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Murder and vanishing without a trace: the mysterious case of Lord Lucan
Fifty years ago, the notorious peer disappeared, never to be seen again (officially), following a brutal murder in his Belgravia home. Laura Thompson reviews the case of the gambling earl suspected of killing his children’s nanny Sandra Rivett and attacking his estranged wife – and explores what the cause celebre reveals about social attitudes of the time
Just before 9pm on Thursday 7 November 1974, the rarefied calm of Belgravia, that oasis of white stucco in the heart of London, was defiled by violence. Behind the stately façade of 46 Lower Belgrave Street, family home of the 7th Earl of Lucan, 29-year-old nanny Sandra Rivett descended from the top of the six-storey house into the basement to make tea. In the darkness, an assailant was waiting. Sandra was bludgeoned to death with a length of piping, bundled into a sack and left on the bloodied kitchen floor. Shortly afterwards, near the top of the basement stairs, another woman – 37-year old Veronica Lucan, the earl’s estranged wife – was similarly battered. She fought off her attacker and, just before 10pm, burst into the Plumbers Arms pub at the end of Lower Belgrave Street. The late-evening customers were confronted with the sight of a small, barefoot woman, her head coated with blood. “Help me, help me – I’ve just escaped from being murdered!” she exclaimed, followed by: “My children, my children – he’s murdered my nanny!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/0008466-2-3975926-e1731582114910.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Sandra Rivett, who was working as a nanny for Lady Lucan when she was attacked and killed in 1974. Lord Lucan vanished the following morning (Photo by TopFoto)" title="Sandra Rivett, who was working as a nanny for Lady Lucan when she was attacked and killed in 1974. Lord Lucan vanished the following morning (Photo by TopFoto)" /> From that moment, the story became public property. Shortly afterwards, police kicked in the elegant door of the Lucan home. There, within the formal interior, they found Sandra Rivett’s body. Upstairs were the three children who had been in her care: Frances, aged 10; George, seven; and four-year-old Camilla. No trace of an assailant was discovered. Quite soon, however, the identity of the man whom Veronica Lucan claimed had “murdered my nanny” would be known to Scotland Yard detectives. From her bed in hospital, where she’d received 60 stitches to close her head wound, Veronica stated that the attacker had been her husband, Lord Lucan – 39-year-old Richard John Bingham, a professional gambler nicknamed ‘Lucky’. It was then, too, that the ‘official’ theory about the case was formed – a version of events that was instantly accepted by the police and which, even after half a century of speculation, has never been supplanted. According to this narrative, Sandra Rivett, who should have had the night off, was murdered in error, her killer mistakenly believing that the woman descending into the basement was Lady Lucan. When Veronica herself appeared around 9pm, Lord Lucan realised his mistake and attacked her, but wasn’t able to finish the job. Lord Lucan before and after the murder The Lucans had lived separately since January 1973. In July that year, Veronica had won a vicious custody battle that cost Lucan around £20,000, and which he was obsessed with overturning. He became deeply concerned for his children, not least because Lady Lucan suffered with a number of mental health problems which, he judged, might leave her unable to care for them adequately. By this point he was drinking heavily and gambling more heavily still. It seemed, then, that his motive for killing his wife was strong, both financially and emotionally. Sandra, who had been employed for just 10 weeks, was the collateral damage. After Veronica ran to the pub, Lord Lucan also left the house. Almost nothing is known of his movements thereafter. From an unidentified location, he rang his mother, Kaitilin, the dowager countess and a Labour party activist, asking her to collect the children. According to her, he added: “Oh mother, there was something terrible in the basement. I couldn’t bring myself to look.” Read more | The curious case of Lord Lucan, plus 10 other mysterious disappearances from history Some time before midnight he visited the home of Susan Maxwell-Scott, a friend in Uckfield, Sussex. At the 1975 inquest into Sandra Rivett’s death, Susan related the story that she said Lucan had offered her: he had been passing the house in Belgravia, saw a fight going on in the basement and rushed in to interrupt it, whereupon Veronica accused him of hiring a hitman. This story was also told in a letter, post marked Uckfield, sent to Lucan’s brother-in law, Bill Shand Kydd. “V. has demonstrated her hatred for me in the past and would do anything to see me accused,” Lucan wrote. At some point in the early hours, he wrote two letters to an old friend, Michael Stoop. The car that the suspect had been driving, a Ford Corsair borrowed from Stoop, was found on Sunday 10 November, parked in a residential street in the port of Newhaven, some 17 miles from Uckfield. Lord Lucan himself had disappeared. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1346553233-36d3cdd-e1731581563375.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Ford Corsair used by Lucan, abandoned in Norman Road, Newhaven on the morning of the murder (Photo by Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="The Ford Corsair used by Lucan, abandoned in Norman Road, Newhaven on the morning of the murder (Photo by Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Why did the murder strike a note with the nation? It is not hard to understand why this case became an immediate cause celebre. It had everything, including a mystery – whither the vanished earl? – that remains unsolved to this day. The most famous murders carry both a mythic element of the timeless and an atmospheric imprint of their time – and none more so than this one. It was a parable of class, of the high-born brought low, of aristocratic hubris. But the flavour of the story – the peculiar piquancy of its social context – is that of the early 1970s. Before the murder, Lord Lucan – pinstriped and sleek in the age of T-Rex and Wimpy bars – had proceeded every day from Belgravia to the Clermont Club, an elite gambling house on Berkeley Square, while the three-day week and the oil crisis raged in a troubled country that settled down at night to watch Upstairs, Downstairs. Lucan, living a seigneurial life on an income of £12,000 a year (around £110,000 in today’s terms), could not have existed in a later era. His kind – aristocrats with neither sufficient means nor the will to earn them – were on the edge of extinction. In an earlier age, he would not have been so profoundly incongruous, and his life would probably have been quite different. In 1974, his rebarbative image, looming arrogantly from every newspaper, was – to use a then-unknown phrase – supremely triggering. There was never a second of doubt about his guilt, though the case against him rested upon the word of Veronica, Lady Lucan. She was portrayed as frail yet impressively indomitable, perhaps rather reminiscent of Diana, Princess of Wales in a later era. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/shutterstockeditorial2126670a-e88e30d-e1731581809470.