Chapter 6

Gunned Down in the Morning Mist 1536

On the chill morning of Monday 13 November, 1536, a heavy mist hung in the streets of London. At 5am there were few others stirring as the wealthy merchant Robert Packyngton stepped out of his home on Cheapside making for the thirteenth century church of St Thomas of Acre where he was planning to attend mass. This was a ritual he was known to carry out every day without fail.

Suddenly, there was a loud bang. Many of Robert’s neighbours heard the noise, along with some labourers already at work in nearby Soper Lane, some of whom had seen this ‘man of good substaunce’ emerge from his home. Not many would have recognised the thunderous clap as the noise of a gun going off but, at the sound, Robert was seen to slump to the ground. He had been shot dead.

Murders committed using firearms were almost unknown in early Tudor England. In fact this may have been the capital’s first. So Packyngton’s demise was one that would shock the nation. Yet, as the sixteenth century Chronicler Edward Hall put it, the ‘deed-doer’ was ‘unespied and unknown’. Perhaps the gunman had used the mist as a cover for his crime. Indeed the method of murder suggested a cunning, well planned assassination.

Robert Packyngton was born in 1489 in Stanford-on-Teme, Worcestershire, into a family of landowners. His older brother, Sir John Packyngton became a successful lawyer. Robert first trained as a lawyer too but, by 1510, had completed his apprenticeship in the Mercer’s Company and began work as a merchant exporting cloth and importing ‘sundry wares.’

By the time of his death Packyngton was primarily an exporter of cloth who frequently travelled to the Netherlands on business. In 1535, he is known to have exported a total of 250 cloths to Antwerp. He had also represented the Mercers’ interests as a Member of Parliament, speaking ‘somewhat against the covetousness and crueltie of the clergie’. He sat in the parliament of 1529 that would oversee the Reformation and was later described as a man who brought ‘English bybles from beyond the sea’ indicating that he sympathized with the religious revolution beginning to sweep England. Indeed, his brother Augustine is recorded as having tricked Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop London, into thinking he had bought all of William Tyndale’s remaining English bibles from the Low Countries so that he could burn them at St Paul’s. Augustine gave Tyndale the money and then he simply printed a new version.

From the archives, it emerges that in the months before Packyngton’s death – thanks to his travels to the Netherlands on business – he had been reporting to Henry’s right hand man, Thomas Cromwell. Stephen Vaughan, one of Cromwell’s spies, thought him important enough to advise his master to ‘cherisshe him and geve hym thankes.’ It’s not known what kind of information Packyngton was passing to Cromwell, but it certainly made him a player in the tumultuous politics of the 1530s and could have made him enemies. Indeed, he seems to have been well aware of the risks, making an early will a year before his death, carefully providing for his ‘lytell’ children.

Packyngton was buried in St Pancras church but after his murder the mystery about who had perpetrated it quickly grew, becoming a talking point across the land. However, despite a proclamation by the mayor of London that there would be a ‘gret rewarde’ for any information that could help identify his killer, none was forthcoming. In the coming years most of the suspicion fell upon the clergy, by this time a popular target. The Protestant reformer John Bale suggested that ‘conservative bishops’ were behind the slaying, while the lawyer and chronicler Edward Hall also thought that the established clergy must be to blame saying, ‘he was had in contempt with theim, and therefore mooste lyke by one of theim thus shamefully murdered.’

It was left to another prominent historian, John Foxe, in the late 1550s, to name an actual person in relation to Packyngton’s murder. He accused John Stokesley, the Bishop of London at the time, asserting that he had paid a priest the sum of sixty gold coins to perpetrate the deed. Later, Foxe changed his story, asserting that it was the Dean of St. Paul’s, John Incent, who ordered the murder and who had confessed as much on his deathbed. Foxe intimated that a shady Italian had been hired to carry out the shooting. Most of those who wrote accounts of Packyngton’s murder did so from a Protestant point of view, but could provide little evidence of a detailed conspiracy by the Church. Indeed, John Incent was one of Cromwell’s closest allies. Incidentally, Foxe also reported that at the time of Packyngton’s murder there were rumours that Robert Singleton, a onetime chaplain to Anne Boleyn, was being talked of as being the murderer, but he dismisses the idea. Singleton is known to have been an agent of Cromwell and was put to death in 1544 for treason.

Portrait of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to King Henry VIII. (Courtesy Wellcome Library, London)

There is no doubt that Packyngton sympathised with Lutheran thinking and, at his funeral on 16 November, the sermon was read by the leading Protestant reformer Robert Barnes. But the later conflicting accounts of Packyngton’s demise from those who supported Henry’s purge of the old order and their difficulty on agreeing on a single named culprit are unconvicing. It seems outlandish for the Church to have gone to such lengths to kill one individual who was known to be anti-clerical. There were many others who, like Packyngton, posed a threat but were not murdered in the same way.

By the time that Holinshed’s famous Chronicles were published in the 1570s, proponents of the old religion were no longer in the frame. He recorded that the real murderer was a much more humble soul who had been caught for another crime at Banbury in Oxfordshire. Condemned to death, the unnamed man was brought to the gallows where, apparently, he suddenly confessed to Packyngton’s murder. It is likely that this story can be discounted as criminals making wild boasts from the gallows were quite common in a time when a public hanging was something of an entertainment and this version of events only emerges in the records some forty years after the murder.

Holinshed’s tale also appears unsatisfactory when the manner of Packyngton’s death is considered. It has all the hallmarks of a professional hitman equipped with the latest weapon and with the cunning to make his escape unseen. Foxe’s suggestion that a foreigner was to blame may hold some weight. Whoever did kill Packyngton, this was unlikely to have been the work of one man acting alone but part of a wider plot. Those who wanted Packyngton done away with clearly wanted him dead very badly and knew how to cover their tracks. What did he know? What risk did he pose? We can be pretty sure that he was involved in espionage on some level and was linked with Cromwell, a slippery character.

One intriguing theory is that it was all a case of mistaken identity and that Packyngton’s death was organised by allies of Tunstall who were actually meant to kill his brother, Augustine, for that embarrassing ruse regarding the bibles. The problem with this idea is that Augustine was already dead and that what we know about Tunstall’s politically meek character makes him an unlikely candidate for such intrigue in any case.

Another possibility is that his murder was nothing to do with the religious turmoil going on in England at the time. There is a tendency to see any dramatic incident during these years as somehow connected to the Reformation. Could it just as easily have been the result of a business transaction that had gone wrong, perhaps on the continent and for which retribution was being exacted? Of course this is mere speculation and the Packyngton murder remains a perplexing ‘whodunit’ to this day.