The Last Woman Burned Alive In England

Catherine Hayes is one of the most notorious women in the history of English crime — a figure who committed a murder so brutal that it became the stuff of ballads, broadsheets, and nightmares, and who then suffered an execution so botched that it stands as a black mark on the history of English justice. She was the last woman in England to be burned alive at the stake. And she was not supposed to burn alive. She was born Catherine Hall around 1690, near Birmingham, the daughter of a farmer. By her own account, she ran away from home at fifteen, was picked up by an army officer who enticed her with gold, and spent her teenage years in a chaos of domestic service, prostitution, and survival. In 1713, at twenty-three, she married John Hayes, a carpenter and the son of a Warwickshire farmer who had employed her. The marriage was secret and unhappy. John was devout, miserly, and violent; Catherine was restless, promiscuous, and resentful. They moved to London in 1719, where John prospered as a coal merchant and money-lender on Tyburn Road. Catherine complained he withheld money and beat her. By 1725, they despised each other.

Then two men entered their lives. Thomas Billings, a young tailor, arrived at the Hayes’ door seeking lodging. Catherine claimed he was a relative; in fact, he may have been her illegitimate son by John’s own father, conceived when she had been a servant in the Hayes household years before. Billings became her lover. Then Thomas Wood, an old acquaintance from Warwickshire, also took lodging — and also became her lover. The three of them conspired to kill John Hayes. On 1 March 1726, they persuaded John to join them in a drinking contest. Once he was insensible, they beat him to death with an axe. Then, in the dark of night, they dismembered his body. Wood, who had been a butcher, did the cutting. Catherine held the candle. They threw the head, wrapped in cloth, into the Thames at Millbank. The rest they dumped in a pond in Marylebone Fields. But the head was found the next day, washed up on a sandbank near Westminster, and displayed on a pike in the churchyard of St Margaret’s. It was recognised. The trunk and limbs were found in the pond. Catherine, Billings, and Wood were arrested. Wood died of fever in Newgate Prison before he could hang. Billings was hanged in chains. Catherine was tried for petty treason — the murder of a husband by a wife — and sentenced to be burned alive at the stake.

The Horror

The execution was set for 9 May 1726 at Tyburn. By the early eighteenth century, it had become customary to strangle a woman before burning her, so that she was dead before the flames reached her body. The cord was threaded through a hole bored in the stake, and the executioner would pull it tight once the fire was lit. Catherine was drawn to Tyburn on a hurdle — a wicker panel dragged behind a horse — and tied to the stake with an iron chain around her body and an iron collar around her neck. Two cartloads of dry brushwood were piled around her. She begged the executioner, Richard Arnet, to strangle her before the fire reached her.

He tried. He took the cord and pulled. But the wind blew the flames toward him, the fire burned his hands, and he let go. Catherine Hayes gave three dreadful shrieks. The faggots caught. She was seen trying to push the burning wood away with her bare hands, but the iron chain held her fast. The fire engulfed her. Contemporary reports claim that Arnet, seeing her agony, threw a large piece of timber into the flames, which struck her head and broke her skull, so that her brains came out. It was over an hour before her body was reduced to ashes. She had been burned alive — because the executioner could not hold the cord through the fire.

The Modern Relic

The relic is the place, and it is one of the most walked-over sites in London. Tyburn — where Catherine Hayes burned — was the principal place of public execution in London for centuries, located near what is now Marble Arch and the southeast corner of Hyde Park. The gallows stood at the junction of Oxford Street, Bayswater Road, and Edgware Road, and hundreds of thousands of Londoners were hanged there over the centuries. Today, it is one of the busiest traffic intersections in the city. There is no marker for Catherine Hayes. But a small stone plaque near Marble Arch commemorates the site of the Tyburn Tree, the famous triangular gallows where so many died. And the pond in Marylebone Fields where John Hayes’s dismembered body was dumped is long gone, built over by the streets of modern Marylebone. The last woman burned alive in England died in agony because a cord burned through an executioner’s fingers — and the city where it happened has paved over every trace of her, except the stories.

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