In April 1784, George Nevill, 17th Baron Abergavenny, was approached to ask whether he would accept promotion to an earldom. In the wake of Pitt the Younger’s success in the general election, it was time for debts to be repaid and right at the front of the queue was John Robinson. Robinson had formerly worked for Lord North as a political agent but had chosen to switch his allegiance to Pitt and put all of his energy into securing Pitt a handsome victory. Robinson’s daughter was married to Abergavenny’s heir, Henry, so the new peerage would ensure that Robinson would ultimately be grandfather to an earl.

Abergavenny had also made a political journey. Married back in the 1750s to a member of the Pelham clan, he had naturally found himself within the orbit of the Old Corps Whigs and then of the Rockinghams. A consistent opponent of North and his handling of the American crisis, he had distanced himself from the former Rockinghamites who had entered the coalition with North and ultimately helped to bring the Fox-North administration down. So, the earldom was a double reward.

It might all have been very different, as exactly 37 years previously, while a student at Christ Church, Oxford, Abergavenny had narrowly avoided being tried for murder.

The story, as told in the press and in private correspondence, was that one of the Christ Church scouts (servants) named John or William Franklin (the papers could not agree which) had been found early in the morning of 4 April 1747 in one of the college quadrangles, badly bruised and with a fractured skull. His hair had been shaved and his eyebrows burnt off. There were also tell-tale indications of him having been very drunk.

What appeared to have happened was that a group of students, one of them Claudius Amyand, had been holding one of their regular shared suppers in their rooms, but had decided to entertain themselves by making Franklin, who seemed to have had a reputation as being somewhat eccentric, extremely drunk. The regular attendees had taken the prank (as they viewed it) so far, but things had become more extreme when they were joined by others, who had not been part of the original group. The newcomers were Abergavenny, Lord Charles Scott, a younger son of the duke of Buccleuch, Francis Blake Delaval and Sackville Spencer Bale (later a clergyman and domestic chaplain to the 2nd duke of Dorset). They appear to have handled Franklin very roughly – making fun of him by shaving his head – and to have left him so drunk that he was utterly incapable. According to Frederick Campbell, Abergavenny and Scott retreated to their own rooms at this point, leaving it to the remainder of the party to drag Franklin ‘out to snore upon the stair-case’. [Hothams, 42]

It was unclear what happened next, but it was assumed that after being abandoned on the stairs, Franklin had fallen down, fracturing his skull. On being discovered in the morning, Abergavenny’s valet took Franklin home, where he was examined by a surgeon, but nothing could be done for him. That there may have been a more sinister explanation for his injuries was, however, indicated early on by the news that most of those believed to have taken part in the drinking session had fled, and it was gossiped that the two most responsible for his injuries had been Abergavenny and Scott. [Ward, 169]

Certainly, the coroner’s jury considered that there had been foul play and brought in a verdict of ‘wilful murder by persons unknown’. Some observers took a different view. Frederick Campbell reckoned that it had been a joke that had been carried too far and he was certain that none of those in the frame would ever be convicted. He also added that ‘there was not three of the jury but was drunk’. [Hothams, 42] Horace Walpole’s sympathies, unsurprisingly, were also with the students, commenting: ‘One pities the poor boys, who undoubtedly did not foresee the melancholy event of their sport’. He had nothing to say about the unfortunate Franklin, who had lost his life. [Walpole Corresp, xix. 387] The only one of the group who seemed to have played no role in what had happened to Franklin was Amyand, who had quit the supper party early.

Had Abergavenny been charged with murder, he would have been able to apply to the House of Lords to be tried before them, in the same way that had happened to Lord Mohun in the 1690s and was to happen again soon afterwards to Lord Ferrers and Lord Byron.

In the event, there was no need for Abergavenny to face the prospect of a trial in Westminster Hall. While the coroner’s jury had concluded that Franklin’s death had been murder, the grand jury that sat on the case during the summer assizes refused to bring in the bill triggering a trial. The grand jury was said to have been made up of some of the principal gentlemen of the county and to have deliberated for several hours before reaching their decision. No doubt they were reluctant to agree to a trial of students from gentry (or noble) backgrounds, but they may also have been swayed by the convenient death of Lord Charles Scott just a few weeks before the assizes, which left the proceedings lacking a key witness (or a likely defendant).

Whatever his role had been, Abergavenny walked away unscathed. In 1761 he applied to be recognized as Chief Larderer at the coronation of George III and Queen Charlotte, and in 1784 he had his status enhanced with promotion to the earldom. Blake Delaval was also able to cast off whatever opprobrium had attached to him, and just two years after Franklin’s death stood for Parliament for the first time (unsuccessfully). He later represented Hindon and Andover and in 1761 was made a knight of the Bath. What happened, truly, on that night in April 1747 was never discovered and justice for Franklin – or at least a full explanation of what had happened to him – was never achieved.

