When Sir William Wolseley married the widowed Ann Whitby in 1752, who was the real bigamist?

Wolseley Hall was destroyed in a serious fire in the early 1950s and was demolished in 1966

Patrick Comerford

Accusations of bigamy, adultery, infidelity and seduction in rural Staffordshire in the mid-18th century were at the heart of a complex legal battle over 270 years ago. The case and the appeal were drawn out between 1752 and 1754, and the stories that unfolded involved accusations of greed, manipulation, cheating, forgery, desertion, perjury, bigamy, adultery, bribery, drugged drinks and corrupt and dishonest clergy.

I came across these stories once again during a number of visits to Staffordshire in recent weeks, including visits to Wolseley, Rugeley, Stafford, Lichfield and Tamworth. These stories centre on the widowed Ann Whitbey (1724-1782), who went through some sort of a marriage ceremony with the widowed Sir William Wolseley (1692-1779) of Wolseley Hall, in 1752. Ann was then 28, a widowed mother with two young children; Sir William was 60, more than twice her age, and the recently widowed father of three sons and a daughter, then aged from one up to 12.

But were they ever truly married? And if there was bigamy, who was the guilty partner?

Sir William Wolseley was the fifth baronet of Wolseley, and the son of Captain Richard Wolseley, who established the Irish branch of the family at Mount Wolseley. When his uncles, the third and fourth baronets, Sir William Wolseley and Sir Henry Wolseley, died in quick succession in 1728 and 1730, he unexpectedly succeeded to the family title as the fifth baronet of Wolseley and inherited Wolseley Hall in 1730. A younger brother, Sir Richard Wolseley (1696-1769), inherited the family’s Irish estates at Mount Wolseley, Co Carlow, and became a baronet in his own right in 1744.

The High House, Stafford … John Robbins was MP for Stafford in 1747-1754 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Sir William Wolseley married his first wife, Ann Fieldhouse (1706-1752) from Rugeley, in 1738, when she was 31 and he was 46, and they were the parents of four children, three sons and a daughter:

1, Sir William Wolseley (1740-1817), who became the sixth baronet.
2, Admiral Charles Wolseley (1741-1808).
3, Sophia Wolseley (1749-1801), who married William Piggott (1743-1802).
4, James Wolseley (1751-1773).

Ann (Fieldhouse) Wolseley died of smallpox in January in 1752, and nine months later the widowed Sir William married the widowed Anne Whitby, daughter of William Northey, on 23 September 1752.

But soon a complex case of separation from bed and board was being played out in the ‘Bawdy Court’ of the Diocese of Lichfield, and then in the Court of Arches appeal court. The case and the reputations of all involved became major points of gossip in the coffee houses of London and in the parlours of country houses in Staffordshire.

Sir William Wolseley’s case against Ann Whitby or Ann Robins was heard in 1753 before Richard Smalbroke (1716-1805), who was Chancellor of the Diocese of Lichfield and Coventry for 64 years. Sir William stated that his wife, Dame Ann Wolseley, had committed adultery with John Robins, MP for Stafford, and he alleged fraud involving the falsification of the parish register in the Castle Church, Stafford.

Wolseley alleged that John Robins and Ann Whitby were married bigamously on 9 October 1752, but claimed that marriage was falsely recorded by the Revd William Corne, the curate of Castle Church, and that had been changed in the register variously to 9 June 1752 and then to 16 June.

These dates are pivotal to grasping the intricacies of the case. The records indicate that William and Ann were married on 23 September 1752; if she married Robins in October, her marriage to Robins was null and void and bigamous; however, if she married Robins in June her marriage to Wolseley was bigamous and null and void.

If William wanted to access Ann’s inherited wealth, an annulment would not suit him. In their marriage contract, Ann agreed to pay him £300 a year and undertook to make no claims on the Wolseley estate should she survive him. A separation based on adultery could lead to further claims on her fortune, while an annulment would not, because in the eyes of the law the marriage would never have taken place.

