The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  The battle of Boroughbridge was fought on 16 March 1322, near the Ure river in Yorkshire; dismounted men-at-arms and archers drove back the cavalry, then another royalist army moved up behind the rebels and forced them to surrender. Lancaster was captured and tried; evidence revealed that he had been contemplating an alliance with the king’s old enemy Robert the Bruce. Lancaster – the king’s cousin – was beheaded. And Robin Hood, deprived of his home, became an outlaw in the king’s forest.

  But if Walker is correct in identifying Robert Hood of Wakefield as Robin Hood, he was not an outlaw for long. In the spring of the following year the king made a progress through the north of England, reaching York on 1 May. From 16 May to 21 May he stayed at Rothwell, between Wakefield and Leeds, and spent three days hunting at Plumpton Park in Knaresborough Forest. And the Lytell Geste makes this visit a part of the story of Robin Hood, describing how the king “came to Plumpton Park/And failed [missed] many of his deer”. Where the king was accustomed to seeing herds of deer, now he could find only one deer “that bore any good horn”. Which made the king swear by the Trinity “I wish I could lay my hands on Robin Hood”:

  I wolde I had Robyn Hode

  With eyen I myght hym se.

  So, according to this ballad, one of the foresters suggested that the king should disguise himself as an abbot, riding through the greenwood with a band of monks. The ruse was successful; Robin and his men stopped the “abbot”, but recognized him as the king. And the king thereupon found Robin so likable that he invited him to join the royal household as a vadlet, a gentleman of the royal bedchamber. The king continued on his travels until February 1324, when he returned to Westminster. The royal household accounts for April record payment of the past month’s wages to Robyn Hod and twenty-eight others. The first record of a payment to Robyn Hod is in the previous June. The ballad tells us that after being a servant of the king for somewhat over a year Robin asked the king’s permission to return to Barnsdale. And the household accounts for November 1324 record that Robyn Hod, formerly one of the “porteurs” (gentlemen of the bedchamber) had been given five shillings “because he is no longer able to work”. The ballad says that Robin asked the king’s leave to return to Barnsdale, and was given permission to stay for seven days. But he never returned; instead he regrouped his merry men, and lived on in the greenwood for another twenty-two years. If this is based on fact, then he died about 1346, in his mid-sixties.

  The king’s fortunes took a downward turn after Robin’s departure. He had recalled the banished Despensers, and the younger of the two had become his “favourite” – to the disgust of his queen, who had already had to contend with Piers Gaveston. She was a Frenchwoman, daughter of Philip the Fair. Now she began to take a romantic interest in an unpleasant and ambitious young baron called Roger de Mortimer, who had been thrown into the Tower for his opposition to the Despensers. Queen Isabella became his mistress, and it was probably she who plotted Mortimer’s escape. He fled to Paris, and was joined there by Isabella, who was on a mission for the king. They landed at Orwell, in Suffolk, with an army of almost three thousand. When the king heard the news he fled, and was captured, and imprisoned in Berkeley Castle. He was forced to abdicate, and his son (aged fifteen) was crowned Edward III. On the night of 21 September 1327 horrible screams rang through the castle. The next morning it was announced that the king had died “of natural causes”. There were no marks on the body, but it is said that his features were still contorted with agony. A chronicle of some thirty years later states that three assassins entered his cell when he was asleep, and held down the upper half of his body with a table. Then a horn was inserted into the anal orifice, and a red-hot iron bar was used to burn out the king’s insides.

  Mortimer and Isabella ruled England as regents for four years; then the young king asserted himself, had Mortimer seized in Nottingham Castle, and had him executed as a traitor at Tyburn. The loss of her lover almost drove the queen mad. But she was restored to favour, and lived on for another twenty-eight years.

