The Heads on the Tower and Their Burial by Night

In silence and amid general horror the heads of the lords who perished by the executioner's hand on the Old Town Square on 21 June 1621 were set upon the tower; they hung there as a warning, a terror and a dread to a defeated nation. Their taking down ten years later, by contrast, was done with ceremony, and it was a scene worthy of an ancient tragedy: the skulls were lifted by sons, grandsons and kinsmen. When Prague was in Saxon hands in 1631 and many exiles returned to Bohemia with them, it was announced from the pulpit during divine service in the Týn church on 30 November that the burial of the executed would take place that afternoon at two o'clock. Four hours before evening the friends of the beheaded lords took the heads from the spikes with their own hands, laid each in a separate box and carried them into the customs house by the bridge; among them was Mikuláš Diviš, whose tongue had been nailed to the gallows on the day the lords died on the square. When the Týn bells had tolled three times and at great length and the preachers had gathered at that customs house, the procession set out: in front rode Václav Vilém of Roupov, behind him a pewter cross was carried, then came thirty-three pairs of preachers, and before the bier walked Master Martinius of Dražov, and all sang along the way to the Týn church. Where the heads were laid at last is known only from legend. The secret is said to have held until 1766, when the skulls were come upon while the foundations of a new altar of the Virgin were being dug near the Týn sacristy, and were removed from the church; by another account they were buried at Saint Saviour's. The preacher Matěj Krocín, who was assistant clergyman at Týn in 1631 and is said to have held the keys of the chapel, testified under interrogation after the expulsion of the Protestants in 1632 that the heads had been carried from the Týn chapel to the Carolinum, and that he had not seen them since and did not know where they were.