Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Paulden said that his brother William chose twenty-two men and, at midnight on Friday, 27 October 1648, they rode out of Pontefract Castle to Mexborough, about four miles from Doncaster. There they rested before crossing the river and sending a scout ahead to make sure that entering Doncaster was safe. The next morning they arrived in Doncaster at about seven and met a friend who was walking along the street with a bible in his hand, a pre-arranged all-clear signal. They passed the Parliamentarian guard, posing as members of Colonel White’s regiment from Rotherham. They were allowed into Rainsborough’s lodgings, where they told him he was their prisoner; they would not harm him if he was prepared to go quietly with them.

  At first Rainsborough appeared ready to go along with the Royalists. They told him to mount and he started to do so. Then he spotted that there were only four Royalists close by and that two of his own men, still armed, were near enough to help him. He took a fatal chance, taking his foot out of the stirrup and shouting, ‘Arms! Arms!’ One of the Royalists, not wanting to kill him, dropped his pistol and sword and grappled with Rainsborough. While they were on the ground, Rainsborough’s lieutenant ran the Royalist through with his sword. Another Royalist drew his sword and wounded Rainsborough in the neck. Rainsborough grabbed the sword, got to his feet ready to fight, but was run through by Captain Paulden’s lieutenant. Rainsborough fell down dead.

  Thomas Paulden wrote a second account that was broadly similar but different in detail, so it is still very difficult to be sure what happened. The second account did not, for instance, mention the man with the bible. The accounts are believable because of some details that can be corroborated. They say that the Royalists got past the Parliamentarian guards by saying that they had a letter from Cromwell. We know from other sources that Rainsborough was in fact expecting a letter from Cromwell; he wanted the command of the siege of Pontefract sorted out in London, and expected to have instructions at any moment. Rainsborough was lodging at the main inn in Doncaster, on the north side of the market place.

  It belonged to Mr Mawood, who had asked Rainsborough the previous evening whether he planned to dine there on the Sunday. The colonel had answered that he expected orders and was uncertain. What is interesting is that the assassins seem to know about this, and the informal nature of the siege at Pontefract was just one aspect of the very fluid nature of the relationship between Royalists and Parliamentarians in the area. It is also possible, of course, that Cholmley was involved in the conspiracy. It would have suited him very well for the Royalists to capture Rainsborough; it would leave him indisputably in command of the siege and disadvantage the intruder from London in a very satisfying way indeed. The fact that the Royalist company was allowed such an easy escape from Pontefract Castle also suggests collusion by Cholmley. Cholmley himself may have supplied Paulden with the information that Rainsborough was expecting messengers from Cromwell at any moment. Without necessarily ordering or organizing the abduction of Rainsborough, Cholmley could relatively easily have made it happen in this way.

  Collusion from the Parliamentarian side must be suspected because of the way the case was never followed up. When Pontefract eventually fell, no attempt was made to find or identify or punish the murderers. Rainsborough’s family and other supporters were indignant that no efforts were made, complaining to Parliament that in fact they were being discouraged from searching for the prosecutors of ‘so bloody and inhumane a butchery’. That suggests that the Parliamentarian authorities knew there was some Parliamentarian complicity, whether by Cholmley or someone higher up the chain of command. Simple revenge was out of the question.

  Cromwell was himself personally involved in the closure of the episode. He arrived immediately after Rainsborough’s murder to deal with the siege, which was odd, given that there were so many pressing matters to attend to in London; the execution of Charles I was being debated at Westminster and St Albans. Cromwell was there, at Pontefract, supervising the siege without bringing it to an end, for some time. His involvement there may have been in some way connected with the assassination, or indeed in covering it up. When Westminster heard of Rainsborough’s death, Cromwell was instructed by Parliament to ‘make a strict and exact scrutiny of the manner of the horrible murder’. Maybe that was why Cromwell arrived in person. Maybe he did find out who was to blame. But in the excitement of the impending execution of Charles I, any findings Cromwell may have reached about the Rainsborough murder were overlooked; it appears that Cromwell himself was uncharacteristically ready to overlook the matter.

