How we kept Uncle Frank’s head in a hat box
As a family heirloom, it was certainly unusual. A historical novelist’s wonderfully eccentric account of... by Katharine Grant
Even though it was raining, for those of a certain disposition the spectacle had much to recommend it as a day out: a rope, an axe, a knife, and blood and guts in generous proportions.
But August 10, 1746, was not such a nice day for my five-times great-uncle Frank — Francis Towneley. The rope, axe and knife were the tools of his execution — yes, all of them. My Uncle Frank and the soldiers who died with him were the last men in the UK to be hung, drawn and quartered.
Their crime was treason. As Roman Catholics, they had raised a regiment to help Bonnie Prince Charlie dislodge the Hanoverian King George II from the British throne. The rebellion failed; the ultimate punishment was bound to follow. For the occasion, Frank had a black velvet suit made by a tailor in Southwark.
The description of Uncle Frank’s execution published in the Gentleman’s Magazine at the time was vivid, though hardly gentlemanly. It describes how Uncle Frank hung for six minutes — that’s longer than it takes to boil an egg — choking, jerking, legs dangling, and knowing, can you imagine, that this was not the worst. not by a long chalk.
Hanging was not meant to kill, only to hurt. The real execution was much bloodier and more agonising. After the six minutes, still ‘having life in him’, he was laid out on the executioner’s block to be cut into quarters (think operating table, butcher as surgeon, no anaesthetic).
The executioner cannot have been an entirely horrible man. Trying to be merciful and kill him outright, he did whack Uncle Frank with ‘several blows on the breast’.
But it takes a lot to extinguish life, and poor Frank still lived and breathed, so the executioner cut his throat, after which he ‘took his head off then ripped him open, and took out his bowels and threw them into the fire, which consumed them’.
My mind turned to Frank when I was writing my new novel, Sedition, about life in 18th-century London. He was nothing if not seditious, determined to stir up rebellion.
I told you his fate wasn’t gentlemanly. Imagine the hissing and spitting of roasting innards; the crowd groaning with horrified delight and nervously feeling their own necks and limbs, yet still pressing against barriers for a better look. Imagine the shouts: ‘More! More!’
And more there was. The executioner, showing off a rare skill, ‘slashed his [Uncle Frank’s] four quarters’, and when the body was fully butchered, plonked the bits, along with the head, into a coffin.
The coffin was, however, only a temporary resting place. Soon afterwards, some hair having been snipped off by the family as a memento, Uncle Frank’s head was dipped in preservative pitch, rammed onto a spike and exhibited on the top of Temple Bar, the gateway between Fleet Street and the Strand that marked the entrance to the City of London.
tHAT was where traitors’ heads routinely ended up, and a dragon now marks the exact spot. Frank’s body parts were luckier than his head. They were released to the family and buried in St Pancras churchyard.
I’d like to tell you that Uncle Frank’s head remained on Temple Bar for a couple of days before joining the body. I’d like to tell you that my family then sewed the body back together and that Uncle Frank is now whole again — still dead obviously, but whole.
Alas for Uncle Frank! He remains in bits. Worse — at least for his head — the sojourn on Temple Bar turned out to be a beginning rather than an end.
It happened like this. Uncle Frank’s head greeted all those passing beneath Temple Bar for at least a couple of decades. We know the timescale because Dr Johnson, that famous man of letters, saw it in the late 1760s, enquired about it and was told it belonged to Colonel Francis Towneley, that ‘ gay and volatile’ traitor, who, very bravely (that’s my view, not Dr Johnson’s) had covered Bonnie Prince Charlie’s retreat at the expense of his own life.
Dr Johnson’s response isn’t, so far as I know, recorded, but I hope he was told that Frank’s demeanour at the last was cheerful — he’s said to have laughed and joked his way to the scaffold — and that his devilmay-care attitude to the horrors in store was of great comfort to the subordinates who died with him.
I don’t think Frank looked his best by the time Dr Johnson saw him. What with weather and birds, he must have been a bit raggedy — raggedy enough, so family lore has it, for us to say ‘enough is enough’ and to steal him from Temple Bar. I believe this, since a head is just the sort of useless thing my family would steal.
Whatever the precise facts, it’s undeniable that Uncle Frank — or his head — arrived in the Towneley house in Park Street, Westminster, and sat there until someone could make up their mind what to do with him. There seems to have been no wish to take his head to the graveyard in St Pancras and do the decent thing.
Instead, Uncle Frank’s head was eventually shipped back to the ancestral home, Towneley Hall in Burnley, Lancashire, where he was placed in a basket loosely covered with a napkin, lodged on the sideboard in the red drawing room (there was also a blue drawing room, but perhaps the red seemed appropriate) and occasionally transported into the dining room to be passed round as a spectacle after dinner with the port. In 1964, a very elderly cousin recorded: ‘It was there when I was a child.’
Perhaps Uncle Frank spooked other children, since in the end his head found a new home in a wooden box stuck behind the panelling in the family chapel, and there he might have remained if it hadn’t been for central heating.
Heat and severed heads are not a good combination, and poor Uncle Frank was becoming quite discoloured.
So A new home was found, this time in a hatbox that was, in due course, dispatched back to London to sit among family papers in Drummonds Bank, Trafalgar Square — less than a mile from Temple Bar, where the head’s adventures began.
It wasn’t until after World War II that Uncle Frank’s head, still in its hatbox, was sent northwards once more and was finally buried in St Peter’s Church, Burnley. The end of the story? not quite. In 1978, this traitor ( though, naturally, we thought of him as a martyr) was deemed worthy of a blue commemorative plaque to be erected above the tomb in which his head (now minus hatbox) had finally been interred.
However, my mother wasn’t having any plaque erected before she reassured herself that the much-travelled head was safe and well. She had the tomb opened, and there, to everyone’s relief, was Uncle Frank’s head, spike hole still visible in the skull, and even some residual straggles of hair — pitch is a fine preservative.
But what was this? Another head rested beside him. Whose head? no one knew then, nor knows now, but it must have been interred with him. It rests there still, and my mother, in a considerate gesture, turned the two skulls to face each other so they could chat eternally: the original talking heads. It’s both a horrible and a funny tale.
He himself would have seen the funny side, I think, but whatever the humour, the horror of the execution remains.
In one way Frank was lucky. He did at least die before being disembowelled. In 1660, Major- General Thomas Harrison, condemned for signing Charles I’s death warrant, was reported to have leaned across and hit his executioner after being cut open. Guy Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot fame was much cleverer. He leapt from the gallows to make sure his neck broke.
The executioner must have been very annoyed, and, indeed, the crowd. When cheated of the main spectacle of their day out, they could become very angry and the executioner himself might have to flee for fear of violence.
For myself, I’m always grateful to Uncle Frank. As a Towneley by birth, my family history is full of stories, but his was the greatest. It was also very real, since the piece of hair cut off as a memento at his execution still sits, wrapped in parchment, in a small leather frame on a table in my family home. Touching the frame was a touch across time, and I rather envied my mother for having seen Frank in the flesh, as it were. When the tomb was opened, I was away. How unlucky was that!
Before being strung up, Frank addressed the crowd. ‘Tomorrow I die,’ he said, ‘and hope to make my exit in a manner becoming a Christian and a soldier.
‘The vulgar look upon the death I am to die as ignominious and shameful in all cases, but I think otherwise and hope my unfortunate end will not be the occasion of any scandal to my family.’
This last hope has certainly been realised. Far from being a scandal, Uncle Frank, what with your bravery in the face of a hideous execution and the travails of your head, you’ve actually been a bit of an inspiration.