Chapter 23

Murdered for ‘Pulling Another Man’s Nose’ 1591

As he stood in the dock wearing a loose nightgown over a ‘yellow frieze doublet’ with his feet manacled and arms bound, Arnold Cosby must have cut an eccentric figure. Appearing at sessions held at St Margaret’s Hill in Southwark on 25 January, 1591, the 33-year-old was accused of a dastardly murder. He had, the jury heard, callously killed an old rival, Lord Bourke. The contemporary chronicler John Stow logged that Cosby was charged with taking a dagger and subjecting Bourke to grievous injuries, ‘of which mortall wound he died within two houres after.’

Both Cosby and Bourke hailed from backgrounds rooted in the torrid crucible of sixteenth century Irish politics. Cosby was born around 1558 at the family seat, Stradbally Abbey, in Ireland. His family has a well-documented lineage dating back to Saxon times and originally hailed from Nottinghamshire. His father, Francis, served as a soldier during the reign of Henry VIII. By the 1550s he had emigrated, taking up residence in the Pale, the part of Ireland under English control. Here he became involved in campaigns to extend power over other parts of the country and was frequently embroiled in tussles with the local Irish. In 1558, his efforts were rewarded by Queen Mary who made him ‘general of the kern’, heading a permanent fighting force, though in later years he would fall out with the crown over his corrupt dealings and conduct as a military commander. He also gained notoriety for his part in a massacre of seventy unarmed members of the O’More clan at Mullaghmast in 1578. He was to meet a bloody end in a battle of 1580, possibly with the collusion of some of his own men.

Perhaps a propensity to violence and duplicity was in the blood. Certainly Francis’s son, Arnold, eagerly took up arms. He served, ‘with great reputation’ as a member of the Earl of Leicester’s forces in the Low Countries during the 1580s, which were fighting alongside the Dutch against the Spanish. Cosby served at the Battle of Zutphen on 2 September 1586, where the poet Philip Sydney was killed. Made a captain, Cosby was soon given a pension of three shillings per day for his good service and by 1591 was said to be ‘well known around court’.

John Bourke became the 2nd Baron of Castleconnell in 1584. It followed the ennoblement of his grandfather, Sir William Bourke, in 1580, a title granted to him by Elizabeth for his efforts in opposing a local uprising near their estates in the south west of Ireland. In the course of a skirmish with the rebellious James Fitzmaurice, John’s father, Theobald, had been killed. But the Bourkes were victorious and Fitzmaurice’s head ended up on a spike over the gate of Castleconnell.

By the 1590s both Crosby and Bourke had a relatively good pedigree within society, but there had been bad blood between them before the events of winter 1591. It’s not known exactly what caused the quarrels but according to the chronicler Stow, Bourke and Cosby had already fought a duel at Greenwich and subsequently been ‘made friendes’. But the mutual resentment seems to have festered.

At his trial Cosby would confess that things came to head when Lord Bourke had, one evening, ‘pulled his nose’. Then, on 13 January, Bourke had received an insulting letter from Cosby in which he challenged him to another duel. As a peer, Burke’s superior rank meant that he would have been well within his rights to deny Cosby the satisfaction of any such contest. But it’s clear that Bourke now wanted to put an end to the affair.

Detailed accounts of what happened next have come down to us from several pamphlets, at least one of which appears to have been written by a servant of Lord Bourke himself. We learn from them that the duel took place at about 8 o’clock on the morning of 14 January in fields near Wandsworth, then in Surrey. No-one knows quite what happened next as the pair confronted each other alone, without ‘seconds’ as was usual in such duels. But it seems that before combat could ensue Cosby, who was described as ‘a man of proude conceipte, borne of mischeiffe’ feared that he might lose the contest, never having expected Bourke to accept his challenge. He therefore decided to play a contemptible trick on his foe.

