Crimes & Criminals of 17th Century Britain

Chapter 1

A Brief Portrait of a Time Barely Familiar

Anyone wishing to understand what life was like during a particular era would benefit from studying the great criminal cases of the age, for these are among the best indicators as to the social, religious, political and economic doctrines that many ordinary people of the time lived their lives by, day in and day out. Their hopes, fears, beliefs, superstitions, standards of education, past-times, even their levels of compassion; all are laid bare throughout such proceedings. And so a look at crimes and criminals of the seventeenth century forces the reader to consider a curious and revealing version of today’s Britain.

On the one hand, the era’s populated areas may seem semi-familiar places, through the thousands of yet-existing villages, certain city street-names and a great many landmark buildings nationally, some of which were actually established in the seventeenth century, such as the rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Despite this, however, virtually all of the taverns, buildings and miscellaneous locations observed herein where heinous crimes were committed no longer exist in the form they did at the time.

This observation even applies to rural locations. Typifying this (natural) advance of history, for our purposes, is Primrose Hill, on the northern side of Regent’s Park – site of one of the most infamous acts of the 1680s. This is the place where Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s garrotted corpse was left in a ditch, with a sword rammed through it; yet one would be hard pushed to realise it these days. In the time we are to consider, Primrose Hill was detached from the City of London by greater than two miles, formerly part of a great chase appropriated by King Henry VIII, and in the late seventeenth century still distant enough to be called the countryside. Nowadays, it has been swallowed up and incorporated into Greater London and while yet impressive, the sense of remoteness it must have presented when Sir Edmund’s body was dumped here has gone forever. Its manicured grass slopes are criss-crossed with a network of paths that now accommodate all manner of joggers, kite-flyers, dog-walkers, tourists and so on. One has to leave the paths and walk west into the rougher scrubland along the perimeter of (where is now) the Barrow Hill Reservoir to come anywhere near the approximate site where, almost 350 years ago, a drama occurred that came to both horrify and disgrace London. These days, it is difficult to even sense the echo of Sir Edmund’s killing, let alone imagine easily what this place must have been like when his corpse was deposited here.

Over the last four centuries, London has been redeveloped over and over, all the time spreading and growing to such immense proportions that it has now swallowed up every village, pasture and town within a 600-square mile radius. Like other cities, it was still walled at the start of the seventeenth century. Simultaneously, other British towns and villages have risen, fallen or become incorporated; ancestral homes have been rebuilt or fallen into decay; great road complexes and railway lines have opened up formerly-inaccessible parts. In some places the very landscape itself has changed through extensive deforestation, drainage, quarrying or cultivation. The point I am making is this; in most cases, the near-exact locations of the century’s horrific crimes can be reliably gauged, lending a strange familiarity to them. But it is important for the reader to consider that we are reaching so far back in history that if one could somehow be transported to the period and the locations then very few places would be immediately recognisable to us.

The approximate site on Primrose Hill where Godfrey’s body was dumped, as it is today.

Equally worth remarking upon are the conspicuously different attitudes of the era. Readers today will no doubt observe a great many generational similarities in evidence, but the fact remains that this was a Britain entirely different socially, economically, religiously and politically to the one we know now. Some motives are all too familiar, it is true, avarice being the most recognisable, as well as sexual jealousy, vengeance and ruthless ambition. But others are not so readily accessible. Murderous purges upon witchcraft occurred, for instance, as well as treasonable assassination attempts, which were not uncommon. And although tyranny among the rulers of the time was recognised and understood as an abhorrent crime, it stopped few in power from practising it.

