by Peter Moore
For Reverend George Parker, Midsummer Day was like any other. Tuesdays brought no official business and he was free to pass the time as he wished, in his study or gardens, with his wife and daughter or friends. There was just one job to distract him. He kept a little herd of four dairy cows which were led up to graze in the north of the parish, in his glebe meadows, each morning by his servant. Every afternoon Parker would fetch them home himself, an easy task entailing little more than a gentle stroll along Church Lane and then perhaps a minute more along an overgrown byway, before he could gather them together and drive them home for milking. Parker was a man of particular custom, and he set off for his glebe at five each afternoon. Usually he took his seven-year-old daughter, Mary, with him, but on 24 June 1806 he left his rectory alone.
By now the narrow lanes that cascaded down through Oddingley from the north, winding from Hadzor or Smite Hill towards Tibberton and Crowle, were dotted with travellers, tradesmen and farmers returning from Bromsgrove Fair. In the village James Tustin saw Parker as he passed Pound Farm. Hardly a minute later Susan Surman, who was bringing down Barnett’s cattle, met him further along the lane. Reverend Parker and Surman paused to bid each other good afternoon. It was just a brief exchange, but it was one that the dairymaid would for ever recall with a chill of terror. Surman entered Barnett’s Wash Pool Meadows, and Parker turned right into his glebe.
At about five or six minutes past five o’clock, two butchers from Worcester, Thomas Giles and John Lench, were walking through Oddingley on their way north to Hadzor. They had passed Oddingley crossroads and were about ‘two stones throws’ north of Barnett’s Pound Farm when they heard the piercing report of a shotgun from behind a hedge. The butchers stopped and listened. The echo of gunfire had passed in a second. All that remained was the low chatter of birdsong. Lench told Giles that he had seen a hare rush across the lane. Someone must be shooting game.
A split second later came a ‘wry, dismal’ shout of ‘Murder! Murder! Murder!’ It was a desperate cry, even heard by James Tustin a quarter of a mile away at Pound Farm. The butchers wheeled around. The shouting had come from a meadow, close by but shielded from view behind a tall, thick hedgerow. Determined to investigate further Lench and Giles ran up the lane ‘as hard as they could’.
The butchers soon reached a gate which opened out into Barnett’s Middle Wash Pool Field, and they raced across to the adjacent hedgerow, frantically trying to glimpse through the woven briars, holly and hawthorn, but it was impossible ‘owing to the thick of it’. Temporarily defeated but with increasing resolve, they then ran up the meadow desperately searching for a stile or a gate.
At the top of Middle Wash Pool Field the hedge dipped down enough for Giles, the taller of the two, to peer over. He saw a short man running down the field. His body was bent, his arms hung low and limp by his side, a spectacle Giles later described as a ‘slooping posture’. The man was wrapped in a blue greatcoat, dotted with white buttons. He was wearing an old-fashioned round hat.
Giles dropped to his knees, crawling and scrambling through the undergrowth, as Lench arrived behind him. Spotting the man with the ‘slooping’ gait, Lench cried out across the field, ‘You villain! What have you been doing?’
The man in the blue coat was ‘all of a tremble’. He paused for a second, gazing across the meadow at Lench. His body was pulled into a crooked defensive posture. Lench noticed that he looked ‘very pale’.
‘Me? Nothing at all,’ the man called back.
By now Giles had plunged beneath the hedge and entered the field. He rushed straight for the man, who was fumbling with a bag which, as the butcher approached, he threw into the hedgerow. The man turned round just in time to see Giles dashing towards him, and narrowly avoided his swinging arm.
As Giles recovered his footing, his target spun about and raced away towards a gate. It was only then that the butcher had a chance to survey the scene before him. Giles hurried down the middle of the meadow, where he found ‘a man in a state of burning, both his clothes and his flesh’. From the long gown, it was clear that the victim was a clergyman. He had been shot from close range, and hit in the midriff. The wadding from the shot had burrowed into his skin and was now beginning to smoke. A minute later and the body would be alight in the tall summer clover.
