Chapter 2

Murder Made to Look Like Suicide 1514

The death of an infant child is always devastating for the parents in question, but when London merchant Richard Hunne’s baby son Stephen passed away in March 1511, the consequences would end up shaking the whole of Tudor society. Given the heartache Hunne must have felt at the death of his five-week-old child it was, perhaps, not surprising that when Thomas Dryfield, the local parish priest at St Mary Matfelon in Whitechapel, demanded Stephen’s christening robe in return for his services he was a little put out. The priest was following the custom of extracting a so called mortuary fee applied by the clergy when someone died, effectively as payment for the burial. Mortuary fees were regarded by some as not only insensitive, but symptomatic of a corrupt church feathering its own nest. Hunne decided to make a stand by refusing to give the priest his fee, claiming that as the piece of cloth was his and not his son’s property, he was not obliged to part with it. For a time the matter was forgotten, but when Hunne and the church once again came into conflict the issue was revisited and would eventually have deadly ramifications.

Hunne lived in the parish of St Margaret’s, London. He was a liveryman at the Merchant Taylors Company and was worth ‘at least a thousand marks’ according to the contemporary writer Thomas More, while the chronicler Edward Hall said he was ‘of honest reputation, no man to the sight of people more vertuous.’ Along with the mortuary issue Hunne came within the sights of the clergy over other issues. He had come to the defence of a neighbour called Joan Baker, who had been accused of heresy. Then, in November 1511, Hunne came into dispute with the parson of St Michael Cornhill over the title of a burnt out property.

The church was cracking down on Lollards, a group of dissenters who thought that the church should get back to the business of saving souls, rather than accruing wealth. Hunne was suspected of Lollardy, probably correctly. To send a message that Hunne’s perceived attacks on the powers of the church were not acceptable, the matter of the unpaid mortuary fee was now pursued after all. In April 1512, probably encouraged by his superiors, Dryfield sued Hunne at the archbishop’s Court of Audience held at Lambeth Palace – a higher level of church court than was strictly necessary. The judgement went against Hunne.

He, however, was not prepared to capitulate, refusing to hand over the robe or the six shillings and eight pence it was worth. Then, on 27 December, somewhat provocatively, he attended vespers at St Mary’s. When the officiating chaplain, Henry Marshall, saw him, he refused to continue with the service unless Hunne left, calling out: ‘Hunne, thou art accursed and standest accursed.’ In January 1513, Hunne took a suit out against Marshall for slander at the court of the King’s Bench, claiming his reputation as a businessman had been dented by the chaplain’s remarks. He also took out a second action using the law of praemunire – claiming that the church had overstepped its authority in pursuing him for the mortuary fee.

The ecclesiastical authorities began to take the threat posed by Hunne’s use of praemunire seriously. Originally intended to curb the power of the Pope in English matters it was now being more commonly used to challenge the Church’s jurisdiction in ordinary legal cases. However, for several months there was a lull, with a series of adjournments as debate raged about the merits of each side’s case. Then, in early 1514, in an attempt to outflank its enemies, the Church suddenly decided to begin proceedings against Hunne for heresy. In October, the Bishop of London, Richard Fitzjames, had the merchant arrested and a search made of his lodgings. Damning evidence was supposedly found, including the possession of a supressed bible in English. Hunne was thrown in the Lollards’ Tower at St Paul’s, a small prison attached to the cathedral.

Writing fifteen years later, Thomas More alleged that the Church had been right to pursue Hunne as he was indeed a heretic who had been attending subversive meetings. But the anti-clerical Edward Hall said that the priests did so out of ‘malice’ in revenge for the cases taken out against them. John Foxe in his Actes and Monuments says that the pre-Reformation Church wanted to make an example of Hunne to avoid more cases of praemunire being taken out.

On 2 December, Fitzjames interrogated Hunne at Fulham Palace. According to Foxe, Hunne was accused of both preaching and publishing against the laws of Almighty God, had spoken against the right of the church to collect tithes and likened the bishops and priests to ‘the scribes and Pharisees that did crucify Christ’. There is evidence that Hunne made a partial confession that day but whatever he might have admitted to, it wasn’t enough to satisfy Fitzjames and he was taken back to prison at St Paul’s in the charge of Dr William Horsey, the bishop’s chancellor.

Murder or suicide? A woodcut from a 17th century edition of Acts and Monuments by John Foxe, showing the body of Richard Hunne discovered in the Lollards Tower at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. (Courtesy of the Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University)

On the morning of Monday 4 December, Hunne was dramatically found dead in his cell hanging from a beam. As soon as word of the death got out there ‘arose great contention’. Dr Horsey let it be known that Hunne had simply committed suicide, but there was soon a clamour for justice among the citizens of London as rumours spread that Hunne had, in fact, been murdered.