Throughout the 1600s, many people of position and rank were unjustly manoeuvred to their deaths politically through partisan legal systems that knew no mercy. The seventeenth century was a time when the names of the guilty and the innocent can sometimes appear confusingly blurred, since those with judicial power repeatedly became truly guilty of worse crimes than those they sentenced. This barbarity arose from the fact that to set an example, or undermine a perceived national threat, the authorities in control often felt it necessary to come down all too harshly; this was, after all, a time when domestic politics and personal convictions were worth going to war against your own countrymen for. Therefore, time and again, in obliterating a long-term threat, those in power tyrannically proved themselves willing to commit judicial abuses upon people who were seen to be guilty of heresy, sedition or rebellion.

LAW, ORDER AND PUNISHMENT

Although the highest in the land might be manoeuvred to their deaths through the courts if the political situation demanded it, others of position and rank could be cleared of the most violent of crimes if they pleaded their clergy.

This was one of the more curious loopholes in the law throughout most of the century, owing its origins to an ancient claim to be tried in an ecclesiastical, or church, court under canon law. However, by the seventeenth century this had morphed out of all recognition into a statute allowing partial clemency for first-time offenders accused of certain crimes, including, sometimes, murder and manslaughter. A pardon was often facilitated by a reading test, promises of good conduct in the future, financial compensation, and, no doubt, bribery in certain instances. This, quite naturally, gave the educated and wealthy a certain scope to manoeuvre their freedom, even at the expense of a conviction, while those less privileged generally paid with their necks.

A rare exception to the rule, starkly highlighting the attitudes of the time, was the case of Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven. On 25 April 1631, the earl was arraigned at the King’s Bench Bar and found guilty of rape and sodomy, and after being convicted by a jury of his peers he was executed on Tower Hill the following 14 May. This case is a complicated one. The rape was found to have been committed upon his wife Anne, Countess of Castlehaven, by one of the earl’s minions, but abetted by the earl himself. However, the sodomy charges related to (apparently consensual) relations with his page, Lawrence Fitz-Patrick. Castlehaven denied it all, declaring during his trial that he had:

‘a wife who desires a younger husband, and a son that is gaping after my [Wiltshire] estate, and has the Devil and wicked servants to assist their maliee, in indeavouring to take away my life wrongfully.’

This was not without foundation, since everyone stood to benefit from the earl’s death, and one is left with the feeling that whatever the earl’s persuasion, allegations of homosexual behaviour were levelled merely to encourage his conviction. The intolerance of the time is clear: for during the trial it was observed that ‘sodomy’ – and by association homosexuality – was

‘of so abominable and vile a nature it is a crime not to be named among Christians; and by the Law of God, as well as the antient laws of England, it was punish’d with death.’

Fitz-Patrick, the page, and Giles Browning, Countess Anne’s rapist, were also executed.

In this case, the earl was accused by his wife, but there is a prevalent suggestion that legal suits against peers were rarely contested successfully by commoners. This is perfectly illustrated by the case of the monstrous Earl of Pembroke during Charles II’s reign (1660-1685), whose time is correctly regarded as one when the aristocracy killed almost in contempt of the law, aware that the status quo was likely to see them acquitted. At best, manslaughter convictions were obtained, but unless the crime was proved undeniably premeditated, as opposed to happening in the heat of the moment, acquittals usually still followed. The fact that almost everyone was armed, and murders through loss of control occurred as an inevitable by-product of this, seems to have been something beyond the comprehension of the times.

Such gross leniency for killing a fellow human being appears all the more perverse given the vast array of other offences which were considered prosecutable – many of which today seem Draconian. Throughout the 1600s at York for instance, men and women were arraigned for such crimes as witchcraft; uttering seditious words; defrauding the revenue; sacrilege; libellous words; cattle-stealing; clipping money and melting the clippings into new coins; being an imposter; being a Catholic priest; speaking against the Church of England; spreading false news; not accepting the oath of allegiance; holding a conventicle; publishing unlawful books; scandalous conduct… and so on. As this suggests, commoners generally fared far worse than riotous city gentlemen or the higher landed gentry in the shires. Poorly educated and often desperate, common people frequently felt the full force of the law.

