'To heaven on a gibbet': the repentance of Nathaniel Butler, murderer, 1657

Because of Frank Thorney in The Witch of Edmonton, I have been thinking about exemplary penitence in early modern culture, and the way the felon who, accepting their punishment as just, and making all the right noises about contrition, is rehabilitated by a communal forgiveness (where ‘forgiveness’ means not remission of punishment, but assurances from the spiritual leaders of the community that they can die with some certainty of not being damned).

The case I’ve found as a historical parallel is that of Nathaniel Butler, who in 1657 perpetrated a brutal murder, attacking his sleeping bedfellow, a nineteen year old apprentice named John Knight. The motive was nothing to do with sex, or shame: nobody in any of the pamphlets about the case finds anything unusual about two young men sharing a bed. Rather, John Knight had been left in charge of his master’s business, a silk mercery, and Butler had seen just how much money was in the till. Knight had invited Butler to stay with him because he didn’t want to be alone with the responsibility of holding the keys to the till.

Only Knight knew that Butler was in the premises: Butler been leaving his own master’s house on the quiet, and had come and gone late and early to spend the nights with Knight. Again, this surreptitious aspect to his behaviour sprang, as far as you can tell, from not being under his own master’s roof at night.

It should also be said that Butler may have had a reputation as a bad sort, exactly the wrong sort of companion for a trusted apprentice. He had twice been moved on (‘turned over’ is the expression used), master to master. For a young male inhabitant of Oliver Cromwell’s London, Butler was managing to live a surprisingly rakish life, drinking and visiting brothels: “He lived in Fornication, frequenting the company and the Houses of Harlots”, asserted Samuel Ward in a later work, A Warning-piece to all drunkards and health-drinkers. He financed this way of carrying on by befriending other apprentices (who, in their trammelled lives, might have found a wicked friend intensely stimulating). Soon his friends or victims would be robbing the shop to fund their interesting new life with young Nathaniel.

I do recognise that part of the way Butler could tell his story was as a journey from what John Ford had Frank Thorney call the 'abyss' back to salvation, Butler might well have played up his vices as part of that narrative, as when he "condemned himself in his general ill led life, as having been addicted to gaming, drinking, and abusing himself with women, and other vices whereto the Devil had inured him, in order to this his black or rather bloody sin of Murder. He hath been often heard to cry out of his too licentious course of life, And as oft hath he cried out of the sight of the money, which led him into the snare of temptation to this vile Act." (A Full and the truest narrative of the most horrid, barbarous and unparalled murder, p.9. A word or two may have dropped from the text, the devil inuring him to vice in order to lead to his black or rather bloody sin of murder.)

The murder was most foul. Butler had seen two bags of full of money (there was £110) in the till on Tuesday, and had been brooding about getting his hands on it. During the daylight hours of Wednesday, August 5th, Knight and he had a ‘morning draught’ together at The Black Swan, and agreed to spend the afternoon fishing. Knight bought Butler a rod. They went fishing, having bought bread bait at a tavern called The Sun, from 2pm till 5pm. Then, “We appointed to meet together at eight of the clock that night, which we did at Honey-lane end, and thence went into Fish-street to the Maiden-head, and drunk three half pints of Sack, and eat a piece of Salmon of twelve pence.”

After briefly going back to his own lodgings, Butler was hiding in the warehouse when the silk merchant’s premises were locked up at 10pm. In Knight’s bed, Butler could not sleep: “I made proffer many a time with my knife to the intent to cut John's throat, and once put my knife up again: And between three and four of the clock, on Thursday morning, I took my knife and cut his Mouth to his Ear, at which he shrieked out and cried Murder. Then I put my right hand into his Mouth, and so lay struggling together for about half an hour, and at length I strangled him: after which I looked about the Chamber, and the Devil instigated me to cut his Throat, which I did with my right hand, we being both naked.

Then I slipped off my bloody Shirt, and wiped the blood off me, and put on my clothes, and having taken the Keys of the Till, where the money lay, out of John's pocket: I brought down my bloody shirt, and laid it on the Counter in the shop, and opened the Till and took out two Bags of money, and went away with them, leaving the Keys in the Till, and the shop door open standing a char.”

The murderous assault did not leave Butler unscathed: when the normal business of Thursday morning started: “A sad spectacle is discovered by a bloody shirt found (lying on the Counter in the Shop in the morning,) by the maid servant of the house, who presently called in some of the neighbours, who going to the chamber where the Apprentice lay, they found him lying with his feet on a corner of the bolster, and his head towards the lower end of the bed, in gore blood, and with a lock of hair in his right hand, and some scattering hairs were found in his left-hand also; they were all struck with amazement! The house is raised! The neighbourhood called in! A tumult about the door! The murder visible! The Murderer unknown and escaped in the morning, presently after the fact.”(A Full and the truest narrative, p.3.)

