There are good exits, there are bad exits,
and then there is Lord Lovat’s exit.
It’s April 9th, 1747.
Tower Hill is packed to the gunwales.
London has turned out in its thousands to watch the old scoundrel –
Lord Lovat –
lose his head.
And his Lordship isn’t just any old scoundrel.
Lord Lovat is Simon Fraser:
liar,
schemer,
turncoat,
charmer,
Jacobite,
anti-Jacobite,
and, this morning,
the star turn in the capital’s favourite entertainment,
a public execution.
And you gotta hand it to the old boy.
He’s nearly 80 but he’s going to meet his end with a smile on his face and enough nerve left for one last performance.
What a scene. Tower Hill.
This day, April 9th, in 1747.
A spring morning with a nip in the air and a crowd that would have done a West End opening night proud.
A sense of anticipation and excitement.
Londoners loved a spectacle and the crowd knew it was going to get one.
Though it got more than it bargained for.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This spectacle –
this show on Tower Hill –
had everything.
Treason.
Intrigue.
A man who had lied,
charmed,
betrayed,
double-crossed and wriggled his way through half a century of high-stakes politics.
And now,
at nearly eighty,
he’s about to lose his head.
Yes, beheaded.
Or if you prefer, deheaded.
Beheaded.
Deheaded.
Whatever.
That huge crowd has headed to Tower Hill to see that head and the rest of Lord Lovat go their separate ways.
And what a star turn the old fox was.
The fox without a tail,
as his enemies called him.
Tower Hill:
thousands in the crowd,
the axe ready,
and Simon Fraser, the old Highland trickster,
coming to meet his end with a smile on his face and enough nerve left for one last performance.
Though frankly they might have said without a moral compass
and been nearer the mark.
Lord Lovat was many things in his time.
Clan chief.
Courtier.
Conspirator.
Jacobite.
Hanoverian.
Jacobite again when it suited.
A man who could swear loyalty to one king in the morning and quietly write to another by teatime. If loyalty were a coat,
Lovat wore it reversible.
And here he is now,
brought down at last by the failure of the 1745 Rising.
Bonnie Prince Charlie defeated. Culloden a disaster.
The old game over.
But if you think he’s going quietly, you haven’t met Lord Lovat.
First, the entrance.
He’s carried in a sort of sedan chair because he’s too frail to walk far.
But frail does not mean meek.
He’s dressed elaborately,
layers upon layers,
as if determined to go to the block looking like a walking wardrobe. One observer said he was more loaded with clothes than a Dutchman with ten pairs of breeches.
Which is not a phrase you hear every day,
but you take the point.
He surveys the crowd.
Thousands of them.
London out in force.
And what does he do?
He smiles.
Of course he does.
This is a man who once had bagpipers play at full blast to drown out the screams of a woman he was forcing into marriage.
A man who treated catastrophe as a kind of parlour game.
The more mischief,
the better the sport, he liked to say. You begin to see the pattern.
And then,
just as the proceedings are getting properly underway,
London obliges with a bit of bonus chaos.
The scaffold collapses.
Down it goes,
with spectators on it.
Eight or ten people killed.
Others injured. Absolute pandemonium.
Among the dead,
the master carpenter of the scaffold and his wife.
They were selling beer beneath the scaffold.
Making a killing at the killing.
So to speak.
And what does Lovat do?
Roars with laughter.
And sure enough, out comes his refrain, “the more mischief the better the sport.”
You couldn’t script it.
Or rather, you could,
but people would say it was over the top.
They rebuild.
They reset.
The show must go on.
Back to business.
Lovat,
unruffled,
settles himself.
He puts on his spectacles to inspect his own coffin.
Checks the spelling, one imagines. One final administrative detail. Then he turns to the audience and delivers a few classical quotations. Horace.
Ovid.
When in doubt, go Roman.
And then,
with what witnesses agree is remarkable composure,
he lays his head on the block.