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Lord Lucan, seen at a West End club playing cards. A keen gambler, on more than one occasion he lost many thousands of pounds (Photo by Evening News/Shutterstock)" title="Lord Lucan, seen at a West End club playing cards. A keen gambler, on more than one occasion he lost many thousands of pounds (Photo by Evening News/Shutterstock)" /> Arguably the strongest evidence against the earl was that he had run away. So much for the mottos of the old school tie (in his case, Eton) that mandated facing the music and behaving like a gentleman. Here was proof that ‘They’ were no better than ‘Us’ – an intensely satisfying narrative. The national mood was summed up by a letter to the Daily Express printed on 20 November 1974: “The ordinary people of this country are accustomed to being told how lazy and greedy they have become and how they must make greater sacrifices,” it said. “If I were a miner, factory worker or railwayman and I had read of Lord Lucan’s lifestyle (rise at noon, lunch at the Clermont, gambling losses of £5,000 in one afternoon) I would have said a few well chosen words when my alarm went off this morning.” Lord Lucan evades justice Britain was bankrupt and volatile, crippled by strikes, high energy costs and taxation. This was also the year of the IRA pub bombings. On the night of 7 November, as the first detective was entering 46 Lower Belgrave Street, two people were killed at a pub near Woolwich Royal Artillery Barracks. A couple of weeks previously, there had been a minor explosion at Brooks’s club in St James’s Street. The world of Lord Lucan was not, in fact, immune to the national situation, but it certainly looked that way. Had Lucan been arrested and tried, there would have been a glorious sense of catharsis. Instead, he continued to evade justice. “Where is this jerk? He’s giving me a headache,” was how Detective-Sergeant Graham Forsyth, the officer assigned as Lady Lucan’s de facto bodyguard, summed up the general mood. Yet there was also a kind of pleasure within the frustrated rage at the way that this story was playing out. It was confirming a communal belief that those who belong to ‘the Establishment’ can get away with things. “Lord Lucan has so many friends. There is so much money around,” said Eunice Hensby, Sandra Rivett’s mother, at her daughter’s inquest, which opened on 16 June 1975 and ended with a guilty verdict against Lucan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-592341618-75b6ec6-e1731581517481.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Police divers prepare to search Newhaven harbour in November 1974 after the car driven by Lord Lucan was found nearby. No trace of the missing earl was discovered (Photo by Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)" title="Police divers prepare to search Newhaven harbour in November 1974 after the car driven by Lord Lucan was found nearby. No trace of the missing earl was discovered (Photo by Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)" /> Having been fixated on the earl for seven months, the press now lamented the fact that there was so little focus upon his victim. “It was Lucan’s aristocratic family and gambling friends who dominated,” wrote the Sunday Mirror, railing against this “ugly real-life performance of Upstairs, Downstairs”. It claimed that ranks had closed against Veronica, “who dared to accuse her vanished husband, the Seventh Earl of Lucan. Damned bad show, don’tcherknow.” Alluding to the fact that Bill Shand Kydd and his wife – Lady Lucan’s sister – had spent 19 June at the races, the editorial concluded: “What with the beastly inquest, into the bargain it was Ascot Week, too!” A highly persuasive article by the writer James Fox, published in the Sunday Times Magazine a few days earlier, had set the prevailing mood in elegant stone. Lucan was a cold, aggressive throwback, it suggested, a monstrous emblem of male privilege. His wife was a quasi-feminist figure, an intelligent modern woman who, despite her struggles with depression, had stood up to Lucan and suffered for it. His friends, ranged stubbornly on his side, were also “condescending, almost patronising” towards the police investigation. This last, of course, played into the belief – strongly implied from early on – that Lucan had been helped to flee justice. The circle of upper-class gamblers who congregated at the Clermont – the “Eton Mafia”, as Scotland Yard called them – would, it was suggested, do anything for one of their own, the freedom of an earl being worth more than the life of a servant in their ghastly antique code. Re-examining the Lucan case It is a belief that dies hard. Yet 50 years on, now that the Lucan case is ‘history’ and the societal anger that occluded it has calmed, its nuances should surely be clearer to see. Since the death of Lady Lucan in 2017 it has, for instance, become possible to question her testimony which, during her lifetime, was presented as a kind of gospel. One can also criticise the conduct of the police; no other suspect was even considered, so in essence there was no investigation. There was, however, a good deal of relish among the police at having the ‘nobs’ in their power. Indeed, Lucan’s friends became useful scapegoats for police failure to find the man himself, that intoxicating hate figure who had quite possibly got away with murder because that is what the rich and powerful did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/WHA1320037-c1d3390-e1731581963246.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Newspaper stories claiming to have traced Lucan’s movements continued to run decades after his disappearance – this headline in the Daily Mirror appeared in 2012" title="Newspaper stories claiming to have traced Lucan’s movements continued to run decades after his disappearance – this headline in the Daily Mirror appeared in 2012" /> Yet Lucan merely looked rich and powerful. In fact, he was a weak man, though liked by many, including those who thought him capable of eliminating a woman he had come to hate (others thought him innocent). He could scarcely have been more remote from the image that has long held sway, glued into position by our healthy national resentment of two-tier justice, our love of schadenfreude, our pleasure in such a glaring – almost cartoonish – proof that ‘the Establishment’ is as rotten as we wish to believe. In truth – as should also now be clear – Lucan was ‘Establishment’ on paper only. He was a man whose sole status came from a minor title, living off a couple of family trusts, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. And an earl without proper means was, by the 1970s, a figure with no authority at all: a melting waxwork, paid to sit at the Clermont tables and dress the house for the truly rich and powerful – the ones with oil money. Yet within the British psyche, the class system exerted its strange, illogical, atavistic pull. It would do still, I think, should the case occur today. Enduring mystery: what happened to Lord Lucan? Ever since the grisly murder of Sandra Rivett in 1974, theories have swirled to try and explain Lucan’s fate In 1992, the high court made this declaration: “Be it known that the Right Honourable Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, died on or since the eighth day of November 1974.” That, effectively, was an acceptance of the evidence of Susan Maxwell-Scott, who said that Lucan drove away from her house in Uckfield in the early hours of 8 November. Of course, that statement is unprovable. The car that Lucan was driving was seen, parked in Newhaven, in the early morning of that November day – but there was no way to prove who had driven it there. So it is possible that Lucan was at that moment being flown out of the country – and even that he is, at the age of nearly 90, still alive today. Indeed, in 1999 his son, George, was refused permission to take his seat in the House of Lords, there being reasonable doubt as to whether the title was his to assume. It was not until 2016 that George became the 8th Earl of Lucan – and even then, his accession did not mark an end to speculation about the fate of his father. In the past 50 years, Lucan has been ‘seen’ all around the world. He has been identified as, among many other people, a pot-smoking hippy in Goa. When disgraced Labour MP John Stonehouse was arrested in Australia in December 1974, having faked his own death, he was apprehended in the belief that he was Lucan. There have even been claims that the earl himself was murdered. The detective who headed the investigation – and who at the time was wholly convinced that Lucan had killed himself – later signed a book deal to explore his powerful new conviction that the earl was in Botswana. The son of Sandra Rivett, adopted at birth but understandably possessed with an urge to achieve justice, pursues a belief that Lucan is now a Buddhist living in Australia. I myself agree with the 1992 statement by the high court. If there was a plan to help Lucan escape, it was dreamed up by his friends – most of whom were tapped-out gamblers rather than masters of the universe – on the spur of the moment, yet was so water tight that it has succeeded in keeping him hidden and alive for half a century. I find this impossible to accept, not least because the cost involved would have been immense. To my mind, Lucan knew that Newhaven was the journey’s end. His words in a final letter to Michael Stoop – “when you come across my children, which I hope you will, please tell them that you knew me and that all I cared about was them” – read like a signing-off. Then he threw in his hand, and jumped into the English Channel. Other theories are available. Laura Thompson is the author of A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan (Bloomsbury, 2014) This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Hell at Glencoe: what led to the massacre in the Scottish Highlands?