The various approved narratives of the killing stress that Butler was then incapacitated by guilt, conscience-stricken by what he has done. He did, despite this assertion, buy himself a new trunk, and had locked the two bags of money in it, but he stayed under his master’s roof. Back at Mr Worth’s shop, everybody in the neighbourhood queued up the stairs to view the victim’s body. A young man volunteered that he saw Knight fishing with another youth, not known to him, the day before. Asked to describe this person’s clothing, the witness unluckily described clothes exactly as worn by a young man who happened to be peeping round the door, who was seized and questioned.

Then a neighbour’s servant named Butler as an acquaintance of Knight, not as a suspect, but as someone who might know more about other acquaintances of the dead apprentice. Those sent to find Butler found him in a shop in Bread Street, and “asking him whether he knew one John Knight, he being as it seems smitten in his own heart, faltered in his speech, & made out of the shop with a dejected Countenance; at first denying that he knew him, but presently after confessed that he did know him; whereupon they asked him to accompany them to Milk-street? but he pretended businesse and said he could not go then, and went his way: In this discourse with him, having perceived his hands to be scratched, they began to be suspicious of him, so that they followed him at a distance, till they saw him in his Masters house in Carter lane.”

When this was reported back, one of the marshal’s men was sent to detain Butler at his master’s house in Carter Lane. He was brought to the scene of his crime without him making any resistance “where he was caused to be stripped, and in searching him, his Leather Drawers were found to be bloody, and some blood about his Clothes; also stains of blood on his Stockings, which with the scratches on his Face and Hands, were strong presumptions, that he had a hand in this Murder, with which he being charged, several times denied. During the time of this search of him, the Marshal of this City with another Gentleman went down to his Masters house, and enquiring for Butler's Trunk, a new Trunk was shewed them, which being instantly broke open, they therein found two Bags of money, one of which Bags had Mr. Worth’s Mark on it, which being brought by the Marshal to Mr. Worth’s house, and being thrown down upon a Table with acclamation! that they had not only found out the Murderer, but the money also: The Marshal’s man then called for a Cord, wherewith he bound his Hands; Some of his Hair being plucked off to be compared with the Hair which was found in the young man’s hand that was Murdered; and being ready to carry him away: He then began in a crying manner to Confess; the Coroner and some of the Jury with two Constables being present, he began by degrees to acknowledge one thing after another; and at last confessed the whole Murder, and the manner thereof before them.”

So much for the murder: Butler’s trial was a formality, his death sentence inevitable.
This is the entry in the newsletter, Mercurius Politicus for the week of August 13th-20th:

As you see, two men and three women received death sentences in the same week, with 14 branded and 7 set to be whipped. Why Butler jumped to prominence among this company of felons and unfortunates stems from (obviously) the awfulness of his crime, a discovery of his guilt that was seen as under providential direction, and, most importantly, the elaborate thoroughness of his repentance.

At his trial, Butler confessed everything: his only plea to the court was that he be given more time to repent. It was objected by the Lord Mayor himself that he had given poor Knight no chance to die having purged his soul of sins. Nevertheless, Butler’s plea was upheld. One by one, divine by divine, then in numbers, clerics and chaplains came to his cell in Newgate. This mobilisation apparently stemmed from moral alarm at the bloodiness of this crime in Oliver Cromwell’s God-fearing London. In 1657, they were near enough in time to earlier habits of discourse to be shocked by a crime against friendship, but there’s also a real sense that they felt a money-motivated murder just ought not to be happening. Butler had revealed to them a worrying vision of apparently integrated and virtuous young men, London apprentices stealing from their masters to finance a range of urban debaucheries that ought not to be there. Butler represents a malaise: so he had to be turned into a figure of reclaimed godliness. One of the pamphlets says that "he hath declared some of his Complices, and what an ill instrument he had been for them, with their wicked practices in wronging of their Masters, and many other things tending to their Masters wrong, and their own ruins; which in time will be further enquired into." But that sounds like a vague assurance, half-expressive of a reluctance to find more trouble than is necessary. The main aim was getting Butler's life told to proper and instructive effect.

The Puritans set to work on him. Randolph Yearwood, the Lord Mayor’s chaplain, recounts how Butler needed to move beyond simply acknowledging his sins, to a full understanding of his sinful nature:

“At my first Conference with him which was about five or six days after his Condemnation, I found him very ready to acknowledge his actual sins, and to charge himself with them and the aggravations that did accompany them, and this with sad tears of complaint, and indignation against himself and his sins; but did take no notice of his sinful Nature; Which myself and a Friend with me (Mr Griffith of the Charter house) perceiving, We endeavoured by Scripture to shew him his sinful Nature, as the Root of all his sinful actions.”

