George Swalwell was the last person to be publicly executed in Darlington. He had been sentenced to death in Durham three days earlier for treason as he refused to renounce his Catholicism. He was trussed to a cart and taken to his hometown, where four priests beat him with a rod across the Market Place to the gallows on Bakehouse Hill.
‘To terrify him the more, they led him by two great fires, the one made for burning his bowels, the other for boiling his quarters,’ recorded Bishop Richard Challoner.
The rope was put around Swalwell’s neck and, as he urged Catholics in the crowd to pray for him, he was pushed off the ladder. He was cut down before he lost consciousness and the hangman ‘drew him along by the rope yet alive, and there dismembered and bowelled him, and cast his bowels into the fire’, said the bishop.
At the taking out of his heart, he lifted up his left hand to his head, which the hangman laid down again; and when the heart was cast into the fire, the same hand laid itself over the open body … Then the hangman cut off his head and held it up saying: ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ His quarters, after they were boiled in a cauldron, were buried in the baker’s dunghill.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2002)