In 1692, government troops shot, bayoneted and burned to death up to 40 Highlanders in a remote corner of Scotland. Why, asks Allan Kennedy, did King William III & II authorise an act of such calculating brutality?
It was early when the soldiers roused themselves, the dawn still a distant promise. As they mustered in the darkness, they likely could not see much of the rugged valley surrounding them, the narrow river running through its centre, or the forbidding mountain peaks pressing in from all sides. Nor, probably, did they care, for the grim task before them was surely enough to occupy their minds. In the name of William III & II and Mary II, joint king and queen of Scotland, these 120-or-so men (most of whom probably hailed from the Scottish lowlands) were charged with bringing order to a remote corner of the realm. They were to do so at bayonet-point, by visiting exemplary punishment on a group of people that, in the judgment of William and Mary’s ministers, had proved insufficiently enthusiastic in their submission to government authority. As they stood in the winter chill, preparing to begin their bloody work, the troops cannot have known that what they were about to do would forever be remembered as one of the most horrific acts of political violence in British history. For this was Glencoe, home to a small sept of Clan MacDonald, and on the morning of 13 February 1692, it became the site of a massacre. Read more | How glorious was the Glorious Revolution? The soldiers, led by Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, had been quartered in Glencoe for nearly a fortnight. The troops had ostensibly been extracting ‘free quarter’, meaning that the local populace (made up of perhaps 200 families) was being forced to provide them with food and board – a common mechanism in early modern Scotland for punishing people, such as the MacDonalds, who had failed to pay their taxes. All the while, however, the groundwork was secretly being laid for the massacre. Glenlyon received his final orders on 12 February: “Yow are hereby ordered to fall upon the Rebells, the McDonalds of Glenco, and putt all to the sword under 70. You are to have a speciall care that the old Fox and his sones doe upon no account escape your hands. You are to secure all the avenues that no man escape. This you are to putt in executione att fyve of the clock precisely.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/02/shutterstock_1567355881-ea5360a-scaled.jpg" width="2560" height="1707" alt="Glencoe sits near the south-western end of the Great Glen" title="Glencoe sits near the south-western end of the Great Glen. The National Trust for Scotland is preparing to launch a £300,000 archaeological investigation into their site of the massacre. (Image by Shutterstock)" /> Kill without hesitation So it was that, at the appointed hour, Glenlyon mustered his men around the settlement of Inverrigan, a short distance into the five-mile-long glen. While he remained there, parties of around 20 men were dispatched to fall upon the glen’s various other settlements, each with orders to enter the main homes and kill without hesitation. The primary target was Alasdair MacDonald, also known as MacIain, the aged clan chief and the ‘old fox’ referred to in Glenlyon’s orders. He lived at Polveig, near the mouth of the glen. As the soldiers burst into his home, he rose to greet them and began to get dressed, but fell dead when a volley of gunfire thundered into his back. MacIain’s sons, Iain, Alasdair and Archibald, were marked for similar treatment, but all managed to escape into the hills, thanks to warnings from their servants. Meanwhile, another party of troops descended on the settlement of Achnacone, further into the glen, where they broke into the largest house to find eight men huddled around a fire. Guns were immediately discharged; five of the men died, but the others managed to flee. Similar scenes were played out all through Glencoe, although the chosen weapon was not always gunfire; one attack at Leacantuim saw 80-year-old Archibald MacDonald bludgeoned into unconsciousness, before later being burned alive inside a house where he had taken refuge. Opinion | “The anglocentric view we have of British history is unsustainable,” says Misha Glenny Back at Inverrigan, Glenlyon was not idle. Nine men, bound hand and foot, likely to prevent them raising the alarm, were shot one by one, before the soldiers turned their attention to the rest of the village. The attack seems to have been chaotic, and many MacDonalds escaped, although others, including an old woman and a boy no older than five, did not. There was little room for mercy; when Glenlyon himself attempted to save the lives of two young men, one of his fellow officers, citing their orders, overruled him and shot them both. From about 7am, Glenlyon began receiving reinforcements from nearby Fort William. By late morning there were well over 600 soldiers in Glencoe, but there was little left for them to do. The MacDonald townships were all smoking ruins, and most of those who had not been killed had long-since escaped. Instead, the soldiers rounded up the MacDonalds’ cattle and drove them back to Fort William in an act of confiscation-cum-plunder. As they withdrew back to their quarters, the troops left somewhere between 30 and 40 MacDonalds dead. The massacre was a consequence of a short-term crisis in the governance of the Scottish Highlands, combined with much longer-term trends. Lowland Scots had been developing hostile ideas about Highlanders since at least the 14th century, and by the 1690s this discourse – which tended to shape English and other non-Scottish views as well – was firmly rooted in the idea that Highlanders were violent, barbaric, uncivilised and fundamentally disorderly. In the estimation of one particularly hostile contemporary observer, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, they were “more contemptible than the vilest slaves”. And the worst of the lot were widely held to be those who, like the Glencoe MacDonalds, lived in Lochaber, the wild and mountainous region at the south-western end of the Great Glen. For most of the 17th century, but particularly during the reigns of Charles II (1660–85) and James II & VII (1685–89), such antipathy laid particular stress on the idea of lawlessness, thereby casting Highlanders as incorrigibly criminal, with cattle-rustling being the offence of which they were most commonly accused. Under both Charles and James, various mechanisms for suppressing Highlanders’ supposed lawlessness had been tried, but with the increasingly prominent connecting thread of using military force (or the threat thereof) to beat Highlanders into line. So, when William and Mary became king and queen of Scots in 1689 (after ousting James VII in the so-called Glorious Revolution), they inherited a realm that had become accustomed to treating its Highland inhabitants – probably not much less than half of the entire population of Scotland – as a threatening ‘other’ that needed to be kept robustly in line. Read more | 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites Latent suspicions In the short term, the story that terminated in Glencoe began three years earlier at Dundee. It was there on 13 April 1689 that John Graham, Viscount Dundee raised the standard of James VII, proclaiming the start of the first Jacobite rising. Dundee was aiming to restore James as king of Scots, two days after the Scottish parliament had formally declared him deposed in favour of William and Mary. Despite scoring a military victory over Williamite forces at the battle of Killiecrankie in July, during which Dundee himself was killed, the rising never posed a particularly serious threat to the new monarchs, and by late 1690 it had more or less petered out. Crucially, however, the rising had been sustained almost entirely by Highland manpower, thus confirming latent suspicions that Highlanders were naturally disloyal and disorderly. The events