The police forces of the day were often poorly-paid, corrupt, superstitious men appointed by local justices of the peace, or magistrates. Known as parish constables or peace officers, they would be responsible for the administration of justice. Coroners had the power to pronounce someone guilty at an inquest, even before a trial had occurred, whilst paid informers and thief-takers, often with a criminal background themselves, frequently emerged offering their services to catch other criminals.

Assize courts were a feature of the era, occurring periodically in county towns across the land. These were presided over by travelling circuit judges, principally from London, who might spend several days overseeing the trials of various imprisoned suspects before moving on somewhere else. Judges, particularly in Middlesex (that is, London and the wider area), commonly handed out death sentences without pity at mass assizes; multiple executions were not uncommon. In fact, many ordinary trials were mere exercises. One witness became sufficient to convict an accused murderer, burglar, incendiary, highwayman, or a whole gang of ‘clippers and coiners’ (forgers and coin-debasers) all the way to the gallows. In some cases of high treason, the testimony of a single witness was illegally judged to be enough if the situation dictated that some rebellious gentleman needed to be made an example of.

Localised civil disorder was quelled by raised militias, or trained bands as they were sometimes called, with shooting melees and force often sufficing as a means of pacification. Simultaneously, huge sections of the regular governmental army were ill-disciplined men, so brutalised by conflicts at home and abroad that they often inflicted great violence on the helpless communities where they were billeted as they moved about the country.

It is well-known that at the start of the seventeenth century, certain medieval tortures were still utilised by the authorities. The average prisoner might expect to be deprived of his reason, starved by desensitised gaolers, beaten or chained, whereas those more stubborn were ‘pressed’ (crushed) with boards and rocks if they refused to talk, or else stretched on the rack. Corruptly, however, those who had money were allowed many indulgences. The barbaric punishment for treason – infamously hanging, drawing and quartering – was still enforced, although the ‘hanging’ part began to give way to decapitation by an axeman. Simultaneously, women convicted of murdering their husbands were publicly burnt, the crime being classed as one of petty treason because the law decreed their status was subordinate in the relationship.

Halifax had a guillotine-like contraption for executing felons. It was last used in 1650, on a linen thief called Wilkinson and a horse rustler called Mitchell. Engraving by Wenzel Hollar, reproduced in The Picture Magazine. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

One of the principal punishments inflicted on the common male murderer however, was ‘gibbeting’, which is worth briefly observing. By the end of the seventeenth century, many countryside views across the nation in general had become spoiled by the grim and sinister sight of a rotting human carcass encased in a metal cage that hung from a wooden beam, or sturdy oak. This was a practice followed throughout the seventeenth century, occurring post-execution and known as gibbeting, with the gibbet frequently being placed as near as possible to the location of the encased subject’s crime. This ghoulish punishment was also known as ‘hanging in chains’ and afterwards the corpse of the offender might be seen suspended by the roadside for years, perhaps even decades – sometimes until the body presented nothing more than a wind-bleached skeleton and the original circumstances of the crime had become long forgotten. Occasionally, the gibbet post bore its grisly burden until the beam collapsed in strong winds, or the contraption simply fell apart through the ravages of time. If we are to believe certain stories, some murderers were occasionally even gibbeted alive, dooming them to a death by starvation as they languished in the immovable confines of an iron cage on some lonely weather-beaten heath.

At a handful of locations across Britain, battered gibbets (usually replicas) still stand, providing grim testimony to some forgotten atrocity. In fact, in the mid-twentieth century, the remains of what were believed to be a gibbet post were discovered in Potsford Wood, west of Wickham Market, Suffolk. This is likely to have been the site were Jonas Snell’s corpse was suspended in 1699, strapped in irons, following his execution for murder. He had used a sledgehammer to kill his employer, John Bullard, as well as the man’s father (also John), at Letheringham Mill. The murders were committed during a robbery, and in attempting to get away at three in the morning, Snell, it seems, got hopelessly lost. When he was imprisoned in Bury Gaol, he is said to have composed a gruesome poem in which he admitted the murders, and many years after his execution birds built their nests in his skull, according to an account of the tradition in the Ipswich Journal of 18 April 1885. Be that as it may, a cracked plaque is now attached to the crumbling post, declaring:

‘Remains of Potsford Gibbet. In use at the end of the 17th century. Last known hanging April 14th 1699. (Jonah Snell).’