Ann Whitby’s father, William Northey (1690-1738), was MP for Calne in 1713 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Ann Whitby was the daughter of William Northey (1690-1738) and his wife Abigail (Webster). He was MP for Calne in 1713 and for Wootton Bassett in 1714. He had inherited large property near Chippenham in Wiltshire and bought the Compton Basset estate near Calne. He accused his wife Abigail of adultery and claimed her son Thomas was not his but was in fact the son of Edward Thomas. Indeed, when William Northey died, Abigail married the same Edward Thomas. William Northey left only £1,000 in his will for Thomas, and so his daughter Ann inherited most of his wealth as a result of her mother’s alleged adultery.

Some writers suggest this acrimonious atmosphere of infidelity and adultery influenced Ann in her formative years. Ann was considered to be beautiful and when she married John Whitby of Whitby Wood (1716-1750) in 1743 she was 19. They were the parents of two sons: the Revd Thomas Whitby (1746-1828) of Creswell Hall, High Sherrif of Staffordshire, who is buried at Saint Mary’s Church, Stafford; and William Whitby (1748-1792).

John Whitby died in 1751 and within a month of his death the widowed Ann had started an affair with John Robins (1714-1754), MP for Stafford (1747-1754). She soon became pregnant again, but soon suspected the 38-year-old MP had ‘abandoned’ her. Ann then looked to the 60-year-old widower Sir William Wolseley to save her name and reputation. However, after her marriage to Wolseley, Robins returned and Ann left Wolseley to live with the much younger Robins.

George Winfield, a Lichfield publican, tried to serve a decree from William on Ann at Robins’s house in Stafford on 11 October 1753. He ‘searched diligently’ for her, but having waited an hour he pinned the decree to the door and left.

The case for Sir William and for Ann were handled by their lawyers: John Howard and Edward Burslem Sudell respectively.

William sought separation or divorce from bed and board and mutual cohabitation on the grounds of adultery. He graphically described her alleged adulterous behaviour, claiming Ann, ‘unmindful of their conjugate vows did in violation thereof behave herself in a very lascivious, incontinent and adulterous manner and did contract a criminal correspondence and intimacy with John Robins Esq and without any lawful cause quitted the conversation with her said husband Sir William Wolseley and in or about the month of October, went to live with said John Robins at his house in Stafford in an adulterous manner and went by the name of Robins and as the pretended wife of John Robins.’

He went on to say that in Robins’s house they had ‘frequently lain naked in one and the same bed together and have at such times had carnal use and knowledge of each other’s bodies and have committed the foul crime of adultery’. The court heard that two body impressions were found on the bed and that Ann had been frequently ‘lighted’ up to Robins’s bedchamber by servants and that Robins had later ‘followed on’.

William maintained that from June to September 1752, he had proposed marriage to Ann and that they had agreed to marry each other. Meanwhile, Robins asserted that he had proposed marriage to her between April 1751 and May 1752.

William presented a copy of the parish register with their marriage on 23 September 1752 at Colwich Church. The wedding was conducted by the Revd John Clements, Vicar of Colwich, and the witnesses included his nephew, Lieutenant Richard Wolseley, later Sir Richard Wolseley (1729-1781), the second baronet, of Mount Wolseley, Co Carlow.

Sudell, Ann’s lawyer, told the court that on 16 June 1752 John Robins and Ann Whitby were married in the Castle Church, Stafford, by the Revd William Corne. He presented an extract of the register, but this was a copy and not the original, and was not evidence that the date 9 June had been scratched out and replaced with 16 June.

Mount Wolseley, Co Carlow … Sir William Wolseley’s nephew, Sir Richard Wolseley, was a key witness in the case (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Throughout the case, Wolseley’s lawyer John Howard referred to Ann as ‘Ann Robins, falsely called Dame Ann Wolseley’, and he called Lieutenant Richard Wolseley as a witness. He said he was present at the marriage in Colwich Church on 22 September 1752, although the parish register indicates they were married on 23 September.

He described the domesticity of the Wolseley household, how he dined with William and Ann on 26 September, when she took her place ‘at the head end of the table’, and how he saw William and Ann walking together in the garden.

The judgment in Lichfield favoured Sir William. But Ann appealed and her case was heard by Sir George Lee in the Arches Court of Canterbury and began on 5 April 1754. The new evidence before the court involved the importance of the dates of the alleged marriages of Ann and John Robins, the alleged drugging of Ann and the pressure on her to sign a marriage agreement with Sir William.

