William Christian of Ronaldsway, known in Manx as Illiam Dhone, Brown William, was Receiver General of the island during the Civil War. In 1651, with the Earl of Derby away fighting for the King and the Countess holding Castle Rushen, he led the rising that handed the Isle of Man over to the forces of Parliament. When Charles II came back in 1660, the Derbys came back too. The new Earl had Christian arrested and tried, and he was shot by a firing squad on Hango Hill on 2 January 1663. The King had issued a general pardon, and the Privy Council later condemned the execution, but by then it was done.
To many Manx people he was a martyr, and stories gathered round his death. The Manx Society volume on him gives two versions. In one, blankets were spread on the ground under his feet so that not a drop of his blood should fall on the hill. In the other, not a drop of blood came from his wounds at all, because he bled inwardly. Either way, the island was not to be marked with his blood.
The ballad "Illiam Dhone", made some time after his death and translated from an old copy by the Rev. John Crebin in 1774, goes further. It foretells ruin for those who had a part in his death, and later tellers pointed to families who lost their estates, whose heirs fell into poverty or whose names died out on the island. The Manx Society text also notes a tradition that the man who carried out the sentence was rewarded with land in the north.
Hango Hill still has the ruin of a seventeenth-century summerhouse on top, built by the Derbys after the execution. Manx nationalists gather at the hill each year to remember him. No ghost is recorded for the site in the sources found; what attaches to it is the curse.
Comments