The following day the coroner, Thomas Barnwell, and members of an inquest jury ‘elected by great dyscrecion’ went to inspect Hunne’s body, which was still hanging in the cell. A pamphlet printed in the 1530s fleshed out the details of what they found. Hunne was ‘hanging upon a staple of iron in a girdle of silke, with faire countenance, his head faire kemmed, and his bonet right sitting upon his head.’ They observed that Hunne’s eyes and mouth were closed, ‘without any staring, gaping, or frowning, also without any driveling or spurging in any place of his body.’ As some members of the jury took Hunne’s body down they noticed that, strangely, the noose around his neck was loose. There was little blood on the body apart from some small streams coming out of his nose. The account continues, ‘Save onely these foure drops of blood, the face, lips, chinne, doublet, coller, and shirt of the said Hun, was cleane from any blood.’ They noted that Hunne’s hands were free but marks on his wrists showed they had previously been bound.

Meanwhile, ignoring the uproar which was sweeping London, the Church risked more ire by proceeding with the case against Hunne for heresy despite the fact that he was already dead. This time the allegations included the claim that he had called the Pope ‘Satan’. Over the course of a week a string of witnesses were produced to testify in front of three bishops that Hunne had engaged in heretical practices. And, on 16 December, Hunne’s mouldering body was brought into the Chapel of Our Lady at the old St Paul’s and put on trial. Hunne was found guilty. The final indignity came on 20 December when the Church, as was their right, had the city’s authorities take Hunne’s body to Smithfield where it was publicly burned at the stake.

While this was going on, the inquest into Hunne’s death was also continuing. Over the coming weeks, its members found plenty of evidence which tallied with their growing suspicion that Hunne had been murdered rather than committed suicide. They concluded that the only thing in the room Hunne could have used to hang himself was a stool but it was in the wrong place. The girdle was too short for Hunne to have used it to hang himself and marks on his neck seemed to have been caused by something metal – perhaps a chain. The absence of the kind of bodily discharges usually associated with slow strangulation was also puzzling. Then there was the matter of a large pool of blood, found in a different part of the room from where the body hung. Added to this was the issue of Hunne’s jacket which was covered in blood but folded down away from the body, ‘which thing’ they said Hunne could never ‘doe after he was hanged.’ Everything pointed to a crime and the inquest recorded that, ‘it appeareth plainely to us all, that the necke of Hun was broken, and the great plenty of blood was shed before he was hanged.’ Hunne, it seemed, had not only been murdered but hurriedly trussed up to make it look as if he had hanged himself.

The hunt was on for Hunne’s killers and the authorities were helped in their endeavours by the behaviour of one of the chief suspects, the Bishop of London’s ‘summoner’, Charles Joseph. Shortly after Hunne’s body was discovered he had attracted suspicion by fleeing the capital, seeking sanctuary in the village of Good Easter in Essex. He was apprehended there and brought to the Tower of London, soon confessing that around midnight on the night that Hunne had died he, along with the bellringer John Spalding and Dr Horsey had climbed the staircase that led to the cell where they found the prisoner lying on his bed. Horsey had cried ‘Lay hands on the thief’ and the trio had then set about murdering Hunne. He stated that ‘I, Charles, put the girdle about Hunne’s neck. And then John Bellringer and I, Charles did heave up Hunne, and Master Chancellor pulled the girdle over the staple. And so Hunne was hanged.’

Joseph’s confession, together with deposition from other witnesses taken by the inquest (at least as set down in the pamphlet), began to build up a picture of how events had unfolded. After Hunne had been brought back from his audience with Fitzjames on Saturday 3 December, Horsey had evidently come to Hunne praying forgiveness of ‘all that he had done to him, and must doe to him.’ Hunne spent most of that day locked in the stocks in his cell and later Spalding bound his wrists behind him before leaving him locked up. Meanwhile Joseph had gone to a brothel out of town, making sure to be seen by witnesses in order, it was believed, to give him an alibi. But that evening, under the cover of darkness, he had snuck back into London.

Later that night he entered Hunne’s cell with Spalding and Horsey and put a wire, heated by the flame of a burning candle, up Hunne’s nose. This may have had the intention of piercing Hunne’s brain while leaving no marks, but it did not kill him as was hoped merely making him bleed profusely, accounting for the blood on his jacket. They then strangled him, possibly with a piece of chain. Hunne was hurriedly dressed in clean clothes before being lifted into the noose, made out of his belt, which was attached to a hook in the wall. For good measure, the murderers put Hunne’s cap on his head and also brushed his hair.

Despite his efforts, Joseph had been spotted in London on Sunday evening and been seen around the Lollards’ Tower on the Monday morning in a state of some agitation by three different people. For his part, Spalding had claimed not to have been at the prison that night but other testimony showed this to be a lie. He had shown other witnesses that he had the keys early on the morning that Hunne was later found dead. Among the many other pieces of evidence, one of Joseph’s servants said that, two days after Hunne’s body was found, her master had declared: ‘I have destroyed Richard Hunne’.

Hunne’s body had been found late on the Monday morning by assistant prison keeper Peter Turner. He had arrived to serve the prisoner breakfast at 8am but could not find Spalding. He was eventually brought the keys by one of the latter’s underlings. When he and two others went up to the cell they found Hunne hanging, immediately informing Horsey who had rushed to view the spectacle accompanied by a host of other clergy.

