Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
A little fact for you: the last man to be hung, drawn and quartered in England was a man fighting for the right to union representation.
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Cite?
A quick search offers this repudiation:
Quote:
In July 1781, the penultimate drawing and quartering was carried out against the French spy François Henri de la Motte, who was convicted of treason. The last time any man was drawn and quartered was in August 1782. The victim, Scottish spy David Tyrie, was executed in Portsmouth for carrying on a treasonable correspondence with the French. A contemporary account in the Hampshire Chronicle describes his being hanged for 22 minutes, following which he was beheaded and his heart cut out and burned. He was then emasculated, quartered, and his body parts put into a coffin and buried in the pebbles at the seaside. The same account claims that immediately after his burial, sailors dug the coffin up and cut the body into a thousand pieces, each taking a piece as a souvenir to their shipmates.
In 1803, British revolutionary Edward Marcus Despard and six accomplices were sentenced to be drawn, hanged, and quartered for conspiracy against King George III; however their sentences were reduced to simple hanging and beheading. The last to receive this sentence were two Irish Fenians, Burke and O’Brien, in 1867; however, the punishment was not carried out.
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And:
http://www.executedtoday.com/2011/08...and-quartered/
Quote:
On this date in 1782, a crowd contemporaries pegged at 100,000 mobbed the gruesome public execution of David Tyrie — the last man hanged, drawn, and quartered in British history.
Tyrie was a Scotsman clerking at a Portsmouth naval office, who was caught in a treacherous correspondence with the French. He lacked political pull of his own and either the means or inclination to shop confederates, and therefore faced the full weight of the treason statute.
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