Chapter 5

A Cook who was Boiled Alive 1531

‘This yere was a coke boylyd in a cauderne in Smythfeld for he wolde a powsyned the bishop of Rochester Fycher with dyvers of hys servanttes, and he was lockyd in a chayne and pullyd up and downe with a gybbyt at dyvers tymes tyll he was dede.’

This was how the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London reported the demise of Richard Roose, a man from humble origins who met an excruciating end, his ghastly punishment deemed appropriate for perpetrating one of the most devious and wicked crimes of his time. Yet the manner of Roose’s execution becomes all the more distressing once one delves into the murky background to the case which has since emerged from the shadows of history. For it seems that this humble cook may well have been an unwitting dupe in a plot to kill his employer and an unfortunate victim of the simmering political tensions of the age.

Roose, also known as Richard Coke, worked in the kitchens of John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, who was one of the foremost ecclesiastical figures of his day. Like the better known Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey, Fisher had for many years enjoyed royal favour and patronage. The son of a Yorkshire merchant, he was educated at the University of Cambridge and eventually became its chancellor. His talents caught the eye of Henry VII who, in 1504, made him Bishop of Rochester while still in his thirties. Fisher also acted as personal chaplain to Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s mother and he was chosen to give the funeral oration at Henry’s funeral in 1509. He helped tutor Henry VIII and was considered one of the finest theologians of his day. The scholar Erasmus lauded him as, ‘the one man at this time who is incomparable for uprightness of life, for learning and for greatness of soul.’ Despite his abilities Fisher possessed a rather dour nature; this was a man who kept a skull on his table at mealtimes to remind him of imminent death. It was as if he had a presentiment of what was to come.

In the early part of Henry VIII’s reign, Fisher was an important ally of the king. Henry boasted that he was glad to be able to rely on such ‘a learned man, such a good man’ as Fisher. But when Henry began his attempts to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, it put the pair at loggerheads. Fisher became one of the most vehement supporters of her cause, going on to write as many as eight books in defence of her marriage to Henry.

By the early 1530s, Fisher was briefly imprisoned for resisting Henry’s attempts to limit the power of the clergy. Once released, he continued to oppose the king’s bid to be recognised as head of the English church. By 1531, it appears that Fisher was, in many ways, already a marked man whose enemies were circling, looking for any opportunity to bring him down. Indeed, Henry let it be known that the bishop and his adherents should be ‘thrown into the river’ if they did not fall in line with his will.

On 18 February that year, a large broth or gruel was made in the kitchens of the Bishop’s residence in Lambeth Marsh. It was designed to be eaten by all of those in the household, including members of Fisher’s family. In the hours that followed, as many as sixteen or seventeen of the diners became very unwell. One gentleman, Benett Curwen, died in agony. Some of the beggars who congregated near the house hoping to benefit from the leftovers which were habitually handed out as charity, were ‘lyke wyse infected’ after eating some of the pottage. One of them, a widow called Alyce Tryppytt, also perished. It was assumed that those who had suffered had been the victims of an intentional poisoning plot.

One man who hadn’t been affected was 62-year-old Bishop Fisher. Stow tells us that he ‘eate no pottage that day.’ Another account says that Fisher, described elsewhere as being in poor health at this period, announced he had no appetite that dinner time and said he would eat later in the evening. But rumour was rife that he had been the real target and the scandal rocked London. Poisoning engendered huge fear in the Tudor elite and the matter came to the direct attention of the king. He abhorred ‘such abhomynable offences’. Using such a device to murder meant that no one could ‘lyve in suertye out of daunger of death’.

A culprit was duly found. Roose was dragged out of the kitchens and arrested. An obscure record in the Venetian archives states that under interrogation on the rack the cook confessed that he had indeed added a nameless powder to the meal, but said that it had all been meant as a ‘jest’. He had thought the offending substance merely a laxative. Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador to England, wrote in a letter to his master at the time that, ‘The cook was immediately seized, at the instance of the bishop’s brother, and, it is said, confessed he had thrown in a powder which, he had been given to understand, would only hocus the servants, without doing them any harm.’ Nevertheless the king felt that his crime was so outrageous that Roose should not be put on trial for murder in the usual way. To the surprise of many he was, instead, arraigned for high treason as if he had made an attempt to murder one of the royal family themselves. Indeed, on 28 February, Henry appeared at the House of Lords himself and spoke for an hour and a half on the subject of poisoning.

So heinous was the crime, according to the king, that this ‘detestable offence nowe newly practysed and comytted requyreth condygne punysshemente for the same’. A special law was quickly introduced by parliament allowing Roose, and anyone else found guilty of the crime, to be boiled to death. The statute, known as the Acte for Poysoning, mentioned Roose specifically, describing him as a man of a ‘moste wyked and dampnable dysposicyon’ who had cast a ‘certyne venym or poyson into a vessell replenysshed with yeste or barme stondyng in the kechyn.’ This had been used to make the broth.