Other, terrible wounds had been inflicted to the victim’s head. On the right side it was horribly clubbed inwards, with large blunt gashes to his forehead and above his right eye from which blood still flowed. As Giles stared down at the body, frozen in horror, he saw the clergyman’s leg stir and right fist clench ‘as if he was in the act of dying’. He had clearly been the victim of a ferocious attack. Not many yards away, partially obscured by foliage at the foot of the hedgerow, were a thin bag and the broken components of a shotgun.
Only then did Lench join Giles beside the corpse. ‘Stop looking at the man that is dead, but run after the one that is living and get him if we can!’ he implored. His words had an instant rousing effect on Giles, who lifted himself up and ran off towards the gate in pursuit. John Lench, suddenly alone with the smouldering body at his feet, turned back towards Pound Farm, where he hoped to find help. But before he reached the fold-yard he met Tustin in the lane. Minutes before, Tustin had heard shouts from the glebe meadow, but had thought it was just the shrieks of playing children. Now he saw Lench rushing towards him. ‘There’s a man shot in the glebe fields! Come along!’ the butcher cried.
Several fields to the west of the glebe meadow, Thomas Giles had quickly caught up with the man in the long blue coat. Giles was athletic, could run swiftly and, would later declare, ‘was almost level with him within the space of about three grounds’. Once within earshot, he called out for him to surrender.
It was a hazardous situation. Giles was fitter and faster than the man he chased, but to get too close was dangerous. The man had just committed a violent crime and had been disturbed at the scene by more than one person who would be able to identify him. His capture would almost certainly result in a swift trial and subsequent execution. He must have known that he had little left to lose.
Mindful of his own safety above all else, the butcher chose to trail the murderer rather than striking a blow at him. For almost a mile he tracked his target as they snaked westwards, always keeping a hedgerow between them for his protection. At length the man stopped, stooped down beneath the hawthorn and looked the butcher full in the face. He was a short man, Giles recalled, with a thick prominent jaw and a large bald forehead. He was deathly pale.
The murderer thrust his hand into his pocket and whispered to Giles that if he did not stop following him, he would ‘blow his brains out’.
This was too much for Giles, who watched as the murderer gathered up the skirts of his greatcoat and went off along two fields ‘very gently’ in the direction of Hindlip, a nearby village.
Rather than follow at a distance, Giles turned back and retraced his steps towards Oddingley. There, about a mile away, all thoughts of the clover harvest had now dissipated. The early-evening sun shone over a scene of growing confusion and outrage in Reverend Parker’s glebe meadow. His body lay where it had fallen, his midriff smeared with drying blood, horribly burnt and blackened. Like the hares in the meadows or the house martins in the lanes, his murderer had appeared only for a few moments. And before the last breath had left Reverend Parker’s body, he was gone.
CHAPTER 1
Rev. Mr Parker of Oddingley
Nine months earlier, September 1805
THE PARISH OF Oddingley lay low and inconspicuous, sprawled over a shallow undulating valley in the mid-Worcestershire countryside. It was a picturesque but isolated place, a blend of open fields, twisting lanes, stray oak trees and fruit orchards, which all told measured about a thousand acres. The seven farms at the village’s backbone were distinct and self-contained. Their pretty half-timber or red-brick farmhouses stood behind trimmed hedges and wooden gates and were surrounded on all sides by barns, workshops, st
ables, ricks, muddy pools, old marl pits and, in the fields beyond, the huddled roofs of labourers’ cottages. In the summer months the meadows and open pastures rang with the rattle of traps, the moans of livestock being driven from fold-yard to market and the shouts of labourers at harvest. But now, with autumn approaching, the pace of life slackened as the leaves began to yellow in Trench Wood and the cold night drew steadily in.
Oddingley lay roughly in the centre of Worcestershire, a short distance north of the fertile market gardens of the Vale of Evesham. Just three miles away was Droitwich Spa, where the local market was held each Friday and villagers met to drink and socialise. Further to the south-west, Worcester perched splendidly on the banks of the River Severn, the city’s cobbled streets laced with the smouldering chimneys of porcelain factories and the shop windows of its ‘forty or fifty master glovers’,1 who brought the city almost as much fame as the quality of its salmon and lamprey – a rusty-coloured eel and a particular local delicacy – that were fished from the moody waters of the river.