This seems curious, or unexpected. 'Actual sin' is a technical theological term, and in the OED ("after post-classical Latin peccatum actuale ...Theol. sin committed through a person's own actions; opposed to original sin"). But it makes me see that Frank Thorney in the play, who talks so thoroughly about his accumulated sin from his earliest years, while barely saying anything in the way of pertinent regret and contrition for the dreadful killing he perpetrated, is conforming to the same type of idea: your larger and innate sinfulness is as important a priority as the specific sin in your specific crime, or maybe even more important. Once you acknowledge your 'sinful nature', then you can realise your utter dependence on divine grace, and so proceed towards salvation.

The Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Titchbourne, himself visited Butler’s cell four days after the murder, to instruct him.  The Lord Mayor contributed to one of the pamphlets describing the case and its outcome: part of Yearwood's The Penitent Murderer is "under his Lordships own hand."

This mobilisation, born of a desire to control ad manage this piece of news, explains is why there is such an emphasis within the surviving pamphlets on how London readers must not pay attention to sensational, lying, slanderous pamphlets and ballads that have been published. (A Full and the truest narrative of the most horrid, barbarous and unparalled murder, committed on the person of John Knight was “Published after many Lying and false Relations both before and since his Death, with a detection of many lies and absurdities; and that the truth may be known.”) The story has to be a victory for faith, a re-assertion of civic order, not a fictionalised and sensationalised tale of gore. Of the pamphlets vilified by the various chaplains and Puritan divines dealing with the good outcome of this murder, I can only find Heavens cry against murder. Or, a true relation of the the bloudy & unparallel'd murder of John Knight. This would seem to be a plausible account of events, but was vehemently accused of various inaccuracies, such as impugning the probity of Butler’s father, asserting that the two young men had been baptised in the same font, and even alleging that Butler paid his master Mr Goodday half a crown a day to employ a journeyman to work in his place so that “he might have the more freedom of excess and riot”, adding “('Tis the more pity and misery, that such base gifts should blind a Master’s eyes and judgement too)”. I think this pamphleteer went too far in spreading blame to the senior adult generation. The convincing details in the pamphlet are probably novelistic in nature (the writer imagines that Butler turned up at Knight's funeral, and gave himself away). The author certainly spins out his sketchy knowledge of the events with not very illuminating moralisations about the evil of murder, which fill most of the little book.

Meanwhile, in the newsletter, Mercurius Politicus, a series of adverts announced the forthcoming approved version:

In his last fortnight, Butler became more and more the exemplary instance of the sinner reclaimed. His various counsellors express extraordinary confidence about his chance of salvation. Randolph Yearwood told the Lord Mayor, his patron, that “I verily believe you will see him yet once more; not as a Malefactor in an obscure disparaging Goal, but as an Angel of God in the Kingdom of Christ, whither (I am confident) he is gone, and you are going.” J.D. began his Blood washed away by tears of repentence with a letter to Butler, which he then took to the prison, paid his fee to enter, and delivered to the malefactor

In this febrile atmosphere, heady with repentance and a sense of the sinner reclaimed, the young man himself appears hysterically joyful, eager for the scaffold. This is the account of his last night, from Yearwood's The penitent murderer - "Evangelical joy" was an expression of approval used from 1617 onwards.

"About five a clock he fell into such a rapture and extasie of consolation as I never saw, nor (I believe) any of my fellow-Spectators; for he would shout for joy that the Lord should look on such a poor vile creature as he was: He often cried out, and made a noise, and indeed did not know how to express, and signifie fully enough his inward sense of Gods favour, saying, Must he be an heir, an heir of God, and a joint-heir with Jesus Christ, a fellow Citizen with the Saints, &c.He could not bear such a glorious discovery. Now that his joy was right Evangelical joy, appeareth thus, in that mourning and bitterness went before it; yea, he rejoiced with trembling, and could exceedingly often say that he would yet have a deeper, and a more thorough sense of sin; he could never be sufficiently abased before the Lord.Now the time was at hand that he should be carried forth to Execution, but he thought it was not near enough; for he asked several times, What a clock is it? I demanded why he enquired so concerning the time of the day? Would you gladly die? said I. Yes, yes, saith he, I desire to be dissolved, and to be with Christ which is best of all." 

One can note that the forgiveness is determined and led by the Puritan divines, in charge of community response. In the present day, perpetrators of awful crimes are expected to exhibit remorse, and the reactions to that remorse by friends or family of the victim is faithfully reported. Among all these pamphlets, I have not seen any indication of what poor Knight’s family thought about the murderer. Their opinion was not sought, not important.