The case was considered so sensitive that the King’s Council and the sovereign himself took an interest. They undoubtedly had a hand in the progress of the inquest. Months went by before the coroner was allowed to produce his report, but the findings were no less sensational for the delay. The official document recorded that Joseph, Spalding and Horsey had ‘felonioiusly strangled and smothered’ Richard Hunne at the Lollards’ Tower and ‘also the neck they did break of the said Richard Hunne, and there feloniously slew him and murdered him’. It added that ‘with the proper girdle of the same Richard Hunne of silk, black of colour, of the value of 12 pence, after his death, upon a hook driven into a piece of timber in the wall of the prison aforesaid, made fast and so hanged him.’

But could the three suspects successfully be brought to trial? Not if Fitzjames had anything to do with it. Horsey, along with the other two suspects, were certainly kept in custody awaiting proceedings. But in early 1515, Fitzjames branded the inquest jurors ‘false, perjured caitiffs’. That spring he wrote to Cardinal Wolsey, denouncing the ‘untrue quest’ which had landed his chancellor with an indictment for murder, going on to maintain that Horsey was as ‘innocent as Abel’. He also alleged that Charles Joseph’s confession had been extracted through torture. Meanwhile, in response to the issue of clerical powers that had arisen, King Henry had ordered a whole conference in which the rights and wrongs of the case were hotly debated by councillors, MPs and churchmen.

In the end, a kind of fudge was arranged. In November 1515, despite Horsey’s indictment for murder, Henry VIII himself instructed his attorney Sir John Earnley to accept the chancellor’s plea of not guilty when the case came in front of the King’s Bench. Horsey, incidentally, had submitted himself for trial even though, technically, he could have asked to be dealt with by the church courts. Thanks to the king, the case against Horsey was dismissed and it is thought that Joseph and Spalding also escaped any severe punishment.

It was not the end of the matter. The fact that no one had been brought to justice for what most still believed to be a murder rankled with many leading figures in non-ecclesiastical circles. In May 1523, after an appeal from Hunne’s daughter Margaret and her husband Roger, parliament passed a bill ordering that Richard Hunne’s property should be given back to his family. The king wrote to Horsey demanding that it should be he that recompensed Hunne’s family and not the Royal purse that should suffer. In the letter he states that, despite pardoning Horsey for the crime, he still considers him guilty of it. He speaks of ‘the murder cruelly committed by you … as by our own records more at large plainly it doth appear’.

The king’s apparent volte-face only left the matter of whether Hunne really was murdered even more open to debate. Thomas More, writing in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, published in 1529, was convinced that he had committed suicide just as the Church had maintained. More, a fierce defender of the pre-Reformation Church, thought the witness testimony shaky and said that Hunne had hanged himself in despair. The Protestant Foxe, on the other hand, thought that the brave Hunne had been cruelly killed for making a stand, pronouncing him a martyr.

Many writers have pointed out that the Church really had no need to murder Hunne. Their heresy case was almost bound to succeed whereas murdering Hunne was likely to cause a backlash. But it is equally possible that the Church was worried that leaving Hunne alive any longer would only encourage a greater diminution of its powers and was prepared to resort to skulduggery.

One deposition, from Thomas Granger, a servant of the Bishop of London who was with Spalding on the Sunday evening, was at odds with the rest. He said that Hunne had asked for a knife saying he’d rather kill himself than be treated so. However, if even half the rest of the evidence given to the inquest (and even More admitted that jurors must have been ‘right honest menne’) was real, then Hunne’s death seems suspicious. As much as the Church didn’t need to kill him, there was no reason for Hunne to have taken his own life. While he may have opposed the Church on some matters, he was still religious and would have considered suicide a sin.

A portrait of Sir Thomas More, who believed Richard Hunne hanged himself. Engraving by Jacobus Houbraken, after Hans Holbein the Younger. (Courtesy Wellcome Library, London)

Another theory is that Hunne may have been killed by accident during torture and that Horsey and his associates then tried to cover up their bungling. Death caused by over-zealousness is not out of the question, though it doesn’t fully address the suspicious actions recorded by the witnesses. More plausible is that one of the three accused, most likely Joseph, not understanding the wider issues at stake, simply overstepped his authority. Fitzjames was then left to clear up the mess, having Hunne burned as a way of trying to deflect attention on to the victim’s heretical views rather than the Church’s responsibility for his death.

Many historians have viewed the Hunne affair as an early example of the rift between Henry and the Church that would explode a decade or more later. In the short term however, the Church weathered the storm and there is little evidence that the king was looking for a showdown at this time. It was, of course, really the issue of Henry’s marriage that would see him begin a concerted campaign to rein in the powers of the Church. Mortuary fees were curbed, though not abolished, in 1530.

If none of the big political players had emerged a winner from the Hunne affair, then neither did those more intimately involved. Clearly deemed an embarrassment, Horsey was exiled from London to Exeter and died in relative poverty in 1543. Despite the king’s directions, Hunne’s family does not appear to have fully regained its fortunes either. By the late 1530s, his daughter Margaret was appealing to Thomas Cromwell claiming that she, her husband and her seven children were suffering extreme ‘indigence and poverty’.