Hi,

I don't want to be pedantic, but your comments that the Gunpowder Plotters were beheaded is inaccurate. They were hung, drawn and quartered.

That involved partial hanging, when the victim was cut down, still alive, then disembowelled, and tied to four horses, by his arms and legs; the horses were driven off in different directions, thus 'quartering' the subject.

That has always seemed to me to have been, in addition to being a particularly unpleasant form of execution, unlikely to have worked properly. In the first place, 'partial' hanging could not be guaranteed to have left the victim still alive, (or consciuos, any way), and disembowelling would almost certainly have killed the victim, so that the quartering could really only take place on what was by then a dead body.

Regards,

Roy Burke

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