  When Lambert (Cromwell’s successor at Pontefract) started negotiating the terms for Pontefract’s surrender, he made it clear that there would be no pardons for Rainsborough’s killers. Lambert was oddly apologetic about it. He said he knew they were gallant men and he wanted to save as many of them as he could, but he must have six of them surrendered to him and their lives were forfeit. They were Colonel Morris, Sir John Digby and four others. He regretted it. As far as he was concerned the raid in which Rainsborough died ‘was an enterprise no brave enemy would have revenged in that manner’; Lambert did not want to do it, but Cromwell insisted on it. The garrison’s response was to break out in two separate sallies, during which four of the wanted men escaped. The remaining two had themselves walled up in a chamber inside the castle, with enough food and water to last them a month. When the castle was surrendered, Lambert believed that all six had indeed escaped.

  Interestingly, Cromwell was able to tell Lambert the names of the six men, which suggests that he had indeed made enquiries during his time at Pontefract. A manuscript compiled by the antiquarian Nathaniel Johnston, who got his information from the staff at Rainsborough’s lodgings, named the six as Colonel Morris, ‘Cornet’ Blackburn, Marmaduke Greenfield, Alan Austwick, Sir Charles Dallison and Mr Saltonsal. Despite the fact that their names were known, and despite the high public profile of their victim, not one of the six men was ever tried or punished.

  Rainsborough’s body was taken to Wapping, his family home, and given a huge and spectacular funeral involving over fifty coaches and 1,500 cavalry. The preacher who gave his funeral oration said, ‘I think he was one of whom this sinful nation was not worthy; he was one of whom this declining Parliament was not worthy.’ He was a great national figure, yet the Parliamentarian establishment, now in full power with the King’s death imminent, chose not to bring his killers to justice, deliberately left the case unsolved.

  The Chipping Campden Mystery: The Strange Disappearance of William Harrison

  The so-called Campden Wonder, as the poet John Masefield called it, is one of the strangest crime mysteries in English history. It sounds very small in scale – the disappearance in 1660 of an elderly steward in a Gloucestershire village – but the way the story unfolded implies that something complicated and peculiar might have taken place.

  The steward was William Harrison and he was the servant of Sir Baptist Hicks, who had made his money as a mercer and moneylender. When James VI of Scotland arrived in London to mount the English throne as James I, Hicks took the opportunity to supply the new king with the best silks he could find and lend him £16,000. In return, James I gave him a knighthood. Hicks wormed his way through James’s courtiers in the same way, supplying, lending and finding out a lot of secrets along the way. Hicks became very rich, rich enough to buy himself a peerage, after which he styled himself Viscount Campden. At Chipping Campden he spent a huge sum building a three-storied mansion. It had a glass dome which was always lit up at night to help travellers who might be lost on the wolds. It also had two banqueting rooms linked by an underground passage under the Terrace Walk. He was keen on underground passages.

  In 1645, sixteen years after Sir Baptist Hicks, 1st Viscount Campden, died, the great house was wantonly destroyed by Sir Henry Bard. Bard was, ironically, a friend of the Campden family, though it is hard to tell this from his actions. He held the house as a garrison for Charles I, and his soldiers were so rapacious that they completely impo
verished the people of the surrounding area. As Charles marched to Evesham he ordered his garrison out of Campden House and, on leaving, Sir Henry Bard set fire to it, burning the whole building and turning it into a ruin.

  Hicks’s daughter Juliana had gone to live in Rutland with her son, the third Viscount Campden. In 1660, she was still there. Meanwhile, the old steward, William Harrison, stayed on among the ruins of Campden House with his family, living in the stable block, from which he administered the estate and forwarded the tenants’ rents to Lady Juliana.