RDEE

Further reading:

The Hothams: being the chronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and South Dalton…, ed. A.M.W. Stirling (2 vols, 1918)

Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (Yale edition)

W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford: University Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1958)

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Whitehall Evening Post

Long before he came to the scaffold on 5 May 1760, Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers, had made quite a name for himself as a notorious member of the House of Lords. Ferrers had not expected to inherit the peerage, being the son of one of the 1st Earl’s younger sons. However, the death of his mentally unstable uncle in 1745 handed the title to him, along with extensive lands. According to the family historian, it was a distinction:

his ungovernable temper (at times amounting almost to insanity) rendered him unworthy to inherit

Stemmata Shirleiana

In 1758 Horace Walpole reported to his friend Horace Mann, how Ferrers had been the subject of gossip for the last year as he was believed to be attempting to murder his countess. He had been ordered to keep the peace by the Lords, only to break it time and again. He then ignored an order to attend the chamber, preferring instead to go to the Hertford assizes, where he appeared as a witness against a highwayman who had attempted to rob him. Ferrers had apparently drawn a pistol to defend himself, but was trembling so badly that the highwayman snatched the gun out of Ferrers’ hand, telling him he knew well that it was not his only one. Ferrers’ ability to testify was then challenged on the grounds that he was excommunicated. The highwayman was acquitted.

By the time he came to be tried for his own life, then, Ferrers was well known to the Lords but for all the wrong reasons. A contemporary had apparently said of Ferrers years before that he would not be thought mad enough to be ‘shut up’ till he had murdered someone, and he would then be found too mad to be executed.

The action that finally brought Ferrers to be tried in Westminster Hall was the cold-blooded murder of his steward, John Johnson, on 18 January 1760. After Ferrers and his countess separated, Ferrers had entrusted much of the running of his estates to agents, like Johnson, but he had become increasingly convinced that they were acting against him. He summoned Johnson to a meeting, separated him from the rest of the servants and shot him.

Ferrers was quite open with those who came to give the dying man help that he had meant to do it and that he in no way repented trying to kill someone he characterized as ‘a villain’. However, having botched the attempted assassination he decided he might as well show clemency to the unfortunate man. Johnson was carried up to a bedroom in Ferrers’ house, a surgeon was called for, and Ferrers even demonstrated the angle at which he had fired the pistol to help the surgeon attempt to remove the bullet. It all proved in vain and, after lingering for several hours, Johnson died of his injuries.

After Johnson’s death Ferrers was arrested and carried off to Leicester gaol. He was then removed to the Tower of London to await his trial before the House of Lords on 16 April.

Westminster Hall was normally flanked by stalls selling books, pamphlets and other goods, with the four law courts of chancery, exchequer, king’s bench and common pleas located in the four corners. Transforming it into a court for a state trial like Ferrers’ meant the stall keepers being forced to shut up shop for the duration, while scaffolds were erected so that spectators could be accommodated. Unlike many parliamentary occasions, this was one that was open to a large number of people. Royal chaplain, Edmund Pyle, recorded it as ‘a most august sight’.

At the heart of proceedings, though, were the Lords themselves, presided over by the recently promoted Lord Henley, who served as lord high steward for the duration. At 11am on the 16th a great procession of judges and officials filed into Westminster Hall, followed by the Lords in pairs. After the charge had been read out, Ferrers was brought in with a gaoler bearing an axe before him. During the trial the blade was turned away from him, signifying his innocence until conviction. The prosecution then proceeded upon the case, summoning witnesses to establish the course of events.

When he was finally called on to give his defence, Ferrers appeared embarrassed and reluctant to proceed. After some hesitation, he presented witnesses testifying to the ‘lunacy’ of his uncle, the 3rd earl, and of another relative, Lady Barbara Shirley. He now argued (at the prompting of his own family), that he had also been temporarily insane at the time of the murder. As the trial entered the second day, though, the questioning gradually unpicked Ferrers’ version. While some witnesses concurred that he was known to be prone to tantrums, others contradicted the impression, suggesting instead that Ferrers was quite normal, if given to heavy bouts of drinking.

At the close of the trial each lord, from the most junior to the most senior, stood in turn to declare whether or not they believed Ferrers to be guilty or not guilty ‘upon mine honour’. The result was never in much doubt and on 17 April one by one Ferrers’ erstwhile colleagues rose to condemn him. On the 18th the court reconvened when he was sentenced to be hanged and his body submitted for dissection in Surgeons’ Hall.

In deference to his rank, Ferrers was said to have been hanged with a rope made from silk. Accounts of his execution do not mention this, though it is clear that far more ceremony was accorded him than most of the unfortunates who ended up at Tyburn. On the day of his execution, he was allowed to travel from the Tower in his own coach, wearing the suit he had worn on his wedding day, though he was denied a last request to stop at an inn for a drink before reaching the scaffold. The place of execution itself was swathed in black cloth in deference to Ferrers’ position. Such carefully staged solemnity was upset at the end by a contretemps between the executioner and his assistant, after Ferrers accidentally handed five guineas to the latter by mistake.

This was the last occasion when a peer of the realm was hanged for murder, but it was also the first time that a new device was used at the gallows. In the past, those convicted were turned off a cart or ladder; Ferrers was the ‘guinea pig’ for the ‘new drop’, whereby the floor was removed from underneath his feet.

