In 1661 the skeletons of Cromwell, Ireton and other regicides were hung upon the gallows. The last execution took place in 1783, the scene being thereafter transferred to Newgate. The Tyburn Ticket was a certificate given to a prosecutor of a felon on conviction, the first assignee of which was exempted by a statute of William III. from all parish and ward duties within the district. The hangman’s halter was colloquially known in the 16th century as the Tyburn Tippet.
See A. Marks, Tyburn Tree, its History and Annals (London, 1908).
TYDEUS, in Greek legend, son of Oeneus, king of Calydon, and Periboea. Having slain his uncle (or other relatives) he fled for refuge to Argos, where Adrastus received him hospitably and purified him from the guilt of blood. Tydeus took part
in the expedition of the “Seven against Thebes,” in which,
although small of stature, he greatly distinguished himself. In
the desperate battle under the walls of the city, he was severely
wounded by Melanippus, but managed to slay his adversary.
Athena, who held Tydeus in special favour, hastened to the
field of battle, to heal him of his wound and bestow immortality
upon him. But the sight of Tydeus, cleaving open
the skull of his dead enemy and sucking out his brains, so
disgusted her that she left him to his fate. Tydeus married
Deipylē, the daughter of Adrastus, by whom he had a son,
the famous Diomedes, frequently called Tydides.
Homer, Iliad, xiv. 114–132; Apollodorus iii. 6, 8; Schol. on Pindar, Nemea, x. 12.
TYLDESLEY with SHAKERLEY, an urban district in the Leigh parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, 11 m.
W.N.W. from Manchester by the London & North Western
railway. Pop. (1901), 14,843. The town is of modern growth
and depends upon its cotton mills and the large Collieries in
the neighbourhood.
TYLER, JOHN (1790–1862), tenth president of the United
States, was born at Greenway, Charles City county, Virginia,
on the 29th of March 1790. He was the second son of John
Tyler (1747–1813), governor of Virginia in 1808–1811 and United
States district judge in 1812–1813. The family was of English
descent, but the claim of relationship to the famous Wat Tyler,
though always stoutly maintained by President Tyler, cannot
be substantiated. John Tyler the younger entered the grammar-school
of the College of William and Mary, at Williamsburg,
in 1802, and graduated in 1807. Two years later he was
admitted to the bar. His public life began in 1811, when he
was elected a member of the Virginia House of Delegates.
Here he served for five years, being chosen also in 1815 a member
of the council of state. In 1813 he raised a company for
the defence of Richmond against the British, serving
subsequently in minor operations elsewhere. From December
1816 to March 1821 he was a member of the national House
of Representatives. A Republican in politics, and a firm
believer in the doctrines of strict construction and state
sovereignty which Thomas Jefferson had been principally instrumental
in formulating, he opposed consistently the demand
for internal improvements and increased tariff duties, and
declined to follow Henry Clay in the proposed recognition of
the independence of the Spanish colonies in South America
and in the Missouri Compromise legislation. For the conduct
of Jackson in Florida, in the summary execution of Arbuthnot
and Ambrister, he had only strong condemnation. He declined
a re-election to the House in 1821. In 1823–1825 he was again
a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and in 1825–1827
was governor of the state. In 1827 he was elected to
the United States Senate to succeed John Randolph. In 1829–1830
he also served as a member of the Virginia constitutional
convention. His career as senator was marked by a degree
of independence which at times made his party position uncertain,
notwithstanding the fact that his political ideas continued
to be those of a thoroughgoing strict constructionist. Believing
protective tariff duties to be unconstitutional, he voted
against the “tariff of abominations” in 1828, and also against
the tariff of 1832, since the latter measure, though reducing
duties, showed no abandonment of the protective principle. The compromise tariff of 1833, made necessary by the hostile attitude of South Carolina, owed its inception largely to him, but he voted against the “force bill,” an act for enforcing the collection of duties, being the only senator whose vote was so recorded. His hostility to a high tariff policy, however, did not prevent him from condemning the South Carolina ordinance of nullification; and in the presidential election of 1832 he supported Andrew Jackson, to whose political principles and methods, as to those of his advisers, he was invincibly opposed, as the “least objectionable” of the various candidates.
The vigorous course of the president towards South Carolina,
however, led him, after 1833, to act more and more with the
opposition which presently became the Whig party; but he
was never at heart a Whig, at least as Whig principles came
later to be defined, and his place is with the Democrats of the
Calhoun school. He sought to incorporate in a new code
for the District of Columbia, in 1832, a prohibition of the
slave trade in the district, at the same time opposing the abolition
of slavery there without the consent of Maryland and
Virginia, which had originally ceded the district to the United
States. In the controversy over the removal of the government
deposits from the Bank of the United States he sided
with the bank, and voted for Clay’s resolution censuring Jackson
for his course in the matter. In 1833 he was again elected
to the Senate, notwithstanding the criticism of his independent
attitude and the wide approval of Jackson’s policy in regard
to the bank. In the election of 1836 he was supported as a
candidate for the vice-presidency by the friends of Hugh L.
White of Tennessee, the Democratic candidate opposed to
Martin Van Buren, and received 47 votes, none of them from
Virginia. When the legislature of Virginia voted instructions
to its senators to support Senator Thomas H. Benton’s resolution
expunging from the journal of the Senate the resolution
of censure, Tyler, though admitting the right of instruction,
could not conscientiously obey the mandate, and on the 29th
of February 1836 he resigned his seat. He was by this time
reckoned a Whig, and his refusal to favour the Van Buren
administration lent colour to that view. In 1838 he became
once more a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and
in the same year was chosen president of the Virginia Colonization
Society, of which he had long been a vice-president.
In 1839 he made an unsuccessful contest for the United States
senatorship. In December of that year the Whigs, relying
upon his record in Congress as a sufficient declaration of political
faith, nominated him for vice-president on the ticket with
William Henry Harrison, expecting that the nomination would
win support for the party in the South. Harrison and Tyler
each received 234 electoral votes and were elected. On the
4th of April 1841, one month after the inauguration, Harrison
died, and Tyler became president. The detailed discussion
of the events of his administration, 1841–1845, belongs to the
history of the United States (see United States: History). He
retained Harrison’s cabinet until his veto of the bill for a “fiscal
corporation” led to the resignation of all the members except
Daniel Webster, who was bringing to a close the negotiations
with Lord Ashburton for the settlement of the north-eastern
boundary dispute; and he not only opposed the recognition of
the spoils system in appointments and removals, but kept at
their posts some of the ablest of the ministers abroad. He
stood, however, as it were, midway between the two great
parties, without the leadership or support of either; Van Buren,
whose influence in the practical working of politics was still
great, refused to recognize him as a Democrat, and the Whigs
repudiated him as a Whig; while with Clay leading the majority
in Congress, harmony between that body and the executive
was from the first impossible. The annexation of Texas,
achieved just before the close of his administration, seemed
to commend him for a second term on that issue, and in May
1844 he was renominated by a convention of Democrats,
irregularly chosen, at Baltimore. The majority of the
annexationists, however, would not support him, and he had further