In that bible-addled age, it only needed a platform for almost any person to set up as amateur preacher: the scaffold was one, the demonically possessed also tend to embark on emulations of the sermonising to which they had always been exposed. Butler did his best, trying to address the vast crowd that gathered to see him hanged from papers, and going on in sweaty terror and exultation for over an hour, before being asked to abbreviate and cease reading out from his papers what was anyway inaudible to most. Butler found further favour by officiously denouncing ‘papists’ who had visited him in prison, which he alleges they did to put the argument to him that only the true Catholic church could absolve his crime. Butler further asserted that among such visitors were ‘papist’ ladies. Anyone who paid the fee to the gaoler was admitted, and the thought of such a propaganda coup, executed right under Cromwell’s nose, as Butler’s late conversion and embrace of Rome may indeed have induced such an attempt, whatever its risks.

This is the first report of the murder I have discussed, from the newsletter (Mercurius Politicus) of the same week:

That is the bare report, unadorned, un-spun. There's little about it to suggest what an outpouring would follow:

One of the famous books of the age was John Reynolds' big anthology of stories in The triumphs of Gods revenge against the crying and execrable sin of murther. There had been an edition in 1656, but a new one appeared in 1657. The title page seems to have been augmented from a relatively plain 

to one that didn't simply point to murders abroad, but acknowledged trouble at home: "histories which contain great variety of mournful and memorable accidents, historical, moral, and divine, very necessary to restrain and deter us from the bloody sin, which in these our days makes so ample, and large a progression". That would, I think, be Butler.

The quarto of The Witch of Edmonton was printed in 1658. I've often wondered why then, in that particular year, and very tentatively wonder now whether Frank Thorney didn't come into somebody's memory, triggering the thought that there had been a play with a very penitent murderer in it (and that type of person sold well).

The Murder at the White Horse Inn, Chelmsford, 1654.

My blog here has been a stranded whale since before Christmas. Last term precluded any extras: teaching, marking and being admissions tutor took up all my time.

Still, I hope to start picking things back up a little, and my post today gives an example of laudable persistence. Prior to a pre-Easter trip into Suffolk, I have been looking at a few Suffolk-related witchcraft pamphlets, and also happened on A True relation of a horrid murder committed upon the person of Thomas Kidderminster, of Tupsley in the county of Hereford, Gent., at the White-Horse Inn in Chelmsford, in the county of Essex, in the month of April, 1654.

This pamphlet was not published until 1688, and it relates events that began in 1654, but came to light only in 1662-3. Quite why the pamphlet appears so late is a mystery, a mystery deepened by the condition of the EEBO copy, which does look like an editor or censor’s hand has gone through it, marking passages for deletion.

Thomas Kidderminster was a man who first lost all his inheritance, and then was brutally killed for the fortune he had managed to make through his own exertions. His father, who had re-married, died when Thomas was 11: Thomas’ step-mother then re-married, and proceeded to divest her first husband’s son and heir of his estate.

Kidderminster gave up on all this, and set out to make his own way: he became a steward to the Bishop of Ely, came to own land, and lent money too. Boosted by this, he married, and, spotting a bad debtor in the making up (Sir Miles Sandys, who had speculated ruinously on reclaiming fenlands) in Ely, decided that he wanted to relocate his resources elsewhere, and that he would pull out of all his Ely properties, and reclaim what debts he could from Sir Miles.

After making his local transactions, Kidderminster changed £600 of silver for gold in Cambridge. He then faced a trip to London, and, considering the main route more likely to be dangerous, opted to take what is described in the text as the by-road through Chelmsford. As he had on other occasions, he stopped at the White Horse Inn in Chelmsford (which is still there). This was at some date in April 1654. He never arrived back in London, where his pregnant wife was awaiting his return.

Mistress Anne Kidderminster gave birth in August 1654. She made inquiries about her husband, but was hardly placed to retrace his likely journey and ask around (though it is clear that there would have been plenty of local gossip if she had inquired in Chelmsford). Her husband was variously reported to be in Amsterdam, Cork, and Jamaica. She found means to have inquiry made in all these places. Nothing was to be heard of him. Obliged to fend for herself, Anne Kidderminster became a wet nurse in Gloucestershire.

What had become of her husband remained a mystery. Then, one day in 1662 or 1663, her sister was reading ‘the then News-Pamphlet’ in her company, and suddenly made the dramatic announcement ‘ Sister, here is news of your Husband’.

What had happened was that the White Horse had changed owners at the death of the Innkeeper, who had been a man called Sewell. The new owner had decided to replace a fence between his ground and his neighbours with a clay wall. During the necessary digging, what was initially taken to be a brown bowl was unearthed: this was quickly identified as a skull, with an ominous hole in its left side, and the rest of the skeleton was soon found. The body had been crammed into the grave, bent double. At a local inquest, where the surviving Mrs Sewell had been inconclusively questioned, Sir Orlando Bridgeman had decided that the only way forward, to find the identity of the victim, was to place an account in the ‘Publick Diurnal’. It was this account Mistress Kidderminster’s sister had read. The account in the newspaper apparently suggested that the victim might have been buried ten years ago.