At the time, much was made of the equity of the law: Ferrers had not escaped execution and, like any other common criminal, his body was handed over for dissection. But even in death, rank clearly did matter. While a minimal level of probing was carried out on the earl’s corpse, he was not fully dissected, and was handed over promptly for burial at St Pancras. To ensure that an annoyed populace did not dig him up, the grave under the tower was said to have been dug unusually deep.

RDEE

Further Reading:

Howell’s State Trials, xix.
Elizabeth Hurren, Dissecting the Criminal Corpse: Staging Post-Execution Punishment in Early Modern England (2006)
E.P. Shirley, Stemmata Shirleiana, or the Annals of the Shirley Family (1873)

The fate of Thomas Fiennes, Lord Dacre, in 1541, the first peer to be executed for an offence short of treason, evokes sympathy from the modern observer, both as a punishment out of proportion to his crime (which fell far short of wilful murder) and for the abuse of process required to deprive him of the chance of acquittal by his peers. It is, however, hard to feel any sympathy for the second peer to face the same fate, namely Charles, Lord Stourton, sixteen years later. Here we are fortunate to have a lengthy narrative, compiled very soon after the murders of William Hartgill and his son, John, by one who had access to eye-witness testimony. Although the anonymous author was seemingly a servant of Stourton (whom he refers to several times as ‘my Lorde’), he makes no attempt to conceal the magnitude of his master’s crime, notable, as it was, for its duplicity and barbarity.

The immediate context of the murders was the degeneration of a relationship that had once been close. Charles’s father, William, had employed William Hartgill as his steward, but, towards the end of his life, he had come to distrust him. In a letter written shortly before his death in 1548, he reproached Hartgill for seeking ‘youre owne gayne more than my comodytie and honor’. The first serious outbreak of violence came at Whitsuntide 1550 when the new Lord Stourton’s servants besieged William Hartgill and his wife in the tower of the church of Kilmington, for which offence Stourton was briefly imprisoned in the Fleet. Thereafter, he continued to harry the Hartgills, plundering their corn and cattle and organising a vicious assault on John Hartgill. These oppressions attracted the attention of the privy council which condemned him in heavy damages of nearly £400. On Monday 11 January 1557 Stourton enticed the Hartgills to a meeting at Kilmington church on the pretext of paying them this sum. At first this meeting was a public one, for Stourton came not only with a group of his servants, numbering about 15, but also with a larger group of local gentry to the number of about 60. When all were gathered, Stourton, instead of paying the damages, arrested the Hartgills on a spurious charge of felony and so seriously assaulted the younger Hartgill’s wife ‘so as in three howres the companye had moch to doo to kepe lyfe in her’. The public forum of the arrest was a curious mode of proceeding if the purpose was murder; none the less, the author of the narrative was in no doubt that the murders were premeditated. He tells us that, once Stourton had William and John Hartgill in his custody, he sent away his servants save ‘soch as he had especially appointed for the murder’.

The murders themselves appear to have been particularly brutal. At about 11 p.m. on 12 January the bound prisoners were beaten with clubs in a close next to Stourton’s manor house at Stourton, two miles from Kilmington, and then, when this did not extinguish life, they had their throats cut in the manor house itself with Stourton standing by with ‘a candel in his hande’. The bodies were then buried in a cellar and every effort made to conceal them. The narrative implies that Stourton feared betrayal by his own servants, and the fact that the sheriff, Sir Anthony Hungerford, was later able to exhume the bodies, even after they had been buried under rubble, shows that at least one of those present gave evidence against their master. Indeed, the narrator of the account, drawing on this information, not only describes the method of murder but also part of the conversation in the aftermath. One of the perpetrators is said to have told his master, ‘Ah my Lorde! This is a pytiouse sight: hadde I thought that I now thincke, before the thing was doon, your hole land could not have woon me to consent to soch an acte’. To which Stourton darkly replied, ‘What, fainte harted knave! Ys yt anny more then the rydding of two knaves that lyving were troublesome bothe to Goddes lawe and man’s? There is no more accoumpt to bee made of them than the kylling of ij sheep’.

With the facts of the offence against him so unimpeachable, Stourton was proceeded against with expedition. His status as a peer, his office as lord lieutenant of Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset, and his strong Catholic affiliations under a Catholic queen, provided him with no protection. On 28 January he was committed to the Tower and soon after brought before the council and asked where the Hartgills were. Here he had no plausible lie: he had arrested and openly mistreated them in the presence of members of the local gentry. He lamely replied that he had committed them to the constable and they must have escaped. On 19 February he was indicted before the Wiltshire j.p.s sitting at Salisbury, and a week later he was tried by his peers in Westminster Hall. He initially refused to plead but changed his mind when threatened with the penalty of forte et dure (in others words, being loaded with weights until he either died or pleaded, the standard penalty for such refusers). After his inevitable conviction, he was taken to Salisbury where, on 6 March, he was executed in the market place.