Cosby first offered Bourke a choice of rapier, the weapons that were to decide their fate, making a show of measuring their length to prove that they were equally matched. We also learn that he then offered up the idea that they should both scar each other’s faces and break the ends of their rapiers to make it appear to others as if they had fought. They could, he proposed, then call an end to the matter with their honour intact. Bourke wasn’t happy with this suggestion insisting that they should fight. It was as this point that Cosby recommended to Bourke that if they were to duel he should take off his spurs, in case they impeded him. Bourke duly knelt down to do so.

His enemy now at a disadvantage, Cosby lunged forwards plunging his sword deep into Bourke’s flesh, burying the blade a full 10-12 inches into either his foe’s chest or shoulder depending on which report one follows. Then, grabbing a dagger, Cosby proceeded to inflict twenty-one to twenty-three more wounds upon Bourke’s body in a frenzied attack. The doomed peer was left with injuries to his hands, arms and face as well as thighs, legs and even ankles.

Cosby then fled the scene, but his horse went lame a short time afterwards, hampering his escape. Meanwhile Bourke’s footman had run to the house of John Powell, a man with the exotic title of Yeoman of the Bottles in the queen’s household (which essentially meant he looked after the monarch’s alcohol). The footman told Powell that his master and Cosby had gone out to fight on their own. Powell rode off in search of the feuding duo and discovered the bloody body of Bourke. He came across the peer being attended on by a female passer-by who was desperately trying to staunch the bleeding. Still alive, despite his extensive wounds, Bourke was taken by cart to a house in Wandsworth where, it was alleged, he lived just long enough to recount to the Earls of Essex and Ormond what had happened. Cosby was pursued and soon apprehended a few miles away in Newington. He was then examined and supposedly confessed to the murder, before being thrown into Marshalsea prison.

The case gripped London and there was a rush to publish pamphlets relating every detail of the sordid affair. The trial itself was attended by leading figures including the Lord Chamberlain, Earl Wormwood and Sir George Carey, Knight Marshal of England. John Popham, the Attorney General, prosecuted on behalf of the queen. Despite his earlier ‘confession’ Cosby now pleaded not guilty. He protested that, in fact, he had won the duel and having Lord Bourke at his mercy told him that he would spare his life if he would break his sword and return to the court, admitting that he had been in the wrong all along. He alleged that Bourke had refused. This evidence did not impress the jury and Cosby was swiftly found guilty. His request to be ‘shot to death with bullets’ rather than be hanged was denied.

On 27 January, Cosby was taken back to Wandsworth ‘townes end’ and a scaffold constructed near the spot where he had perpetrated the crime. According to a contemporary pamphlet he was now penitent, ‘calling upon God to forgive him even to the last gasp.’ Once hanged, Cosby’s corpse was gibbeted for all to see.

The case leaves a number of intriguing questions unanswered. While Cosby may well have been sly enough to con Bourke into dropping his guard by the simple ploy of asking him to take off his spurs, is it unlikely that such an experienced soldier as Cosby did ‘quaile’ at the thought of death before the duel. Would he really rather have been ‘at home’ as one of the contemporary pamphlets asserts? As far as we can ascertain he was the man with the greater fighting prowess. Also, is it likely that a man who had suffered such a large number of wounds could have given a full account of what had transpired on that morning? However, if his injuries were as extensive as reported, it casts doubt on Cosby’s weak claim that he was intending to spare Bourke as does the fact that he then left him for dead. Apart from Cosby’s confession, almost certainly elicited under duress, we only have Bourke’s word, transcribed by his own servant, that he had acted dishonourably during the duel. Cosby’s lower status – a mere captain accused of killing a peer – put his defence at a disadvantage, especially with someone as esteemed as Popham presenting the case for the Crown. Certainly the long elegy attributed to Cosby, supposedly written in Marshalsea prison while awaiting execution was not written by him, but cast him as a Tudor ideal, the repentant villain, who realising his fate accepted God’s punishment for his devilish deeds. Its final lines read:

That Cosbie hath misdone so hainously.

The circle of my time is compressed,

Arrived to the point where it began:

Worlde, countrie, kin and friends, farewell, farewell!

Flie thou my soule to heaven, the heaven of blisse!

O bodie! bear the scourge of thine amisse.’