“Still the earth moves…” (1)

“Eppur si muove,” still the earth moves, Galileo Galilei the Medieval genius was said to have added to his recantation when he faced the Inquisition for the second time in 1632 as a suspect of heresy.  By then he was already a frail and ailing 68-year-old, once and for all forbidden to talk again about the movement of the planets.  He went afoul with the official stand of the Church at the time, which was that the earth was stationary and at the center of the universe and the sun moved around it.

“The Bible is intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go,” was how a cardinal expressed the Church’s stand.  While Galileo had his champions, one of whom would be the future Pope Urban III, his enemies in Church far outnumbered them.

Much had been written and recorded about last words or last acts of the condemned, including those who were condemned for execution.  And because executions in centuries past were public spectacles, enterprising citizens made business out of printing broadsheets supposedly containing the last words of the condemned.  Widely sold, hardly was it noticed in these broadsheets that some statements were repeated for different men.

“I forgive you with all my heart, for now, I hope, you shall make and end of all my troubles,” Mary, the Catholic Queen of Scotland told her executioners at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587.  She was beheaded for treason upon the orders of Queen Elizabeth I, the Protestant Queen of England, her first cousin.

Routed by Oliver Cromwell and his Roundhead forces, King Charles I eventually faced the scaffold to be beheaded on January 30, 1649.  On it he gave a final message to his people.  “And therefore, I tell you (and I pray God that I laid to your charge) that I’m a martyr of the people.”

A celebrated family of executioners who dominated the scaffold in France is the Sansons.  In 1766 Charles-Henri Sanson was confronted by young Chevalier de la Barre.  Insisting that he was no criminal, the condemned de la Barre refused to kneel down.  “Do your duty,” he told Sanson.  “I shall give you no trouble, only be quick.”

In centuries past in Europe, the usual sword of execution had a two-inch wide blade with a blunt edge and measured about 40 inches in length.  “Whenever I raise the sword I wish the sinner everlasting life,” was how a German sword of execution was inscribed.

Some parts of the paraphernalia for execution were the scaffold, the platform on which the condemned stood for execution, usually by beheading, while the block was the piece of wood on which the condemned laid his neck.   The gallows was a frame of two posts and a crossbeam from which was suspended a rope for hanging criminals.  The guillotine, named after its inventor Joseph Ignace Guillotin, was a simple machine for beheading where a heavy axe or blade slid down in vertical guides.

In some places, execution contraptions were given names.  One name was the Scottish Maiden, an early version of the guillotine, in which the Eighth Earl of Argyll, Archibald Campbell, was executed in 1661.  He declared as he knelt for beheading that it was the “sweetest maiden he has ever kissed.”

On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI declared seconds before his life ended on the guillotine: “I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge. I pardon those who have occasioned my death and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited by France.”

By October of that same year when the unlamented Queen Marie Antoinette followed her husband to the guillotine, 21 Girondins, or moderate Republicans, were also guillotined in France.  One of the leading Girondins, Georges Danton, told Sanson the executioner at the scaffold, “Don’t forget to show my head to the people.  It is well worth the trouble.”

(2004)