and the exercise of power, Frances E. Dolan makes the following observation in her study of the representation of women's executions in early modern martyrologies, plays, and scaffold speeches:scholars increasingly focus on the ungovernability and 'generic slippage' of executions and the unpredictability of the condemned's behavior, stressing a constantly shifting interplay among the punishers, the punished, and the spectators, rather than the simple imposition of power on/against the condemned. Given this slippage, the scaffold becomes not only a locus of domination and oppression, but also an arena of boundary crossing, negotiation, and possibilities for agency.5Each moment in which the state demonstrated its power by constructing a scaffold and putting the seemingly helpless victim on display was answered by counterscripts presented by that victim, other participants on the scaffold, and the crowd. Accompanied by the significant potential for conflict between perspectives, these opportunities for dialogue indicate that executions were collaborative events carried out by a wide range of characters who demanded to be heard as they acted out their competing scripts. Sarah Covington outlines this assumption about perspective and the results it produces:In examining the shifting roles played by authorities, martyrs, and crowds, it is ... important to take not one side but many, placing oneself in the middle of the action from a confusing perspective that shifts from the stage to the audience and back again.... [A]ccounts of executions ... attest to a central fact of executions, which was not that they were simply displays of state power or set pieces for one individual's embrace of martyrdom, but rather collective affairs, dependent on all the actors involved.6In the following study of the dramatic and ritualised nature of executions in England from 1641 to 1660, I will argue that these events, defined by scripts and counterscripts, were therefore multivocal in nature. …