that would unfold were fundamentally shaped by that conviction. At first, though, William’s government seemed to proceed with caution. In June 1691, it entered negotiations with the remaining Jacobites, with the talks being conducted at Achallader in Perthshire under the leadership of John Campbell, 1st Earl of Breadalbane. Armed with a slush fund of £12,000 to help lubricate the negotiations, Breadalbane persuaded the Jacobite chiefs to agree to a three-month cessation of arms. Read more | A king without a crown: James VII and II’s years in exile This agreement outraged much of the Williamite establishment because of its generosity to the Jacobites – after all, it provided for nothing more than a truce, and did not even require the chiefs to renounce their support for James VII. Nevertheless, when the terms of the Achallader agreement were presented to him, King William swiftly ratified them. Already, however, there were signs that this apparent moderation concealed a more ruthless impulse. This was most evident in the establishment in 1690 of a new military installation at Fort William, specifically intended to provide the government with coercive muscle on the ground. Shortly after the Achallader talks came to an end, William raised the stakes still further by issuing a proclamation, dated 17 August 1691, in which he demanded that all the Jacobite chiefs sign an Oath of Allegiance to him no later than 1 January 1692. If they acquiesced, they would receive a pardon and be accepted into the king’s peace; if they refused, they could expect consequences. Over the next few months, all the Jacobite clans capitulated and signed the oath, a process greatly assisted by James VII’s decision in December to release them from their earlier oaths to him. But in the case of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, there was a hitch. MacIain arrived at Fort William on 31 December 1691 ready to give his family’s allegiance. But there was nobody at the fort empowered to receive it. The nearest competent official was at Inveraray, 40 miles distant. By the time MacIain got there, it was 6 January – five days after the deadline. The Glencoe MacDonalds were not the only ones to miss the deadline, but because of the clan’s small size and long-standing reputation for being troublesome, hardline elements within William’s government decided they could safely be used to deliver a broader lesson to unruly Highlanders. Crucial in this was John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, recently appointed secretary of state by William, and a man determined to advertise his loyalty to the new regime. On 7 January 1692, Stair issued an edict that all those who had failed to take the oath were to be destroyed, and on 11 January he added more specific orders singling out the Glencoe MacDonalds. A third set of orders, dated 16 January and this time bearing the signature of William himself, confirmed that the MacDonalds were to be “extirpated”. It was in response to these instructions that Glenlyon was dispatched to Glencoe on 1 February to await the green light. Intense public outcry The bloodletting that followed two weeks later was, in its immediate aim of killing off Highland Jacobitism, a huge success. Following the Glencoe massacre, William would never again face serious Jacobite agitation in Scotland. But this security was offset by devastating reputational damage. At first, news of the massacre spread slowly. It was not until two months later that the first account of the atrocity appeared in print – in the form of a short and fairly sober account of the killings produced by the Jacobite press in Paris. Soon, however, British Jacobites were capitalising on Glencoe’s propaganda potential and, from the end of 1692, a steady stream of pamphlets stirred up an intense public outcry. Even in an age inured to violence, the cold, calculating nature of the government’s actions at Glencoe was horrifying, as was the fact that the soldiers had been living with their victims for a fortnight prior to turning on them. King William, supposedly an antidote to James VII’s autocratic regime, and the champion of freedom across Europe, now risked being seen as more vicious than the worst continental despots. Horror soon turned to outrage, and emotions boiled over in the 1693 session of the Scottish parliament, which demanded an inquiry into the massacre. One was set up, but it never met, and so the 1695 session reiterated the demand more forcefully. This time, the authorities relented, establishing a Commission of Inquiry that did meet, submitting its report to the king in June. The 1695 report condemned the massacre, calling it murder and declaring it “barbarous and inhumane”. Most of the main actors, including the military men and, crucially, the king himself, escaped condemnation. But a scapegoat was readily found, and the man chosen to shoulder the blame was John Dalrymple, Master of Stair. “The Master of Stair’s letters had exceeded your majesties’ instructions towards the killing and destruction of the Glencoemen,” the report intoned, before going on to observe that Dalrymple had “absolutely and positively ordered” the MacDonalds to be “destroyed without any further consideration than that of their not having taken the indemnity in due time.” Thus the commission painted Dalrymple as a bloodthirsty obsessive who had deliberately betrayed the king’s trust, and he was formally censured in parliament. He was never to face trial, but having clearly been set up to carry the can for the whole sorry affair, he was eased out of his office as secretary of state before the year was out. The grisly apogee Many of the MacDonalds eventually returned to Glencoe, and it remained populated until at least the 18th century. Today, little trace survives of the original settlements, or of the massacre itself; tourists must make do with a stone memorial and a modern visitor centre. But the murders committed on that freezing February morning in 1692 have long since passed into infamy, and over the years they have been pressed into service to further a variety of agendas. For some, the massacre offered proof of the Scots’ brutishness, helping make the case for Scotland to be ‘rescued’ by the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707. For others, it demonstrated the essential victimisation of the country at the hands of a monarchy vastly more interested in England (and, in William’s particular case, the Netherlands). In this reading of history, it was less an advert for union than for independence. Still others, viewing the massacre as the grisly apogee of Highlanders’ enthusiasm for violence and feuding, have used it to argue for the backwardness of Gaelic culture. And some, interpreting Glencoe as a form of anti-Gaelic ethnic cleansing, have suggested that it highlighted the fundamental incompatibility of Scotland’s Gaelic and Lowland identities. Many of these interpretations are historically dubious. However, they serve to demonstrate how the Glencoe massacre has wormed its way into Scottish national consciousness. But with the National Trust for Scotland, which today owns much of the glen, preparing to launch a new, £300,000 archaeological investigation into its history, now is an opportune moment to reconsider the events of 1692. Above all, we should recognise that, behind the layers of recrimination, myth-making and narrative-building, lies a harrowing human tragedy that, more than three centuries later, still retains the power to shock. Allan Kennedy is a lecturer in history at the University of Dundee. He is the author of Governing Gaeldom: The Scottish Highlands and the Restoration State, 1660–1688 (Brill, 2014) LISTEN: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Glencoe massacre on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time This article was first published in the March 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
Did the Scottish mass-murdering cannibal Sawney Bean actually exist?
