The Execution That Started a Riot

The execution was so medievally brutal that the crowd turned into a rioting mob. In 1586, Anthony Babington and his young conspirators were convicted of plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I. Seeking to make an absolute example of them, the court sentenced them to the most agonizing death possible: being hanged, drawn, and quartered. On the scaffold, the executioner intentionally cut them down from the gallows while they were still fully conscious. Babington was laid on the wooden table, staring wide-eyed at his executors as they sliced his abdomen open and pulled his internal organs out one by one to burn them in front of his face. He was recorded whispering “Spare me, Lord Jesus” even as his heart was ripped from his chest. The butchery of the first seven men was so unimaginably gruesome that Queen Elizabeth, watching reports from the palace, was horrified by the public’s shock. She issued an emergency order for the remaining seven plotters scheduled for the next day, decreeing they must hang until they were completely dead before the blades could touch them.

Interesting Fact The executioner for the Babington plotters was an amateur who struggled with the anatomy, making the disembowelment a clumsy, prolonged torture. The event deeply scarred the public, and historians note it was one of the last times a crowd in London watched a full conscious quartering without screaming out in protest against the state.

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