Patrick Comerford
In my visits to Rugeley and Brereton in Staffordshire over the past week or two I heard again the stories of a number of murders or supposed murders in the area from the 16th to the 19th centuries, including a murder on the canal, the murderous spree of a local doctor who became known as the ‘Poisoner of Rugeley’, and the story of two sisters said to have been buried alive by Cromwell.
I came across these stories of intrigue and plotting, murder and supposed murder, once again in the churchyards of old Saint Augustine’s, the ‘Old Chancel’, and the new Saint Augustine’s, its 19th century successor.
But a story that truly caught my imagination is one that has tangential links with the Comberford family, a drama with links with two women called Dorothy Chetwynd – one the granddaughter of William Comberford of the Moat House, Tamworth, the other a young 16th century teenage ‘beauty’ who, according to local lore, was burned at the stake for murdering a husband three times her age, although all the historic evidence denies there was ever such a murder or such a grizzly execution.
I first became aware of this gruesome story through links provided by Dorothy Comberford, a daughter of William Comberford (1551-1625) of Comberford Hall, who entertained Charles I, as Prince Charles at the Moat House on Lichfield Street, Tamworth, in 1619. She married Walter Coleman of Cannock, a partner with the Comberford family in iron ore and mining interests in Wednesbury.
And so, I came across some family links with Rugeley: Dorothy’s youngest half-sister, Anne Comberford, was born in 1609, and in 1634, she married Benjamin Rugeley, who was closely related to the Rugeley family of Hawkesyard in Armitage.
Dorothy (Comberford) and Walter Coleman were the parents of two sons and two daughters, and their elder daughter Dorothy married Thomas Chetwynd (died 1633) of Rugeley, ancestor of the Chetwynd baronets. It was this marriage that introduced me to the supposed story of the Chetwynd murder.
Before all this, there was an earlier murder in the Chetwynd family: Thomas Chetwynd’s immediate ancestor, William Chetwynd of Ingestre, a courtier, was murdered in 1494. A rival courtier, Sir Humphrey Stanley of Elford, the Sheriff of Stafford, had set the trap and was clearly responsible but was never brought to trial or punished.
William Chetwynd’s son, another William Chetwynd (d 1546), married Elizabeth Ferrers, a daughter of Sir John Ferrers of Tamworth Castle, and they were the parents of Thomas Chetwynd (d 1555) of Ingestre, who was 16 when he married Jane Salter. They, in turn, were the parents of three sons and three daughters.
The eldest of these six children, John Chetwynd (d 1592), was the Sheriff of Staffordshire. His first wife was Mary Meverell, the daughter of Ludovic Meverell of Bold; his second wife was Margery Middlemore of Edgbaston, Warwickshire. It was John’s son, Thomas Chetwynd of Rugeley, who married Dorothy Coleman, a granddaughter of William Comberford of the Moat House in Tamworth.
The youngest of William Chetwynd’s six children was Dorothy Chetwynd, an aunt of Thomas Chetwynd who married Dorothy Coleman. And it is this aunt who is said in many accounts to have murdered her husband, Sir Walter Smyth (1501-1526), and to have been burned at the stake for the murder 27 years later on Wolvey Heath on 15 May 1553.
Dorothy Chetwynd was not the first nor was she the second wife of Sir Walter Smyth of Elford, six miles from Comberford in Staffordshire. In 1505, Smyth married his first wife Anne Staunton. They were the parents of one daughter, Margery, who married her step-brother, Richard Huddleston, the younger son of Walter’s second wife, Lady Isabel Neville.
Lady Isabel Neville was a daughter of John Neville, Marquess of Montagu, and a niece of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the ‘Kingmaker’. She was twice married: her first husband was William Huddleston of Millom, Cumberland, and they were the parents of two sons, Sir John Huddleston and Richard Huddleston.
Isabel then married Sir Walter Smyth of Elford in what was the second marriage for both partners. When Isabel died in 1516, she was buried at Elford, and Walter soon married his third wife, Dorothy Chetwynd. In what may have been a source of gossip in the day, Dorothy was only 16 or 17 when she married Walter Smyth, and he was 50 – although Dugdale says that at 50 he was an aged man, he was certainly more than three times her age and 33 or 34 years older than her.
Walter Smyth first met young Dorothy when he was trying to arrange a marriage for his son and heir, Richard. He approached Thomas Chetwynd of Ingestre, who was willing to endow Dorothy with a dowry of £500. But when old Walter set eyes on young Dorothy, he was captivated by her beauty and became a suitor himself. The odd couple were quickly married, and young Richard had to seek another bride.
Dorothy was regarded as one of the beauties of her day. But Dorothy and Walter did not live happily ever after. It is said that soon after the marriage her affections wandered after younger men, especially William Robinson, a 22-year-old from Drayton Basset, and began plotting to get rid of her husband. She induced her housemaid and a stable groom to help her and Robinson in a scheme to strangle Walter in bed.