Alexander 'Sawney' Bean, an infamous clan leader and cannibal, supposedly wreaked devastation in 16th-century Scotland. Find out more about his true identity…
According to most accounts, Alexander 'Sawney' Bean was a Scottish farm labourer born in about 1530 in Galloway. Soon after his marriage, and for reasons unknown, Sawney and his wife moved to live in the Bennane Cave. This cavern is over 200 metres deep and the entrance is covered by the sea at high tide. From this lair Bean ventured out to ambush, murder and rob unwary travellers. The bodies were brought back to the cave where they were butchered and eaten. Thus no evidence of the crimes was left. In time his eight sons grew old enough to help him in this work. The sons then had children by the six daughters to give Sawney and his wife 32 grandchildren. The whole clan lived by robbery and murder, eagerly consuming their victims. Eventually a man escaped an ambush and survived to raise the alarm. A force of royal soldiers set out to hunt down the gang of outlaws – who were then executed. However, the tale can be traced back only to London chapbooks more than 150 years after the events they claim to describe. These cheap publications concentrated on lurid crimes, scandals among the nobility and other sensational tales. There is no earlier evidence that Sawney Bean existed, though it must always be borne in mind that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Just because no earlier accounts survive it does not mean that Bean did not exist. However, it is possible that tales of Sawney Bean were based on the story of an undeniably real cannibal-robber named Christie Cleek. Christie was a butcher who became a highway robber in the Grampians in 1341. He equipped himself with a sharp hook on a long pole (a cleek) with which he pulled travellers to the ground before killing and robbing them. He is said to have eaten cuts of meat from his victims when he was short of food. This Q&A was first published in BBC History Magazine
In the 16th century, Antwerp was a global centre of trade, talked about around the world. Michael Pye considers its rise and bloody fall
In the 16th century, Antwerp was a global city that was talked about around the world – a centre of commerce, trade, knowledge and innovation, plus one of scandal, murder, secrets and intrigue. Michael Pye, author of Antwerp: The Glory Years, considers its rise and bloody fall. Michael Pye is the author of Antwerp: The Glory Years (Allen Lane, 2021) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Michael Burleigh discusses some of history’s key political killings, from Julius Caesar to Abraham Lincoln
Michael Burleigh discusses his book Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder, which considers what we can learn from looking at assassinations as a category of political violence. He also talks about some of the key assassinations through history, from Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln to the mysterious 1986 killing of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme Michael Burleigh is the author of Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder (Picador, 2021) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-183105&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fday-of-the-assassins%2Fmichael-burleigh%2F%2F9781529030136%3Fawaid%3D3787%26utm_source%3Dredbrain%26utm_medium%3Dshopping%26utm_campaign%3Dcss%26gclid%3DCj0KCQjw0emHBhC1ARIsAL1QGNcm7zBVFAZ8NbFz9PpeF3rmylhA_sg3RjRpr5bwy1eWBVJ1uIBkuUAaAnr2EALw_wcB" target="_blank" rel="sponsored">Buy now on Waterstones
As the Stuart king lay dying, rumours swirled that he had been poisoned – and that the perpetrator was his best friend. Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell investigate…
James VI and I died at Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire on 27 March 1625. In the weeks afterwards, the official line – from courtiers, preachers and poets alike – was that James had died well, confident in his salvation, firm in his Protestant faith, and surrounded by the men he treasured most: his son Charles, and his favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. It was a comforting story, designed to enhance the monarchy’s prestige while easing the awkward transition from one reign to the next. But already in these early weeks, another, far less comforting, story of James I’s last days had begun to worm its way into contemporary imaginations. This secret history, the unauthorised version of James’s death, would take another 12 months to achieve a definitive form, but the anxious whispers around court in the early spring of 1625 were disturbing enough. Something untoward had happened in James’s sickroom. Someone had violated the strict protocols regulating who was to treat the king, and when. This interference had precipitated a dramatic deterioration in the king’s condition, just when his doctors thought him on the road to recovery. Tempers had flared and strange accusations had been hurled. A royal servant and a royal doctor had been brusquely silenced and commanded to leave the court. The king, it was said, had been poisoned, and the all-powerful royal favourite Buckingham was the man who had killed him. Long dismissed by historians as an implausible falsehood, the allegation that James VI and I had been murdered would haunt English politics for three decades. It did so, in great part, because of an astonishingly successful piece of political writing. In the spring of 1626, George Eglisham, a Scots Catholic poet, physician and polemicist, published The Forerunner of Revenge Against the Duke of Buckingham, a pamphlet accusing Buckingham of murdering several leading courtiers, as well as the king. Copies of The Forerunner arrived in London just before the House of Commons, bent on impeaching the unpopular Buckingham, opened hearings into James’s death. The Commons’ decision to charge Buckingham for his “transcendent presumption” in meddling with James’s treatment infuriated Charles I, who would soon dissolve the parliamentary session in frustration. As contemporaries began to pore anxiously over copies of Eglisham’s tract, the allegation that Buckingham had murdered James entered the turbid stream of rumour, libel and controversy that engulfed the favourite in the turbulent last two years of his life. When John Felton assassinated Buckingham in the summer of 1628, some thought it a fitting “execution” of a notorious murderer, while others reported that Felton himself had cited Eglisham’s pamphlet as one of his motivations for killing the duke. The mystery of James I’s murder continued to draw attention in the 1630s, but it was during the revolutionary crisis of the 1640s that it left its deepest marks. During the opening weeks of the Civil War, multiple new editions of The Forerunner of Revenge poured from London’s presses as hardliners worked to stiffen parliamentarian resolve for the military struggle against Charles I and his ‘evil’ advisers. Throughout the war, parliamentarian writers reused the story of James’s murder for their own advantage, but few could have predicted the stunning role that it would play at the very crisis of the English revolution. Forced to justify its vote to end negotiations with the king early in 1648, parliament published a scathing declaration detailing Charles I’s legacy of misrule. Heading the list of charges against the king was the claim that Charles had dissolved parliament in 1626 to protect his father’s murderer. The implication was clear: Charles had perverted the course of justice to cover up his own guilt. Read more | Killers of the king: the men who dared to execute Charles I Royalist pamphleteers reacted with horror to the implicit charge of parricide, an allegation that they feared would destroy the monarchy. But their deconstruction of the story’s murky origins had only limited effect. That Charles I had murdered his father became a shibboleth of the radical cause. Early in 1649, the regicides almost certainly considered incorporating the accusation into their formal charges against the king, and, if Charles had offered a plea at his trial, the prosecutor John Cook would have bolstered his depiction of the king’s tyrannical misrule with allusions to James’s murder. As the English republic struggled to shore up its legitimacy in the wake of Charles’s execution, its newswriters returned repeatedly to the secret history of James’s death: God had blasted the Stuart dynasty, they argued, and James’s untimely demise was both a sign and a cause of God’s righteous anger. Charles I had died, in part, for the original sin of his reign – the murder of James I. But how did this story begin, and why would anyone in 1625 have taken it seriously? James fell ill early in March 1625. He