Ann pleaded that she and Robins were married by the Revd William Corne on 16 June 1752. Corne, however, appears to have a crisis of conscience, and he later admitted to several witnesses and in a signed affidavit, that he acted illegally but with the best intentions.

The evidence suggested that Ann was pregnant by Robins and the date of the actual marriage was 9 October 1752, seven days after she married William. Robins begged Corne to enter the date of 9 June to save her ‘dignity’ – a reference to her pregnancy before marriage.

Corne was told that it was well known that Robins was with Lord Uxbridge on 9 June and could not have married Ann that day. Robins then told Corne to change the date from the 9 June to 16 June, and in what appears to have been bribery or inducement gave Corne £1,000.

In court, Sir Brooke Boothby (1710-1789), a Derbyshire landholder, alleged Corne asked him to see if Sir William would forgive him if he told him the whole truth. Boothby’s family once owned the Moat House, the former Comberford family home in Tamworth, and his son, also Sir Brooke Boothby (1744-1824), was a member of the intellectual and literary circle in Lichfield.

John Dunn claimed to have seen a change in the register to 16 June when he knew the marriage was on 9 October. Phoebe Booth, who also knew Corne, said that she had heard him say he had ‘grievously injured’ William. Richard Derry, Ann’s servant, claimed Ann and John Robins were married on 9 October and that he gave Ann away.

Corne confessed to fraudulently altering the parish records and inserting an incorrect date for the marriage. Although he said he falsified dates for the sake of Ann’s dignity, he admitted receiving £1,000. This would make him a party to a bigamous marriage, as he must have known that Ann had married William 17 days earlier.

There were allegations that Ann had been drugged or forced to drink too much at a dinner on 26 August 1752 in the vicarage of the Revd John Clements who had married Ann and William. The next day they signed a contract to marry, and the implication was that Clements and his wife were involved in some subterfuge along with William.

The Wolseley Arms, by the River Trent, near Rugeley in Staffordshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The judge, Sir George Lee, initially rejected suggestions from Ann’s legal team that Corne’s affidavit should be ignored because of his fraudulent actions, that he was guilty of a clandestine marriage, that he had excommunicated himself and that he was not a reliable witness. In fact, Corne had died 19 months before the appeal, on 22 November 1753, and could not be questioned on his affidavit. In Lee’s opinion, no credible witness supported Sir William’s cause. He dismissed as unreliable allegations that Corne had married Ann and Robins on 9 October, as Corne had previously perjured himself.

To complicate all these matters, the parish register where the alleged altered marriage dates for Ann Whitby and John Robins were entered, shows no sign of any significant and meaningful alteration.

The final judgment was that William’s marriage to Ann was invalid because she was already married to Robins at the time. Lee also ruled that Ann should pay no costs, and so these probably fell on Sir William.

Robins absconded to France for fear of being charged with perjury, and died shortly after on 17 December 1754. Ann also absconded, but never faced charges of perjury or bigamy and held on to her fortune. When Robins died she married her third – or fourth – husband, Christopher Hargrave, a chancery solicitor. Sir William Woseley was never charged with bigamy, never married again and died on 12 March 1779.

A scandalous book, The Widow of the Woods (1755), published after the appeal, was written by a one-time associate of Sir William, Benjamin Victor. The Wolseley family tried to buy up as many copies of the book they could and burned them, but is still available online.

Further reading:

Alan Wiggins, The Bawdy Courts of Lichfield, ‘Sir William Wolseley 5th Baronet v Whitby or Robins or Wolseley – Trying to divorce somebody you might not actually be married to!’ (19 June 2019)

Sir Brooke Boothby (1710-1789) gave evidence in the case … his family lived in the Moat House, the former Comberford family home in Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The Chetwynd family in Rugeley, MPs for Lichfield, Stafford and Tamworth, and Comberford family links

Lower Hall, the former residence of the Chetwynd family in Rugeley, was demolished before 1800 … it may have stood on the site of the Old Post Office (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

With my return visits to Rugeley, Brereton, Stafford, Wolseley, Lichfield, Tamworth and other parts of Staffordshire, I have written about the Chetwynd family, the supposed murder by Dorothy Chetwynd of Sir Walter Smyth, the elderly husband who was three times her age, and the complete lack of historical evidence or primary sources for the stories in local lore of that murder or of Dorothy’s alleged execution by being burned at the stake.