  William Harrison did not get on with his wife. She was a supporter of Cromwell and was described as ‘a snotty, covetous Presbyterian’. Harrison hid all his papers from her because he suspected her of being in touch with Parliamentarians. He also had difficulties with his son, a man of forty who wanted his job. It would appear that William Harrison did not lead a very happy home life, and he consequently leant heavily on the friendship of his devoted servant, John Perry. The Perry family lived in a cottage near the gates of Campden House. There were two brothers, twenty-four-year-old John and thirty-year-old Richard, their mother, who was thought to be a witch, and Richard’s wife and two children. They were allowed to live there rent-free and their needs were supplied by the estate, through Harrison.

  On 16 August 1660, just a few weeks after the Restoration of Charles II, William Harrison walked across the fields to Charingworth, three miles away to the east. He was collecting rents, while most of the villagers were in the fields harvesting. He did not return. As night fell, Mrs Harrison sent John Perry to meet him, but Perry did not come back that night either. At daybreak, Edward Harrison set off in the direction of Charingworth to look for his father and Perry. He met Perry coming back alone. Perry knew nothing about William Harrison’s whereabouts and they walked together to Ebrington, a hamlet halfway between Campden and Charingworth.

  Later in the morning a woman who was gleaning in the fields half a mile from Campden House found beside some gorse bushes some of William Harrison’s belongings. She picked up a comb, a hat and a neckerchief. The hat and comb were cut and there was blood on the neckband. The villagers assumed that William Harrison had been murdered, stopped harvesting and started looking for William Harrison’s corpse. They could not find it, but they were certain Harrison was dead. Increasingly they suspected John Perry of murdering him. The local magistrate, Sir Thomas Overbury, rode over from Bourton to question him; he was the nephew and heir of the far more famous Sir Thomas Overbury who was poisoned in the Tower of London.

  Perry gave a detailed itinerary of his search, including the names of two countrymen he met on the way: Reed and Pearce. He had not liked wandering across the fields on his own at night, which was why he persuaded Reed and Pearce to join him. He had sheltered in a hen coop by a churchyard until midnight. Then the full moon appeared and it was light enough for him to see his way clearly. Then a mist rolled in and he could see nothing again, so he spent the rest of the night under a hedge. At dawn he set off again. He knocked on the door of a man called Plaisterer at Charingworth, and found that Harrison had collected £23 in rent there the previous afternoon. He called on another tenant, Curtis, and Harrison had called there too for rent, though Harrison had been less lucky as Mr Curtis had been out at the time and so he did not get his money. This being as much as he could do, Perry set off home, without William Harrison and without any idea where he might be.

  John Perry’s nocturnal journey sounded very odd, but Reed, Pearce, Plaisterer and Curtis confirmed that the bits of the story that related to them were perfectly true. On the other hand, there was no one to corroborate Perry’s version of what he was doing (or not doing) between 9.30 at night and four in the morning. Overbury decided he had no choice but to detain Perry for a couple of days while he awaited more evidence. But there was no more evidence. Overbury questioned Perry again and Perry repeated the story. Then, very rashly, he changed his story. A travelling tinker had murdered Harrison, he said, then he thought up another scenario in which a gentleman’s servant had robbed and murdered Harrison. The body was hidden in a bean-rick in Sheep Street, he said. The villagers searched the bean-ricks and found nothing.

  On 24 August, Overbury questioned John Perry a third time. This time Perry said his mother and his brother Richard had killed Harrison when he returned from Charingworth. He said they had often asked him to tell them when Harrison was going to collect rents. He implied that usually he evaded the question, but this time he answered them. The result was that when William Harrison returned to Campden House after his rent-collecting, Richard Perry followed him. At first John Perry was not with them. When he joined them, he found Harrison on the ground and his brother Richard kneeling on him. Old Joan Perry was standing watching. Harrison had said, ‘You rogues, are you going to kill me?’ and pleaded with Richard not to kill him. Richard told him to hold his tongue, called him a fool and then strangled him. Richard emptied the pockets, emptied the money into his mother’s lap and then the two of them, Richard and the mother, dragged the body to the great sink beside Wallington’s Mill.

  John Perry insisted that he had nothing to do with the murder or the disposal of the body. All he did was to keep watch, and it was while he was doing this that he saw John Pearce.

