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 Historical
The Executioner Always Chops Twice: Ghastly
Blunders on the Scaffold
 by Geoffrey Abbott
$17.95 / St. Martin's / 2004
A Yeoman Warder (a Beefeater) living in the Tower of London,
Geoffrey Abbott, author of such books as Tortures o' the Tower
of London and Lords of the Scaffold, has written a
sometimes droll, sometimes bloody, but always engaging survey
of the business of killing convicted criminals, including the
methods and the people who perform the deeds.
The Executioner Always Chops Twice summarizes all forms
of execution and torture through the ages, from burning at the
stake, the guillotine, the axe, boiling in oil, and being stretched
on the wheel, to the more modern methods of the firing squad,
electric chair, gas chamber, and lethal injection. But by far
the most space is given to hangings, which, according to Abbott,
are "possibly the oldest method of execution." While
the incidents described span the centuries, many of the more
colorful and ghastly descriptions take place during the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance.
The account of the beheading of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots,
for instance, describes executioner Simon Bull's difficulties
with the axe (he was more used to hanging). His first blow missed
the mark, hitting the knot of her blindfold, and he had to swing
a few more times to sever the head (though in the end, he needed
to use his knife to cut through the gristle).
Sometimes the mistakes are even more ghastly. In 1488, an executioner
botched the boiling-in-oil execution of Loys Secretan so badly
that the convicted criminal rose to the surface twice, screaming
for mercy. The onlookers were so incensed by the cruelty that
they beat the executioner to death. Charles VIII later pardoned
these people, and Loys, still alive, was taken to the church
of the Jacobins for sanctuary, where he spent the rest of his
days, never showing his badly scarred face again.
The Executioner Always Chops Twice is full of such accounts,
as well as woodcut illustrations that bristle with detail. Abbott
provides a complete and entertaining picture of executions and
the faulty machines that were run by even more fault-prone executioners.
—Charles Rammlkamp
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