Worcestershire attracted businessmen and travellers from all parts of Britain. On his tour of the kingdom the poet Robert Southey remarked rosily that Worcester was ‘a fine and flourishing city, in the midst of a delightful county’. His sentiments were echoed by Mr W. Pitt, a surveyor from Birmingham, who was commissioned by the Board of Agriculture in the early 1800s to complete a review of the area with ‘observations on the means of improvement’. The land to the north of Worcester, Pitt observed, was ‘most beautiful … one combination of noble hills,2 forming, as it were, the frame of a delightful picture … diversified with all the beauties of hill and dale, wood and water’.
Oddingley was buried deep in this rural landscape. It was a comely place of fairs, pear cider, religious festivals and the hunt, and it provided a home for some 112 inhabitants including a full cast of likely rural characters: dairymaids, carters, shepherds, stable boys, blacksmiths, farriers, threshers, reapers and drovers. Among these labourers literacy levels were low and traditions strongly kept. Glimmers of the village’s cultural past were captured in the names of the farmers’ fields: Calves Close, the Old Rickyard, Flax’s Close and Nuthill Sling. At work they wore the familiar uniform of flowing smock frocks, beaten corduroy breeches, heavy pairs of leather working boots and handkerchiefs tied at the neck. In winter this costume was supplemented by the greatcoat, often patched and torn or hackneyed with age. The labourers scraped their livings where they could: drawn like moths about a light from one temporary contract to another, occasionally straying out of the parish for two or three weeks at a time on the promise of something better.
By the end of September the pace and industry of the summer months was replaced in Oddingley by a quieter period in the farming calendar. There was also cause for relief. Across the county crops had fared far better in 1805 than in the preceding year. The bad harvest of 1804 had inflated the price of wheat in3 the Worcester markets by 47 per cent to 89s. 9d. a quarter, kindling memories of famine and unrest. But throughout the summer of 1805 the weather had held, and by the middle of September temperatures were still unusually high – the Morning Chronicle 4 in London attributing the plague of wasps in the city parks to the warmth of the season.
There was no such irritation 130 miles away in Worcester, where the county newspapers continued to fill their columns with news of council meetings, notices of farm sales, adverts for patent medicines and reports of the continuing conflict with France. Of all issues, the war remained the driving subject. For the past two years the Worcester Herald 5 had speculated about the possibility of Napoleon mounting a successful crossing of the English Channel and had kept a careful diary charting the movements of the Worcester Volunteers – a jumbled assembly of men armed with little more than muskets, knives and pitchforks – who were to form a home guard in the event of a successful attack. Many believed the long-threatened invasion was still imminent and on 17 August the paper reported that three days’ gunfire had been heard thundering along the French coast.
This news filtered out from Worcester to the surrounding countryside, where it was absorbed in the farming communities. Of these, Oddingley was a typical parish, only differing from other villages in that it did not have a resident squire. The great local landowner, Lord Thomas Foley, resided at his lavish country seat eleven miles away at Witley Court, meaning there was a gap at the top of the parish hierarchy. Without the customary figurehead, Oddingley parish was instead led by an uneasy amalgam of its leading men, which included the seven village farmers – six of whom leased their properties from Foley – and the clergyman, Reverend George Parker.
As with most of his contemporaries, no physical description of Parker survives. The only clue to his appearance comes from a single woodcut,6 etched many years later. It depicts Parker in the seconds before his death, a young man wearing a broad hat which is perched loosely back on the crown of his head. The clergyman’s face appears strong and determined but also at the same count sunken and starved of expression. It is likely that the author did not know his subject, or that the detail of the piece was bent to serve the drama and required narrative of the moment. A more vivid image was left by Thomas Alsop, a local farmhand, who recalled Parker strolling languidly along the lanes, smoking his pipe and ‘tossing up a penny piece’.7
This dramatic but untrustworthy depiction of Reverend Parker’s murder is the only surviving image of Oddingley’s clergyman
It was now more than 12 years since, on Friday 3 May 1793, he had arrived in Worcestershire to accept Lord Foley’s offer of the living of Oddingley parish and to claim its accompanying salary of £135 per annum and assorted benefits. These included the three-storey rectory on Church Lane, its accompanying gardens and the right to keep animals and cultivate the glebe – upwards of ten acres of meadow to the north of the village centre.
