Chapter 21

The Bride who Poisoned Her Husband with Pancakes 1590

There are all sorts of reasons that lovers give for not wanting to have sex with their partners. Yet Anne Brewen’s excuse for rejecting her new husband’s advances must take some beating for novelty and bravado. Following their wedding night nuptials she refused to lie with her spouse, John, until ‘he had gotten her a better house.’ For good measure, Anne also told John that she was not going to give up her maiden name, Welles, until he could procure a befitting property and promptly took up lodgings elsewhere.

The truth was that the scheming Anne was not in love with her new goldsmith husband at all, but with another man in the same trade and together they now planned to do away with John as cunningly as they could. The subsequent murder was to become such a sensation of the age that it was recorded in a host of pamphlets and contemporary ballads. The most detailed account was given in The Trueth of the Most Wicked and Secret Murthering of John Brewen, which has sometimes been attributed to the celebrated Elizabethan playwright Thomas Kyd.

Anne Welles was a ‘proper young woman’ who was clearly perceived as quite a catch, for we are told that she had a ‘comely personage’ and was loved ‘by divers young men.’ One of these was bachelor John Brewen, an affluent London goldsmith who had become besotted with Anne and showered her with gifts of jewels and gold. He also enjoyed the favour of her ‘friends and kinsfolk’. But there was another man called John Parker who was keen on Anne too. He was also a goldsmith but not free to marry, perhaps because he was not well off enough. Anne, no doubt flattered by Brewen’s attentions and attracted by his prospects, accepted his gifts. Her real romantic feelings however were for Parker.

After a ‘long and earnest suit’ Brewen realised that he was making no progress with Anne, despite a ‘promise between them’. Piqued, he asked for his gifts back. Perhaps Brewen had also got wind of rumours about a romance between Anne and Parker. After all, according to the pamphlet, the pair had already been intimate by this stage. In fact Anne was secretly pregnant with Parker’s child. Anne then refused to return Brewen’s presents. The furious goldsmith promptly had the woman arrested. We are told that Anne was ‘astonished and dismayed’ at the situation in which she now found herself. Yet she was so determined to keep her trinkets that she decided to reconsider her position. She told Brewen that if he would withdraw his action against her she would agree to marry him after all. Brewen was delighted and consented. It would turn out to be, in the words of the pamphleteer, ‘the worst bargain that ever he made in his life.’

Parker, still consumed with passion for Anne, wasn’t going to lie down and accept the situation. Despite Anne’s agreement with Brewen it is likely she was still sleeping with Parker and after her marriage she made her home near his. He now began to urge her to do away with her husband. At first Anne rejected the notion, but Parker soon ‘kindled such a hatred’ in Anne’s heart against her spouse that she agreed to kill him. Parker, on his part promised that once the murder was carried out he would marry Anne as soon as he could. They began to plot in earnest.

But how was the deed to be done? The couple had decided that poison would be the safest option. Anne didn’t waste any time. Just three days into her marriage, on a Wednesday in February 1590, she put her plan into practice.

Parker had bought a strong, but unidentified, poison ‘whose working was to make speedy haste to the heart without any swelling of the body’ and gave it to Anne to put into Brewen’s food. Despite not living in Brewen’s house she arrived that cold morning with a ‘plesaunt countenance’ asking if it would please her husband to have a ‘mess of suger soppes’. Sugar sops were a sort of Tudor pancake traditionally eaten in the run up to Lent. Brewen was pleased by the gesture saying, ‘I take it very kindly that you will doe so much for me’. Anne then set about making the sugar sops putting some poison into the mixture. She managed to spill the first lot, so had to set about making up another portion, this time sending her husband out to get a snack of some herrings so she could concentrate on cooking and adding more of the deadly substance.

Brewen happily gobbled down the second lot of sugar sops. Meanwhile Anne made a show of eating some from which the poison had been omitted. Within minutes the gulled goldsmith was racked with pain. He ‘began to waxe very ill about the stomacke, feeling also a grievous gripping of his inward partes.’ Pronouncing himself unwell, Brewen then proceeded to vomit violently, with ‘such straines as if his lungs would burst in peeces’. He then asked Anne to put him to bed which she did. But when Brewen asked her to stay she told him she couldn’t, returning to her lodgings, ‘and so unnaturally left the poysoned man all alone that whole night longe, without either comfort or companie.’ Brewen was sick all night, ‘til his entrails were all shrunke and broken within him.’ However it took the poor man nearly a week to die, with the fiendish Anne finally agreeing to attend on him after he complained that he was ‘not long to continue in this world.’ It seems Brewen went to his grave still not suspecting that his own wife was his killer. Brewen was buried on the Friday and no-one else appears to have suspected that his new bride might have had anything to do with his death either. His passing was put down to natural causes.

So Brewen’s death was taken as an unfortunate, though not uncommon tragedy and when, some months later, Anne gave birth to a child everyone locally believed that the baby was his, not Parker’s. The youngster sadly died in infancy. Meanwhile, during the next two years, Anne carried on her relationship with the ‘lusty’ Parker, who was a frequent visitor to her house. The pamphlet paints Anne as a pitiful figure who had become in thrall to him. Parker threatened to stab her with a dagger if she did not do as she was told and subjected her to continual physical abuse. The loathsome Parker, we are told, would ‘haule and pull her as was pittie to behold.’ Meanwhile he refused to marry Anne even when she fell pregnant with his child once more. Terrified that her reputation would be left in tatters Anne ‘would not goe forth of her doors’ fearing her neighbours would see her ‘great bellie’.

However, the pair often argued and in one spat Parker refused Anne’s exhortations to marry her, saying he would never wed such a ‘strumpet’ and accusing her of only wanting to get hitched so that she could poison him like she had done with Brewen. Anne shouted back, ‘Why thou arrant beast, what did I then, why thou didst not provoke me to doo?’ She continued, ‘It had never been done but for thee: thou givest me the poison, and after thy direction I did minister it unto him and woe is mee … it was for thy sake I did so cursed a deede.’

Anne Brewen being burned at the stake, from the title page of a 1592 pamphlet The Truth of the Most Wicked Murdering of John Brewen. (Courtesy of Lambeth Palace Library)

Tudor dwellings had thin walls; people lived cheek by jowl, so it was no surprise that this row was overheard by some of those living close by. They reported what they had heard to the local magistrates. Anne was interrogated by Alderman Haward while Parker was quizzed by Justice Young. Both denied any knowledge of Brewen’s murder. Then, the authorities played an old trick to trap them. Anne was made to believe that Parker had already ‘betrayed the matter’ and falling for the simple ploy she confessed, telling the whole story of what had happened. In the following weeks she was ‘carried into the countrey’ to be delivered of her child and afterwards brought back to prison.’ Both Anne and Parker were brought before the sessions at Newgate in London in the summer of 1592. The pair were quickly found guilty of murder.

In his Annales of England John Stow told how in ‘this moneth of June a young man was hanged in Smithfield and a woman burned, both for poisoning her husband, a goldsmith.’ The sentence was carried out on Wednesday 28 June 1592. The court had specifically ordered that Anne should remain alive long enough to watch as Parker was hanged before she herself faced the flames of the pyre.