Damn His Blood

by Peter Moore

  Still the focus remained fixed on Richard Heming and his whereabouts. A popular theory maintained that he had escaped to a faraway corner of Britain, where he had blended into a new community under a different name. Various sightings supporting this argument were fed back to Pyndar, including a persuasive account from a servant girl who had grown up in Droitwich and claimed to have seen Heming begging in Portsmouth. Her story was relayed back to Pyndar by the son of a Worcester magistrate, but the speed of communication was such that no action was taken for a fortnight. In the end nothing came of the report, which was filed away in Hadzor amid the growing piles of notes.

  A more widely accepted explanation was that Heming had escaped overseas. For nearly a decade after his disappearance the Napoleonic Wars rumbled on, drawing men from British shores to battles on the continent. Around 300,000 of these were never to return, lost in campaigns and conflicts that stretched across Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Netherlands, and it was imagined that Heming was among them. Another suggestion was that he had somehow slipped past Richard Ward’s careful watch in Bristol in the days following the attack, and managed to steal himself away in a boat bound for the New World. A letter was circulated in Droitwich to this effect some years after 1806, ‘stating that he had escaped to America, and giving a circumstantial account of the way in which he got out of the country’. This letter was supported by the evidence of man named Creswell, a Droitwich resident, who told his friends he had seen Heming while travelling there. Although it appeared extraordinary to have chanced upon a figure as elusive as Heming in a continent as vast as North America, Creswell’s account was accepted by many.

  Mary Chance’s claim that Heming had returned to Oddingley was generally not credited. Her sighting had been an isolated one, and the prospect of him dashing about the fields and lanes on Midsummer night while all eyes were watching for him seemed unlikely. Yet there were those who still suspected that Heming had met the Captain, Barnett or Clewes after his disappearance. Elizabeth Heming in particular was not placated by letters from America or by the farmers’ dismissals and denials. In The Bishop’s Daughter, a novel by the Reverend Erskine Neale, published decades later in 1842, Elizabeth Heming is portrayed. Neale had visited Oddingley after the murders. His plot drew heavily on the case and was strikingly accurate.

  She was assured by the Oddingley farmers4 that Heming was gone to America; and from time to time, names of persons were given who had seen him there; and more than once extracts of letters, said to be written by him, were distributed in the neighbourhood. To none she gave credence. Her remark was, ‘I know better. He would never abandon his wife, and his children, and his home, without a word. No; he is near me! I am sure of it; and it must be the business of my life to discover where. I know my mind is not so clear as it was; and that my troubles have nearly got the better of me; but still in my dreams he would not stand by me so often and warn me, if there was not an effort to be made and a secret to be discovered.

  Elizabeth believed that Richard had been lured back to Church Farm by Captain Evans and John Barnett on Midsummer Day. What happened to him after this was unclear but she had heard about the clover rick that George Banks had built at Church Farm on 25 June, and she felt sure that something – perhaps Heming’s body – was hidden inside. This theory drew on other evidence that placed him at Church Farm in the hours and days after the murder. William Chellingworth was one farmhand who said he had seen Heming slip out of the farmhouse as Baker searched it, boasting to a local man that ‘he could hang all the head men in Oddingley’.5 William Rogers of Dodderhill, a neighbouring parish, quietly told friends that his son-in-law had seen Heming at Evans’ on the night of the murder. None of these reports had ever been passed to Pyndar.

  The clover rick stood at the heart of the mystery. For Elizabeth it was the key to discovering what had become of Heming. The years following his disappearance had been cruel. The suspicions against him had left her ostracised in the area, and in June 1807 Elizabeth and her three daughters had been issued with a removal order by their parish in Droitwich. Within a few years all three children were dead. These misfortunes preceded her marriage, to Edward Newbury, a labouring man, but shortly afterwards he died too. Battered by a sad series of circumstances, none of which were of her own making, Elizabeth Newbury – as she had now become – retained her conviction that the Oddingley farmers were hiding something about Heming’s disappearance.

