Thread by @soychicka

Y'all know how 'spies' and 'traitors' used to be treated, right?

It's not just execution.

Trump wants to be able to do to whistleblowers what Henry VIII did to my great(n) uncle:

hang, castrate, disembowel, and dismember them...

aka "hung, drawn, and quartered."

Let me tell you a little bit about my family history:

My great-n-uncle was Thomas Abell, chaplain to Catherine of Aragon.

And apparently, back in the early 1500s, _some_ Catholic priests weren't fond of womanizing and pedophiles .

He didn't think Henry VIII should be able to throw women* out, and wrote what some might call a whistleblower complaint, or a *dossier* that explained why.

* eventually
1 divorce,
1 annullment (-> H8's Ghislaine),
+ Anne Boyelin & her teenage cousin, both beheaded

And Henry VIII didn't like this much either - so Great-uncle Tom (a priest) was convicted of high treason vs "the crown", and punished as follows:

a) hung (as in suspended, not to snap his neck)
b) his penis was severed and his bowels removed
c) cut into quarters for display

If you'd like to read a contemporaneous account, of that day...

one slightly more distant, from The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe in 1838...

books.google.es/books?id=axUXA…

and in modern English:

So, yeah.

For treason, execution is still punishment that's on the books - but the constitution demands a form of execution that is NOT cruel and unusual punishment.

When @realDonaldTrump says "You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now" - he's not talking about execution by lethal injection or hanging.

He's talking about what you CAN'T do anymore, even to those actually guilty of treason.

He's talking about Henry VIII did to my great-uncle.

Disemboweling someone whilst they're still conscious, and cleaving them into quarters, to distribute across the nation.

As an example.