But the stories of the Chetwynd family led me to further genealogical and historical research into other family stories, and I came across stories of how one branch of the Chetwynd family in Rugeley were in direct descent from the Comberford family of Comberford Hall and the Moat House on Lichfield Street, Tamworth.

This branch of the Chetwynd family included another Dorothy Chetwynd who was a nun in Bruges, a 17th century; a 17th century MP for Stafford; and an 18th century MP for Lichfield who ran up heavy debts and whose funeral was delayed for weeks by his creditors.

The Rugeley branch of the family was founded by Dorothy Smyth’s nephew, Thomas Chetwynd (1561-1633), whose wealth came chiefly from the iron industry. His brother, the Very Revd Edward Chetwynd (1577-1639), was the Dean of Bristol (1617-1639) and chaplain to Queen Anne of Denmark, while a sister, yet another Dorothy Chetwynd, a nun in Bruges.

This Thomas Chetwynd married Dorothy Coleman, a granddaughter of William Comberford (1551-1625) of the Comberford Hall, who entertained Charles I, as Prince Charles at the Moat House on Lichfield Street, Tamworth, in 1619. Dorothy Comberford married Walter Coleman of Cannock and Rugeley, a partner with the Comberford family in iron ore and mining interests in Wednesbury, and their daughter Dorothy married Thomas Chetwynd.

Dorothy (Coleman) and Thomas Chetwynd were the parents of Walter Chetwynd, named probably after his grandfather Walter Coleman, who married Dorothy Comberford; and of William Chetwynd, who became a merchant and shipowner in Bristol, probably through connections made by his uncle, Edward Chetwynd, Dean of Bristol.

The Ancient High House in Stafford … William Chetwynd was MP for Stafford in 1661-1679 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

William Chetwynd married Elizabeth Long, and this branch of the family returned to Rugeley when their son, William Chetwynd (1628-1691), inherited family estates in Rugeley, Staffordshire, and Grendon, Warwickshire, from his unmarried uncle Walter Chetwynd, who died in Rugeley in 1653.

At first, William was seen as hostile to the Stuarts. His election as chamberlain just before the Civil War was initially vetoed by the council, and he held that office even after the execution of Charles I. But back in his ancestral Staffordshire, after succeeding to his uncle’s estate in Rugeley, William Chetwynd was named to the Staffordshire assessment commission under the Protectorate, and he was clearly an Anglican and a royalist.

Shortly after the Restoration of Charles II, he was reported to be ‘well-moneyed, … loyal and orthodox’ and ‘an ingenious, sober man’. He was also described, though incorrectly, as a ‘burgess for Lichfield’.

William Chetwynd ploughed some of his money back into his family business. He began manufacturing garden-rollers at Madeley, bought several mills along the Trent, where he ground corn and produced starch and paper, and bought more land, increasing the value of his estate.

Chetwynd was the first of his family to enter Parliament when he became MP for Stafford in 1661. He was an active MP in the Cavalier Parliament, and sat on a number of committees, including one for restoring the bishops and another for ‘preventing mischief’ from Quakers.

He was involved in the Stour and Salwarp navigation, between the River Severn at Mitton, Kidderminster, and the edge of the Black Country at Stourbridge. He was involved in debates on confirming ministers in their livings, banning nonconformists (‘sectaries’ or ‘conventicles’) from meeting, preventing electoral abuses and on cattle imports from Ireland.

He was a political friend of the Duke of Ormonde and the Duke of Leeds, and was also high steward of Lichfield (1678-1686). After one vote in 1675, he was sent a hamper of German wine. Chetwynd later admitted he had scarcely been sober for five after, drinking in Lichfield with his cousin Sir Robert Holte of Aston, Matthew Smallwood, Dean of Lichfield, and Richard Dyott (1619-1677), MP for Lichfield.

Chetwynd decided not to stand for Stafford again in 1679, probably under political pressure locally, and he took no further part in politics. He was 63 when he died at Grendon, his Warwickshire estate about halfway between Tamworth and Atherstone, on 9 April 1691, and was buried at Rugeley.

William Chetwynd left a life interest in his estates to his sister Mary. She placed a memorial in Saint Augustine’s Church, Rugeley, describing his time in the militia and Parliament, and describing him as ‘conspicuous for intelligence, prudence, and constancy … and faithful to Church, King and country’.

