Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  James set off for Perth with twenty-five men including Lennox, Mar, Erskine and John Ramsay, his current favourite. When this party was within a mile of Gowrie House, the Master of Ruthven rode ahead to let his brother know they were approaching. The Earl of Gowrie, who was having dinner with three of his neighbours, was suspicious; he could think of nothing that would bring the king to Perth. Anyway, he rushed out to give the king a welcome, apologizing that there was not enough food in the house to supply dinner. James had to wait an hour while food was sent out for. During this hour, the king drank and chatted to the earl, who was uneasy.

  The Gowrie steward asked the Master why the king had come. It was good question. The Master said, ‘Robert Abercromby, that false knave, has brought the king here to cause His Majesty to take order for our debt.’ James later suppressed this comment. Abercromby, the king’s saddler, was not called in court to comment on the Master’s remark, so it was probably true – at least to the extent that it was the reason given to the Master by the king. The stranger and the pot of gold were inventions of James.

  After James had dined in the Great Hall, he went upstairs with the Master. The Master turned to the company and said, ‘Gentlemen, stay, for so it is His Highness’s will.’ Lennox was suspicious, anxious and rose as if thinking of following the king. He was held back by the remark of Gowrie that the king had gone up ‘on some quiet errand’, discreetly implying that the king and the Master had gone upstairs for sex. The two went upstairs, along the Great Gallery, then through a heavy door which they locked behind them. They were in the gallery chamber with a turreted room leading out of it, and they stayed there for over two hours.

  The rest of the company left the Great Hall and walked in the garden, talking and eating cherries. Then, some time after five o’clock in the evening, the earl’s equerry announced that James was riding away from Perth. Gowrie sensed that something was wrong, shouted, ‘Horse! Horse!’ and went into the courtyard, where the porter assured him that the king had not left the house and he had the keys of all the gates. Gowrie went into the house to see whether James was there or not. Then he emerged to say that he thought the king really had gone. The group was startled to hear the king’s voice shouting, ‘Help, my Lord Mar! Treason! I am betrayed! They are murdering me!’ They looked up to the turret room window, where they saw the king, red-faced, with a hand clutching his mouth and cheek.

  Lennox and Mar led the rest of the company up the stairs, only to find their way blocked by the locked heavy door. They worked at it for half an hour, but were unable to break it down.

  Two people stayed apart from all of this, and their behaviour suggests that they were acting as part of some plan. One was the page, Ramsay, and the other was Erskine. If the unfolding plot was of James’s making, only these two young men need have known about it. Ramsay was the one who gave out the false story about James having ridden away. Instead of following the rest of the company into the Great Hall, he had gone up a small spiral staircase called the Black Turnpike, and which led directly into the gallery chamber where the king and the Master were. Ramsay must have known about this route from the king, who knew the geography of the house well. Presumably the door at the top of the Black Turnpike had been unlocked by the king when he was left alone for a moment by the Master. The shouting from the window by the king was evidently for Ramsay’s benefit, a signal to come up to the chamber via the Black Turnpike.

  Erskine and his brother set upon Gowrie and tried to kill him. With help from his supporters, he managed to fight them off. Erskine ran back to the Black Turnpike and with three companions went up to join Ramsay. When Ramsay arrived in the turret room he saw James and the Master wrestling. The Master was almost on his knees, with his head under the king’s arm, yet managing to hold his hand over the king’s mouth to stop him shouting. When James saw Ramsay he called, ‘Strike him low! Strike him low! He is wearing a secret mail doublet.’ Ramsay instead slashed at the Master’s neck and face. Then he and James pushed him down the little spiral staircase.

  It is evident that if James had wanted to apprehend the Master he could easily have done so. Erskine found the badly wounded Master on the stairs, shouted, ‘This is the traitor,’ and killed him. Gowrie came running up behind. He stepped over his brother’s body and entered the gallery chamber. There he met Ramsay and the three other men who had killed his brother. The king was hiding in the turret room. Gowrie looked about him and asked where the king was. Ramsay said he had been killed. At this stunning news – whether he thought it was good or bad scarcely matters – Gowrie lowered his guard and the assassins promptly killed him.

  Within minutes everyone was in the gallery chamber. The king knelt by Gowrie’s body and thanked God for his deliverance. Outside, the citizens of Perth were gathering, summoned by the tolling town bell. They were devoted admirers of Gowrie, and James and the other assassins could have been in serious difficulties if it had not been for the presence, by chance, in Perth of three hundred armed king’s men. If they had not been there, James VI of Scotland might not have lived long enough to become James I of England. But James was remorseless. He sent after the Ruthvens’ two young brothers, but their mother had the sense to take them quickly across the border. One died in exile. The other was arrested when James became king of England and imprisoned in the Tower, without trial, for twenty years.

  The motive was fairly clear. By murdering the Ruthvens and virtually annihilating their family, James wiped out his debt to them. He was also able to confiscate their huge estates, so he turned a worrying and politically embarrassing debt into a large profit, some of which he used to advance his fellow assassins.

