The Chipping Campden Mystery: The Strange Disappearance of William Harrison

 

The so-called Campden Wonder, as the poet John Masefield called it, is one of the strangest crime mysteries in English history. It sounds very small in scale – the disappearance in 1660 of an elderly steward in a Gloucestershire village – but the way the story unfolded implies that something complicated and peculiar might have taken place.

The steward was William Harrison and he was the servant of Sir Baptist Hicks, who had made his money as a mercer and moneylender. When James VI of Scotland arrived in London to mount the English throne as James I, Hicks took the opportunity to supply the new king with the best silks he could find and lend him £16,000. In return, James I gave him a knighthood. Hicks wormed his way through James’s courtiers in the same way, supplying, lending and finding out a lot of secrets along the way. Hicks became very rich, rich enough to buy himself a peerage, after which he styled himself Viscount Campden. At Chipping Campden he spent a huge sum building a three-storied mansion. It had a glass dome which was always lit up at night to help travellers who might be lost on the wolds. It also had two banqueting rooms linked by an underground passage under the Terrace Walk. He was keen on underground passages.

In 1645, sixteen years after Sir Baptist Hicks, 1st Viscount Campden, died, the great house was wantonly destroyed by Sir Henry Bard. Bard was, ironically, a friend of the Campden family, though it is hard to tell this from his actions. He held the house as a garrison for Charles I, and his soldiers were so rapacious that they completely impoverished the people of the surrounding area. As Charles marched to Evesham he ordered his garrison out of Campden House and, on leaving, Sir Henry Bard set fire to it, burning the whole building and turning it into a ruin.

Hicks’s daughter Juliana had gone to live in Rutland with her son, the third Viscount Campden. In 1660, she was still there. Meanwhile, the old steward, William Harrison, stayed on among the ruins of Campden House with his family, living in the stable block, from which he administered the estate and forwarded the tenants’ rents to Lady Juliana.

William Harrison did not get on with his wife. She was a supporter of Cromwell and was described as ‘a snotty, covetous Presbyterian’. Harrison hid all his papers from her because he suspected her of being in touch with Parliamentarians. He also had difficulties with his son, a man of forty who wanted his job. It would appear that William Harrison did not lead a very happy home life, and he consequently leant heavily on the friendship of his devoted servant, John Perry. The Perry family lived in a cottage near the gates of Campden House. There were two brothers, twenty-four-year-old John and thirty-year-old Richard, their mother, who was thought to be a witch, and Richard’s wife and two children. They were allowed to live there rent-free and their needs were supplied by the estate, through Harrison.

On 16 August 1660, just a few weeks after the Restoration of Charles II, William Harrison walked across the fields to Charingworth, three miles away to the east. He was collecting rents, while most of the villagers were in the fields harvesting. He did not return. As night fell, Mrs Harrison sent John Perry to meet him, but Perry did not come back that night either. At daybreak, Edward Harrison set off in the direction of Charingworth to look for his father and Perry. He met Perry coming back alone. Perry knew nothing about William Harrison’s whereabouts and they walked together to Ebrington, a hamlet halfway between Campden and Charingworth.

Later in the morning a woman who was gleaning in the fields half a mile from Campden House found beside some gorse bushes some of William Harrison’s belongings. She picked up a comb, a hat and a neckerchief. The hat and comb were cut and there was blood on the neckband. The villagers assumed that William Harrison had been murdered, stopped harvesting and started looking for William Harrison’s corpse. They could not find it, but they were certain Harrison was dead. Increasingly they suspected John Perry of murdering him. The local magistrate, Sir Thomas Overbury, rode over from Bourton to question him; he was the nephew and heir of the far more famous Sir Thomas Overbury who was poisoned in the Tower of London.

Perry gave a detailed itinerary of his search, including the names of two countrymen he met on the way: Reed and Pearce. He had not liked wandering across the fields on his own at night, which was why he persuaded Reed and Pearce to join him. He had sheltered in a hen coop by a churchyard until midnight. Then the full moon appeared and it was light enough for him to see his way clearly. Then a mist rolled in and he could see nothing again, so he spent the rest of the night under a hedge. At dawn he set off again. He knocked on the door of a man called Plaisterer at Charingworth, and found that Harrison had collected £23 in rent there the previous afternoon. He called on another tenant, Curtis, and Harrison had called there too for rent, though Harrison had been less lucky as Mr Curtis had been out at the time and so he did not get his money. This being as much as he could do, Perry set off home, without William Harrison and without any idea where he might be.