  The next day, Overbury interviewed Joan and Richard Perry. They denied John’s allegations completely. The villagers searched the sink by Wallington’s Mill, found nothing, searched the fish ponds and all the ruins of the house, and found nothing there either. There was no sign of William Harrison’s body. In spite of this, Overbury decided that the Perrys must stand trial for murder. When the three were being taken to prison at Campden, Richard dropped a ball of string. The guard showed it to John, who immediately identified it as ‘the string my brother strangled my master with.’

  At the September Assizes at Gloucester, the case was brought before a judge, but the judge, Sir Christopher Turnor, threw it out on the grounds that there was no body and therefore no evidence that murder had been done. The Perrys were kept in prison, though, and at the next session, the spring Assizes, their case was heard. This time a different judge, Sir Robert Hyde, decided that the lack of a corpse was no hindrance.

  Meanwhile, something else had happened. In the February before William Harrison’s disappearance there had been a robbery at Campden. On a particular market day when a famous preacher was visiting the town, and everyone in the area was either in church or at the market, there was a break-in at William Harrison’s house. A ladder was placed against the wall to reach a second-storey window, an iron bar was ripped away with a ploughshare (which was flung down in the room) and the sum of £140 was stolen. The burglary was evidently carefully planned and carried out, and the culprits were never found, in spite of many inquiries.

  There was a sequel to this crime three months later, on May Eve. Inmates of the almshouses and passers-by in Church Street could hear, from outside the high walls of Campden House, frantic screams for help from John Perry. Three men who happened to be passing in the street ran to the courtyard gate of the house, where they found Perry in a state of sheer terror. He had a pick in his hand and his coat pocket was slashed. He said he had been set upon by two men in white brandishing drawn swords, and that they would have killed him if had not defended himself with the pick. The pick bore recent cut marks to corroborate his story. A key in his pocket was similarly notched.

  Perry’s behaviour and the bizarre story he told made people think that in some way he and his family had been responsible for the earlier robbery of William Harrison. Perry was pretending to be a victim of criminals in order to divert suspicion. At the September Assizes, the Perrys had been more or less forced to plead guilty to the robbery because they would be pardoned immediately. Charles II had marked his Restoration in May by an Act of Pardon and Oblivion. They pleaded guilty and as expected, guaranteed by law, they were duly pardoned. But, as in many modern cases of plea bargaining, the result rebounded on them in that they now had a criminal
record and were seen as a criminal family. If they were capable of robbery, then why not aggravated robbery with violence? Why not murder?

  When it came to the spring Assizes of 1661, the Perry family took back their admission of guilt for the robbery. They had not been the robbers on that occasion. Nor were they guilty of murdering William Harrison. John Perry tried to retract all his stories, saying that he was mad and did not know what he was saying. The outcome was inevitable. There was still no body, no positive evidence of any kind that murder had taken place, the accused all pleaded not guilty; but they were found guilty and hanged.

  The executions were carried out consecutively. Old Joan was hanged first. It was assumed she was a witch and had put a spell on her sons. Richard was hanged second, after appealing to John to clear their names. John did not do so, but he did say something significant before he too was hanged; ‘I know nothing of my master’s death, nor what has become of him; but you may hereafter possibly hear.’

  And more than a year later, in August 1662, something utterly extraordinary happened. William Harrison appeared alive and well in Chipping Campden. Given what had happened during his absence – the trial, humiliation and execution of three innocent neighbours – Harrison was required to give an account of himself to Sir Thomas Overbury. This is what he said.

  As I was coming home that Thursday evening, there met me a horseman and said, ‘Art thou here?’ and I, fearing he would have ridden over me, struck his horse over the nose, whereupon he struck at me with his sword several blows and ran it into my side while I, with my little cane, made what defence I could. At last another came behind me, ran me in the thigh, laid hold on the collar of my doublet and drew me into a hedge near the place. Then came another. They did not take my money, but mounted me behind one of them, drew my arms about his middle and fastened my wrists together with something that had a spring lock to it – as I conceived by hearing a snap as they put it on. Then they threw a great cloak over me and carried me away.