George Parker had been 30 years old when he first set foot in Oddingley. He was able, principled and worldly, still a bachelor and quite possibly an instant attraction for the eligible local ladies. There must have been every hope that the appointment, which constituted his second ecclesiastical post, would be successful and enduring. Yet it was a hope that soon faded. By the autumn of 1805 Parker was deeply unpopular with many in the parish. There had been sparks of violence and a succession of court cases with John Barnett of Pound Farm. Thomas Clewes from Netherwood had been heard damning his name in the Droitwich taverns, and as details of the poisonous quarrel seeped out into nearby parishes, it was said that opposition to Parker was led by Captain Evans of Church Farm. It was clear to all across the parish that the feud cut deep.8
George Parker was not a native of Worcestershire. He was born to Thomas and Jane Parker at a farm in Johnby in the Lake District, hundreds of miles to the north of Oddingley. Thomas Parker is recorded as being ‘a respectable yeoman, of good connections’ and like many in the locality probably filled his fields with flocks of Herdwick and Rough Fell sheep, which were traded at the market in Penrith, seven miles away. George Parker was baptised at Greystoke Church on 26 June 1762 in the grassy shadows of the Lakeland Fells.
In the 1760s Thomas Parker and his young family were comfortably set in life. Whereas almost all of his peers leased their slices of the Cumberland hills from members of the old landed gentry, Parker held a considerable estate in his own name, something that was a clear source of independence and pride. A quirk of Parker’s acreage was that a portion lay detached from the rest, intermixed with fields belonging to the Duke of Norfolk and controlled by his son, the young Earl of Surrey, who lived just two miles from Johnby at Greystoke Castle. At some point around the year 1770 Thomas Parker had approached Surrey, proposing to reorganise these boundaries so that they could manage their estates more effectively. It proved an astute move. The result of the ensuing arrangement pleased Parker and Surrey so much that a friendship was formed. To further express his gratitude Surrey promised Thomas Parker that he would provide an education for his son George.
It was an unexpected twist that carried George Parker’s life on a new and exciting course. Supported by Surrey, he enrolled in the endowed grammar school at Blencow, just a mile and a half from his family home, where he studied history and the classics alongside the sons of gentlemen. Thereafter, George Parker’s bond with Surrey strengthened. The earl was an eccentric politicking Whig famed in high society for his disregard for social and hygienic niceties and for the ‘habitual slovenliness of his dress’. Among commoners, though, he was highly popular, a charismatic figure known for his ‘conviviality’ of spirit, his reformist tendencies and for being something of a provocateur. During the general election of 1774 he supported several local freemen who managed to dislodge the Carlisle parliamentary constituency from the powerful and fabulously wealthy Tory-leaning Lowther family. At the elections of 1780 and 1784 he was himself elected to Parliament, where he instantly joined Charles Fox in fierce opposition to the American war.
How precisely George Parker served the Howard family during these years is unclear, though one theory suggests he was engaged as Surrey’s election agent. This fact was later questioned, but it still appears the most plausible explanation. By nature George Parker was ambitious, persuasive and hard-working, traits which displayed themselves in subsequent years and would have served him well while scrambling through the thickets of an eighteenth-century general election campaign. Agents were sent out into the boroughs, charged with cajoling, harrying and pestering the freemen for votes, reminding them of their allegiances and distributing financial incentives when necessary. A trusted knot of energetic lobbyists would have been indispensable for Surrey, who did not just have to trouble himself with his own election campaigns in Carlisle, but also had to orchestrate others intended to plant favoured Whigs in Westminster from constituencies scattered about the country in places like Arundel, Leominster and Hereford. That the young Parker was duly dispatched to such distant outposts of the Howards’ vast estates would explain his taste for travel, something that may well have developed in these formative years.