  It is of course conceivable that the Robin Hood who lived in Edward’s reign had no connection with the legendary outlaw of Sherwood Forest; one reference book (Who’s Who In History) says that he was alive in 1230, in the reign of Henry III, on the grounds that records show that the Sheriff of Yorkshire sold his possessions in that year (for 32s 6d) when he became an outlaw; but the same reference book admits that the Robyn Hode of Wakefield is also a good contender. There is something to be said for this earlier dating, for it would give more time for the legend of Robin Hood to spread throughout England. But there is also a great deal to be said for Robin Hood of Wakefield. If he became an outlaw in 1322, as a result of the Lancaster rebellion, then he spent only one year in Sherwood Forest before the king pardoned him. The story of his pardon by the homosexual king certainly rings true – as does his appointment as a gentleman of the bedchamber. It is natural to speculate that he may have found that his duties in the bedchamber involved more than he had bargained for, although at this time the king’s favourite was the younger Hugh le Despenser (executed by Mortimer and Isabella in 1326). So he returned to the greenwood, and became a hero of legend. We do not know whether he became the arch-enemy of the Sheriff of Nottingham, but the sheriff – who would be the equivalent of a modern Chief Constable – would have been responsible for law and order in Nottinghamshire and south Yorkshire, and would certainly have resented a band of outlaws who lived off the king’s deer. One chronicle states that Robin also had a retreat in what became known as Robin Hood’s Bay, and ships in which he could escape to sea. (He is also said to have operated as far afield as Cumberland.) If a concerted attempt had been made to flush him out, it would probably have succeeded. But most of the peasants and tenant farmers would have been on Robin’s side. There had been a time when the forests of England were common land, and half-starved peasantry must have felt it was highly unreasonable that thousands of square miles of forest should be reserved for the king’s hunting, when the king could not make use of a fraction of that area.

  But there could be another reason that Robin was allowed to operate without too much opposition. When he was at court he must surely have met the fourteen-year-old boy who would become Edward III, and Edward would be of exactly the right age to look with admiration on a famous outlaw. This is only speculation, but it could undoubtedly explain why Robin was allowed to become the legendary bane of authority in the last decades of his life.

  Authority has its own ways of striking back. According to the Sloane Manuscript, Robin fell ill, and went to his cousin, the Prioress of Kirklees, to be bled – the standard procedure for treating any illness in those days. She decided to avenge the many churchmen he had robbed, and allowed him to bleed to death. Another account says that she betrayed him at the request of her lover, Sir Roger de Doncaster. Still another source states that the man responsible for Robin’s death was a monk who was called in to attend him, and who decided that the outlaw would be better dead. He was buried in the grounds of the nunnery, within a bowshot of its walls. Grafton’s Chronicle (1562) says he was buried under an inscribed stone, and a century later another chronicle reported that his tomb, with a plain cross on a flat stone, could be seen in the cemetery; in 1665 Dr Nathaniel Johnstone made a drawing of it; Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments also has an engraving of the tombstone. In the early nineteenth century navvies building a railway broke up the stone – it is said they believed its chips to be a cure for toothache. So the last trace of the real existence of Robin Hood disappeared. But by that time the grave of the prioress had been discovered among the ruins of the nunnery, and it bore some resemblance to the tomb of Robin Hood. It also mentioned her name – Elizabeth Stainton.

  The real significance of Robin Hood is that he lived in a century when the peasants were beginning to feel an increasing resentment about their condition – a resentment that expressed itself in the revolutionary doctrines of John Ball, and which exploded in the Peasants’ Revolt
of 1381, only a short time after Robin is first mentioned in print by Langland. The Peasants’ Revolt is generally considered to mark the end of the Middle Ages; but it is in the ballads of Robin Hood that we can see that the state of mind known as the Middle Ages is coming to an end.

  46

  The Mystery Death of Mary Rogers

  The mysterious death of the “cigar girl” Mary Rogers, which caused a sensation in New York in the summer of 1841, would hardly cause a raised eyebrow in the same city today. That the mystery has never been forgotten is largely the work of Edgar Allan Poe, who transformed it into a classic detective story. Half a century after the death of the cigar girl, information came to light that suggested that Poe’s “guess” had been at least partly correct – and that led one writer to suggest that Poe himself may have committed the murder.

