The Deadly Deed

What was murder?

‘Of all the felonies murder is the most heinous’ so wrote the Elizabethan legal expert Sir Edward Coke. His contemporary, the writer Anthony Munday, branded it an ‘abhominable offence in the sight of God and Man’. This did not mean that the Tudors thought that murder was the worst crime; that position was reserved for treason, which as well as including direct attempts to overthrow the monarch could even include counterfeiting. Felonies were defined as serious crimes where the punishment was usually death. In Tudor England, it was not only murder or treason that could see you executed – you could equally be hanged for offences such as rape or robbery.

By the 1500s it was established that murder was something carried out furtively with some form of pre-meditation. In The Boke of Justyces of Peas, published in 1510, murder was described as ‘where a man by malice pre-pensed lies in wait to slay a man and according to that malicious intent and purpose he slays him so that he who is slain makes no defence.’

During the course of the sixteenth century, English law began to define the boundaries of murder more clearly. Someone who was an accessory to a murder, or who instigated one, became equally culpable even though they hadn’t wielded a weapon. Beating a person or making someone else do so could be murder if the victim then died of their injuries. If a murderer planned to kill someone but happened to kill someone other than their intended target, it could still be murder. And, if a group set out with the intent to kill, they could all be tried for murder, even though they might not have committed the act themselves.

Murder was made distinct from manslaughter under the Tudors, with the latter defined as a death that occurred as a result of ‘chance medley’, essentially in a hot-blooded affray. The line between manslaughter and murder remained muddied, particularly in the case of sudden, apparently unpremeditated murders, during theft for instance. The penalty for manslaughter could still be death but the crime rarely ended in a hanging. When the playwright Ben Jonson killed actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in 1598, he was tried for manslaughter and escaped execution.

Infanticide, the killing of newborn babies, had historically been dealt with by the separate ecclesiastical courts, but from the Tudor period, as worries grew about its prevalence, secular courts became involved. It filled Tudor commentators with horror. One pamphlet told of a maid ‘delivered of a sweet and tender infant’ but ‘casting all motherly and natural affection from her buryed the same alive.’ Infanticide carried the death penalty, but prosecutions were few as proof was needed that the baby had been born alive.

Witchcraft, used to kill, was treated as a separate felony from murder and in 1542 and 1563, acts of parliament were passed which decreed that anyone who used enchantment and sorcery to kill or destroy a person would be liable to the death penalty. Similar laws were enacted in Scotland. There were numerous cases. In 1566 Agnes Waterhouse, from Hatfield Peverel, was accused of bewitching to death William Fynne and was hanged. In 1593 Alice Samuel and her family were hanged for the killing of Lady Cromwell in Huntingdonshire and in 1594, Gwen Ellis was executed after causing the murder by witchcraft of Lewis ap John.

Suicide was seen as self-murder and, according to the Tudor writer William Harrison, writing in 1577, ‘such as kill themselves are buried in the field with a stake driven through their bodies.’

From the outset of the Tudor period there was concern that murder and violence were on the rise. A statute of 1487 noted ‘how murders and slaying … daily do increase in this land.’ By Elizabeth I’s reign, William Lambarde, a justice of the peace, despaired at the level of violence saying that ‘sin of all sorts swarmeth’. While murder was not as rife as it had been in Medieval times, research by historians suggests that the chance of becoming the victim of a violent death in Tudor England was much higher than it is today. For example, the historian J.S. Cockburn calculated from court records that the homicide rate in Kent in the sixteenth century was 4.6 per 100,000 of the population. The rate in Essex was 6.8 per 100,000. This compares to a modern rate of around 1 per 100,000.

According to Edward Hext, an Elizabethan justice of the peace from Somerset, one in five of all criminal cases never came before the authorities so, of course, many murderers may have remained undiscovered.

Culprits and victims

In a country with a population of no more than four million, made up of small and often rural communities, most murderers knew their victims. It is reckoned that thirteen per cent of all homicides occurred within families. Wives made up three quarters of the victims of domestic murder. There were occasional cases of children being murdered too, such as the woman from Kilburn who, ‘with a peece of a billet brayned her two children’. Servants were often the victims as were, occasionally, masters and mistresses. Outside the home, men made up most of the victims of homicide, largely through fighting, with pre-meditated murder rarer.

