Victorian and twentieth-century sensibilities have been quick to condemn the decapitation of Wingina by a force under the command of Ralph Lane. They saw the action as unwarranted brutality against a Native American leader. Though, in actuality, it was not Wingina whose head was displayed to Lane. The Roanoke chief had changed his name to Pemisapan, which Lane – probably informed by Manteo – correctly took to mean that he planned to start hostilities. This is also what another Algonquian chief, Powhatan, did a generation later.

But exactly how unnatural and savage was beheading in Tudor times, unaware of the modern concepts of “cruel and unusual punishment”?

In Elizabeth’s England, traitors’ heads were raised on pikes above Stone Gate, at the southern end of London Bridge. In 1592, 34 displayed heads were counted by a German visitor. The early seventeenth-century engraving by Cornelius Fisscher of London depicts Bridge Gate, at the south end of London Bridge, with only twelve heads on poles. It must have been a slack season.

Elizabeth was also Queen of Ireland, where beheadings and their display were just as commonplace.

In 1569, Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh’s half-brother, was appointed governor of Munster province in Ireland. To quell a rebellion there, he is reported to have used terror tactics by setting up a corridor of severed heads to his camp. He was rewarded with a knighthood.

The Lord Deputy (Governor) of Ireland then, Sir Henry Sidney was successful in suppressing rebellions. His soldiers proudly brought back the severed heads of leading rebels, as seen in the following portion of an image from Derrick’s 1581 illustrated account of those conflicts, The Image of Irelande, with a discouerie of Woodkarne. Because woodkern were native warriors who roamed heavily forested 16th-century Ireland, they were very difficult to hunt down. Derrick added descriptive captions in doggerel couplets.

Sir Walter Raleigh was well aware of the policy then applied to Irish rebels. “[W]e have always in Ireland geven head money for the killinge of rebels, who ar evermore proclaymed at a price. So was the Earle of DESMONDE, and so have all rebels been practised against. ^[1]

In 1583, the Earl of Desmond was hunted down and killed by the O’Moriarty clan and English troops. The clan chief, Maurice, received 1,000 pounds of silver and a pension of 20 pounds a year from the English government for Desmond’s head, which was sent to Queen Elizabeth and displayed on London Bridge on 13 December 1583. Exposed to wind and water, it is doubtful that the head lasted long enough for the German’s visit in 1592.

Yet, Elizabethans did hold some actions inhuman, especially how bodies of dead Christians were treated. For instance, on 19 December 1578, in a bay near the town of “Cyppo” north of Valpariso in Chile, Drake’s shore party was ambushed on the beach, killing “one Richard Miniuy…, whose dead body…the Spaniards beheaded, the right hand cut off, the heart pluckt out, all of which they carried away in our sight…a most extreame and barbarous Cruelty.” ^[2] Drake also pointed out that the Spanish colonial authorities were equally brutal to the native Indians.

On the other hand, the common penalty for certain crimes against the Crown, like treason and counterfeiting (the monarch’s image on a coin), was hanging, drawing, and quartering. This involved an incomplete hanging, then castration of the living victim who then was dragged dragged through the streets for a public witness to justice, and finally the severing of the body into four quarters. It is no coincidence that a century later, in 1676, the pious New England Puritans captured the Wampanoag chief Metacomet (called by them King Philip), then decapitated him and quartered his body so they could put it on display.

Ralph Lane’s swift action at Roanoke to prevent a wide war that would endanger his men, in its proper context, should be seen as in the 16th-century military tradition. And, yes, he could well have expected the decapitated head of the treacherous Pemisapan to be brought to him by Edward Nugent. Before Roanoke, Lane had served in Ireland. After twenty years “service about Her Magesty’s person, he chose to employ himself in Her desolate Kingdom of Ireland.” ^[3] One of the ironies of history is that just three years before the fight at Roanoke, in August 1583, an Irishman of likely the same family, Edmund Nugent, “base brother to the baron of Devlin,” was himself decapitated and his head taken to the Lords Justices. ^[4] But Lane had not been involved in that. At the time, he was busy moving the entire O’More clan from the border of The Pale to distant County Kerry. ^[5]

In the 21st century, such examples of the inhumane treatment of political enemies, rebels, and native peoples flaunts international standards of justice and human dignity, leaving only dictatorships, religious fanatics, and the criminally insane to seek glory in ruthless bloodletting. Incidentally, while he was still at Court, Lane had received a letter from Captain Richard Bingham, with an eyewitness description of the November 1580 sailors’ massacre of surrendered and disarmed Papal soldiers at Smerwick Harbor in Kerry. ^[6] It exonerates the English army and especially Walter Raleigh, who was then serving in County Cork. But Elizabeth and her Court praised the action and how Raleigh’s participation displayed zealous devotion to his sovereign. He, it must be admitted, did nothing to refute the claim.

Eric Kingelhofer, July 2024

Footnotes

[1] October 1598 letter from Raleigh to Sir Robert Cecil, Principal Secretary, Letter XV in Sir John Pope Hennessy,  Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland, Thomas Herron, ed., University College Dublin Press, Dublin. 2009, p. 99; orig. ed., Kegan Paul, London, 1883. p. 194.

[2] The World Encompassed and Analogous Contemporay Documents concerning Sir Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation of the World, Cooper Square Publishers, New York, 1969; orig pub.1926; text from Sir Francis Drake, Bt. The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, Nicholas Bourne, London, 1628, p.41.

[3] Ibid., p. 505.

[4] Calendar of State Papers, Elizabeth, vol 2, p.463.

[5] Ibid., pp. 493-94, 499.

[6] BL Cotton B XIII, f. 322. Bingham also sent that day, 11 November 1580, the same letter to Lord Leicester, f. 324. These little-known letters contradict Hooker’s later account of Raleigh’s loyal participation in the murders.