Bore Street, Lichfield, at night … Walter Chetwynd was the MP for Lichfield from 1715 to 1731 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Chetwynd estates eventually passed to William’s first cousin once removed, John Chetwynd of Ludlow, Shropshire, a grandson of Ralph Chetwynd, a younger brother of Walter Chetwynd of Bristol. Grendon eventually passed in 1719 to John Chetwynd’s son, Walter Chetwynd (1680-1732), who was the MP for Lichfield from 1715 to 1731, and who amassed such large debts that he was forced to resign and then accepted an appointment as Governor of Barbados in the hope of escaping the debt collectors at his door.

This Walter Chetwynd succeeded to the Grendon estate when his grandfather, Charles Chetwynd, died at Grendon in 1719. He was first elected a Whig MP for Lichfield in 1715 and spoke and voted against the septennial bill, a law extending the maximum term of Parliament from three years to seven. It was designed to stabilise the Hanoverian regime against Jacobite threats and to reduce political volatility.

When he became Paymaster of Bounties and Pensions in 1718, his appointment forced a by-election in Lichfield, and in the by-election on 18 March 1718 he was defeated by one vote by the Tory, William Sneyd. Chetwynd’s supporters claimed they were ‘barbarously beaten and abused and their lives were endangered by a great mob with papers in their hats resembling white roses’, the emblem of the Jacobite pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie. Chetwynd challenged the result legally and he returned to Parliament as the MP for Lichfield on 10 December 1718.

From then on, Chetwynd voted with the Whig government, and he was re-elected for Lichfield in 1722 and again in 1727. His kinsman, John Chetwynd (1643-1702) of Rudge Hall, was MP for Tamworth (1698-1700), MP for Stafford (1689-1695, 1701-1702) and High Sheriff of Staffordshire (1695-1696).

Tamworth Town Hall … John Chetwynd (1643-1702) of Rudge Hall, was MP for Tamworth (1698-1700), MP for Stafford (1689-1695, 1701-1702) and High Sheriff of Staffordshire (1695-1696) (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

When Joseph Comerford erected his plaque to the Comberford family in the Comberford chapel in Saint Editha’s Chapel, Tamworth, in 1725, he says the family ‘died out with the death of Robert, last scion of the Staffordshire branch in England, when he died in AD 1671’. However, it is difficult to believe that he did not know of this powerful political family in Lichfield and Tamworth who were immediately descended from the Comberford family.

Perhaps, he ought to have known too that there were descendants of the Comberford family living in Heveningham family in the Lichfield area.

Chetwynd found himself in a financially straitened situation, perhaps because of his wife’s lifestyle, and he resigned his seat on 13 April 1731 to take the post of Governor of Barbados, with the promise of £2,000 a year. As he was preparing to set out for the West Indies, however, he died at his house in Sackville Street, London, on 5 February 1732. His funeral was delayed by three weeks or more by bailiffs seeking to extract debts owned by the dead man.

According to Lady Huntingdon, ‘poor Mr Chetwynd’s corpse … had been so barbarously treated, for since his death, which is now three weeks, there have been bailiffs by it night and day, and will not let it be buried. I think it should almost distract his wife, and more so when she reflects it is chiefly by her means the poor remains of him are used in so shocking a manner, for I believe it will be hardly in her power to do justice to many of his creditors.’

His wife, Barbara Goring of Kingston, Staffordshire, died a year later and left her mother as the guardian of their children. Their eldest son, Walter Chetwynd, died of a fever caught while attending a trial at the Old Bailey in 1749. Their second, William Henry Chetwynd, succeeded to Grendon, but he had no children when he died in 1755, though twice married, and he left Grendon and an estate of £3,000 a year to his brother’s granddaughter, Mary Blundell.

Anson Street, in the heart of Rugeley … the Anson family, later Earls of Lichfield, bought the ‘Manor’ of Rugeley from the Chetwynd family in 1768 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Mary Blundell was a granddaughter of John Chetwynd of Weeping Cross, between Stafford and Rugeley, and a daughter of Montague Blundell, Lord Blundell. Her second husband, General Lord Robert Bertie (1721-1782), was Governor of Cork (1762-1768) and Governor of Duncannon, Co Wexford (1768-1782). In 1768, Lord Robert sold what was described as the ‘manor’ of Rugeley to Thomas Anson of Shugborough, later Viscount Anson, who was succeeded in 1818 by his son Thomas William, later Earl of Lichfield.