Stourton appears to have been a man of fairly repulsive character. Even his father had nothing good to say about him. In a letter to Thomas, Lord Cromwell, in 1539 he described his son as a ‘false hypocrite’ worthy of imprisonment in King’s Bench or the Marshalsea. The author of the narrative was even less appreciative, remarking, aside from the murders, his ‘other routs, ryottes, robberyes and murdres yt wer to long to wright’. This, however, is not to say that his crimes, at least those against the Hartgills, were committed without considerable provocation. The Hartgills were described by one of their neighbours in 1540 as ‘quarrelsome men of evil reputation’, and Stourton seems to have good grounds for the belief that the older Hartgill had exploited his early connexion with the family to defraud them. None the less, these provocations can be cited in explanation but not justification of the murders. So extreme was the offence that Stourton’s baronial status may not have protected him even in an earlier age where there was a greater tolerance of aristocratic crime.

S J P

Further reading

Rev. Canon J.E. Jackson, ‘Charles, Lord Stourton, and the Murder of the Hartgills’,  Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, VIII (1864), pp. 242-336.

J.G. Bellamy, Strange, Inhuman Deaths: Murder in Tudor England (2005), pp. 141-67.

THE HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 1422-1461, edited by Linda Clark, is out now. For further details about the volumes, including purchasing information,  visit the Cambridge University Press website, here.

The catalogue of serious crimes laid at the door of men who either went on to sit or had already sat in the fifteenth century Commons gives the impression that, as a group, there numbered amongst them men of pathological violence. Two of the more lurid stories serve to illustrate the point. In the early years of Henry V’s reign, it was alleged that Sir Edmund Hastings, in the midst of a parliamentary career that saw him represent both Northumberland and Yorkshire, had commissioned an atrocity. William Bercher of Kingthorpe (Yorkshire), where Hastings was lord of the manor, complained to the King that a gang of ten men, acting on the knight’s orders, had put out his eyes and cut away most of his tongue (‘sez oyles ousterent et graunde partie de sa lange trencherent’). Later his attackers, learning that he could still speak, had taken, in a marked act of eccentricity, to disguising themselves as women (‘en arraie des femmes’) and lying in wait to kill him. Sadly, his ultimate fate is unknown. Equally alarming was the indictment laid in 1466 against Robert Eyre, MP for Derbyshire in the Parliament of 1459: he was named as an accessory to the brutal murder of one Nicholas Fox, whom, it was alleged, had had his right hand and foot cut off in the presence of his pregnant wife. To these lurid tales are to be added others less vivid. Although past and future MPs were only occasionally named as principals in cases of murder, a significant number were, like Eyre, indicted or appealed as accessories, implying that they either commissioned a killing or, at least, offered some assistance to the killers.

It would, however, be unwise to accept this picture at its face value. Medieval crime can only be viewed through a distorting lens. Nearly all the evidence of individual crimes comes in the form of ex parte statements, most obviously so in the case of petitions for redress and common-law appeals (in other words, at the suit of an offended party) but also in that of indictments (that is, at the suit of the Crown). Although accepted by a presenting jury as representing a likely truth, in origin an indictment is a description of an offence made to conform to certain legal conventions and designed to assert unequivocally the guilt of the indicted. Thus, not only do accounts of crimes given in indictments and appeals tend to exaggerate the wrong attributed to the charged, but that tendency was an almost universal one with, for example, manslaughters inflated into brutal murders. The famous ‘murder’ of Richard, son and heir of the MP, Sir Humphrey Stafford of Grafton (Worcestershire), in May 1448 provides an instructive example. An indictment laid before the county coroner portrays his death as a premeditated murder committed by Sir Robert Harcourt, MP for Oxfordshire in 1447; yet an eyewitness account in a contemporary letter gives the context as a clash between two armed men almost equally responsible for the unfortunate consequence. Any allegation of violence thus has to be viewed with caution. Malicious and exaggerated indictments were part of the game of local politics among the class from which MPs were drawn. This consideration partially explains why many MPs were indicted or appealed of the capital crime of felony, but not a single one was convicted and executed (the only executions were for treason).

None the less, scepticism should not be carried too far. Some MPs, at least, had a very relaxed attitude to even the most brutal of violence. In 1467 Sir Robert Harcourt’s younger brother, Richard, asked the Pope for dispensation to marry again as, seemingly through no fault of his own, he had had his first wife and her suspected lover, one of his household servants, murdered for adultery. For others violent crime seems to have amounted almost to a profession with such a catalogue of offences attributed to them that their criminality is impossible to doubt. The most notorious of these was the Cornish MP, Richard Tregoose. From the time he came of age in the early 1420s until his murder at the hands of one of his many enemies in 1452, a series of indictments were laid against him for acts of apparently gratuitous violence, from false imprisonment and robbery to maiming and rape. It is striking that, despite this litany of complaint, he was elected to represent Cornwall in the Parliament of February 1449. A much wealthier and more important man, William Tailboys, had a similar record. Even before he was elected to represent Lincolnshire in the Parliament of 1445, he had a string of offences laid at his door, including one count of accessory to murder. By 1449 so notorious had his activities become that the Commons described him as ‘a comon Murderer, Mansleer, Riottour, and contynuell Breker of [the King’s] peas’ and asked that he be committed to the Tower. A handful of other MPs had comparable records of violence, sustained over years rather than manifest in a single act, and secured election even after their violent tendencies had become apparent. If a violent reputation was ever a bar to election in the fifteenth century, it was one that could be outweighed by rank and connexion.

