23 August 30 BC
Caesarion, son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, is executed by Roman troops in Alexandria.
23 August 1305 : William Wallace dies a grisly death
The Scottish rebel is hanged, drawn and quartered before a jeering crowd
At London’s most famous market, the crowds were waiting for the execution of the great rebel. After years in France trying to drum up military and diplomatic support from European powers for Scotland’s independence, William Wallace had at last been captured.
Convicted in a Westminster trial of “sedition, homicides, plunderings, fire-raisings, and diverse other felonies [including treason]”, he was dragged through the streets from the Tower of London to Aldgate and thence to the Elms, on Smithfield market’s western edge. There, Wallace was hanged before a great throng, jeering and cheering in equal measure. In accordance with the law, his body was cut down before he was quite dead. His genitals were sliced off; his internal organs ripped out and
burned in front of him. Then, finally, the executioner cut off his head and chopped his body into four parts. His limbs were sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth; his head was jammed onto a pike and displayed on London Bridge, “as a cause of fear and chastisement of all going past and looking upon these things”.
Centuries later, Wallace was rehabilitated as a kind of Scottish freedom fighter, a representative of the masses standing up to the tyrannical King Edward I. At the time, his contemporaries would have considered such an interpretation laughable. Far from being a common Scot, Wallace was a son of the lesser nobility, and his surname, which may derive from a word meaning ‘Welsh’, suggests non-Scottish origins in his ancestry. Certainly there is no evidence he saw himself as a nationalist hero. But to modern admirers, none of that matters. They prefer the Wallace in Mel Gibson’s 1995 film Braveheart, a kilt- wearing, woad-smeared Che Guevara, ranting in an Australian accent. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook
23 August 1481
Death of English judge and lawyer Sir Thomas Littleton. He is buried in Worcester Cathedral. Littleton’s Treatise on Tenures was the first English legal text to be printed.
23 August 1572
The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre began in Paris with the assassination on royal orders of a number of key Huguenot leaders. Within a day this had escalated into a widespread general slaughter of French Protestants.
23 August 1639
The city of Madras (now Chennai) was founded by Francis Day of the East India Company on a strip of land purchased from the Raja of Chandragiri.
23 August 1960
American musical producer and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II died of stomach cancer,aged 65. He is best known for the musicals he wrote in collaboration with Richard Rodgers which included Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music, which opened on Broadway shortly before his death and contained the last song he and Rodgers wrote together – Edelweiss. Following his death the lights of New York’s Times Square were turned off for a minute and those of London’s West End dimmed as a mark of respect.
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