Gibbeting does not seem to have had quite the desired effect, despite the greater threat it carried – that of denying the condemned criminal a Christian burial. For when this gruesome post-mortem fate was combined with that of a sure execution, it frequently served only to encourage the criminal to murder his victim in order to avoid being identified in the future. Nor was the threat of being cut to pieces and anatomised on a surgeon’s table after hanging enough to stem the surge in banditry that developed as the century drew out.

The corpse of servant George Atkins hung from the Caxton Gibbet, Cambridgeshire; he had murdered three members of the Foster family at Monksfield in 1671. Fleeing after the crime, Atkins remained absent for many years, but was ultimately recognised in a local tavern after returning.

Those who were not executed faced the living Hell of one of England’s disgusting prisons. Of these, perhaps it is Newgate that remains the most infamous; this monstrous fortification loomed on the corner of Newgate Street and Old Bailey, adjacent to the then much smaller criminal court appertaining to the City of London and the wider county of Middlesex. Although Newgate was pulled down in 1904, its reputation as a maelstrom of disease, violence and anarchy has enshrined it in London folklore. In the seventeenth century, libellers, forgers, nonconforming clergymen and gentleman traitors were housed with murderers, pirates, highwaymen and fire-raisers. All levels and types of criminal were imprisoned there and certain snippets of data recorded by the diarist Narcissus Luttrell in the early 1690s provide valuable insights into the Hell-hole it presented to the world by the century’s end.

For example, on 22 December 1690 he wrote how a woman had been executed at Newgate for setting the prison on fire; on 8 January 1692, another fire took hold during a foiled breakout by some prisoners. That same night, a highwayman named Robinson died ‘of the feaver’ as he languished in Newgate – Robinson had been arrested in the Temple by the officers of Newgate on the afternoon of 28 December, having ‘killed a porter, and wounded one mortally’. Luttrell also noted the execution in Newgate Street on 13 June 1690 of ‘the man who killed the underkeeper at Newgate’. This case concerned a young prisoner named Thomas Kelsey, who on 21 April that year, had taken part in a revolt at the gaol. The mutineers had vowed to raise a ‘bloody flag of defiance’, and the underkeeper, Henry Goodman, had been stabbed between the ribs during the incident. Kelsey was, naturally, already incarcerated in Newgate when he committed this murder, so his actions were nothing less than suicidal. He was aged just 20 when he was hanged in the road near the gaol.

Site of the Tyburn gallows today.

The terrible conditions of Newgate were hardly unique. James Raine, a Victorian chronicler of the depositions at York Castle, observed:

‘It is impossible to speak in terms of too strong reprobation of the state of the Northern prisons in the seventeenth century. They were dens of iniquity and horror, in which men and women herded together indiscriminately. The dungeons of the Inquisition themselves were scarcely worse. Some of them had no light and no ventilation; several of them were partly under water whenever there was a flood! The number of prisoners who died in gaol during this century is positively startling…’

Whenever there was a want of an executioner, a condemned criminal might be reprieved if he accepted the odious office. At York alone it is reckoned that between five and twenty people were executed annually there between 1650 and 1670. At Tyburn, London’s great triangular gallows near what is today the junction of Marble Arch and Edgware Road, an equivalent number might be launched to their deaths at a single sitting.