John Perry’s nocturnal journey sounded very odd, but Reed, Pearce, Plaisterer and Curtis confirmed that the bits of the story that related to them were perfectly true. On the other hand, there was no one to corroborate Perry’s version of what he was doing (or not doing) between 9.30 at night and four in the morning. Overbury decided he had no choice but to detain Perry for a couple of days while he awaited more evidence. But there was no more evidence. Overbury questioned Perry again and Perry repeated the story. Then, very rashly, he changed his story. A travelling tinker had murdered Harrison, he said, then he thought up another scenario in which a gentleman’s servant had robbed and murdered Harrison. The body was hidden in a bean-rick in Sheep Street, he said. The villagers searched the bean-ricks and found nothing.

On 24 August, Overbury questioned John Perry a third time. This time Perry said his mother and his brother Richard had killed Harrison when he returned from Charingworth. He said they had often asked him to tell them when Harrison was going to collect rents. He implied that usually he evaded the question, but this time he answered them. The result was that when William Harrison returned to Campden House after his rent-collecting, Richard Perry followed him. At first John Perry was not with them. When he joined them, he found Harrison on the ground and his brother Richard kneeling on him. Old Joan Perry was standing watching. Harrison had said, ‘You rogues, are you going to kill me?’ and pleaded with Richard not to kill him. Richard told him to hold his tongue, called him a fool and then strangled him. Richard emptied the pockets, emptied the money into his mother’s lap and then the two of them, Richard and the mother, dragged the body to the great sink beside Wallington’s Mill.

John Perry insisted that he had nothing to do with the murder or the disposal of the body. All he did was to keep watch, and it was while he was doing this that he saw John Pearce.

The next day, Overbury interviewed Joan and Richard Perry. They denied John’s allegations completely. The villagers searched the sink by Wallington’s Mill, found nothing, searched the fish ponds and all the ruins of the house, and found nothing there either. There was no sign of William Harrison’s body. In spite of this, Overbury decided that the Perrys must stand trial for murder. When the three were being taken to prison at Campden, Richard dropped a ball of string. The guard showed it to John, who immediately identified it as ‘the string my brother strangled my master with.’

At the September Assizes at Gloucester, the case was brought before a judge, but the judge, Sir Christopher Turnor, threw it out on the grounds that there was no body and therefore no evidence that murder had been done. The Perrys were kept in prison, though, and at the next session, the spring Assizes, their case was heard. This time a different judge, Sir Robert Hyde, decided that the lack of a corpse was no hindrance.

Meanwhile, something else had happened. In the February before William Harrison’s disappearance there had been a robbery at Campden. On a particular market day when a famous preacher was visiting the town, and everyone in the area was either in church or at the market, there was a break-in at William Harrison’s house. A ladder was placed against the wall to reach a second-storey window, an iron bar was ripped away with a ploughshare (which was flung down in the room) and the sum of £140 was stolen. The burglary was evidently carefully planned and carried out, and the culprits were never found, in spite of many inquiries.

There was a sequel to this crime three months later, on May Eve. Inmates of the almshouses and passers-by in Church Street could hear, from outside the high walls of Campden House, frantic screams for help from John Perry. Three men who happened to be passing in the street ran to the courtyard gate of the house, where they found Perry in a state of sheer terror. He had a pick in his hand and his coat pocket was slashed. He said he had been set upon by two men in white brandishing drawn swords, and that they would have killed him if had not defended himself with the pick. The pick bore recent cut marks to corroborate his story. A key in his pocket was similarly notched.

Perry’s behaviour and the bizarre story he told made people think that in some way he and his family had been responsible for the earlier robbery of William Harrison. Perry was pretending to be a victim of criminals in order to divert suspicion. At the September Assizes, the Perrys had been more or less forced to plead guilty to the robbery because they would be pardoned immediately. Charles II had marked his Restoration in May by an Act of Pardon and Oblivion. They pleaded guilty and as expected, guaranteed by law, they were duly pardoned. But, as in many modern cases of plea bargaining, the result rebounded on them in that they now had a criminal record and were seen as a criminal family. If they were capable of robbery, then why not aggravated robbery with violence? Why not murder?

When it came to the spring Assizes of 1661, the Perry family took back their admission of guilt for the robbery. They had not been the robbers on that occasion. Nor were they guilty of murdering William Harrison. John Perry tried to retract all his stories, saying that he was mad and did not know what he was saying. The outcome was inevitable. There was still no body, no positive evidence of any kind that murder had taken place, the accused all pleaded not guilty; but they were found guilty and hanged.

The executions were carried out consecutively. Old Joan was hanged first. It was assumed she was a witch and had put a spell on her sons. Richard was hanged second, after appealing to John to clear their names. John did not do so, but he did say something significant before he too was hanged; ‘I know nothing of my master’s death, nor what has become of him; but you may hereafter possibly hear.’

