In the night they alighted at a hayrick, which stood near unto a stone-pit by a wall-side, where they took away my money. About two hours before day (as I heard one of them tell another he thought it then to be) they tumbled me into the stone-pit. They stayed (as I thought) about an hour at the hayrick, when they took horse again. One of them bade me come out of the pit. I answered that they had my money already and asked what they would do with me, whereupon he struck me again, drew me out and put a great quantity of money into my pockets and mounted me again in the same manner.
So far, it is clear just from the simple fact that Harrison was alive in 1662 that John Perry’s story of his murder was totally untrue. Probably his account of his night wanderings was untrue as well. But the yarn Harrison was telling was obviously equally untrue. Why would armed men carry Harrison off in order to rob him of a few pounds of rent money? Why would they then stuff his pockets full of money? Presumably Harrison needed to disappear for some reason that he was not prepared to tell anyone, and for some very compelling reason too. The two men were both lying, and probably for the same reason; they simply could not say what was really happening.
Harrison’s story continued:
On Friday about sun-setting, they brought me to a lone house on a heath where they took me down almost dead, being sorely bruised with the carriage of the money. When the woman of the house saw that I could neither stand nor speak, she asked whether or no they had brought a dead man. They answered, ‘No, but a friend that was hurt and they were carrying him to a surgeon.’ She answered that if they did not make haste their friend would be dead before they could bring him to one. They laid me on cushions and suffered none to come into the room but a little girl. There we stayed all night, they giving me some broth and strong waters.
In the morning very early they mounted me as before, and on Saturday night they brought me to a place where there were two or three houses, in one of which I lay all night on cushions by their bedside. On Sunday morning they carried me from thence and about three or four o’clock they brought me to a place by the seaside called Deal, where they laid me on the ground. And, one of them staying with me, the other two walked a little off to meet a man with whom they talked. In their discourse, I heard them mention seven pounds; after which they went away together and half an hour after returned.
The man (whose name, as I after heard, was Wrenshaw) said he feared I would die before he could get me on board; then immediately they put me into a boat and carried me to ship-board where my wounds were dressed. I remained in the ship (as near as I could reckon) about six weeks.
The fictitious six week voyage to ‘Turkey’ involved being chased by Turkish pirates, being captured and taken to Smyrna and sold in the slave market there. Harrison became the slave of an eighty year old Turkish doctor. He was given a little silver bowl to carry and was given the nickname ‘Boll’. When the doctor died, Harrison sold the bowl and bought his passage home.
Most commentators on this remarkable episode have assumed that the seven pounds mentioned was the price Harrison fetched as a white slave. This is a preposterous idea. There were white slavers, but they were interested in kidnapping healthy young girls (and boys), certainly not old men of seventy-two in the wrecked state that Harrison seems to have been in by this stage, exhausted and covered in cuts and bruises. The whole kidnapping by white slavers yarn is an obvious cover story, the sort of borrowed melodrama that an uneducated person would come up with in the seventeenth century. What Harrison was trying to do was not only avoid telling the truth about his secret journey, but show that he was out of the country during the ordeal of the Perry family.
Harrison would certainly have heard about white slavers. The Mediterranean in particular was infested with pirates and in Turkey and North Africa there were thousands of white Christians from northern Europe who had been abducted. Only twenty-three years before the disappearance of William Harrison, Colonel Rainsborough’s father, Captain William Rainsborough, was hailed as a hero for rescuing 339 men, women and children from one port. In the early seventeenth century, Barbary pirates regularly raided the coasts of Ireland, Wales and the English West Country, snatching scores of people who were then sold on as slaves. Although by the nineteenth century William Harrison’s story looked utterly childish, the background his story was based upon was real enough. But Harrison was no spring chicken. He was far too old to be worth transporting anywhere for any kind of work. Nor was he in the right location. In the early seventeenth century, it was certainly risky to be living in an isolated village on the south coast of Ireland, where pirates could come ashore, take twenty people and be away again before the alarm was raised; such things happened. But Chipping Campden was a long way inland. Both age and geography are against William Harrison’s story.
There is an understandable assumption that Perry and Harrison were both lying for the same reason, that Harrison had to disappear for a few months and a cover story had to be concocted, and that Perry would corroborate it.
When Harrison was presumed dead, his son lost no time in asking lady Juliana for his father’s job. She agreed to this, and he was extremely unpopular. When Old Harrison reappeared, there was great relief because it meant that Edward Harrison would have to give way to his father. Edward was in the forefront of the witch-hunt against the Perrys. He may have been instrumental in having the Perrys brought to trial a fatal second time. He certainly arranged for John Perry’s body to be hung in chains on Broadway Hill, ‘where he might daily see him’. Mrs Harrison was not pleased to have her husband back. In fact, she committed suicide six months later.
For some reason which nobody in the family or the neighbourhood could know about, William Harrison needed to undertake a journey. He trusted John Perry absolutely, and Perry seems to have trusted him, too. Perry’s trust in Harrison turned out to be misplaced, as Harrison did not return in time to save Perry’s life. Harrison and Perry probably presumed that the lack of a body would mean that there could be no murder trial. The judge at the first Assize thought so, too. Unfortunately the judge at the second Assize did not. Maybe Harrison was away longer than intended because he really was abducted.