SOCIETY AND VIOLENCE

Behind all the political and economic stresses that agitated the general desperation, it can also be said that something else is observable in the attitudes of the time. Put simply, violence appears to have been astonishingly normal to the people of the seventeenth century. With brutality conspicuous at all levels of everyday society, the threat of lethal punishment by the law was perhaps not the horrifying extremity it might seem nowadays. In fact, most considered the lives of others thoughtlessly cheap. Pity, it may be remarked upon, seems to have been a strange and valuable emotion on all sides and at all levels.

The reasons behind this mind-set could be debated endlessly; they are very complex. During and after the civil wars (1642-1651), it is as though no one knew any different, and the land must have become awash with men who had seen such carnage that they were almost desensitised to it. To the succeeding two generations (who knew their fathers and grandfathers may have killed to achieve a purpose), demanding satisfaction through violence became compulsory following even the most trivial of arguments. Subsequently, in higher circles, as duelling became ever more fashionable, an almost ridiculous blindness to the outcomes of violent actions, especially when in a state of rage or intoxication, seems to have become a point of personal honour in many instances.

Of course, the high murder rate was aggravated by the fact that surgery was much less sophisticated, meaning that some injuries now survivable were then fatal. But without digressing too much, sometimes the levels of violence employed were so mindlessly casual that one can only suppose the people of the time lived in a naturally brutalising, and brutalised, society. Living under barbarous criminal laws that were executed with intentional disregard for the finer sensibilities of human nature, the people of the seventeenth century can be said to have been educated to honour cruel discipline as wholesome discipline; to regard with complacency all suffering from which they were exempt; and to consider benevolence and compassion as sentimental weaknesses. It was a time when gentlemen caned their manservants, ladies beat their maid-servants, fathers horsewhipped their sons, mothers chastised their grown daughters, tradesmen and artisans beat their apprentices and teachers flogged their pupils with repulsive severity.

The worst examples of these excesses make for difficult reading. On 14 September 1699, for example, a schoolmaster called Robert Carmichael was tried before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh for the murder of one of his pupils, John Douglas, son of William Douglas of Dornock. After bolting the door of the school-house in Moffat, Carmichael had ordered two other boys to restrain young Douglas before he thrashed him mercilessly for a prolonged period of time. He also beat the boy violently around the head. Finally, he struck his victim so forcefully between the shoulder-blades with the butt-end of his whip that it caused the child’s death. Realising he had committed murder, Carmichael attempted to escape, but was caught; despite the objections of the victim’s father, the schoolmaster was convicted only of manslaughter on 13 November. He was sentenced to be whipped in Edinburgh’s Lawn-market, as well as at the cross and the Fountain-well, before being imprisoned until he could find security (raise money enough) to leave Scotland, never to return.

What is truly astonishing about this is that Carmichael’s actions stemmed from pure revenge; having learned the boy was to be removed from his school, he simply resolved to do the poor child harm.

Everyone lashed out. And when the law was seen to flog lesser convicts through the best streets and most fashionable squares of any town, we can surmise that ordinary people sometimes found themselves compelled to vigorously emulate the example. Even educated people routinely beat their servants. The writing of Samuel Pepys, a Member of Parliament and Chief Secretary to the Admiralty, famous for his diaries and correspondence, reinforces how astonishingly normal violence was, for on 1 December 1660 he observed how he himself had been forced to beat his own maid that morning because certain items had not been prepared adequately. Administering this punishment left the diarist ‘vexed’.

The seventeenth century was a truly hazardous time to be a British citizen. But it did at least help shape – albeit violently – the democratic direction the nation was heading in politically and socially. At the very least, in studying the state of society then, we can now see how far we have advanced in our approach to law and order.

