June 25th, 2010
Dodd has return’d from his expedition to Cheapside and London Bridge with my Lady Mother and all much dismayed at what they found upon the Bridge. The hanging, drawing and quartering we saw before may not have been what it seemed. My Lady Mother wrathful, my Lord Father concerned and Dodd continuing his low opinion of Londoners and Southrons in general. We will discuss the matter after dinner.
June 16th, 2010
God’s teeth. What a disaster. Who could possibly have thought it? Jesu, I am utterly undone.
June 16th, 2010
No time for dinner. My Father had commanded us to Westminster City by boat for to view with him a much-rotted corpse that upset one of the Queen’s Chamberers at the Privy Steps by having the ill-manners to be washed up there. Lord, what vapours there must have been! There is no notion of who the man was, for he had been in the river a couple of weeks at the least and had lost both his clothes and his feet. He was put in the river still living in despite a stab to his kidney, for there was water in his lungs. Dodd much sickened by it. We left in great disorder since the corpse then farted, turning the candles blue. But the man has some odd little scratches upon his shoulders and back, as if he had rolled in brambles. My father in great good humour and excellent health, despite the departure of Mistress Bassano from Somerset House.
June 16th, 2010
Dodd and I walked back from Tyburn to the Temple and went to speak with Mr Fleetwood, the Recorder of London’s most ill-affected and cowardly lawyer of a nephew. It seems he hath a Daybook too full to act in court for the likes of Sergeant Dodd nor even to be paid by my most worshipful Father, Baron Hunsdon. All this by the information of his clerk, a weaselly ugly little man with a haughty nose and no courtesy. I was hopeful Dodd might strike him, but in the end we left him and I shall speak with my Father that none of our family ever instruct the lily-livered young solicitor. Truly laswyers are the scum and impostume of the country, besides being very costly.
By God’s good grace, while we took tobacco by the duck pond next the new Inn still abuilding, a pocky young man said he would take the brief. He may be a spy but no matter if he can settle the pleadings well enough. As we went back to Somerset House, I saw again the delightful creature I met at my lord Oxford his card party the other week, this time as she was taking a boat across the Thames with her woman and so we could not speak.
May 20th, 2012
To Tyburn for a hanging, drawing and quartering with Sergeant Dodd.
The priest seemed no very ill sort of man, despite his Davil-addled Papistry but it was a dull show since he was gagged and furthermore hanged for a goodly time so he was already dead by the time Mr Hughes castrated him and cut his belly open.
A ballad-seller did good trade by it and a pie seller too.
One of the crowd was taken with a distemper for some reason and vomited foully – I hope not by reasons of the Plague which is hot in London even now. I was reminded of my dearest Lady Widdrington, who much surprised me when last she was in Carlisle by saying she thought it was enough to execute traitors and no need for such a show as it does not affright the Jesuits and not the crowd neither.
She is the wisest of women, but surely so vile a crime as treason against our Most Gracious Queen deserves more than a mere hanging?