One writer who has studied the case has latched onto old Joan’s reputation as a witch and the evident friction between William Harrison and his Presbyterian wife. It is just possible that William Harrison and the Perrys were members of a witch cult. It would certainly explain the extreme secrecy involved and the intense loyalty shown. But there may be a simpler solution.
Among the Campden family papers there is a letter from the third Viscount Campden to his mother, Lady Juliana. It was written from Algiers, which in itself carries reverberations of Harrison’s description of a long voyage and being captured by Turkish pirates. Campden’s letter at first appears mundane enough. It is a request for cash. Then there is a receipt for money received ‘by hand of Harrison, oure good servant, who retourneth forthwithe, and as I will later.’ Campden was a young Royalist and like many others of his kind he was living in safe exile abroad during the Commonwealth, and using the opportunity to take a Grand Tour. The letter is very close to proof that Harrison did indeed undertake a voyage to the Mediterranean, and it shows him characteristically pursuing his duties as Lady Juliana’s steward. She trusted him to take her son the money that he needed.
The remaining problem is the secrecy and the deception. Why did Harrison need to conceal from his family and the neighbourhood this routine business trip? There was certainly no need for it in 1660. The Royalists were not being hunted any more; it was rather the reverse, with Parliamentarian regicides on trial for their lives. But between 1642 and 1660, journeys like Harrison’s trip to Algiers would have been treated as treasonable. The eighteen years of doing family business in secret had become a habit. The voyage to Algiers had after all not needed to be secret, it was just that Harrison was an old man and he had got into the habit of extreme caution. On the other hand, Harrison had presumably not gone missing in this way b
efore, or his family would not have reacted as they did. Presumably the Algiers trip was a one-off foreign trip, or Mrs Harrison would have known there was no need to worry. Or was Harrison in the habit of keeping everything from her, because of her Cromwellian sympathies and her general antipathy towards him?
Baptist Hicks had built caution and secrecy into the layout of his estate. He knew he had to protect his enormous wealth, especially in economically and politically fast-changing times. There were underground passages leading to neighbouring houses, so that at times of crisis, such as impending raids, valuables could be taken out for safety. Occasionally the rumbling of barrows and handcarts in the tunnels could be heard. Before the commandeering and destruction of the house, William Harrison, helped by the Perrys, had successfully emptied it of most of the portable furnishings by way of these tunnels. Or it may be that many of the house’s treasures were actually stored in the tunnels. If so they might have remained there after the house was burnt down. William Harrison’s role as steward would then have extended beyond mere rent-collection; he was curating an unknown amount of treasure in the network of tunnels under and round the ruins. The swordsman’s attack on John Perry and the break-in at William Harrison’s house suggest that others had got to know that there were valuables to be had.
These are only suggestions about the nature of William Harrison’s responsibilities. Lady Juliana had clearly entrusted him with some great task, which he partially delegated to John Perry. Harrison had to go away, to Algiers, to take money to Lord Campden, and for some reason – not enslavement - his return was delayed. It was the delay that proved fatal to the Perry family. But there are still many unsolved mysteries surrounding the case. What was John Perry really doing during his unaccountable nocturnal wanderings? Why was William Harrison’s son so keen to see the Perrys suffer? Why did Mrs Harrison hang herself after William Harrison’s return? Why did William Harrison take so long to return home?
The Murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey
The body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found in a ditch on Primrose Hill in London on Thursday 17 October 1678. Two men who had been drinking at the White House inn in the fields north of Marylebone that wet afternoon found the body towards 4 o’clock. It had a sword stuck through it, the neck was broken and there were massive bruises on the chest; he appeared to have been ‘beaten with some obtuse weapon’ or punched and kicked. A circular mark round his neck showed that he had been hanged or strangled. The surgeon who carried out the post mortem observed that the two sword wounds had been inflicted perhaps days after death, that ‘there was more done to his neck than an ordinary suffocation, and that he had not eaten for two days before his death. He had wax stains on his clothes, which implied that he had been maltreated in the house of some well-to-do people: people who lit their house with candles. It did not look as if he had been murdered in the place where the body was found as there was no evidence of a struggle, though the ground had been trampled by a number of bystanders by the time the investigators arrived. Robbery was evidently not a motive as the body still carried money and rings.
The man who came to this strange, violent and apparently inexplicable end was a fifty-seven year old bachelor who had the reputation of being the best Justice of the Peace in England. He was magistrate for Westminster. He made his living as a coal merchant and lived in Hartshorn Lane near Charing Cross. He was a well-known figure in the neighbourhood, tall, thin, sad-looking, always dressed in black, but with a gold hatband and cane. Edmund Berry Godfrey had been knighted for his bravery in staying at his post regardless of the risk to himself during the Great Plague of 1665. In 1669 he had showed great courage once again in pursuit of his duty when he had the king’s physician, Sir Alexander Fraizer, arrested for owing him money; Godfrey found himself briefly imprisoned for that solecism. He nevertheless was a very frightened man when he disappeared on 12 October 1678. He was missing for five days, with the whole of London out looking for him, before his body was found on Primrose Hill.