It was put to Anne Kidderminster by her friends that she might give up her quest: but she apparently had visions of her late husband, ‘in the habit he usually wore, looking very sternly upon her; but one night, as she lay in Bed, her Husband appear’d to her in a White Sheet, with Streaks of Blood upon it’ . So she set off towards Chelmsford with a male companion. En route, they were benighted at Rumford, some 15 miles short, but there she met a Mary Mattocks, wife of a sawyer, who was there on the merest chance: she had forgotten to purchase a piece of chalk, without which her sawyer husband could not work. On this trip back to Rumford, she met Anne Kidderminster, who asked her about Chelmsford, and than about the White Horse. Mary Mattocks has plenty to say (we learn later that she had overheard the chief witness to the events describe them to her aunt): that the present Innkeeper there is a good man, but the previous one, Sewell, ought to have been hanged, ‘for there was certainly a gentleman Murder’d in the House.’. The hostler at the inn she also accuses of involvement, and he actually now lives in Rumford. But a messenger sent to him says too much, and he refuses to come to meet Mistress Kidderminster.

She is sent on to Chelmsford by her eager informant, with the suggestion that she stay with her aunt, a Mistress Shute, at the sign of the Cock: but on arrival, Mistress Shute has since died of the plague, so Mistress Kidderminster goes to the White Horse Inn, and talks to the new innkeeper, Master Turner. Turner has a good reputation, but his Inn doesn’t: for business reasons, he is keen to have this case of the unknown murder victim cleared up. He suggests that they leave the back way, and go straight to the widow Sewell’s. This they do, and the widow is at first vociferous about Turner causing trouble for her, but learning who Anne Kidderminster is, will say no more.

Mistress Kidderminster stays the night at the White Horse, in the room adjacent to the one where her husband had been murdered. She is so frightened at this prospect that she has the maid sleep in the same bed with her. Unsurprisingly, Anne alone hears ‘a great Noise in the next Room, which went out into the Gallery, where something seem’d to fall with that violence, that she thought the Room shook, and afterwards came to her Chamber-door, and lifted up the Latch’. All the landlord can say is that it has been ‘such things had been often heard before’.

In his efforts to clear the reputation of his Inn, Turner had had the local JP’s issue an arrest warrant against Sewell and his wife. Sewell died suddenly after this warrant was issued, after a spell of walking about ‘like a man who had been craz’d in his understanding’, during which he had very nearly confessed everything to an old civil war comrade (from the parliamentary army), who had warned him against saying any more, for if he said more than he had, he would be obliged to denounce him. The local word was that Sewell had been poisoned by his wife to silence him permanently.

Mistress Kidderminster now shifted her inquiries to the former hostler, and man with the splendid fenland name of Moses Drayne: when she gets to Rumford, he is pointed out to her as he stands in a glover’s shop, and she follows him to the One Bell Inn. There she confronted him about the man who left his horse behind at the White Horse Inn. Was it her husband? She speaks of the victim’s clothes, which seem to correspond, but Kidderminster’s grey satin cap did not correspond to a cap Drayne says was black. She says that her husband’s cap was black. Drayne’s face (well, why fight a cliché?) drains of colour, and he falls silent, nor will he meet her eyes. But he tells her to go to the village of Kilden, and ask for Mary Kendall, who had been a servant in the Inn ‘at the time of the Gentleman’s being there’. A warrant for Drayne’s arrest, at Mary Mattock’s evidence is issued, but forgotten about.

Mistress Kidderminster does two things: she finds out her late husband’s manservant in Ely, to have confirmation of the clothes he was wearing at the time of his journey. She then finds Mary Kendall, who has already been questioned by Justices who have bound her over: Kendall refuses to say anything. Kendall later jumps bail, and is only rediscovered by the merest chance: the coroner on the Chelmsford case is out riding near the house of Kendall’s brother, when a carrier delivers a letter from her. This enables her to be traced to the Walnut Tree in Mile-End Green. Mary is taken to Newgate, where her fellow prisoners assure her that her flight will convict her. She decides to tell all she knows.

At this point, the second plague victim in this narrative: the widow Sewell dies. But the arrest warrant on Drayne is remembered and finally carried out. In prison, he says enigmatically that ‘he fears nothing but the dyer’. Mary Kendall’s story when she tells it is dramatic, and completely true, if likely to be a bit self-serving. She was maidservant at the White Horse, and saw Kidderminster in his room, talked to him, folded him a sleeping cap from a napkin. In her presence, he (foolish man) entrusted his cloak bag with £600 in gold in it to his landlord.