  Mary Cecilia Rogers was born in New York in 1820; her mother, who became a widow when the child was five, supported herself by running a boarding-house in Nassau Street. Mary grew up into a tall, very beautiful young woman with jet-black hair. This led a cigar-store owner named John Anderson, whose shop was on Broadway, to offer her a job as a salesgirl. In 1840 this was regarded as an imaginative piece of business enterprise, for New York was even more “Victorian” than London, and young unmarried girls did not exhibit themselves behind shop counters, particularly in shops frequented exclusively by young men. Mary’s mother objected to the idea, but her daughter’s enthusiasm finally won her over. She drew many new customers to the shop, although – as Thomas Duke is careful to note in his Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910) – “the girl’s conduct was apparently a model of modest decorum, and while she was lavish in her smiles, she did not hesitate to repel all undue advances”.

  She had been working in the store about ten months when one day in January 1841 she failed to appear. Her mother had no idea where she was, and according to Duke, “Mr Anderson was unable to account for her absence”. The police searched for her and the newspapers reported her disappearance. Six days later she reappeared, looking tired and rather ill, and explained that she had been visiting relatives in the country. Her mother and her employer apparently corroborated the story. But when a rumour began to circulate that she had been seen during her absence with a tall, handsome naval officer Mary abruptly gave up her job – only a few days after returning – and was no longer seen on Broadway. A month later she announced her engagement to one of her mother’s boarders, a clerk called Daniel Payne.

  Five months later, on Sunday 25 July 1841, Mary knocked on her fiancé’s door at 10 a.m. and announced that she was going to see her aunt in Bleecker Street; Payne said that he would call for her that evening. Payne also spent the day away from home, but when a violent thunderstorm came on towards evening he decided not to call for Mary, but to let her stay the night with her aunt. Mrs Rogers apparently approved. But when Mary failed to return home the following day she began to worry. When Payne returned from work and learned that Mary was still away, he rushed to see the aunt in Bleecker Street – a Mrs Downing – and was even more alarmed when she told him that she had not seen Mary in the past forty-eight hours.

  It was two days later on Wednesday morning that three men in a sailing-boat saw a body in the water off Castle Point, Hoboken. It was Mary, and according to the New York Tribune “it was obvious that she had been horribly outraged and murdered”. She was fully clothed, although her clothes were torn, and the petticoat was missing. A piece of lace from the bottom of the dress was embedded so deeply in the throat that it had almost disappeared. An autopsy performed almost immediately led to the conclusion that she had been “brutally violated”. Oddly enough, Daniel Payne did not go to view the corpse, although he had earlier searched for her all over New York, including Hoboken. But after being interrogated by the police, Payne was released.

  A week passed without any fresh clues, and a large reward was offered. Then the coroner received a letter from some anonymous man – who said he had not come forward before from “motives of perhaps criminal prudence” – and who claimed to have seen Mary Rogers on the Sunday afternoon of her disappearance. She had, the writer said, stepped out of a boat with six rough-looking characters, and gone with them into the woods, laughing merrily and apparently under no kind of constraint. Soon afterwards a boat with three well-dressed men had come ashore, and one of these accosted two men walking on the beach and asked if they had seen a young woman and six men recently. They said that they had, and that she had appeared to go with them willingly. At this the trio turned their boat and headed back for New York.

  In fact, the two men came forward and corroborated this story. But although they both knew Mary Rogers by sight, neither of them could swear that the girl they had seen was definitely Mary.

  The next important piece of information came from a stagecoach-driver named Adams, who said he had seen Mary arrive on the Hoboken ferry with a well-dressed man of dark complexion, and that they had gone to a roadhouse called “Nick Mullen’s”. This tavern was kept by a Mrs Loss, who told the police that the couple had “taken refreshment” there, then gone off into the woods. Some time later she had heard a scream from the woods; but since the place “was a resort of questionable characters” she had thought no more of it.