SJP

Further reading:

H. Kleineke, ‘Why the West was Wild’, The Fifteenth Century III ed. Linda Clark, 83-88.

The biographies of many of the MPs mentioned in this blog feature in our recently published Commons 1422-1461 volumes. Find out more information about the publication via Cambridge University Press.

THE HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 1422-1461, edited by Linda Clark, is out now. For further details about the volumes, including purchasing information,  visit the Cambridge University Press website, here.

Among the most distinguished families in late medieval Oxfordshire, the Harcourts were able to trace their pedigree back at least to the reign of Henry I, and by the end of the 12^th century had acquired an estate at Stanton Harcourt that would remain the family seat for more than 500 years. Yet, in the 15^th century the family combined distinction with a degree of notoriety. Two brothers, Sir Richard and Sir Robert, both members of the Commons in the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV, were principally to blame for this state of affairs. The elder, Sir Robert, inherited the family lands while still a minor. He spent time in France fighting in the defence of Henry VI’s continental territories, an activity towards which he may have had a natural disposition, for in keeping with his siblings (another brother, John, a servant of the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, in 1444 had managed to secure a royal pardon for his killing of a Lichfield man) he evidently possessed a violent temperament. 

This came to the fore in an altercation in the streets of Coventry in May 1448, in the course of which Sir Robert, who had been visiting his mother, encountered Sir Humphrey Stafford, a man with whom he had long been at odds. Sir Robert and Sir Humphrey managed to ignore each other, but Stafford’s youthful son, Richard, was less controlled, and he and Sir Robert came to blows. Richard emerged no more than dazed from the knock to his head that Harcourt gave him, presumably with the pommel or flat of his sword, but when he struck back at his assailant with his dagger, he was knifed in the back by one of Harcourt’s retainers. Sir Humphrey, turning back to assist his son, was similarly struck in the back and knocked off his horse, but survived, while in the general melée that followed two Harcourt retainers were killed by Stafford’s men. Attempts to bring Sir Robert to justice for the killing of Richard Stafford came to nothing, and a dramatic attempt at private revenge, in the course of which the Staffords attempted to smoke the Harcourts out of the belfry of their own parish church also had to be abandoned, before the Staffords could lay hands on their prey. Sir Robert Harcourt was to enjoy a successful career for a further 20 years, but the political turmoil of Henry VI’s readeption in 1470 finally gave the Staffords their chance: ‘wyth-in short tyme after here men kylled hym in his owyn place’.

By this time, Robert’s younger brother Richard had also displayed the ruthlessness evident in his siblings. As a younger son, Richard had few prospects of inheritance from his own family. He nevertheless managed to make his fortune by contracting two advantageous marriages. He probably owed the first of these, to Edith, youngest daughter and co-heiress of Thomas St. Clere, to the influence of a patron, William, Lord Lovell. Edith was, it seems, some years her husband’s junior, and although the marriage produced no fewer than five surviving children, by the second half of the 1460s relations between the couple had evidently deteriorated to a dramatic degree.

It was thus that in March 1467 Harcourt applied to the papal penitentiary (the official responsible among other things for issuing dispensations for marriages that were technically prohibited by the laws of the Church) in dramatic terms. He stated that he had in the recent past suspected his wife of adultery, and consequently had her and one of his household servants called William (presumably the lady’s suspected lover) killed. Since this had left him without a wife, he asked to be absolved from the crime of murder, and to be granted dispensation to marry again.

It seems that Harcourt already had a new bride in mind, for within the year he was married to Katherine de la Pole, a close relative of the duke of Suffolk, John de la Pole, who had married the King’s own sister.  Katherine was, in addition, a widow, and brought her new husband a very substantial jointure of lands from her first husband, Sir Miles Stapleton. Richard was thus able to enjoy a position of some prominence, and became an important servant in his locality to both Edward IV and Richard III. He lived to a ripe old age, and this probably saved his life in 1485, when he may simply have been too elderly to join his King at the battle of Bosworth, for he was to die of natural causes in the autumn of 1486.  

HK

Click here for the rest of the series ‘Medieval MP of the Month’ – this series was a precursor to our House of Commons 1422-61 volumes, which are now available here.

THE HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 1422-1461, edited by Linda Clark, is out now. For further details about the volumes, including purchasing information,  visit the Cambridge University Press website, here.

The literary figure of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is familiar to many: she was a little hard of hearing, and her name was Alyson or Alice (Chaucer – wisely – does not supply a surname, and in any event, she clearly had a few, since she had married five husbands in succession). Just such a ‘wife’ also made an appearance in the final stages of the career of Walter Rich six times MP for Bath between 1414 and 1435.

Rich was a cloth-maker, having grown his business from more humble beginnings as a weaver. He amassed considerable wealth which he invested in property in the city of Salisbury, where he traded his wares. He began his public career in about 1402, as churchwarden of the parish of St. Michael. Over the following ten years he grew considerably in standing, and in the summer of 1416 he was elected to the first of a total of six mayoralties of his home town. It is possible that he owed some of his popularity among his neighbours to the firm stand he took, following his predecessors, in a dispute with the local priory over the ringing of the city’s church bells. Traditionally, the monks had claimed the privilege of signalling when the city’s bells were to be rung by sounding those of their priory church, but in the first decades of the 15^th century the citizens had challenged this, and had taken it upon themselves to ring their bells first.