She was sent by her mistress to sleep with the younger children, ‘that being not her usual Lodging’, and locked in there. Between one and two in the morning, she heard ‘a great fall of something, that it shook the Room where she lay’. When she got up the next morning, her master, mistress, and the hostler were in front of the fire drinking. Neither they nor the Sewell’s two daughters (Betty and Priss) seemed to have been to bed. She is told that the gentleman had left, leaving her a groat as a tip, but her suggestion that she should then go and tidy the room is turned down: the room, she is told, has already been set to rights. This room then stayed locked for eight to nine weeks. Eventually there came a day when her master sent her to fetch him his cloak. In his wardrobe were garments she recognised at the gentleman’s, and the cloak bag. Mary Kendall said that, taking the incriminating clothes downstairs with her, she had directly challenged her mistress, had been bloodily attacked by her, until finally her master had told her to be quiet. Quite obviously she took £20 from her master as hush money (but Kendall subsequently denied having received any money at all). Moses Drayne the hostler, Kendall asserts, took £60 from the £600 and the victim’s clothes, which he sent to a dyer in Mousam to be dyed black. The dyer had asked him why he is doing this, as the clothes were of a ‘better colour’ as they were, but Drayne asserted that he does not like the grey. The sudden prosperity of both the Sewells and Moses Drayne is recollected in detail.

Mary Mattocks in her evidence confirms Kendall’s: three women met while drying washing in the church yard, and she heard Kendall tell the whole story to her aunt Shute. This was shortly after the beating she had received from the Innkeeper’s wife. Mattocks testifies that she heard Kendall tell her aunt Shute about how her master had pulled his wife and the struggling Kendall apart, and gave the latter £20 hush money. Shute advised Kendall to give the money back, for the £20 might hang her in twenty year’s time. But clearly this was a large enough sum to purchase some kind of silence.

Brought to court, Drayne was challenged to pick up the early modern ‘Exhibit A’, Kidderminster’s battered skull: he trembles so much he can scarcely do it. A further tale is told of a boy servant at the fatal inn: Sewell had him tied to a bed post and was whipping him mercilessly when Kendall entered the room. The boy cried at this point that ‘It was well for him she came, or else his Master would have murder’s him, as they did the Gentleman, when he blooded him into the Hogs-Pail’. The boy also said ‘He had heard that the Gentleman was knock’d on the side of the Haed with a Pole-ax, and afterwards his Throat was cut by his Mistriss, with the help of her Daughter Betty’. This boy is not in court: somehow the Sewells had shipped him off to Barbados for spreading his story round town. But Mistress Kidderminster, directed by the coroner, finds the Merchant in Billingsgate to whom the boy was sold (sold? – that’s what it says).

Neighbours are brought into court, who claim they heard cries during the night of the murder, but were fobbed off by the Sewells when they went round in the morning to inquire if all was well. The local washerwoman had been asked (it is also reported), if, after the night of the murder, she had cleaned any linen from the Inn which was ‘more bloody than ordinary’ (I suppose that blood stains from preparing meat are implied. The boy’s words imply that Kidderminster’s blood was drained from his body in the same way that a pig has its throat cut and is hanged up to bleed. This could have been very messy, if done indoors). The washerwoman denied this vehemently, asserting that she had not seen any such thing, and saying that ‘she might rot alive’ if this story was in any way untrue. The generally factual narrative veers once more towards a more 16^th century sort of story of how providence, though not always seen, works out its mysterious course: ‘and so it hapned; for a little time after her Bowels began to rot away, and she became detestably loathsome till she died’.

A local farmer testifies that he had stopped at the Inn after selling barley. He had £20 on his person: he put furniture against the door of his room: and heard Sewell and Drayne come and try the door in the middle of the night…

Drayne is sentenced to death for his part in the murder. In the usual bundling together of cases in a seventeenth century court, a woman sentenced to death for having two husbands (so it says) challenges the hostler to tell the truth, and save Kendall, who has been imprisoned ‘during pleasure’: he confirms that her story was true, and that she had no part in the murder. But then his wife appears and shuts him up: he is subsequently silent even at the gallows. The two daughters of Sewell, who have both Kendall’s evidence and Drayne’s partial confession against them, were also arrested and tried, but the Grand Jury decided that there is not enough evidence to convict them.

After her success in Chelmsford, the widow Kidderminster remarried, and tried to recover her husband’s inheritance in Herefordshire on behalf of their daughter. . Here, she was less fortunate, even though between the years 1670 and 1680, she had ‘three ejectments brought at Common law, and three Bills exhibited in the High Court of Chancery’ against the surviving son of the usurping couple: he asserts that the property had been justly purchased.

The 1688 pamphlet is interesting for its date: why then, and not before? I suppose Mistress Kidderminster did her best to recover the Herefordshire properties, failed, and then found a sympathetic ear, and told her whole story. More remarkable still is the way the EEBO copy seems to have been in the hands of an editor or censor. This reader crosses out whole passages. The first encounter between Mistress Kidderminster and Mary Mattocks is crossed out, and the account of the widow hearing the bumps in the night when she stays at the White Horse. Also, he firmly deletes from the text the names of the various JP’s and Judges that the narrative mentions, as though a proper regard for the legal profession keeps the personal names of the chief officers of the law out of mere pamphlets. Conversely, a Christian name is written in, and then there are an intriguing looking set of annotations which disappear into the crease of the physical book, and so cannot possibly be read on the page image off the microfilm.