was in his late fifties and had been in poor health for some time, but his physicians diagnosed him with an intermittent fever – a tertian ague – which, in its ‘pure’ form, was thought to pose little danger. Nonetheless, the king’s illness added to the anxious mood at court. A serious epidemic sickness (contemporaries dubbed it the ‘purple fever’; medical historians think it may have been typhus) had been cutting a swathe through the English and Scottish aristocracy for months. More alarming still were the bitter disputes over foreign policy that had fractured the Jacobean court. Since late in 1623, James’s favourite, Buckingham, had been working in tandem with Prince Charles to reverse the king’s foreign policy. They had abandoned James’s proposed marriage treaties with Spain and, in alliance with parliament, had pushed the king towards open military conflict with England’s old enemy. But James had begun to push back. Early in 1625, he had prevented an English expeditionary force from helping the Dutch lift the Spanish siege of Breda. James had also indicated his continued willingness to deal with Spain by granting the veteran Spanish ambassador Gondomar a licence to return to Whitehall. When the king fell ill, the pro-Spanish faction at court, marginalised by Buckingham and Charles over the previous year, seemed poised to regain influence. But if James were to die, all-out war with Spain seemed inevitable. Meanwhile, in the king’s sickroom, the royal physicians tried to treat their patient according to the protocols they had designed for managing royal illnesses. It was vital that every physician agree to any treatment in advance, so that no individual could be blamed if anything went wrong, and it was critical that the sickroom be kept free from outside interference. But James was a difficult patient. He “scoffed at medicine” and its practitioners and found the orthodox therapeutic regime of repeated purgation (whether through bleeding, laxatives or emetics) repugnant. The royal physicians knew they would have to struggle to persuade their patient to submit to the standard treatments for tertian agues, and they were willing to call on his courtiers to cajole the sceptical king. The doctors subsequently lamented that it had taken too long to persuade the king to submit to treatment, arguing that the delay had allowed the distemper to mutate into a fever too strong for the king to overcome. But this post-mortem report contained one crucial omission. While James had been arguing with his doctors, he had been seeking medical advice elsewhere. James I’s relationship with the Duke of Buckingham remains difficult to define. Some contemporaries feared that the two men were lovers. Yet, while the pair clearly shared an intimate friendship, the evidence for a sexual dimension in their personal letters is enigmatic. Yet the letters do make clear the importance to their friendship of the shared experience of illness. James and Buckingham nursed each other through bouts of ill health, and exchanged reports about unorthodox remedies. When Buckingham’s conversion to the anti-Spanish cause nearly broke their friendship in 1624, it was the duke’s subsequent illness that provided the occasion for its renewal. Read more | James VI and I and his favourites: what were their relationships like? As the tertian ague’s distinctive chills began to trouble the king early in March 1625, it was thus entirely predictable that he would turn to Buckingham for comfort and counsel. And he knew that Buckingham might have practical advice, for the duke himself had been treated for a tertian ague during his illness the previous year. No doubt James remembered that Buckingham had consulted then with John Remington, an obscure Essex doctor who had developed an effective treatment for the ague prevalent in his home county. Buckingham’s financial accounts for March 1625 record two payments to Remington for consultations with the king during his final illness, and James seems to have been keen to try the Essex remedies – a plaster, comprised mostly of the compound panacea known as ‘London treacle’, and a posset comprised of various herbs designed to counteract the ague’s causes and symptoms. Early in the course of James’s illness, Buckingham gave Remington’s plaster to the king, without consulting the royal physicians. When the doctors discovered what had been done, they ordered the plaster removed, but, since the king’s condition remained stable, no one thought much of the intervention. But when the Essex medicines were reapplied nine days later, apparently at the king’s request, all hell broke loose. Thomas Erskine, Earl of Kellie, the head of the royal bedchamber, wrote to his cousin: “There is something fallen out here much disliked, and I for myself think much mistaken.” The Duke of Buckingham, “wishing much the king’s health”, had given James a plaster “applied to the king’s breast” and a “drink or syrup”, both “without the consent or knowledge of any of the doctors”. Worse still, James had become “extremely sick” after taking the potion, and his deterioration “has spread such… a discontent as you would wonder”. A royal doctor, John Craig, and a bedchamber servant, had been punished for confronting the duke over his actions. Buckingham was “incensed”, Kellie wrote, and “I would be so myself, considering what the world says”. Kellie couldn’t bring himself to spell out “what the world says”. But it is clear that some at court were accusing Buckingham not simply of a reckless disregard for the physicians’ rules but of a deliberate poisoning. James had seemed to be improving; after Buckingham’s second intervention, he deteriorated beyond recovery. In the tense atmosphere at court, such poisoning allegations seemed entirely credible. Shortly after James fell ill, his cousin, James, Marquess of Hamilton succumbed to what looked at first to be another case of purple fever. But the post-mortem symptoms on Hamilton’s corpse, including grotesque swelling and discolouration, unnerved his servants and family. Although the physicians attributed the symptoms to natural causes, many thought they could only be signs of poisoning. The marquess’s friends were already digesting rumours that he had converted to Rome on his deathbed, and some now suspected that a Catholic poisoning plot had ended his life. Well aware that his enemies at court might use the accusations about his medical dabbling to destroy him, Buckingham pressed the king’s physicians to sign a statement vouching for the safety of Remington’s remedies. The physicians, however, were reluctant to sign – even good remedies could have bad effects if administered at the wrong time, they argued, and they could not be certain that the medicines Buckingham and his servants had given James contained only the ingredients Remington had prescribed. As James lay dying, whispers of poisoning began to leak out. Some versions of the story pinned the blame on Buckingham’s Catholic mother; others implicated both mother and son. The Venetian ambassador in London heard that a bedchamber servant had “announced that the duke and his mother in applying some medicaments had taken not the medicine but the poison”, and the ambassador soon came to believe that “parliament will want to enquire into the rumours about poisonous applications”. Such stories had purchase not only at court but also beyond, especially among men like George Eglisham who – as a Hispanophile, crypto-Catholic and Scot – had plenty to lose through James’s death and Buckingham’s ascendancy. Eglisham spent the last weeks of the king’s life in hiding, yet he had once been a man very much on the rise. In 1612, he had rushed to Holland to contribute two polemical tracts to James’s campaign to unseat the Arminian theologian Conrad Vorstius from his chair at the University of Leiden. As a reward, James had granted Eglisham the honorary title of royal physician and a patent to establish a London company for the manufacture of gold leaf. But by late 1624, his fortunes were in ruins. The goldbeaters’ patent had been revoked after parliament’s 1621 attack on monopolies, and he had then fallen victim to the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic backlash of 1624. Eglisham now risked everything on a final, reckless gamble. For years, he had served as personal physician to his old friend the Marquess of Hamilton, and as Hamilton lay dying, Eglisham had smuggled in a Jesuit priest to reconcile the king’s cousin to Rome. The scandal of Hamilton’s alleged conversion infuriated James, and so Eglisham went underground. Shortly after James’s death, he slipped out of England and made his way to Brussels. Eglisham arrived on the continent with a story to tell: Hamilton had been poisoned by Buckingham. As the Habsburg