Now the other thing you need to know is Lord Lovat was extremely fat.
He was said to be the proud owner of the shortest neck in Scotland.
There was widespread speculation – and almost certainly wagers – about whether the axeman could get the job done with a single blow.
Anyway, head and neck –
what there is of a neck –
on the block.
Comes the moment of truth.
The axeman swings so hard the old rogue’s head doesn’t just go quietly,
drop down in among the woodchips and sawdust.
Oh no,
it practically takes wing,
Flies from his body. Spectators in the front row ducking because the head is heading their way.
How mighty was the axeman’s stroke?
I’m glad you asked.
The axe-blade was buried two inches deep in the block.
And should you want to –
I expect some of you will –
you can still see the axe and the block in the Tower of London.
One clean stroke.
Done.
And with that, an era ends.
Lord Lovat is the last man in Britain to be publicly beheaded.
Pause on that.
The last.
After him, no more heads rolling in public view.
The axe, that ancient instrument of state theatre, is effectively retired from the British stage.
Curtain down.
And what a final act it was.
And then –
because this is London,
and London has a long memory –there’s one last detail.
The first man to be beheaded on Tower Hill was also called Simon.
Simon Sudbury.
Archbishop.
Eighty years old.
Dragged out of the Tower where he’d taken refuge
and killed during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.
And now, in 1747,
the last man to be publicly beheaded there –
Simon Fraser.
Lord Lovat.
Also about eighty.
Simon to Simon.
First and last.
Two old men.
Two very different Londons.
One long, bloody chapter of history,
opening and closing on the same note.
And what a final act it was.
Now, because this is London,
and because London never does just one thing at a time,
let’s widen the lens for a moment.
Think about where we are.
Tower Hill.
Just there The Tower of London. We were nosing around in there yesterday,
for the Ceremony of the Keys. That wonderfully ritualised locking up of the fortress every night.
Tradition, continuity, pageantry.
And here, in the same orbit – though we’re outside the Tower, out there on Tower Hill –
we’ve got the opposite.
Spectacle of a different sort. Blood,
politics,
a life that reads like a novel written by someone who’s had too much coffee and no editorial restraint.
That’s London for you.
Ceremony on one hand,
chaos on the other.
Often within shouting distance.
And Lovat himself is pure London theatre,
even though he’s a Highland chief. Because London is where reputations are made and unmade. Where a man can reinvent himself half a dozen times and still end up centre stage.
You can almost hear him thinking, as he surveys that crowd,
that this is his final performance. And he’s not going to waste it.
Which brings us neatly to tomorrow.
Because London never stops.
No sooner have we watched one extraordinary moment than another comes sauntering round the corner, whistling innocently.
April 10th.
Snow Hill.
Now if you know your Dickens, that name should ring a bell.
Snow Hill,
just up from Holborn Viaduct, sliding down towards Smithfield. Dickens country.
Bustle, grime, energy, a bit of danger.
The sort of place where anything might happen.
And in 1633,
something did.
A herbalist called Thomas Johnson puts a bunch of bananas in his shop window.
Bananas.
In London.
For the first time.
You have to picture the scene. Londoners stopping dead.
What on earth are those?
Yellow?
Curved?
Slightly alarming.
Possibly foreign in more ways than one.
The early modern equivalent of someone unveiling a spaceship on Oxford Street.
And the best part?
They don’t really catch on for another two centuries.
That’s London again.
Capable of being ahead of its time and stubbornly behind it,
often simultaneously.
So tomorrow we leave the axe and the scaffold behind and wander up to Snow Hill.
From a Highland lord losing his head to a bunch of bananas causing a minor sensation.
History, in London, has range.
And if Lord Lovat were here to see it,
you rather suspect he’d approve.
After all, the more mischief,
the better the sport.
And here endeth your daily London fix.
Compliments of London Calling.
This is London.
London Walks at your service.
Story time. History time.
Streets ahead.
See ya tomorrow.