His career was, ostensibly, that of a local worthy, but in the autumn of 1446 it came to a curious end. On the night of 11 Nov. 1446, Rich was making his way home along Cheap Street, when he encountered a group of people apparently led by a ‘wife of Bath’ called Agnes Carpenter. For reasons that the subsequent inquiry did not choose to record, Rich agreed to accompany Carpenter to her house, where his lifeless body was discovered on the following morning. An inquest was convened and this brought to light some suggestive details. Agnes, so the jurors found, had suffocated Rich with a linen towel and strangled him with her leather belt, all the while sitting on his chest. She had subsequently fled, but was eventually apprehended and imprisoned.

It remains open to conjecture whether the remarkable marital record of Chaucer’s wife of Bath owed anything to similar practices.

HK

An updated biography of Walter Rich appears in The History of Parliament: The Commons 1422-61. The volumes can be purchased here.

THE HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 1422-1461, edited by Linda Clark, is out now. For further details about the volumes, including purchasing information, visit the Cambridge University Press website, here.

Sir Christopher Talbot (1415-43) was a notable MP in two respects, for his high birth and for his tragic and puzzling end. As a younger son of the great soldier, John, Lord Talbot, it was natural that he should begin a military career at an early age. Knighted while still short of his majority, he commanded his own retinue during the difficult campaign of the winter of 1435-6 when a peasant rising in the Pays de Caux threatened the English position and Paris was lost. He appears to have been an adept soldier, acquiring a reputation as a jouster. In November 1440 one of the correspondents of John Paston wrote of the arrival in England of a Spanish knight, ‘wyth a kercheff of plesaunce i wrapped aboute hys arme’, who was to run a course ‘for his sovereyn lady sake’ against either Sir Christopher or another noted knight, Sir Richard Wydeville.

In 1441, in what was perhaps intended to be only a brief break from military activity, he began to play a part in local administration in both Shropshire and Yorkshire, two counties in which his family had extensive estates. He was elected to represent the former county in the Parliament of 1442, no doubt in his father’s interest to rally the support in the Commons for the financial grants necessary to the defence of Normandy. Very soon after Parliament assembled Lord Talbot himself returned from thence to raise further troops, and it was during his brief visit that Sir Christopher became an earl’s son: Lord Talbot was created earl of Shrewsbury on 4 May.

In the early 1440s Sir Christopher was thus a significant figure in his own right with a place in the royal household to add to his recommendations. These court connexions, together with his father’s influence, helped him to a marriage that allowed him to overcome the financial disadvantages of a younger son. John, Lord Tiptoft, died in the early days of 1443, and with almost indecent haste, he married his widow, Joyce. She was a woman of great wealth: not only did she have significant dower and jointure holdings from her first marriage, but she was one of the two coheiress to the lands of her father, Edward, Lord Cherleton of Powis, and through her mother she had title to a share, albeit a small one, of the Holand earldom of Kent.

Sir Christopher now had wealth to add to his important family connexions, and he looked set to become an important figure in the court of Henry VI. His good fortune was not, however, to last. Within a few months of his marriage he met his death in strange circumstances. On 10 August 1443, a Welsh knight, Sir Gruffydd Vaughan of Trelydan (in Guilsfield in Montgomeryshire), ran him through with a lance at Caus castle (Shropshire), the property of Humphrey, earl of Stafford.  His death seems to have happened during a tournament, but it was not seen as an accident. On the following 17 October a jury, sitting at Shrewsbury before a royal commission, placed the death in the context of a treasonable rising: it claimed that Sir Gruffydd and others imagining the death of the King had collected many traitors from Wales at Caus where Sir Gruffydd had killed Sir Christopher, described in the indictment as Vaughan’s master. Later, on 16 June 1444, a further indictment was laid, again at Shrewsbury, on this occasion before the Shropshire j.p.s. headed by Sir Christopher’s elder brother, Sir John.

The Crown added its own summary action to the indictments. The lands of Vaughan and others implicated in the death were declared forfeit; a reward of 500 marks was offered for Vaughan’s arrest; and when a general pardon was granted in May 1446 those involved in the murder were specifically excluded. This exemption may have moved a local lord, Sir Henry Grey, count of Tancarville, to take the law into his own hands: in July 1447 he had Vaughan executed at his castle at Welshpool. He had two obvious motives for this violent act, namely to claim the substantial reward and, perhaps more powerfully, to avenge Sir Christopher’s widow, who was Sir Henry’s maternal aunt. He was, however, roundly condemned by the Welsh bards Lewis Glyn Cothi and Dafydd Llwyd, who accused him of securing Vaughan’s person by the duplicitous offer of a safe-conduct. In short, the true circumstances of Sir Christopher’s tragic death are beyond recovery, but there is every reason to suppose that it was murder rather than accident.