  The uncertainties surrounding the incident were almost entirely of James’s own making. The opening chapter about the stranger and the crock of gold was pure fabrication. James concocted a complete version of the murders, which was slanted so that he emerged as the victim, threatened and attacked by the maniacal Ruthven brothers who had devised a trap for him. His version was a lie, in that the trap was his own, and the Ruthven brothers were its victims. They were not the assassins; he was the assassin. Yet behind this simple true/false dichotomy lies something more complicated. The Ruthvens did pose a threat to James by holding his huge debt over him. They might have been safer if they had written off the debt; but that is said with the benefit of hindsight. Possibly the Ruthvens were plotting against James, and James anticipated their conspiracy.

  William Cecil was involved in the discreet quest for a successor for Elizabeth I. In terms of bloodline and the pro-Catholic position that had been forced upon him, James was the obvious candidate. If Cecil had a freer hand and could follow his own preference for a Protestant candidate, Gowrie was his man. James was plotting with Essex; James’s idea was to move his army to the English border just as Essex was attempting to gain control in London by insurrection, and demand an acknowledgement regarding the succession. James assumed London would accede to this demand, not wanting to fend off a Scottish invasion while dealing with the Essex rebellion. At that moment, Cecil would have like nothing better than to see James disappear.

  Scottish kings were kidnapped all the time. Since Gowrie would be the alternative candidate for the English throne, with everything at stake, Cecil might entrust him with the task of kidnapping James VI. In support of this scenario, it is known that there was a large English ship lurking off the coast of Scotland at Dirleton near North Berwick. At Dirleton, Gowrie had a fully manned castle. The Governor of Berwick was in close contact with Cecil. All this points to a developing plot to kidnap James. It also shows that the Gowrie family was indeed a danger to James VI of Scotland; the Earl of Gowrie stood to succeed to the English throne instead of James, and he was – probably – being encouraged to abduct James.

  Death of a Leveller: The Assassination of Colonel Rainsborough

  In Doncaster at eight o’clock in the morning on Sunday 29 October 1648, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough was killed by a party of horsemen. That much is
certain. Various versions of what happened exist, but they differ from each other in significant ways. The contemporary accounts that were printed at the time were produced by angry Parliamentarians, their view distorted by their anger, and none of them seems to have seen the assassination anyway. One version has the murderers entering Rainsborough’s lodgings, where they stabbed him, dragged him to the door, cut his throat and pitched him down the stairs before leaving. Another version has Rainsborough quietly accompanying his murderers outside and the murder only taking place when Rainsborough started to resist abduction.

  At the time, there were two leading figures on

  the Parliamentary side in the English Civil War. One was Oliver Cromwell, the other was Thomas Rainsborough. In the previous autumn, Rainsborough shouted at Cromwell, ‘One of us must not live,’ and threatened Cromwell with impeachment for what was seen as his betrayal of the common cause. In Westminster, it was a matter of speculation whether Cromwell would survive. With hindsight, we see Cromwell as the man of destiny, the man of steel, but at the time it looked as Rainsborough was pre-eminent, and that Cromwell would fall.

  The death of Rainsborough was one of those turning points in history that have been overlooked. If he had lived, he would probably have carried through Parliament the Agreement of the People. This was to the seventeenth century what the Social Contract was to the eighteenth century and the Communist Manifesto was to the twentieth. The Agreement would have created in one step the social levelling process that did not in fact begin to happen until 1884.

  Rainsborough was also Cromwell’s only rival, the political and military leader of the far Left of the revolutionaries. Fairfax represented the far Right, and Cromwell the Centre. The three of them acted out their separate roles, with, as late as the autumn of 1647, Cromwell working for the restoration of Charles I to the throne, though with himself wielding the unseen power. Rainsborough’s position was more straightforwardly anti-monarchist. Once Rainsborough was dead, Cromwell was able to shift his own position smoothly to the left, towards the destruction of the monarchy and the total removal of Charles.

  On that much evidence, Cromwell could well have been the instigator of the assassination, but Rainsborough had many enemies. The royalists hated him for his ruthlessness at the siege of Colchester, where in defiance of all the rules of war he ordered the judicial murder of the leading defenders, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle. At the end of the siege Rainsborough had Lucas and Lisle tried by court martial and sentenced to be shot. The two men died with great courage and inspired universal admiration; the incident generated boiling hatred for Rainsborough. So Royalists who wanted revenge for the Colchester atrocity, a murder for a double murder, might have been the assassins. In fact just a month after the execution of Lucas and Lisle an attempt was made to kill him on the road between St Albans and London; he was attacked by ‘three men of the king’s party’.

  Rainsborough was equally hated by the Grandees, the right-wingers in the Parliament and the army, because of his extreme left-wing political stance. Once the Second Civil War was over, the bonding caused by the threat of a common enemy was loosened, and the differences within the Parliamentarian confederation became more overt and conspicuous.