When Mary died in 1800, these estate passed to a distant kinsman, Sir George Chetwynd (1739–1824) of Brocton Hall, who became a baronet in 1795. Brocton Hall, between Rugeley and Stafford and near Wolseley Bridge, was rebuilt by the Lichfield architect Joseph Potter in 1825 and was sold to a golf club in 1923; Grendon Hall remained in the Chetwynd family until it was demolished in 1933.

The title of baronet remains in this branch of the Chetwynd family, although the name of the present title holder, Sir Peter James Talbot Chetwynd, does not appear on the official roll.

Another branch of the Chetwynd family – although not descended from the Comberford family though Thomas Chetwynd and Dorothy Coleman – has also been associated with the same parts of Staffordshire. They are descended from Anthony Chetwynd, a younger brother of that Thomas Chetwynd, and have long been associated with Ingestre Hall and the title of Viscount Chetwynd. A Chetwynd heiress, Catherine Chetwynd, brought her family names and some of the estates into the Talbot family when she married John Talbot.

That branch of the Talbot family were given the title Earl Talbot, donated land for Saint Michael’s Church in Brereton, and gave their name to many places in the Rugeley area, including the Talbot Arms, associated with the ‘Poisoner of Rugeley’ William Palmer. After one Earl Tabot also became Earl of Shrewsbury, the pub became the Shrewsbury Arms, and is now known as ‘The Shrew’.

There was another marriage involving the Chetwynd and Talbot families that resulted in a sensational divorce case in 1865. But that, perhaps, is a story for another evening.

Brocton Hall, between Rugeley and Stafford … home to generations of the Chetwynd family of Rugeley

Further Reading:

HE Chetwynd-Stapylton, The Chetwynds of Ingestre, being a history of that family from a very early date (London: Longman & Green, 1892)

‘They have hanged my saintly Billy’ – how Wiiliam Palmer, the ‘Rugeley Poisoner’, went on a murder spree

William Palmer, the ‘Rugeley Poisoner’ or the ‘Prince of Poisoners’, depicted in the Illustrated Times

Patrick Comerford

In recent days, I have been recalling two tales of murder involving residents of Rugeley, although when I looked deeper into both stories they were not substantiated by the records or by contemporary evidence.

Dorothy Chatwynd was said to have strangled her husband Sir Walter Smyth, three times her age, and to have been executed by being burned to death. Dorthy was an aunt of Thomas Chetwynd, who married Dorothy Coleman, a granddaughter of William Comberford of Comberford Hall and the Moat House, Tamworth.

But when I looked into this story in greater depth, it turned out there is no primary evidence nor are there contemporary records of either the murder or of the supposed execution on Wolvey Heath in Warwickshire.

The second tale involves the sisters Elizabeth Cuting and Emma Hollinhurst, said to have been buried alive in the old churchyard in Rugeley on the capricious orders of Oliver Cromwell. But it takes only a little probing to realise how impossible this was: Cromwell died in 1658 and the sisters died in Rugeley almost 40 years later: Elizabeth in 1695 and Emma in 1696.

However, across the road from the ‘Old Chancel’ and the shared tomb of the two sisters Elizabeth and Emma, two headstones in Saint Augustine’s churchyard tell real stories of Victorian murders in Rugeley. One headstone, on the southside of the churchyard, is to Christina Collins, who was murdered on a canal boat near the church in 1839. Fresh flowers are still laid on her grave regularly.

The grave of Christina Collins, murdered on a canal boat in 1839 … fresh flowers are laid on her grave regularly (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Nearby, under the yew trees at the west end of the church, is the grave of John Parsons Cook, murdered by Dr William Palmer (1824-1856). Undoubtedly Palmer had many other victims, but Cook’s murder was the only one for which he was convicted, and he was executed 170 years ago, in 1856.

Palmer is known as the ‘Rugeley Poisoner’ or the ‘Prince of Poisoners’. He poisoned his friend with strychnine, but he was also suspected of poisoning several other people, including his brother, his mother-in-law and four of his infant children – and there may have been many more. Charles Dickens called him ‘the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey’.