  With little left to lose, in the spring of 1816 she finally testified against them. On 29 March she stood before a panel of seven magistrates in Droitwich and deposed that she believed that Richard’s remains had been concealed in the clover rick. A warrant was granted for its search the following morning, and, almost a decade to the day after Elizabeth Fowler had discovered the shotgun under the staddles, a team of parish constables prepared to descend on Church Farm.

  Elizabeth’s theory was a plausible one. Why had a rick been built so hastily after the murder? Why had Banks not mentioned anything about it to William Chance before? Rick construction was an art and required careful planning. But this one had seemingly been built on a whim in the earliest hours of the morning before the clover harvest had even been completed. Since then it had stood for ten years and had been re-thatched twice by William Barnett.

  A team of constables arrived at Church Farm the next morning to find that the clover rick was gone. Having stood undisturbed for a decade, the night before the warrant was due to be executed it had been dismantled and removed. The constables executed their orders as best they could, digging up the area around where the structure had been, but found nothing. The tension and anticipation created by Newbury’s testimony and the issuing of the warrant had been replaced, once again, by frustration.

  The vanishing clover rick was another riddle in a parish that seemed filled with secrets. Just as those who knew about Heming’s escape kept silent in 1806, those who knew the truth about the rick did the same a decade later. Perhaps they were too scared to report what they knew; perhaps they were too loyal, too proud or too sensible to split. For all that John Rowe had told Pyndar about the plot to kill the parson, there were many others who must have known far more. But what these villagers did know was stowed away: like the harvest tools in deepest winter, fastened in their sheds, hidden out of sight. For those who lived nearby and others who occasionally visited, Oddingley was becoming known as an enigma and an ill-omened place. It was as if a hint of its shadowy, alluring character could be derived from its very name, with ‘oddity’ variously defined in the dictionary as ‘a strange or peculiar person or thing / a strange attitude or habit / an eccentricity that is not explained’.

  Mary Sherwood was drawn to Oddingley during these years. She was the sister of Reverend Butt,2 Parker’s replacement, spent lengthy periods in the parish and later recorded a sadly vivid portrait of it full of pathos and lamentations. Oddingley was, she wrote, an unhappy place. Villagers crowded about their chimney corners in winter to discuss the murder again and again, turning the story over and over in their conversations, like a precious object – first to be examined and then understood. She visited Parker’s glebe, that ‘sanguinary field … where the assassin had affected his deadly purpose’ and she complained of the parishioners, ‘many of whom acquiesced or rejoiced in their bloody achievement so that land was defiled by blood, and filled with the images of death and horror’. With a heavy air of Gothic melancholy, she continued:

  And is it not astonishing6 that many who visited this place while its chief inhabitants lay under the dark suspicion, were filled with a sort of sadness, of which they could not divert themselves? In vain the sun shone on the fair fields of this unhappy parish. In vain an infinitude of beautiful wild flowers added perfume to every breeze, and every charm of rural life was scattered around, and a thousand interesting pictures presented themselves. For that alas! was wanting which could alone make these things delightful. Namely, a spirit of sincerity and harmony and benevolence, among
its inhabitants, arising from the consciousness of being at peace with God.

  To Sherwood, Oddingley was a community adrift. Only a parish blighted by vice and devilry could stoop so low as to murder its own clergyman. It was a view echoed by others in the years following the murder, as the idea that Oddingley was somehow cursed permeated the surrounding countryside. John Noake, a noted local antiquary, journalist and author of Worcester in Olden Times, detected a lingering sadness when he visited St James’ Church. His piece chimed darkly with Sherwood’s.

