Smithfield, London personal signature of the Monarch), invariably upon ministerial recommendation, which if unexercised by the time of a Sovereign's death required renewed authority. In this case Queen Elizabeth did not approve the executions, thus freeing the Protestants. During the 16th century the Smithfield site was also the place of execution of swindlers and coin forgers, who were boiled to death in oil. By the 18th century the "Tyburn Tree" (near the present-day Marble Arch) became the main place for public executions in London. After 1785, executions were again moved, this time to the gates of Newgate prison, just to the south
The Great Terror trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of Western writers and had underlain books such as George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". According to the book, the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which together with man-made famines had led to 20 million deaths according to his estimates. In the appendix of the original 1968 edition of "The Great Terror", Conquest estimated 700,000 "legal" executions took place during 1937 and 1938, which was roughly confirmed by the 681,692 executions found in the Soviet archives