REPORTING CRIME

Throughout the 1600s, information on a great many crimes and murders came the way of the London public via media other than newspapers; the famed London Gazette, as well as a tiny number of provincial news-sheets, did not begin to emerge until the second half of the century. Much news came in the form of pamphlets, chapbooks and even printed ballads, some of it either alluringly sensationalist or else misreporting rumour as fact. Such pamphlets were usually luridly titled so as to draw the reader’s interest. Consider, for example: Three Inhuman Murthers committed by one Bloudy Person, upon his Father, his Mother and his Wife, at Cank [Cannock] in Staffordshire, and the manner how he acted this Bloody Tragedy. Together with his Examination, Confession, Condemnation and Execution, 1675. We are told the prisoner refused to plead at Stafford Assizes and so was sentenced to be pressed to death by way of a board placed on his chest which was loaded with heavy weights. The pamphlet’s frontispiece actually depicted the murderer being crushed in this manner for the titillation of its readership.

Many of the era’s chapbooks bear a dubious stamp of unreliability, to researchers today. There can be a journalistic, made-for-the-playhouse feel about them, due in large part to the moralistic lecturing and evidence of crowd-pleasing supernatural intervention they incorporated into the text. Not only that, but some cannot be independently corroborated by even the smallest snippet of data from elsewhere and we are often left guessing to what extent these were based on fact. After all, with large sections of the day’s media completely ungoverned, there was plenty of room for speculation to be reported as fact.

But these are not the only sources of information concerning the era that are available to us. In many ways, the most telling data nowadays can be gleaned from contemporary diary entries jotted down by the likes of Samuel Pepys and Narcissus Luttrell.

Personal correspondence shared between the educated gentry also provides valuable insights. For example, the Northamptonshire Record Office retains a letter from a Mr Kent of Brackley to Mr Thomas Chare of Bridgewater House in London, dated 31 March 1626, in which a murder is referenced as having lately occurred near the former town, a place in Northamptonshire. The matter concerned a man called Webb, who had collected various debts due to him in order that he might pay his own rent and have some funds left over for the Brailes Fair. Unfortunately, according to Mr Kent, Webb had been murdered the previous Sunday and his body left at Halse, near Brackley, in a position suggesting his attacker, or attackers, had staged it as though a suicide.

Little more is easily discoverable concerning this matter, so the fact that it was rescued at all from becoming lost entirely, is a circumstance we must be thankful for, despite the frustrating lack of detail. In fact, certain cases are so intriguing precisely because we know so little. Some are snippets of events almost lost to history, and the mind cannot help but speculate upon what other data could have become lost forever were it not for the diligence of local writers compiling folklore, perhaps greater than a century-and-a-half after the event. This circumstance certainly accounts for many seventeenth century crimes having foggy, confused or anecdotal details, like the story of the notorious Doone family.

At the time, to pursue a career in what might loosely be called journalism was sometimes tantamount to declaring one’s own political or religious affiliations. This often led to abuse, imprisonment or even murderous assault. The clergyman, pamphleteer and political writer Samuel Johnson is just one example; he was active in promoting the exclusion of King James II from the throne and became marked for persecution as soon as that prince came to power in 1685. The pretext for his punishment was his publication of a rallying cry to all Protestants in the army (James being a Catholic), for which he was sentenced to be degraded from the priesthood, fined, pilloried and whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. King James allegedly declared that, since Johnson had the spirit of a martyr, it was only fit he suffer like one. Following his publication of The Abrogation [removal] of King James in 1692, Johnson suffered an attempted assassination. Seven men broke into his London house in Bond Street, Mayfair, where they found him in bed with his wife. Setting about him with swords and clubs, they raged against him for the book he had written. Johnson was badly wounded in a number of places and fortunate not to have been killed; however, he recovered and lived until 1703.

In many ways, this illustrates the seventeenth century perfectly – any viewpoint, be it a political one, a libellous one, a religious one, a drunken one, or simply an unguarded one brought with it the threat of violent attack from some quarter if expressed warmly enough.

Prior to 1752, when Britain did away with the Julian Calendar, the New Year officially started on 25 March. For the purposes of this work, the years certain events occurred have been