And more than a year later, in August 1662, something utterly extraordinary happened. William Harrison appeared alive and well in Chipping Campden. Given what had happened during his absence – the trial, humiliation and execution of three innocent neighbours – Harrison was required to give an account of himself to Sir Thomas Overbury. This is what he said.

 

As I was coming home that Thursday evening, there met me a horseman and said, ‘Art thou here?’ and I, fearing he would have ridden over me, struck his horse over the nose, whereupon he struck at me with his sword several blows and ran it into my side while I, with my little cane, made what defence I could. At last another came behind me, ran me in the thigh, laid hold on the collar of my doublet and drew me into a hedge near the place. Then came another. They did not take my money, but mounted me behind one of them, drew my arms about his middle and fastened my wrists together with something that had a spring lock to it – as I conceived by hearing a snap as they put it on. Then they threw a great cloak over me and carried me away.

In the night they alighted at a hayrick, which stood near unto a stone-pit by a wall-side, where they took away my money. About two hours before day (as I heard one of them tell another he thought it then to be) they tumbled me into the stone-pit. They stayed (as I thought) about an hour at the hayrick, when they took horse again. One of them bade me come out of the pit. I answered that they had my money already and asked what they would do with me, whereupon he struck me again, drew me out and put a great quantity of money into my pockets and mounted me again in the same manner.

 

So far, it is clear just from the simple fact that Harrison was alive in 1662 that John Perry’s story of his murder was totally untrue. Probably his account of his night wanderings was untrue as well. But the yarn Harrison was telling was obviously equally untrue. Why would armed men carry Harrison off in order to rob him of a few pounds of rent money? Why would they then stuff his pockets full of money? Presumably Harrison needed to disappear for some reason that he was not prepared to tell anyone, and for some very compelling reason too. The two men were both lying, and probably for the same reason; they simply could not say what was really happening.

Harrison’s story continued:

 

On Friday about sun-setting, they brought me to a lone house on a heath where they took me down almost dead, being sorely bruised with the carriage of the money. When the woman of the house saw that I could neither stand nor speak, she asked whether or no they had brought a dead man. They answered, ‘No, but a friend that was hurt and they were carrying him to a surgeon.’ She answered that if they did not make haste their friend would be dead before they could bring him to one. They laid me on cushions and suffered none to come into the room but a little girl. There we stayed all night, they giving me some broth and strong waters.

In the morning very early they mounted me as before, and on Saturday night they brought me to a place where there were two or three houses, in one of which I lay all night on cushions by their bedside. On Sunday morning they carried me from thence and about three or four o’clock they brought me to a place by the seaside called Deal, where they laid me on the ground. And, one of them staying with me, the other two walked a little off to meet a man with whom they talked. In their discourse, I heard them mention seven pounds; after which they went away together and half an hour after returned.

The man (whose name, as I after heard, was Wrenshaw) said he feared I would die before he could get me on board; then immediately they put me into a boat and carried me to ship-board where my wounds were dressed. I remained in the ship (as near as I could reckon) about six weeks.

 

The fictitious six week voyage to ‘Turkey’ involved being chased by Turkish pirates, being captured and taken to Smyrna and sold in the slave market there. Harrison became the slave of an eighty year old Turkish doctor. He was given a little silver bowl to carry and was given the nickname ‘Boll’. When the doctor died, Harrison sold the bowl and bought his passage home.

Most commentators on this remarkable episode have assumed that the seven pounds mentioned was the price Harrison fetched as a white slave. This is a preposterous idea. There were white slavers, but they were interested in kidnapping healthy young girls (and boys), certainly not old men of seventy-two in the wrecked state that Harrison seems to have been in by this stage, exhausted and covered in cuts and bruises. The whole kidnapping by white slavers yarn is an obvious cover story, the sort of borrowed melodrama that an uneducated person would come up with in the seventeenth century. What Harrison was trying to do was not only avoid telling the truth about his secret journey, but show that he was out of the country during the ordeal of the Perry family.

Harrison would certainly have heard about white slavers. The Mediterranean in particular was infested with pirates and in Turkey and North Africa there were thousands of white Christians from northern Europe who had been abducted. Only twenty-three years before the disappearance of William Harrison, Colonel Rainsborough’s father, Captain William Rainsborough, was hailed as a hero for rescuing 339 men, women and children from one port. In the early seventeenth century, Barbary pirates regularly raided the coasts of Ireland, Wales and the English West Country, snatching scores of people who were then sold on as slaves. Although by the nineteenth century William Harrison’s story looked utterly childish, the background his story was based upon was real enough. But Harrison was no spring chicken. He was far too old to be worth transporting anywhere for any kind of work. Nor was he in the right location. In the early seventeenth century, it was certainly risky to be living in an isolated village on the south coast of Ireland, where pirates could come ashore, take twenty people and be away again before the alarm was raised; such things happened. But Chipping Campden was a long way inland. Both age and geography are against William Harrison’s story.