What do we learn from all this? The toughness of 17^th century women, their ramshackle legal processes, that boys could be sold, that women dried washing in churchyards, what the price of silence was (and how limited a silence could be so purchased).

Mistress Beast has her husband murdered, 1582

Mistress Beast did exist, and we will come to her in a moment. This post might have been titled ‘The Worcestershire Murders’, as my source is a well printed and rather well written pamphlet, A briefe discourse of two most cruell and bloudie murthers, committed bothe in Worcestershire, and bothe happening vnhappily in the yeare 1583.

Another possible title for this post might have been ‘Murder most foolish’, for both killings were carried out with reckless disregard for consequences. In the case of Thomas Smith, resentment at a rival mercer’s popularity seems to have blinded the perpetrator to all consideration of what would happen next, while Mistress Beast and her lover seem to have occupied a fantasy realm of amatory conceits where reality scarcely impinged.

On New Year’s Eve in Evesham, 1582, Thomas Smith invited a successful rival in trade, Robert Greenoll, over to his house to share a pint of wine and some apples roasted in the fire. Greenoll, a bachelor, popular both socially and as a tradesman, suspected nothing about Smith, who, if not so successful as a mercer, had a well off family behind him, and was married to a gentlewoman.

But Smith had listened to “the persuasion of the evill spirite with him”, and had already, down in his cellar, dug a grave “about sixe or seven inches deepe” (this has to mean that the body placed in it would be that far below the surface).

Evesham, on this New Year’s Eve, was in a state of rather uptight festivity. There’s to be a play performed (its nature regrettably unspecified in the pamphlet), but the town had made special seasonal provisions against disorder: “In Evesham, all the time of Christmas, there is watch and ward kept, that no misorder or il rule be committed”:

“It grew toward night, when as a play was cryed about the Towne, whereto both old and young did hastely repaire: and this Smith having a boye that served him in his Shop, fearing lest the boye should perceive anie thinge, gave hym money, and bade him goe see the Play: and bring him a whole report of the matter.”

Smith’s Boy fetched the wine and apples, then ‘ran merrily to see the Play’, leaving the two men alone: ‘at last, Greenoll stouping to turne an apple in the fire’, Smith struck him over the head with an iron pestle he had left to hand. Here, the anonymous author half emerges into the narrative, for he has himself heard from Smith about how awfully protracted the killing was: “Smith hearing him to give such a woful groan (as himselfe said to me, when I came to him in prison) began to enter into some sorrowfulness for the deede”. But judging his victim to be beyond help, he struck him three or four times more: but poor Greenoll was still trembling on the floor. Now Smith produced a knife, and stabbed him in the neck ‘but as Smith himselfe said, he did not cut the wezand, but pierced the skin somewhat’, then tried to stab him in the heart. First time, he hit the shoulder blade, then finally killed Greenoll with a second blow at the heart.

Smith then set about the plan which he thought would clear him of the deed, dragging the body down to the cellar, and placing it in the shallow grave, which he smoothed over with a plasterer’s trowel, then shook ‘shellinges’ from the bales of linen flax he kept down there all over the floor, finally placing ‘drifats and chests’ over the fresh and shallow grave. Smith then meticulously washed the house clear of bloodstains, and dried where he had cleaned.

[A ‘dryfat’ is ‘A large vessel (cask, barrel, tub, case, box, etc.) used to hold dry things (as opposed to liquids’, those ‘shellings’ are the pods which would have held the seeds of the flax, i.e., linseed OED.]

At this point, Smith started to behave like a man who now wanted to be caught for his crime he had just committed. He has already told the local night-watchman, ‘See and see not’, and on this slender security he took Greenoll’s keys and robbed his shop: the stolen goods he placed in his own house.

On the next morning, Greenoll’s shop was found to have been robbed, and inquiry was made as to ‘who was abroade that nighte that might be suspected, because of the Playe that was in the Towne’ (one notices again this extreme caution about having a play performed in the community!). The watchman says Thomas Smith was 'abroad somewhat late', and that Smith had sent him that inexplicable watch word, ‘see and see not’.

Smith was fetched in, to be asked where Greenoll was, because there was already “A shrewd presumption against him to be somewhat faultie in the matter”. The authorities say that they will search Smith’s house. Smith says his house cannot be searched, as his wife is away in King’s Norton with the keys “but (quoth he) if you will search my Sellar you maye and so tooke the keyes from his girdle and threw them unto them”.

