20 Rebels Whose Punishment Made Them Legends

Guy Fawkes was the explosives expert for the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, a plot led by Robert Catesby and other English Catholics to blow up England’s Parliament and assassinate King James I. Soldiers caught him guarding barrels of explosives under the House of Lords, and torture made him confess. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but managed to break his neck when he jumped off the ladder leading to the gallows, avoiding the gruesome death that was coming. Centuries later, his face became an international protest symbol.

Joan of Arc was a teenager from a farming family who led French soldiers in the Hundred Years’ War against the English. The Burgundians captured Joan and sold her to the English, who put her on trial for heresy and dressing as a man. The presiding judge was an English-pledged bishop, Pierre Cauchon, who condemned Joan to die after she refused to recant the voices she said told her what to do. She was burned alive in Rouen at approximately age 19. Although a later church trial officially exonerated her, by then the story had surpassed her judges.

William Wallace led Scottish resistance against English rule during the Wars of Independence until he was betrayed near Glasgow and taken to London. Tried for treason before a royal court at Westminster Hall, he was denied a lawyer and argued he could not betray a king he had never sworn to serve. The court rejected that defense and executed him at Smithfield, dragged, hanged, beheaded, and quartered, with his remains displayed in Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling, and Perth as a warning to the Scots. Instead, his death turned him into Scotland’s lasting symbol of resistance.

In 1943, Sophie Scholl, a 21-year-old student in Munich, was part of the White Rose, a non-violent resistance organization that she ran together with her brother Hans. The Gestapo caught her passing out anti-Nazi leaflets. Under interrogation, she took sole responsibility for their distribution, protecting her co-conspirators. During her trial before Roland Freisler, head of the Nazi regime’s political court, she said, “What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare to express themselves.” She was found guilty of treason and beheaded by guillotine a few hours later. She had written one word on her indictment: “Freiheit,” meaning “Freedom.”

Thomas More had been Lord Chancellor, the chief law officer for King Henry VIII, until he refused to swear an oath that declared Henry head of the Church of England. More spent over a year in the Tower of London, where he remained publicly silent so his words could not be used against him, while quietly refusing to renounce his Catholic beliefs. A court found him guilty of treason based on the testimony of a government lawyer. Shortly thereafter, he was beheaded. More is said to have told the onlookers that he died “the King’s good servant, and God’s first.”

The Roman Inquisition, the Catholic Church’s heresy court, had recently called Italy’s pre-eminent scientist, Galileo Galilei, to answer for a book in which he defended heliocentrism, or the theory that the Earth orbits the Sun. There was the threat of torture, and then the humiliation of being made to recant while kneeling. The pope commuted his punishment to house arrest at a villa outside Florence, where Galileo continued his experiments in secret and wrote another landmark physics book. Legend has it that he muttered, “and yet it moves,” though that phrase didn’t appear in print until more than a century after the trial.

John Brown was a radical abolitionist in the United States who believed that slavery would end only through bloodshed. With 21 followers, he attacked a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the hope of sparking a slave insurrection. Brown and several of his men were surrounded and captured by U.S. Marines commanded by Robert E. Lee within two days. At his trial for treason and murder, Brown delivered a calm final speech saying his raid was obedience to a higher law. He was hanged a few weeks later, and Union soldiers marched singing “John Brown’s Body.”

In 1703, Daniel Defoe, later known for his novel Robinson Crusoe, was convicted of seditious libel after he published an anonymous satirical pamphlet lampooning intolerance of religious beliefs. He was fined, spent a while in Newgate Prison, and then sentenced to three days in the pillory. Before the punishment, Defoe had written an ironic ode titled “A Hymn to the Pillory,” and according to contemporaneous descriptions, those who came out to see him punished were moved to applaud him and read his own ode back to him.

Martin Luther, a German monk whose writings against Catholic Church practices had ignited the Protestant Reformation, the schism that split Western Christendom, had been summoned to face Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Refusing to recant, he was placed under an imperial ban, which outlawed him, banned his books, and permitted anyone to kill him without punishment. Instead, a sympathetic prince secretly sheltered him at Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament into German. The famous line “Here I stand, I can do no other” was popularized in supporters’ pamphlets, but it does not appear in the official transcript.