There is an understandable assumption that Perry and Harrison were both lying for the same reason, that Harrison had to disappear for a few months and a cover story had to be concocted, and that Perry would corroborate it.

When Harrison was presumed dead, his son lost no time in asking lady Juliana for his father’s job. She agreed to this, and he was extremely unpopular. When Old Harrison reappeared, there was great relief because it meant that Edward Harrison would have to give way to his father. Edward was in the forefront of the witch-hunt against the Perrys. He may have been instrumental in having the Perrys brought to trial a fatal second time. He certainly arranged for John Perry’s body to be hung in chains on Broadway Hill, ‘where he might daily see him’. Mrs Harrison was not pleased to have her husband back. In fact, she committed suicide six months later.

For some reason which nobody in the family or the neighbourhood could know about, William Harrison needed to undertake a journey. He trusted John Perry absolutely, and Perry seems to have trusted him, too. Perry’s trust in Harrison turned out to be misplaced, as Harrison did not return in time to save Perry’s life. Harrison and Perry probably presumed that the lack of a body would mean that there could be no murder trial. The judge at the first Assize thought so, too. Unfortunately the judge at the second Assize did not. Maybe Harrison was away longer than intended because he really was abducted.

One writer who has studied the case has latched onto old Joan’s reputation as a witch and the evident friction between William Harrison and his Presbyterian wife. It is just possible that William Harrison and the Perrys were members of a witch cult. It would certainly explain the extreme secrecy involved and the intense loyalty shown. But there may be a simpler solution.

Among the Campden family papers there is a letter from the third Viscount Campden to his mother, Lady Juliana. It was written from Algiers, which in itself carries reverberations of Harrison’s description of a long voyage and being captured by Turkish pirates. Campden’s letter at first appears mundane enough. It is a request for cash. Then there is a receipt for money received ‘by hand of Harrison, oure good servant, who retourneth forthwithe, and as I will later.’ Campden was a young Royalist and like many others of his kind he was living in safe exile abroad during the Commonwealth, and using the opportunity to take a Grand Tour. The letter is very close to proof that Harrison did indeed undertake a voyage to the Mediterranean, and it shows him characteristically pursuing his duties as Lady Juliana’s steward. She trusted him to take her son the money that he needed.

The remaining problem is the secrecy and the deception. Why did Harrison need to conceal from his family and the neighbourhood this routine business trip? There was certainly no need for it in 1660. The Royalists were not being hunted any more; it was rather the reverse, with Parliamentarian regicides on trial for their lives. But between 1642 and 1660, journeys like Harrison’s trip to Algiers would have been treated as treasonable. The eighteen years of doing family business in secret had become a habit. The voyage to Algiers had after all not needed to be secret, it was just that Harrison was an old man and he had got into the habit of extreme caution. On the other hand, Harrison had presumably not gone missing in this way before, or his family would not have reacted as they did. Presumably the Algiers trip was a one-off foreign trip, or Mrs Harrison would have known there was no need to worry. Or was Harrison in the habit of keeping everything from her, because of her Cromwellian sympathies and her general antipathy towards him?

Baptist Hicks had built caution and secrecy into the layout of his estate. He knew he had to protect his enormous wealth, especially in economically and politically fast-changing times. There were underground passages leading to neighbouring houses, so that at times of crisis, such as impending raids, valuables could be taken out for safety. Occasionally the rumbling of barrows and handcarts in the tunnels could be heard. Before the commandeering and destruction of the house, William Harrison, helped by the Perrys, had successfully emptied it of most of the portable furnishings by way of these tunnels. Or it may be that many of the house’s treasures were actually stored in the tunnels. If so they might have remained there after the house was burnt down. William Harrison’s role as steward would then have extended beyond mere rent-collection; he was curating an unknown amount of treasure in the network of tunnels under and round the ruins. The swordsman’s attack on John Perry and the break-in at William Harrison’s house suggest that others had got to know that there were valuables to be had.

These are only suggestions about the nature of William Harrison’s responsibilities. Lady Juliana had clearly entrusted him with some great task, which he partially delegated to John Perry. Harrison had to go away, to Algiers, to take money to Lord Campden, and for some reason – not enslavement - his return was delayed. It was the delay that proved fatal to the Perry family. But there are still many unsolved mysteries surrounding the case. What was John Perry really doing during his unaccountable nocturnal wanderings? Why was William Harrison’s son so keen to see the Perrys suffer? Why did Mrs Harrison hang herself after William Harrison’s return? Why did William Harrison take so long to return home?