Talbot’s death was soon followed by another. Even though his wife was in her forties at the time of his death, she was then pregnant. The infant’s life was to be very brief: at some date between September 1443 and September 1444 the borough authorities at Shrewsbury spent 10d. on wine given to the Talbot servants who had come to the town for the burial of Sir Christopher’s child. Joyce, Lady Powis, did not long survive this double blow. She died in the autumn of 1446 and thus did not live to see her second husband apparently avenged.

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The completion of a set of History of Parliament volumes, in this case those for the reign of Henry VI (1422-61), provides an opportunity to answer some statistical questions.  How often, for example, did MPs fall victim to murder?  In the modern era, such murders, whether of sitting or former MPs, are mercifully rare: the tragic death of Jo Cox in 2016 was the first since the IRA’s assassination of Ian Gow in 1990.   In earlier more violent times, such murders were undoubtedly significantly more frequent.  A recent blog on this site (‘Wikidata, British Politicians and the History of Parliament Trust’) has, for example, cited instances, in 1603 and 1684, when one MP met his death at the hands of another.  Even so, it may be that this increase, as one moves back in parliamentary time, was not as profound as might have been expected.

The reign of Henry VI, was, at least in the 1450s, notorious for the level of violence among the political classes.  Yet, of the 2,844 recorded MPs for the reign, no sitting MP and only 23 former ones are known to have been murdered.   The statistic does, of course, need to be treated with caution.  It does not include deaths in battle or in the suppression of rebellion, which might be said to fall into another category of violent death (although the distinction is not always clear cut: Sir William Lucy fell on the Lancastrian side at the battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460 yet his was no typical death in battle for he was killed by the lover and future husband of his young wife: ‘The battle of Northampton and the strange death of Sir William Lucy’,).

There is also the obvious difficulty of the failure of evidence.   Even though legal records survive in abundance, some murders would have been recorded in records now lost; others in records not yet examined; and yet others would have escaped any record, either because murder was not suspected or no indictment was laid or appeal made.    Even so, although the figure of 23 is very much a minimum one, it implies a murder rate rather lower than suggested by the violent reputation of the times.   Further, these murders are not spread evenly chronologically.  As many as seven of the 23 occurred in the first three years of Edward IV’s reign, which seems to have been a period of exceptional disorder, and none are known between Henry VI’s accession in 1422 and 1435.

On the other hand, if the number of murdered MPs was lower than might have been expected, the contexts in which the majority of them took place are none the less revealing of a society where the social constraints on the resort to extreme violence were much less developed than they subsequently became.  Only a few of the deaths occur in contexts which have a strong modern currency.   Two could be described as domestic murders.  Lucy’s death in 1460 falls into this category, as does that of Sir John Butler.  MP for Gloucestershire in 1439, he was killed in 1477 by perpetrators commissioned by his second wife, whom he had only recently married ( See our blog on the subject there: ‘Dangerous Liaisons in 15^th Century England: Sir John Butler’).    Another MP may have met his death in a sexual encounter gone wrong.   On the night of 11 November 1446 Walter Rich, MP for Bath on as many as six occasions between 1414 and 1435, was making his way along ‘Chepestrete’, when he encountered a group of people led by Agnes Carpenter, a ‘wyfe’ of Bath.  Carpenter brought Rich to her house, where she suffocated him with a linen towel and strangled him with a leather belt, sitting on his chest to be doubly sure of his death.   This, however, is the only one of the 23 murders that might plausibly be said to have been the result of apparently casual violence.   Most of the others had a rational framework in that they occurred in the course of disputes, generally over land, and were often expressions of long-standing enmity.

William Tresham, Speaker of the Commons in four Parliaments and the most important of the murdered MPs, provides a clear example: in 1450 he was killed in an ambush, elaborately laid by Simon Norwich, whose inheritance he had illegally annexed (‘The murder of Speaker Tresham’ 27 October 2015).   Another MP, Sir Robert Harcourt, was killed in 1470 by the Staffords of Grafton in revenge for his part in the death of Richard Stafford more than 20 years before.   Such deaths reflect the failure of the law to provide an effective framework for the resolution of quarrels, with the weaker party sometimes driven to extreme measures for lack of a legal redress.   It was, for example, the control that the lawyer, Robert Crackenthorpe, exercised over the organs of local justice in the remote county of Westmorland, that led to his murder in 1438 at the hands of his wife’s family, the Lancasters, whom he had deprived of lands to which they had a moral if not a legal right.

These murders show that, at least in the context of disputes, the legal and social restraints against resort to violent self-help were weak.   Against this background one might have expected the murder of the officers of central and local government to have been significantly more common than it was.   It is true that as many as six former MPs met their deaths at the hand of the Cade rebels in the summer of 1450, with two of them, James Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and his brother-in-law, William Cromer, executed as, in the eyes of the rebels, corrupt agents of the state.   Leaving this episode aside, however, only one of the 23 deaths falls into a similar category, and that came in the disturbed early years of Edward IV’s reign.   On 27 October 1463 John Doding, bailiff of Gloucester, sought to escape a mob of peasantry by taking refuge on the infirmary of Gloucester abbey, but they dragged him out and decapitated him at the high cross in the centre of the town before displaying his head over the west gate.  His offence, real or perceived against them, is unknown.