John Lilburne, a young Puritan apprentice who later helped establish the radical Leveller movement in England, was charged with smuggling outlawed religious tracts from Holland. For that, a royal court known as the Star Chamber sentenced Lilburne to be whipped through London’s streets and confined to the pillory. In addition to receiving around 500 blows with a three-thonged whip, Lilburne pulled more contraband pamphlets from his pockets and threw them to the crowd as he bled in the pillory. When guards gagged him, he continued to protest by stamping his feet.

Ned Kelly was the leader of a gang of Australian bushrangers who resisted the police in colonial Victoria, Australia. During his final confrontation at Glenrowan, he wore about 90 pounds of homemade iron armor made from plowshares, but police shot him in the legs and took him prisoner. Prior to his murder trial, Kelly dictated a lengthy letter outlining police corruption and the oppression of poor Irish-Australian settlers, and a petition for his release was signed by tens of thousands of people. Kelly was hanged in Melbourne at age 25.

Voltaire’s real name was François-Marie Arouet, and he was a French writer who often satirized public figures. He was imprisoned in the Bastille, a Paris jail for political and literary criminals, when authorities thought that some of his verses mocked the regent of France. After about 11 months in prison, Voltaire started using his famous pseudonym for all his future publications. This stint at the Bastille established his reputation as a fearless writer.

John Wilkes was a radical British member of Parliament and newspaper publisher who regularly lampooned King George III in print. When he was charged with seditious libel and incarcerated in London’s King’s Bench Prison, a group of protesters gathered outside and shouted “Wilkes and Liberty.” The soldiers stationed at the prison opened fire on the crowd and killed at least six, an event now known as the St. George’s Fields Massacre. Three times, Parliament kicked Wilkes out of office. And three times, the people of Middlesex voted to send him right back.

The author John Bunyan was an English tinker and preacher who held unofficial religious services not part of the Church of England, a practice that became illegal when King Charles II resumed power. He was imprisoned for doing so, was offered freedom if he agreed not to preach again, and served 12 years in Bedford County Jail. There, Bunyan made shoelaces to feed his family, wrote an autobiography, and wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, which has been translated into over 200 languages.

In 1792, Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, the English pamphleteer, published Rights of Man, an attack on monarchy, and was forced to flee to France, where he was awarded an honorary place in the French revolutionary government. He was tried by default in London for seditious libel and outlawed that year. In Paris, the Jacobins imprisoned him for opposing the execution of King Louis XVI and kept him for almost a year in Luxembourg Prison. He narrowly avoided being executed himself.

Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party, was arrested for picketing the White House on behalf of women’s suffrage. She was given several months’ imprisonment in the District of Columbia Jail, where she went on a hunger strike and was put in solitary confinement. There, guards force-fed her by inserting tubes up her nose. At the same time, guards attacked a different contingent of suffragists at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. Angered by these events, the public compelled the government to free the imprisoned picketers in a matter of weeks.

Eugene V. Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America, and he gave an anti-war speech that led to his conviction for sedition and a ten-year sentence in federal prison. During his trial, he said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it.” While Debs was imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, he ran for president as the Socialist nominee, campaigning as Convict No. 9653. He received almost 1 million votes.

Socrates spent most of his life in the public square of Athens, questioning other Athenians about ethics and what they truly knew. A jury of fellow Athenians convicted him of impiety and corrupting the youth and sentenced him to death. Later, his student Plato wrote that Socrates defended his questioning as a service to the city, but that was Plato’s literary reconstruction, not a transcript of his defense at trial. When yet another student offered to help him escape, Socrates refused, instead opting to die by drinking a cup of hemlock rather than break the law.

Mahatma Gandhi’s journal, Young India, had published anti-colonial articles that led to him being charged with sedition under colonial law and put on trial. He pleaded guilty, declined any legal defense, and even asked the British judge presiding over his case to give him the maximum possible sentence. The visibly moved judge duly passed down a six-year sentence and expressed hope that he would be released early. He served only just under two years, having been released following emergency surgery, but the trial had effectively put British justice in India on trial.

Rosa Parks was a seamstress and secretary of the local NAACP chapter, already a trained activist, when she refused a bus driver’s order to give up her seat to a white passenger. She was arrested and fined for violating the city’s segregation law. She later recalled she was not physically exhausted at the time, only “tired of giving in.” Her arrest mobilized Montgomery’s Black residents, led by a rising young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr., to begin a bus boycott that culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against segregation on buses.

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