  In November 1647, Rainsborough took part in one of the great army debates in Putney Church, debates which became landmarks in English constitutional history. The key question was whether it was time to make a complete break with the past and set up a new form of government, a single chamber elected every two years and with universal male suffrage. The document in which this revolutionary principle was laid out was the Agreement of the People. Rainsborough defended his Agreement with enormous clarity and conviction.

  The poorest He that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest He; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.

  A speaker on Cromwell’s (opposing) side suggested that Rainsborough’s society might lead to the abolition of property. Because four-fifths of the people in England had no property, they would vote for the abolition of property. Rainsborough’s counter-argument was that it was unethical for one-fifth of the nation to enslave the other four-fifths, but the threat to property ownership was still left hanging in the air, and Rainsborough was unable to get his Agreement carried at Putney. To avoid total defeat, Rainsborough proposed that the matter should be put to a gathering of the entire army.

  Meanwhile, Rainsborough was engaged in a secret plot to kidnap the king from Hampton Court Palace, where Charles was living under Cromwell’s protection. When Charles discovered that Rainsborough was after him, he panicked and fled to the Isle of Wight, an action which helped Charles towards the scaffold.

  Rainsborough’s great army rally was convened on 15 November 1647 at Ware, but Fairfax and Cromwell intimidated the troops into voting against the Agreement. Some regiments carried copies of the Agreement and stuck pieces of paper in their hats with the slogans ‘England’s Freedom! Soldiers’ Rights!’ written on them. Cromwell ordered them to remove the pieces of paper from their hats. When they refused, he charged them with a drawn sword, had the leaders arrested and tried. One was shot as an example. It was a far cry from a free vote. Rainsborough’s Agreement stood little chance of succeeding under such coercive conditions.

  Rainsborough tried even before the Ware fiasco to have Cromwell impeached for treason. After the failure at Ware, the tables were turned, and it was Cromwell who tried to silence Rainsborough. He allowed it to be known that he wanted Rainsborough out – ‘from the House and the Army’. But just as it looked as if some concerted effort was going to be made to remove Rainsborough the Royalist menace was seen to be far more important. From January 1648 onwards, Rainsborough was busy, first as Vice-Admiral of the Fleet, then at the siege of Colchester. After Colchester, Rainsborough presented his Agreement in the House. It created a great storm and it almost looked as if there might be a renewed outbreak of the Civil War on the issue of the Agreement.

  The assassination of Rainsborough could therefore have been a Royalist act of revenge for the judicial murder of Lucas and Lisle, or an assassination by the Right wing of the Parliamentarians, or indeed an assassination by the Centre. Rainsborough was sent north to Pontefract, evidently for political reasons: anything, really, to get him away from London.

  The commander in charge of the siege of Pontefract was Sir Henry Cholmley. He was a popular man, who did not take his duties very seriously. Fairfax sent Rainsborough in to replace Cholmley, and Rainsborough’s approach was very different. Cholmley was not giving up his command without a fight, and the Northern Committee who sat at York and who had appointed Cholmley were not happy about the interference from London. Cholmley wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons airing his grievance. Rainsborough at first behaved with unusual tact, proposing that he and Cholmley stayed in separate and equal commands until Parliament had decided what should happen. Unfortunately, on the second day he had second thoughts and told the Committee at York that he could not after all be less than commander-in-chief.

  Sir Henry Cholmley at this point emerged as another enemy made by Rainsborough. Cholmley could have been an accomplice to the assassination. A newspaper report subscribed to the view that a band of Royalists escaped from Pontefract Castle and carried out the assassination; it clearly implicated Cholmley in the conspiracy.

  At the return of the party to Pontefract [from Doncaster], there was a mighty shout in the castle and presently the governor sent a sealed letter (which is against the law of arms) to Sir Henry Cholmley saying that ‘he had now decided the controversy about the command, for his men had left Rainsborough dead in Doncaster street’; at the reading of which the base, treacherous, perfidious Cholmley very much laughed and rejoiced for a long time
together, so that it is more probable that Sir Henry was an absolute complotter in the murder from which, as they came back the same day about two o’clock in the afternoon, his guard of horse (consisting of between two and three hundred) let them quietly pass by in their sight, as their good friends, without discharging one pistol upon them.

  An account of the assassination was published by someone very close to the conspiracy, a Royalist called Thomas Paulden, who decided to reveal what happened fifty-four years after the event, in 1702. Whether this makes the account more reliable is not certain, but at least the emotional charge of narratives written in 1648 is missing, as is the fear of reprisal. Thomas Paulden was the brother of William Paulden, who apparently organized the raid, although he may have acted on orders from someone of higher rank. Thomas Paulden was insistent that the Royalists who attacked Rainsborough were attempting to abduct him, not kill him. Their plan was to kidnap him in Doncaster, then hold him prisoner at Pontefract Castle as a hostage in exchange for Sir Marmaduke Langdale, who was being held captive in Nottingham Castle and who seemed likely to be executed in the style of Lucas and Lisle.