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In 2019 the Commons 1422-1504 Section will publish their first set of volumes pertaining to the period 1422-1461. For more info see here.

The recent BBC adaptation of John Preston’s book – A Very English Scandal – about the trial of the former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe for conspiracy and incitement to murder, prompted us at the HPT to think about other parliamentarians with links to murder, conspiracy and scandal. Today’s blog from our Lords 1715-1790 project Editor, Dr Robin Eagles considers duels between MPs and their political connections…

Politics could be a dangerous business in eighteenth-century England. In a period where the honour code made men quick to reach for their swords, fast friendships were occasionally ended by violent altercations. This was the case with Owen Buckingham, MP for Reading, who attended the birthday party of his friend, William Aldworth in March 1720, only for the two to fall out, for their quarrel to turn violent, and for Buckingham to end up on the floor with a mortal wound. Although technically a duel, Aldworth was compelled to flee leaving his wife distracted out of her wits.

In this case there was no suggestion that the affair had been anything other than an accidental tragedy, but there were other occasions when contemporary society was more than a little suspicious that duels were in fact but thin covers for attempted political assassinations.

One of the most famous of these was the Mohun-Hamilton duel of November 1712. Early on the morning of 15 November 1712 the body of James, 4th duke of Hamilton, premier peer of Scotland, was dragged into his coach waiting on the fringes of Hyde Park. Hamilton had been involved in one of the most notorious duels of the age against Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun – an irascible Cornish peer, who had carved out a career for himself as a particularly effective Whig enforcer. In a spectacularly violent contest, Hamilton managed to kill Mohun, but was himself mortally wounded in the process. According to some accounts he received his death not at Mohun’s hands, but stabbed from behind by Mohun’s second, General MacCartney, who was intent on getting the job done. Many concluded thus that the Mohun-Hamilton duel was far more than a savage culmination of years of dispute between the two men who both laid claim to the Macclesfield inheritance, but was in fact a deliberate effort at assassination dreamt up by the Whigs who wished to prevent the Tory Hamilton from taking up his politically sensitive posting as ambassador to France.

Mohun-Hamilton was not the only occasion when people suspected there was more to the quarrel than personal antipathy. The radical MP and proprietor of the opposition paper the North Briton, John Wilkes, was involved in two incidents that some thought may have been orchestrated by his political enemies. First, while in Paris in the summer of 1763, Wilkes was accosted by a Scots officer, John Forbes, though on this occasion Wilkes managed to avoid fighting a duel, arguing that he simply did not have space in his diary to accommodate him. Forbes attempted to insist on fighting, but when he proved unable to produce a second Wilkes declined, observing that he had ‘more the air of an assassin than of a gentleman’ [Cash, Wilkes, 139]. Later on that year, Wilkes engaged in a pistol duel with fellow MP and government supporter, Samuel Martin, in which Wilkes sustained serious injuries. Indeed, it was in part his need to recover from the bullet wound in the groin that he sustained during the bout that led to him quitting the country. 

Earlier in the century, another famous newspaper magnate, William Pulteney, joint founder of the opposition paper, The Craftsman, was challenged to a duel with his former friend, the notorious court wit, Lord Hervey. The affair arose out of a dispute in the press over the authorship of the introduction to a political tract, widely thought to have been penned by Hervey. The ‘Dedication’ had attacked Pulteney personally, leading to Pulteney publishing an even more vicious response ‘A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel’ in which he alluded to Hervey’s suspected homosexuality. Although Hervey persisted in denying writing the dedication, he now felt he had no choice but to call Pulteney out. The resulting duel, which was fought on frosty ground one January afternoon in 1731, saw Pulteney getting the better of his rival, walking away with a scratch to the hand, while Hervey received a couple of more serious (if not life-threatening) stab wounds before the two men were parted by their respective seconds, Henry Fox and Sir John Rushout. The papers were forced to publish retractions of earlier reports that had suggested Hervey had been disarmed.

What made the whole thing look more like a political job, though, was a rumour that circulated afterwards that Hervey (heir to the earldom of Bristol, but not yet a peer in his own right) was to be ennobled for his role ‘in so meritorious an action’. Duels were normally frowned upon, so the fact that it was believed that he was actually to be ennobled for his part in one emphasized the fact the he was viewed as a defender of the administration, which might well have been only too happy to see Pulteney silenced.

In the event no such peerage was forthcoming and Hervey had to wait another two years before being called up to the Lords by a mechanism known as a writ in acceleration, ostensibly to bolster the government’s rhetorical talents in the upper House. As for Pulteney, he continued to play a leading role in opposing Walpole and was eventually made a peer himself following Walpole’s overthrow. Both men, then, Hervey and Pulteney newly ennobled as earl of Bath, found themselves once more facing each other in the more decorous surroundings of the House of Lords.

RDEE

Further reading:

• Arthur Cash, John Wilkes: the scandalous father of civil liberty (2006)
• Lucy Moore, Amphibious Thing: the life of Lord Hervey (2000)

1. Halsband, ‘The Duel’, History Today (1972)

To find out more about the political career of Jeremy Thorpe, head over to our Heritage Lottery Fund project ‘From the Grassroots’, an oral history project about politics in Devon. See Liberalism in North Devon.