regimes in Brussels and Madrid prepared for what now looked like inevitable war with England, anything that might damage Buckingham could prove helpful to their cause. Perhaps relying on information picked up from Scottish contacts at court, perhaps using intelligence sent to Brussels by spies, Eglisham added an account of James’s death to his more detailed description of Hamilton’s. According to Eglisham, Buckingham was losing his hold over the king, who increasingly resented the duke’s interference in his foreign policy. James wanted to recall the old Hispanophile courtiers. But if the pro-Spanish faction were to regain the upper hand, Buckingham would face ruin. And so the duke took matters into his own hands. With his mother’s help, he poisoned the king while pretending to give him medicines. A white powder mixed with wine sent the king into “violent fluxes of the belly”, while a plaster applied to his chest caused him “great agony”, making him “grow faint [and] short breathed”. Read more | James VI and I: the king who hunted witches Eglisham noted how Buckingham had feigned grief at the king’s death, but no dissimulation could mask the telltale signs of the poisoned corpse. James’s “body and head swelled above measure, his hair with the skin of his head stuck to the pillow, his nails became loose upon his fingers and toes”. Having described similar symptoms in Hamilton’s corpse, Eglisham concluded that he needed “to say no more to understanding men”. Distributed throughout Europe as part of a wide-ranging Habsburg disinformation campaign, Eglisham’s little book wreaked havoc far beyond its author’s wildest dreams. The charges of a disaffected Catholic physician became, in the hands of radical Protestant revolutionaries, a warrant for regicide. Eglisham had demanded that Charles I punish the murderous duke, warning of the dire fate that awaited kings who neglected justice. By shaping the rumours of 1625 into a credible secret history, he had fashioned an endlessly malleable political legend that would ultimately help send Charles I to the scaffold. Alastair Bellany is associate professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Thomas Cogswell is professor of history at the University of California This article was first published in the December 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kate Morgan chronicles the legal history of murder, discussing the cases that shaped UK murder laws
Lawyer and writer Kate Morgan chronicles the legal history of murder, and explores the roles killers, victims, lawyers and judges have played in making UK murder law what it is today. She also discusses crimes that shaped the British legal system, from Richard Parker, the cannibalised cabin boy eaten by crewmates, to Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in the United Kingdom. Kate Morgan is the author of Murder: The Biography (HarperCollins, 2021). Buy it now at Waterstones: Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Waterstones Buy now on Amazon
In the late 13th century, a rumour swept England that the reviled King John hadn't been killed by dysentery – as the historical record suggests – but an assassin's poison. Why did that alternative version of the king's death gain so much traction? And is it founded on truth?
In October 1216 the king of England, travelling across country with what remained of his followers, stopped for a night’s rest at the abbey of Swineshead, deep in the Lincolnshire Fens. It had been hard going and he’d lost half of his baggage train in the treacherous fenland. The abbey was thrown into disarray by his arrival. Its residents scrambled to find accommodation and food for the king and his men, painfully aware that King John brought civil war to their doorstep. At the same time as the king demanded hospitality, Louis of France – attempting to seize John’s kingdom at the head of a determined force of rebel English barons – was laying siege to Dover Castle. The French prince had already received the submission of London and Winchester, and besieged the castles at Windsor and Lincoln. John had not faced him in battle, retreating north in the hope of regrouping his forces. The abbot would hardly have wanted to host John, even in better times. The king had a reputation for unpredictable cruelty and malicious spite. It was widely rumoured that he had killed his nephew Arthur with his own hands – certainly the young prince, a rival claimant for the English throne, had died while in John’s keeping. The king had a nasty habit of demanding hostages from his own nobles as a guarantee of their loyalty. In 1208 one noblewoman, Matilda de Briouze, had refused to hand over her eldest son for fear that he would meet the same fate as Arthur. Within two years the family had been destroyed. Matilda’s husband was outlawed and forced into exile, where he died. John arrested and imprisoned Matilda and her son, and starved them to death. Read more: Was King John really that bad? Yes! Sitting at dinner in Swineshead Abbey, John asked a wary monk how much a loaf of bread cost. No more than a halfpenny, he was told, and the king smiled humourlessly. “What good value,” he murmured. “But if I live, in half a year’s time this same loaf will cost as much as 20 shillings. I swear it.” The monk was aghast. John’s remark made no sense – or if it did, it meant famine and starvation, the ruin of his people. He stared at the king, and thought he would rather die than witness John’s threat come to pass. The monk went to his abbot and was confessed of his sins. Then he went into the abbey garden and found a toad – the only source of poison he could think of. He pricked the toad with a brooch pin, and gathered the white fluid that oozed out of its skin into a cup. Then he filled the cup with strong ale and took it to the king, offering him the old English toast: “wassail!” Ever suspicious, John told the monk to drink first, and he did. Then John drank. Bufotoxin, the poison produced by toads, can stop the heart or set it racing. It causes nausea, vomiting, seizures, pain and hallucinations – and death. There is no known antidote. The monk left the king and went directly to the abbey infirmary. In great pain, John demanded to know where he was and received the news that the monk had died. The king panicked and demanded that they bind up his swollen stomach. Hours later, he too was dead. So goes the story of King John’s untimely death, as told in the Brut Chronicle of English history, written towards the end of the 13th century. As the pages of the Brut tell us, the king was remembered as a hated figure, a tyrant, the man who had been made to seal Magna Carta and then tried to annul it, denying the English their ancient rights of justice and the law. But John’s sudden demise marked a turning point – a dramatic change in the course of the civil war between the rebel barons and the king’s supporters. Men who had despaired of John were willing to back the cause of his son Henry, who was nine years old. And when Prince Louis’ forces were defeated at the battle of Lincoln in 1217, Louis was paid to renounce his claim and return to France. The rebels pledged allegiance to Henry III, and were forgiven. Magna Carta was reissued in the new king’s name and it became iconic in English politics, repeatedly reissued by Henry III and later kings, enforced by rebellious barons. It was a potent symbol of the limitations of royal power, the refusal of the English people ever to submit to tyranny. The act of a hero Without John’s death, everything might have been different. By killing his king, the anonymous monk released England from the clutches of a tyrant, and opened the way to a new settlement, a permanent shift in the balance of power between the king and his people. It was the act of a hero: bravely undertaken for the greater good. But John wasn’t murdered. It’s true that he visited Swineshead Abbey on his last journey. But he was sick, with dysentery, and struggled on as far as Newark, where he died on the night of 18/19 October, after making a will and nominating a council to support the claims of his son Henry. One historian writing at the time said that John had made himself ill with his “pernicious gluttony”. Others, writing in the following decade, declared that John’s death was the inevitable judgment of God on his sins. But they all agreed on one thing: King John died of dysentery in Newark. And yet when the vivid story of John’s murder at the hands of the Swineshead monk appeared in the chronicles, perhaps 50 years later, it was suddenly everywhere – in histories written in Latin, French and English; in popular stories, poems and songs. One learned Latin historian in the 14th century said that, while John had died at Newark, “popular rumour” believed