September 20

The sixteenth century was not a particularly good time to be a Roman Catholic living in England. Actually, it was a horrible time to be one. Roman Catholicism had been outlawed and its practice was grounds for imprisonment as well as execution. Poet Chidiock ‘Charles’ Tichborne was born into a Roman Catholic family in 1558. On the 20th in 1586, Tichborne was disemboweled while still alive for crimes unrelated to his poetry. In fact, there is only one surviving example of his work, which was written the evening before he was to be executed. He called it Tichborne’s Elegy; its opening line is “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares” and it was written for his wife. Queen Elizabeth, when she heard of the details of the execution and the public’s reaction to it, instituted a bold penal reform. Henceforth, Tichborne’s co-conspirators, as well as others who were to be executed, were to be hung by the neck until they were quite dead before they were disemboweled.