On the night of the planned murder in 1525, Robinson failed to show up, but Dorothy went ahead with her plans. She waited until her husband was asleep, and then let the maid and the groom into the room. Dorothy tied a long towel about the sleeping man’s neck, got the groom to lie on him to keep him from struggling, and then she and the maid strangled Walter until he stopped breathing. As he was being strangled, Walter woke and cried out his last words, ‘Help, Doll, help!’
Once he was dead, they carried Walter into another room and sat him upright on a stool before the maid and groom tip-toed out of. Only then did Dorothy raise the alarm, wringing her hands, pulling her hair out, and weeping and wailing. She told the others in the house that she had noticed Walter was not in bed and when she went looking for him she found him dead and sitting up.
Sir Walter Smyth was buried in Saint Peter’s Church, Elford, with his first two wives, Annie Staunton and Lady Isabella Neville. But his third wife, Dorothy Chetwynd, is not named on the elaborate alabaster monument, nor is she buried there.
Some years after the supposed murder, the former groom told the story to Walter’s son, Richard Smyth. The groom was taken prisoner to Warwick, where he was joined by the housemaid and William Robinson. They confessed to the deadly deed and were executed in Warwick.
Eventually, it is said, Dorothy was arrested, convicted, sentenced to death and burnt at the stake on Wolvey Heath, five miles from Nuneaton – according to local lore retold as historical fact by the historian William Dugdale. It was 1555, 30 years after her husband’s death or murder and the same year her father Thomas Chetwynd died.
Dugdale says the source for his account of the murder of Sir Walter Smyth was a letter from Sir John Smyth, a grandson of Sir Walter Smyth, and a son of Richard Smyth, Dorothy’s first intended husband. But the contents of the letter amount to little more than a detailed but second-hand account of the groom’s confession to Richard Smyth, and all this was denied by the groom and the maid at their trial in Warwick.
The story later provided the plot for an historical novel by the Revd BW Gibsone, a former Vicar of Wolvey. But Gibsone admitted that Dugdale’s story is mostly apocryphal, and he suggested that Dorothy was burnt – if, at all, she was burnt to death – for heresy rather than murder.
Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686) wrote his History of Warwickshire in 1656, a full century after Dorothy’s supposed trial and execution. There are no primary sources or contemporary records of her trial or for her execution.
If the Smyths had set up a charge of heresy when they were unable to substantiate the accusation of murder, there is no record of that either in the several lists that became sources for Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Foxe makes no mention of the case and there is no contemporary evidence for the charges against her, her trial and conviction, or of her being burned to death at the stake.
Perhaps the story of Dorothy Chetwynd’s crime and conviction was the one final and successful revenge by Richard Smyth wreaked on his young beautiful step-mother who had spurned him for his twice-widowed ageing father.
The descendants of the Chetwynd family continued to live in the Rugeley and Lichfield area for many generations after and derived their wealth chiefly derived from the iron industry. Dorothy’s nephew Thomas Chetwynd and his wife Dorothy, granddaughter of William Comberford, were the parents of William Chetwynd (1628-1691) of Rugeley, MP for Stafford from 1661 and wrongly described as a ‘burgess for Lichfield’.
Dorothy and Thomas Chetwynd were also the great-grandparents of Walter Chetwynd (1680-1732) of Rugeley, MP for Lichfield, who was impoverished when he died before taking up an appointment as the Governor of Barbados. Other descendants of this branch of the Chetwynd family (and descendants of the Comberford family too), the Chetwynd baronets, lived for generations at Brocton Hall, half-way between Rugeley and Stafford, until 1923.
A second branch of the Chetwynd family in the area lived at Ingestre Hall, between Stafford and Rugeley, and they derived their wealth from coalmining and the collieries they owned in Rugeley, Brereton and Cannock. Ingestre Hall also gave them one of their titles.
Their wealth and estates eventually passed by marriage to the Talbot or Chetwynd-Talbot family, who held the title of Earl Talbot and eventually succeeded as Earls of Shrewsbury.
They were the heirs and successors of the Chetwynd family, they provided the site for both Saint Michael’s Church and the Red Lion pub in Brereton, and they gave their name to a pub in Rugeley that has been known variously as the Talbot Arms, the Shrewsbury Arms and more recently ‘The Shrew’. It had to change its name because of the embarrassing associations with a more infamous and actual 19th century murderer, the ‘Rugeley Poisoner’, Dr William Palmer.
But more in the days to come, perhaps, about Walter Chetwynd, who never became Governor of Barbados and who was pursued even after his death by gruesome debt collectors. And more too of Dr Palmer and some of those other murders and supposed murders.
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