His murder was a complete mystery, and many different theories have been put forward. His injuries are inconsistent with suicide, unless of course he killed himself and then his brothers ran their swords through his body and beat him to make it look like murder; their motive could have been to avoid a suicide verdict at the inquest, in which case his estate would have passed to the Crown.
Three men were later hanged for his murder, though all later commentators agree that they were not the murderers. On 21 December a Catholic silversmith called Miles Prance was arrested and taken to Newgate Prison. Prance’s landlord John Wren said Prance had been out for four nights before Godfrey’s body was found. At Newgate, Prance was tortured until in desperation he told his tormentors what they wanted to hear. On 24 December he admitted to taking part in the murder, but the main instigators had been Catholic priests, three of whom watched the murder in the courtyard of Somerset House. Under duress, Prance gave the names of three tradesmen, Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill. They all served at Somerset House, the Queen’s residence, where the true perpetrators of the crime wanted to place the murder scene. In those days, Primrose Hill was known as Greenbury Hill, and it really cannot be a coincidence that the three names Prance supplied made up the name of the place where the victim’s body was found. It seems to have been some kind of joke on Prance’s part. It is utterly mystifying that the English justice system got as far as arresting three men called Green, Berry and Hill for killing a man whose body was found on Greenbury Hill, but it did, and went as far as finding them guilty and on 5 February 1679 and actually hanging them on Greenbury Hill.
Prance withdrew his confession and was thrown in prison. He naturally recanted his recantation, changed his mind twice more and ended up with his original story. It is an old story – a confession obtained under duress has no value whatever. Eventually Prance’s story was discredited and he admitted perjury. The three men were hanged, but on false evidence, so the case is officially unsolved.
This was the time of the Titus Oates conspiracy. Oates claimed that he had discovered a Popish Plot. The Pope, Louis XIV, the Jesuit General and the Archbishop of Dublin were at the head of a plot to kill the Protestant king of England, Charles II, and set up his Catholic brother, the Duke of York, in his place. London would be set on fire and all the Protestants would be murdered in their beds. Charles II, to his credit, laughed in Oates’s face when he first heard the story. It was totally incredible. Oates described the Commander-in-Chief of the Pope’s army as tall and dark; Charles II knew the man in question, and knew him to be red-haired and short. Charles and his Secretary of State knew that Oates was a fraud, but were (rightly) concerned that he could do mischief.
In the country at large, Oates was widely believed. When Oates realized that he would get nowhere by trying to convince the establishment, he initiated proceedings in the ordinary courts. This was where Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey comes into the picture. On 6 September 1678, Oates went to Godfrey as a magistrate and swore the truth of a statement he had written outlining the Popish Plot. Godfrey conscientiously passed the information on to a friend, Edmund Coleman, secretary to the duchess of York, and Coleman was able to assure Oates that the king knew all about the accusations Oates had made and would take no action.
Oates refused to give up. Three weeks later, on 28 September, Oates went back to Godfrey with further information about the plot, swore to its truth under oath, and then took the additional information to Whitehall to give to the king, who saw that the story was now more than a lie: it was perjury.
Godfrey was now worried. He knew that Titus Oates was committing perjury and that Oates had no conscience about it. He also knew that there was no interest at all at court in pursuing the matter. But because Oates had approached him as a Justice of the Peace and made sworn statements he felt he had no choice but to proceed on Oates’s behalf. He was duty-bound to act, even though he knew Oates was lying. Godfrey became even more worried when his friend Coleman was
arrested. Godfrey said to other friends that he had taken the depositions from Oates very unwillingly and added, ‘I think I shall have little thanks for my pains. Upon my conscience I think I shall be the first martyr.’ He said he ‘was master of a dangerous secret which would be fatal to him’, though he did not say what the secret was. Subsequently it emerged that the secret, which he learned through Coleman, was that Shaftesbury and his Country party (the land-owning grandees who were anti-Catholic and anti-French and wanted to reduce royal power) were ironically in the pay of the French. As it happened both Louis XIV and the Country party wanted the same thing – major political disturbance in England. Receiving financial support from the French was nevertheless something Shaftesbury and his collaborators did not want to be known.
Godfrey now knew their dangerous secret, and he also knew, because his source, Coleman, had been arrested that they would know that he knew. He was in great personal danger. He told a trusted friend that he was not afraid of them if they ‘came fairly’ and that he would put up a fight for his life.
Evidently they did come for Sir Edmund, not fairly, and they maltreated him before killing him, but it is less evident who ‘they’ were. It is unlikely that Catholics were responsible. The mood of the moment in England was such that Catholics would be assumed to be responsible and the backlash would be extreme; English Catholics were painfully aware that for some time to come they were going to be the scapegoats for everything that went wrong. Godfrey was also signalling that he did not believe Titus Oates’s allegations, and that was if anything a pro-Catholic gesture. He was indicating, like the king, that there was no conspiracy. Catholics were in the end hanged for his murder, and in the climate of the time that was probably inevitable, but the Catholics were the least likely people to have been his killers.
Great Unsolved Crimes Page 10