  Two months after the murder, on 25 September, children playing in the woods found the missing petticoat in a thicket; they also found a white silk scarf, a parasol and a handkerchief marked “M.R.” Daniel Payne was to commit suicide in this spot soon after.

  A gambler named Joseph Morse, who lived in Nassau Street, was arrested and apparently charged with the murder; there was evidence that he had been seen with Mary Rogers on the evening she disappeared. The following day, he had fled from New York. But Morse was released when he was able to prove that he had been at Staten Island with another young lady on the Sunday afternoon. One odd story in the Tribune declared that Morse believed that the young lady was Mary Rogers, and that when he heard of the disappearance he assumed she had committed suicide because of the way he had treated her – he had tried to seduce her in his room. He was relieved to learn that the girl with whom he had spent the afternoon was still alive.

  In the following year, 1842, Poe’s “Mystery of Marie Roget” was published in three parts in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion. But for anyone looking for a solution of the Mary Rogers mystery, it should be treated with extreme caution. Poe argues that Mary Rogers was not murdered by a gang but by a single individual. His original view seems to have been that the motive was rape; later he heard the rumour that Mary had died as a result of an abortion, and made a few hasty alterations in his story to accommodate this notion. He argues that the signs of a struggle in the woods, and the battered state of her face, indicate that she was killed by an individual – a gang would have been able to overpower her easily. He also speaks of a strip from the girl’s skirt that had been wound around the waist to afford a kind of handle for carrying the body; but the evidence of two witnesses who dragged the body out of the water makes no mention of this “handle”. In spite of this, there can be no doubt that Poe’s objections to the gang theory carry a great deal of weight.

  In an issue of a magazine called The Unexplained (No. 152) Grahame Fuller and Ian Knight suggest that Poe himself may have been the killer of Mary Rogers. A witness thought he had seen her with a tall, well-dressed man of swarthy complexion on the afternoon she died; the authors point out that Poe had an olive complexion and was always well dressed. But Poe was only five feet eight inches tall – hardly a “tall man”. They also argue that Poe may have killed Mary Rogers in a fit of “alcoholic insanity”. In 1841 Poe’s wife Virginia was dying of tuberculosis and he was under considerable stress; he wrote later: “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much”. Yet none of Poe’s biographers have ever suggested that he was a violent person – on the contrary, most emphasize his gentleness and courtesy. The
re have been plenty of alcoholic men of genius, a few of whom – like Ben Jonson or Caravaggio – have killed men in duels or quarrels; but there is not a single example of one who has ever committed a murder. Besides, no witness suggested that the man who was seen with Mary Rogers was blind drunk. On the whole, the notion of Poe as a demonic killer, writing “The Mystery of Marie Roget” to boast about his crime, must be relegated to the realm of fantasy.

  What was not known to Poe in 1842 is that Mary’s employer, John Anderson, had been questioned by the police as a suspect; like all the others, he was released. But fifty years later – in December 1891 – new evidence was to emerge. By that time Anderson had been dead ten years; he became a millionaire, and died in Paris. Apparently he had told friends that he had experienced “many unhappy days and nights in regard to her” (Mary Rogers), and had been in touch with her spirit. His heirs contested his estate, and in 1891 his daughter tried to break her father’s will on the grounds that when he signed it he was mentally incompetent. The case was settled out of court, and the records destroyed. But a lawyer named Samuel Copp Worthen, who had been closely associated with Anderson’s daughter Laura Appleton, knew that his firm had kept a copy of the testimony in the Supreme Court of New York in 1891, and he made it his business to read it. He finally described what he had learned in the periodical American Literature in 1948. It revealed that Anderson had been questioned by the police about the death of Mary Rogers, and that this had preyed on his mind, so that he later declined to stand as a candidate for mayor of New York, in case someone revealed his secret.