otherwise, and then he told the whole tale in detail. Even the historian who knew it to be false couldn’t resist it – and many others simply presented it as fact. A sumptuously illustrated manuscript created towards the end of the 13th century, now in the British Library, depicts the kings of England from Edward the Confessor to Edward I. In its picture of John, the king stares suspiciously at the poisoned cup proffered by a nervous monk. John’s murder had become the defining event of his reign: the just punishment of a tyrant, and an act of national salvation, carried out by a patriotic subject. Righteous rebels? The success of this story is important, and revealing. That’s because it tells us just as much about the English people’s evolving attitudes towards their kings, as it does about the death of John. Kings were anointed with holy oil at their coronation. They were God’s representatives on Earth, placed in supreme authority to rule over their subjects. When John faced his baronial opponents he was supported by the pope, who excommunicated the rebels for resisting their rightful king. But the rebels did not believe that they were doing wrong. They had renounced their homage to John in response to his abuses – his arbitrary exactions and punishments, his manipulation of the laws to destroy those who opposed him, his refusal to accept the counsel and advice of his greatest magnates. They had offered their allegiance to Louis, an alternative claimant – a man of royal blood, married to a granddaughter of Henry II – because of their belief in the essential nature of kingship. The rebels could not envisage England without a king. But they demanded that their king uphold law and justice. The events of John’s reign were a beginning, the start of real resistance to abuses of kingship. There had been wars before, but they had always been openly self-interested, a matter of rival claimants’ attempts to seize power for themselves. Now, for the first time, the English went to war over an idea of what English government and kingship should be. As the 13th century wore on, this idea of kingship – authority by consent of the people, subject to the laws enshrined in Magna Carta – became embedded in English politics. Political awareness spread far beyond the royal court and the greatest nobility: people in every town, village and parish church heard Magna Carta proclaimed, and they expected the king to uphold it. Listen | Nicholas Vincent discusses the life and reign of the infamous 13th-century monarch Guttering flames In 1253 Henry III had been repeatedly denied grants of taxation by parliament, and he was forced to reassert his support of the charter. He and all the great men of the realm pronounced an oath that placed a sentence of excommunication on anyone who broke the terms of Magna Carta. Standing in a circle holding lit candles, they threw them to the ground, so that the flames guttered out and smoke rose from the floor, while bells were rung. “So let any who break this oath be extinguished and stink in hell,” they intoned. The king made his own promise: “So help me God, I will faithfully keep all these things inviolate, as I am a man, as I am a Christian, as I am a knight, and as I am a crowned and anointed king.” This pronouncement was read out in all the parish churches in England, so that everyone in the land could hear it. Yet no matter how earnest Henry’s promises and pronouncements, they weren’t enough to placate his persistently rebellious barons. And when opposition to his rule finally coalesced into the Barons’ Wars of the 1260s, ordinary people – far more politically active than they were at the beginning of the century – joined the cause. As the two sides squared up in an increasingly bitter conflict, the barons’ leader, Simon de Montfort, was heralded as a saviour of the English people. And when the barons defeated the king’s forces at the battle of Lewes in 1264, a long poem celebrated their victory, describing how they had “fought for England” against Henry’s tyranny and injustice. Martyrdom of a rebel But the rebels’ triumph was short-lived. The following year, at the battle of Evesham, the royalists exacted revenge, slaughtering Simon de Montfort and many of his supporters on the field. Such was the enmity between the combatants that Montfort’s body was mutilated and torn apart. The king’s forces then pursued and killed as many rebels as they could. One witness wrote of the slaughter of a group who had sought sanctuary in a church, remarking that the floor was so deep in blood it flowed down into the crypt. The horrors of 1265 lodged themselves in popular memory for a very long time. As late as the following century, poems and songs lamenting the loss of Simon de Montfort were copied into manuscripts. This had not just been a struggle between powerful noblemen. Village preachers had taken up the cause and farmers and tradesmen had joined in battle alongside their lords. A few days after Evesham, villagers of Peatling Magna, a small parish in Leicestershire, attacked the royalist baggage train, accusing the party of “treason and other heinous offences because they were against the welfare of the community of the realm and against the barons”. De Montfort was hailed as a martyr, a man who had died in a holy cause, fighting for the English people. His death was a shocking break with custom. Not since the battle of Hastings in 1066 had any great English nobleman been killed on the field of battle. Now, powerful men were putting themselves in mortal danger, dying for “the whole community of the realm”. It was the most potent of ideas, and it changed English history. So English politics looked very different by the time the story of John’s murder appeared in the chronicles, 60 or 70 years after his death. No longer the preserve of a tiny minority of the nobility, the institution of parliament was growing in power and reach, while public awareness of matters of governance, law and justice had penetrated to every town and village in the country, to every parish church, smithy, pub and market square. The tale of John’s poisoning must have come from those places, from ordinary people, in conversations long lost to us. It began as a rumour, was elaborated and circulated. It gained in details and in drama – and then, finally, it reached into the written record. It was a direct contradiction of known history, but was a tale too compelling to ignore, too convincing to dismiss. When Edward II was crowned in 1308, he was made to swear a new oath to his people: “To maintain and preserve the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen.” Within two months, enraged with Edward’s promotion of his favourite, Piers Gaveston, the Earl of Lincoln led the barons of the realm in a statement of their position: “Honour and oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person.” If the king should fail to honour the dignity of the crown, if he appears “not to be guided by reason”, then their duty is to the crown, not to the king. Two years later, the barons added that “unless the king granted their requests they would not have him for king”, for “with the breaker of faith, faith may be broken”. In 1327 Edward II was deposed by parliament, with the consent of “all the people”. The medal struck to mark his young son Edward III’s coronation bore a new legend: Populi dat iura voluntas: ‘The will of the people makes the law.’ The people of England had come to believe they had the right to judge their king – just as they had created, and believed, the story that one anonymous monk had judged and executed a king more than a century before. Laura Ashe specialises in the literature, history and culture of medieval England at the University of Oxford. Her books include Richard II: A Brittle Glory (Allen Lane, 2016) This article was first published in the July 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Clifford’s Tower massacre & medieval anti-Semitism
Dean Irwin explains the story of the 1190 anti-Semitic massacre at Clifford’s Tower in York, and how it fits into the wider story of England’s medieval Jewish population
In March 1190, all the Jewish residents of York lost their lives in an anti-Semitic massacre at Clifford’s Tower. Dean Irwin explains what happened, and how it fits into the wider story of England’s medieval Jewish population. Read more: The persecution of Jews in medieval England
Peter Stothard reveals how Julius Caesar’s assassination triggered a brutal power struggle, one that would transform ancient Rome
Author and journalist Sir Peter Stothard discusses his latest book, The Last Assassin, which chronicles the hunt for Julius Caesar’s murderers, a momentous episode in ancient Rome’s story that triggered a brutal civil war and the dawn of the imperial age.