The insane bravado of this suggestion led to the unravelling of Smith’s crime. The search party at first found nothing. Curiously, there seems to be no inclination to break into the house itself, despite the implausibility of Smith’s claim about being left locked out (apart from the cellarage). But as they are about to give up, one of them sees “A little piece of earth, as it were new broken out of the grounde, lying under the nethermost staire”. They decide they must investigate more closely to find where this fresh soil might have come from, move the chests and dryfats, beneath them, they found the ground to be soft, where digging, “Presently they found Greenoll buryed, not past six or seven inches deepe”.

By the earnest entreaty of his friends, Smith was not hanged in chains, but hanged to death, and afterwards simply buried. The pamphleteer observes that we must shun “Repining at our neighbours prosperity”, and says of Smith’s crime amidst this anxiously Christian community, full of alarm at allowing a play to be performed, that “the verie conceite whereof is able to astonish the heart of a Jew, or a Mahomitans recreant”.

To come to Mistress Beast at last, Greenoll's death was not the only murder in the vicinity of Worcester: in the same year, at Cothridge, west of the city, an honest husbandman named Thomas Beast had in his house a handsome serving man called Christopher Thomson. In time, Mistress Beast decided that she preferred Christopher to her husband, and, as the pamphlet disapprovingly puts it, “often times they would carnally acquaint them selves together”. With “the Neighbours not suspecting, but credibly perceiving, the common and unhonest behaviour of this wicked woman and her lusty yonker”, Thomas Beast eventually was apprised of what was going on under his nose. He told the servant to leave, but his wife intervened, and somehow persuaded her husband to keep the man on. The affair then continued until Mistress Beast decided that ‘her sweet dallying friend’ must kill her husband, “whereto a great while he would not consent”.

Here’s the full extent of her reported thinking about getting Thomson off from the charge of murder: ‘with mony and friends I will warrant thee to save thy life, and then thou and I will live merrily together”. The narrator, who seems to be local enough to know something about these people, interjects in horror: “Oh most horrible and wicked Womon, a woman, nay a devil: stop your eares you chaste and grave matrons, whome Gods feare, dutie, true love to your husbandes, and verture of your selves hath so beautified as nothing can be more odious unto you, then such a graceless strumpet should be found, so much to dishonour your notable sexe.”

Finally, fired by her implausible persuasion that he could get away with the crime, the credulous and love-smitten Christopher solemnly promised over a cup of posset that he would carry out the murder. As the murder weapon, he first took a long pike - hardly the least conspicuous of weapons to be wandering around with - but his mistress gave him instead a woodman’s tool, a “Forrest Bil, which she her self had made very sharp”.

Thus equipped, Thomson went and found his master ploughing in a field, started a quarrel, and killed him with a single blow. Thomson fled the scene of the crime, but was soon caught, and was taken to Worcester Castle, where in a brief recognition of the depth of trouble he was in, he exclaimed against his mistress, ‘how she was cause that he committed the deed.”

Mistress Beast was also arrested, but somehow contrived to bombard her lover in his cell with gifts of “Mony, handkerchers, nosegays, and such like amorous and loving tokens”.

Perhaps both of them, faced with inevitable and dreadful punishment for their crime, took refuge in a strange amatory fantasy world: “he besotted in his naughtie affection … made a triumphe, as it were, in carrying a locke of her haire about him, & would sit kissing and delighting in any token she sent him: beside, one day he desired the jaylor, that if he were a man, or one that regarded the extreme afflictions of those, whom the tyranny of love possessed, that he wold doo so much for him, to rip foorth the hart of him, & cleaving the same in sunder, he should there behold the lively Image of his sweet mistresse (as the cheefest Jewell he had) hee desired him to make a present of that precious token.”

This kind of talk to a jailor, in an age when executioners would chop out the hearts of some malefactors, brings to mind the grotesque literalism of John Fletcher’s Memnon, in the play, The Mad Lover, who decides to send his beloved Callis his heart, and commissions a surgeon to do the necessary operation.

The authorities might have been tempted, but they didn’t take Christopher Thomson at his word. He was simply taken out of jail and hanged where he did the murder, then his body was drawn on a hurdle round Worcester, and finally hanged in chains at Cothridge.

Mistress Beast was drawn on a hurdle to a field just outside Evesham, and burned at the stake.

1582, Worcestershire: who would have thought conceits about having the image of your beloved in your heart would be so important to a servant and his mistress? Sidney is perhaps writing Astrophel and Stella, but love poetry seems to be already received by the audience who are, as it were, waiting for his works. Against this, in the Smith-Greenoll case, the reservations of the Evesham civic authorities about festivity and plays: dangerous stuff, imaginative writing or performance.

My image is part of a woodcut in Thomas Cooper, The cry and reuenge of blood, 1620 - the familiar trio of victim, murderer, and instigating devil.