  I don’t usually encourage superstitious7 notions in others, nor harbour them myself, but somehow or other I felt a disagreeable, uneasy sensation during my stay here, and had any one of the two or three farmers who met together at the church invited me to dinner, I think I must have declined with a polite excuse. Indeed the village appeared as melancholy and deserted as though lying under the ban of some unatoned crime, and the few persons who formed the congregation hastened to and from the church, and avoided the stranger’s gaze, as though it were painful to them. Some of the windows of the church, too, were broken, and the wind moaned through the shattered panes of the north transept like a sad spirit of the other world, raving round the walls of God’s house in the sorrow of remorse and despair.

  More worldly troubles awaited several of the farmers. The inflationary cycles that had swirled in the years before Parker’s death continued to haunt them for years afterwards. A disastrous harvest in 1812 plunged Worcester to the brink of famine, leaving county-wide supplies of wheat and potatoes perilously low. At its worst, wheat was selling for the extraordinary price of £1 a bushel in the market, meaning that wheaten bread was almost impossible to obtain. Most villagers and townsfolk were forced to survive the winter on scanty rations of bran and root vegetables, and in Worcester the Bacon and Pease Charity was hurriedly established to feed the 8,000 helpless poor.

  Worcestershire8 had barely recovered from the effects of famine by 1815, when the Napoleonic Wars concluded with Wellington’s victory at Waterloo. The peace was greeted as an ‘unnatural blessing’, but the more prosperous age that was anticipated failed to materialise. Thousands of returning troops and the sudden influx of foreign imports combined to flood both the labour and commodity markets at a stroke, plunging the economy into a devastating recession. Its effects were felt right across the country, and in Oddingley it was enough to ruin several of the farmers. By 1815 John Perkins had fallen into debt and had been forced back into the labouring ranks. The next year Thomas Clewes suffered the same fate. Having pawned and mortgaged all of his land, he filed for bankruptcy and, leaving a large number of creditors unpaid, he left Netherwood Farm for good.

  Clewes had never been skilled with money, but his profligacy at Netherwood had been compounded by a terrible run of bad fortune that had seen several of his most valuable animals die unexpectedly. ‘As for Clewes,’9 recalled one of Erskine Neale’s characters in The Bishop’s Daughter, ‘He warn’t to thrive. A higher power was agen him!’ Clewes had begun the decade as Netherwood’s master; he ended it as a woodman struggling to survive with his wife in a little cottage on the outskirts of Trench Wood. He drank more, the locals noted, and struggled to sleep.

  Not all the farmers suffered. William Barnett’s move to Church Farm in 1809 reaffirmed the family’s ascendancy in the parish. The younger brother soon established himself in the Captain’s old property beside the church, where he was to remain for decades to come. Within a few years of his arrival the village was altered for ever with the appearance of the Birmingham and Worcester Canal. This enormous engineering project sliced right through Oddingley, from Dunhampstead to Tibberton, passing just 50 yards from Church Farm’s door and dividing it from Netherwood, which was left more isolated than ever.

  At Pound Farm John Barnett’s position as the most powerful village farmer had been confirmed in 1814 when his mother died, enabling him to assume full control of the business which he had already stewarded for nearly two decades. Several years later Lord Foley decided to reward him for his contribution to parochial life and to recognise the family’s long-standing loyalty to him as tenants by constructing him an expensive new property named Park Farm in the north of the village. Pound Farm, the Barnetts’ former home, was rented out to the poor.

  The 1820s was a decade at a pivot of British history, poised between the fading Georgian era and the modern Victorian age which would replace it. The Britain of these years was purposeful and pointed, spearheaded by revolutionary technological evolutions such as the telegraph, the steamship, macadamised roads and the railways. In north Wales Thomas Telford’s Menai suspension bridge was one of the first of its kind in the world and was admired as a paragon of brilliant engineering. When the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened four years later, in September 1830, it meant that the 30 miles that lay between the two cities could be negotiated in little more than an hour.