Culprits were mostly men, but records suggest that by Elizabethan times as many as a quarter were women. Some murderers could prove seriously savage. In 1560, a Stratford cordwainer called George Hurte killed a woman in Leytonstone and also ‘cut off her arms and legs.’ Other murderers could show considerable cunning when it came to covering up their crimes. For example, in 1595 the landlady of an inn at Caythorpe in Lincolnshire smothered a wealthy guest, then cut his throat, leaving his hand on the knife, successfully making it look like suicide for four months, until a bloody smock sent for washing gave her away. Others showed less skill. In 1568, a woman who killed her stepdaughter moved the body three times, first burying it under a tree, then in a field of oats and finally throwing it in a pond.

Cases of convicted serial killers were almost unknown in sixteenth century England. It’s likely that any Tudor serial killers that did exist were clever enough never to be brought to book for their crimes. One of those with the guile to avoid the reach of the law may have been Edward St Loe, an MP from Somerset who is believed to have poisoned his own wife and her first husband. He is also suspected of doing away with his own brother William in 1565, using the same method. William was married to Bess of Hardwick, often described as the wealthiest woman in Elizabethan England. She also fell ill, almost certainly having been poisoned by St Loe, but survived.

Motives

Sex and extra-marital affairs gave rise to many murders, with pamphleteers of the day particularly pre-occupied with cases of women who engineered the deaths of their husbands in order to be with other men. One case from the 1550s involved a Warwickshire gentleman, Sir Walter Smith, who took a beautiful younger wife called Dorothy. In time her affections wandered and she took a lover, William Robinson. Desperate to be with him rather than her ageing spouse, Dorothy persuaded a groom and a maid to help her kill Smith. Together they strangled him with a towel in his bed. They got away with the crime for a couple of years until the groom blurted out what had happened whilst drunk. Convicted of murder at the Warwick assizes, he and the maid were hanged while Dorothy was burned at Wolvey Heath. Sexual jealousy could also lead to murder. In 1540, for example, James Rination was hanged in Moorfield, London, for murdering his master in a garden over a ‘harlot’.

Financial gain has always been a strong motive for murder and the Tudor era was no different. One contemporary author spoke of how any man of means was fearful to reveal he had money lest it might ‘abridge his days’. In July 1533, John Wolfe and his wife Alice lured two foreign merchants on to a boat in the Thames, where they proceeded to murder and rob them. In another case, John Graygoose and John Wright, who were married to the sister and mother of a Thomas Chambers, cooked up a plan to murder him before he came of age and inherited a large fortune from his father’s estate, so that their families would benefit instead. Wright, a tanner from Upminster, killed Chambers in June 1595 but was later caught acting suspiciously and went to the gallows in Romford.

A few high profile murders were part of wider political intrigues such as the famous murder of Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots (see page 108). There were less well known instances too. In 1542, Thomas Trahern was ambushed and slain on a road near Dunbar while on a diplomatic mission for Henry VIII to James V’s court in Scotland. The three attackers used a dagger, lance and sword but were later apprehended and hanged. Henry blamed James for Trahern’s death.

Among the gentry, feuds threw up occasional murders. In 1556 for example, a pair of warring families led George Darcy to murder Lewis West near Rotherham. Riots, rebellions and local grievances could lead to murder by the mob. In 1497, a tax collector in Taunton fell victim to a local rising while in October 1536, Dr John Raynes was dragged off his horse and killed in Horncastle during a riot, with some of the perpetrators later hanged. In 1548, Crown Commissioner William Body arrived to destroy Catholic relics in Helston church in Cornwall, but 3,000 angry locals turned out to oppose him. He ended up stabbed to death.

Sometimes the motive for murder utterly defied explanation. In 1572, Bristolian John Kynnestar was arrested for stabbing his wife in the heart twenty-five times. He told a constable that the idea to kill her came in a dream. It is likely he was suffering from some mental illness; this going unrecognised, he was hanged for the crime.

Methods of murder

According to Coke, murder might be committed ‘by poyson, weapon sharp or blunt, gun, crossbow, crushing, bruising, smothering, suffocating, strangling, drowning, burning, burying, famishing, throwing down, inciting a dog or bear to bite’ or even ‘leaving a sick man in the cold.’