The act ‘ordeyned and enacted … that the said Richard Roose shalbe therfore boyled to deathe.’ He would not, the act pointed out, be allowed benefit of clergy (see page 14). No jury would sit in judgement. The verdict had been summarily reached.

On 5 April, Roose was brought to Smithfield where he was lowered several times into the vat of boiling water on a chain until he was slowly scalded to death. One chronicler described the full horror of Roose’s ordeal - ‘He roared mighty loud and divers women who were big with child did feel sick at the sight of what they saw, and were carried away half dead; and other men and women did not seem frightened by the boiling alive, but would prefer to see the headsman at his work.’

Even at the time many doubted that Roose had acted alone. Given how seriously poisoning was viewed even before the new, desperate punishment that had been enacted by Henry, would Roose really have taken the risk of putting something toxic into the soup simply for fun? It’s much more likely that he was encouraged to do so by someone of a higher social standing and simply did what he was told without knowing what the substance was or considering the consequences for himself or Bishop Fisher.

The unprecedented personal intervention in the affair, as well as the extreme punishment he had deemed necessary for the crime, led some to think that the king protested too much. There were whispers that it was all a smokescreen for the fact he himself was involved in a plot to murder Fisher in retaliation for the latter’s obstructive behaviour over Henry’s divorce. Chapuys wrote of Roose, ‘I do not yet know whom he has accused of giving him this powder, nor the issue of the affair. The king has done well to show dissatisfaction at this; nevertheless, he cannot wholly avoid some suspicion, if not against himself, whom I think too good to do such a thing, at least against the lady and her father.’

This astute foreign diplomat’s assessment was probably accurate. It is unlikely that Henry would use such a method to rid himself of the troublesome priest. There is no doubt that Henry would rather have had Fisher out of the way, but his technique of exterminating enemies was far more nuanced, as would be shown in the following years. It is even possible to take his own views on poisoning at face value, fearing that his enemies would use this method to assassinate him and making an example of Roose to warn off anyone who might consider it.

As it in fact transpired, a blanket poisoning was a very inefficient way of ensuring a particular person’s death and Henry’s agents might have been able to come up with a more foolproof method of killing Fisher. So was it just a prank gone wrong or did someone else have a grievance against Fisher? Were they perhaps not so much trying to kill Fisher himself but deliver a chilling warning of the fate that awaited him if he continued to oppose their interests? The obvious suspects in this scenario, as Chapuys hints, are Anne Boleyn and her father, the Earl of Wiltshire, who saw Fisher as one of the leading and most vocal opponents to their advancement at court.

Rumours to this effect were certainly doing the rounds at the time and were fuelled by a another strange incident after the murder attempt, when a cannonball was fired across the Thames into the roof of the Bishop’s house, narrowly missing him while he sat in his study. The shot was alleged to have come from the Earl of Wiltshire’s house, though there seems to be no explanation of whether this was deemed an accident or an intentional act at the time. Certainly, Fisher concluded that his life was in peril and left London for Rochester. In October 1531, Anne Boleyn sent a message to Fisher warning him not to attend the next session of Parliament. She was, she said, concerned that he should not get sick again as he had been in the February. It was only a very thinly veiled threat. At the same time Chapuys wrote that, ‘There is no one here of whom the Lady is more afraid than the Bishop of Rochester …’

Given the campaign of intimidation against him it was unsurprising that Fisher was now in poor health, though he was, it seems, secretly intriguing against the king with Charles V through Chapuys. In 1534, Fisher was briefly imprisoned for supposedly not reporting all the revelations of the Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton. And when, in April, he refused to take the oath of succession thereby acknowledging that the issue of Henry and his new wife Anne were legitimate heirs to the throne, he was thrown in the Tower of London where he languished in severe conditions for more than a year. Stripped of his title and goods he was tricked into openly admitting that he did not see the king as supreme head of the Church and, despite being made a Cardinal by Pope Paul III while still behind bars, Fisher was tried for treason as a commoner.

On 17 June, at Westminster, Fisher was found guilty and originally sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. The king was only merciful in as much as this was commuted to beheading, largely due to public disquiet. On 22 June 1535, Fisher appeared before the crowd at Tower Hill, an emaciated and defeated figure. Decapitated in front of them, his body was then left naked on the scaffold until evening, while his head was stuck on a pole on London Bridge.

Fisher’s death was undoubtedly less painful than being poisoned, or being boiled to death like Roose for that matter. Nevertheless it was a sad and humiliating end for a man who had once been held in such esteem. Fisher’s death was to herald a wave of executions of high profile figures in the following few years. If Anne Boleyn had been behind the murder attempt on Fisher’s life it didn’t help her live much longer. Having become a nuisance to Henry, she went to the chopping block less than a year later. Like Sir Thomas More, who was put to death in July 1535, Fisher was later beatified by the Pope. Roose, the man who had suffered gruesomely for, at worst, being a hapless accessory to murder, became merely another bloody footnote in the annals of Henry’s reign of terror.