  The appearance of Worcester was also changing. In 1819 the city’s new gasworks had opened, and for the first time its streets were illuminated at night. One resident described the ‘splendid’ spectacle of the city streets, ‘the shops sparkling with vivid lustre’.10 He delighted at how the ‘inflammable vapour winds its way into our domestic circles and surprises us with its sudden ignition’. Elsewhere, in 1821 Michael Faraday demonstrated the principles of the electric motor. The following year Charles Babbage delivered a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society describing his design for a ‘difference engine’ or mechanical calculator. In London and the growing industrial areas of the Midlands and the north-west a collective spirit of innovation, optimism and industry was converging to form a potent zeitgeist that swept scientists and engineers along with it. Canals, which had so recently been treated as wondrous advancements, had already lost their sheen and much of their practicality to the railways. Britons were on the brink of a new age: never had the old seemed so old and the new so new.

  Parker’s murder was now a fable lost in time, a crime that belonged to a different age. By the 1820s fewer than four out of ten living Britons had been born in the eighteenth century and very few remained wedded to the old customs that had governed society for so long. A new better-mannered society was emerging as a contrast to the uncouth, expressive and decadent England of King George III.

  In 1803 Colonel Despard had been the last man condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Over the following years Sir Samuel Romily had conducted an energetic campaign against the death penalty, and when the Cato Street Conspirators were tried for high treason in 1820, they became the last men to be hanged and publicly beheaded. The pillory, stocks, public whippings and all the other trappings of the old brutal methods of punishment would also soon be banned.

  In 1822 the able young administrator Robert Peel11 was appointed home secretary and embarked upon a long policy of dismantling the Bloody Code and simplifying English law. The desire for such reform predated Peel, but it was his zeal that would be remembered. A total of 278 statutes were repealed or consolidated over the next eight years in a sustained attack on what Peel considered an obsolete chaotic jungle of legislation, altering for ever a system that had meant around 200 different offences were punishable by death. The statute of 1702 which had prevented the Captain and Barnett from being tried after Parker’s murder was one superseded during this time. In May 1826 a new criminal justice act was passed, allowing accessories to be tried even if the principal was not present. The law was not made retroactive.

  The decade also brought changes in Oddingley. In 1824 Reverend Charles Tookey arrived to replace John Marten Butt, and the following year the Foleys were succeeded as patrons and landowners after selling the entire estate to John Howard Galton. This man acquired a parish in gentle ascendancy. After the dip at the beginning of the century, the village population had slowly begun to rise. Farms lost in the 1810s were replaced by others in the 1820s, most controlled by a new generation of farmers. By now John and William Barnett were the only two surviving agriculturali
sts from 1806. Samuel Jones disappears from the parish records12 around 1815; John Marshall died in 1816; and Old Mr Hardcourt’s long life in the parish came to an end in 1823.

  The Oddingley story belonged to the past. Arguments about tithe payments had rumbled on across the country, but by now even the Church was accepting that reform was inevitable. Parker and his ratepayers were among the last to fight over the tax in such a way. And for the new generation reports of the swearing, expressions of hatred and malice and the left-handed toasts seemed scandalous. As the world’s leading power, Britain was desperate to shake off the embarrassments of its past. Nostalgia was confined to the older generations, with the poet and novelist Horace Smith one of the few left to lament, ‘We have no longer any genuine quizzes13 or odd fellows, society had shaken us together in its bag until all our original characters and impressions have been rubbed out, and we are left as smooth and polished as old shillings.’

  Captain Evans, though, lived on at New House. Now among the very oldest of men, his existence was increasingly secluded and there is little sight of him in the records. On 22 September 1825, at the extraordinary age of 92, he performed his final duty as a magistrate at the George Inn in Droitwich. It was now around half a century since he had served in the American conflict, 42 years since he had retired from the army and 30 since he had been elected to the magistracy in Droitwich. During the Captain’s three decades of unbroken service the British government had been led by six prime ministers and the United States by six different presidents. Such dazzling longevity was to become almost as notable as any of his many social achievements.fn2