Hitting a victim with some form of blunt instrument was perhaps the most common method. This might be almost anything from a pestle and mortar, in the case of a Worcestershire murder, to a piece of a stile in an Essex killing. In the dying days of the Tudor dynasty, innkeeper Thomas Merry killed Robert Beech with fifteen blows of a hammer, then his servant Thomas Winchester with another seven, leaving the weapon sticking out of the latter’s head.

Almost everyone in the sixteenth century would have owned or had access to a knife or dagger and so it was unsurprising that sharp instruments crop up frequently in homicides. Cockburn reports that in Kent, in the reign of Elizabeth I, bladed weapons accounted for thirty-seven per cent of violent deaths. They could be used for some truly gruesome crimes. In 1580, for instance, Richard Tod murdered Mistress Skinner for money using his hunting knife, while in the same year, Margaret Dorington killed Alice Fox by thrusting a knife ‘up under her clothes’. In 1589 at Penshurst in Kent, Alice Smyth was stabbed in the neck by labourers Roland Meadow and Nicholas Gower. They then ‘slit open her stomach and took from it an unborn child.’

Swords or rapiers crop up occasionally in cases of Tudor murder, usually involving the upper echelons of society. Other types of blades also feature. In a case from Worcester in 1576, a man used an axe to kill his own brother. In 1555, Bennett Smith was hanged for the murder of Giles Rufford. Smith had paid two men, Francis Coniers and John Spencer, to kill him and supplied them with two ‘javelins’ with which to carry out the crime at Alconbury Weston near Huntingdon.

In third place behind blades and bludgeoning came strangulation or smothering, with the neck of victims often broken for good measure. A sly murderer might bet on the authorities not recognising the physical signs. Indeed, in 1582, when Thomas Cash from Holton in Lincolnshire strangled his wife Ellen to be with another woman, his spouse’s ill health was blamed. He got away with the crime until 1604, when his mistress revealed his culpability on her deathbed. Cash later confessed.

Easy to administer and difficult to detect in an age before scientific post-mortems, poison was the most feared method of murder in the Tudor era. Arsenic seems to have been the most commonly used agent; often called ratsbane, it was readily available to buy in order to keep down vermin.

Poisoning struck fear into elite members of society as it was a weapon that could be used secretly, with women and servants especially thought to favour this cunning ploy to do away with husbands and masters. Coke called it the most hateful form of murder ‘because it is most horrible and fearful to the nature of man’. In 1599, James VI of Scotland wrote that it was a crime a king was ‘bound in conscience never to forgive’. Poisoning was difficult to prove but convictions were made. In 1571 Rebecca Chamber of Harrietsham in Kent was found to have poisoned her husband Thomas by giving him a wooden bowl containing ‘roseacre and milk’. Christopher Bainbridge, Archbishop of York, died in Italy in July 1514, after his soup was poisoned by his own chaplain, Rinaldo de Modena.

Rumours of unproven poisonings gave rise to many mysteries. Was the food of Margaret Drummond, mistress of Scotland’s James IV, purposely contaminated to ease his marriage to Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII? Was Richard Clough, who died in Hamburg at the age of forty, poisoned because of his secret life as a spy for Elizabeth I?

Poison could have unintended consequences. In 1573, John Saunders of Warwickshire tried to poison his unsuspecting wife with an apple. She happened to give the deadly fruit to her three-year-old daughter instead of eating it and the girl died. Saunders was found guilty of murder, even though he had killed the wrong person.

Firearms were still novelties at the beginning of the Tudor period and notoriously inefficient. Yet as the sixteenth century wore on, worries about gun crime grew. During the reign of Henry VIII, there were measures to ban handguns with a 1541 statute bringing a clampdown following ‘diverse detestable and shameful murders’ involving them. Just two per cent of cases of homicide in Kent during the 1560s were caused by guns, but Elizabeth I’s government sought to introduce more controls, with particular concern over the use of pocket pistols known as ‘dags’. In 1575, the Privy Council complained of thieves armed with pistols who ‘murder out of hand before they rob.’

The century saw the gun become a favourite weapon of the assassin. In 1570, the Regent Moray, ruling Scotland during James VI’s minority, was gunned down from a window in Linlithgow as he passed in a cavalcade below. The killer was James Hamilton, who used a carbine to fire two lead balls into Moray’s belly as he rode by. It’s thought to have been the first ever political assassination using a firearm.