But why did he do it? Palmer made large sums of money from the deaths of his wife and brother by collecting on life insurance, he had defrauded his wealthy mother, and may have murdered his own children rather than bearing the expense of feeding and clothing them. And, it seems, it was all to feed an insatiable gambling addiction.

William Palmer was born at Church Croft House in Rugeley, between the canal and the ‘Old Chancel’ on 6 August 1824, the sixth of eight children of Joseph and Sarah Palmer. His father, a sawyer who made his fortunes in coalmining and collieries, died when William was 12, leaving his widow Sarah with a legacy of £70,000, the equivalent today of about £9.5 million.

At 17, Palmer was apprenticed to a chemist in Liverpool, but after three months he was dismissed amid allegations of theft and embezzlement. He was then taken on as a ‘walking pupil’ at Stafford Infirmary, went to London to study medicine at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, and received a diploma from the Royal College of Surgeons. He returned to Rugeley at the age of 22 in August 1846, styling himself Dr Palmer and setting up practice as a local GP.

Palmer met a plumber and glazier George Abley at the Lamb and Flag public house in Little Haywood, near Wolseley Bridge and half-way between Rugeley and Stafford. There Palmer challenged Abley to a drinking contest; Abley was carried home and died in bed. Nothing was ever proved, but local people noted how Palmer showed an interest in Abley’s attractive wife.

A year later, Palmer married 20-year-old Ann Thornton, also known as Ann Brookes, in Saint Nicholas Church, Abbot’s Bromley, on 7 October 1847. Her mother, also called Ann Thornton, was the mistress of Colonel William Brookes, a former East India Company office who had lived in Stafford. After Brookes died by suicide in 1834, she had inherited a fortune of £8,000, worth about £1.35 million today.

The elder Anne Thornton had lent Palmer money, and she died on 18 January 1849, two weeks after she came to stay with him. An elderly Dr Bamford recorded a verdict of apoplexy while Palmer, for his part, was disappointed with the smaller-than-expected inheritance he and his wife gained from the death.

Palmer became interested in horse racing and borrowed money from Leonard Bladen. They had met at the races, Bladen lent him £600, and then he died at Palmer’s house on Anson Street on 10 May 1850. Bladen’s wife was surprised to find that he died with little money on him despite having recently won a large sum at the races, that his betting books were missing, and there was no evidence that he had ever lent money to Palmer. The death certificate said Palmer was ‘present at the death’ and the cause of death was an ‘injury of the hip joint, 5 or 6 months; abscess in the pelvis’.

Palmer’s first son, William Brookes Palmer (1848-1926), outlived his father. But his four other children all died in infancy, and the cause of death for each child was given as ‘convulsions’. At the time, no one seems to have suspected anything untoward about these deaths, but after Palmer's conviction many suggested he had poisoned them to avoid the cost of feeding them.

An image of William Palmer on a tourist notice board on Market Street in Rugeley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

By 1854, Palmer was heavily in debt and was forging his mother’s signature to pay off creditors. He took out life insurance on his wife, paying a premium of £750 for a policy of £13,000. She died soon after, on 29 September 1854, at 27.

Palmer was still heavily in debt, owing £12,500 and £10,400 to two creditors, who threatened to speak to his mother and expose his fraud. He then took out life insurance on his alcoholic brother Walter, paying a premium of £780 for a policy of £14,000, and then plied Walter with several bottles of gin and brandy a day until he died on 16 August 1855. The insurance company refused to pay out, sent two inspectors to investigate the policy and demanded a further inquiry into Walter’s death.

By then, Palmer was having an affair with his 18-year-old housemaid, Eliza Tharme. Nine months after Anne’s death she gave birth on 26 or 27 June 1855 to a son Alfred, only adding to the doctor’s financial burdens. Palmer’s life and debts were spiralling out of control and he set about plotting the murder of his friend John Parsons Cook, a sickly young man who had inherited a fortune of £12,000.

Palmer and Cook went to the races in Shrewsbury in November 1855, where they bet on a number of horses. Cook won £3,000 but Palmer lost heavily. The pair had a party to celebrate but Cook began to complain that his gin had burnt his throat, fell violently ill and told two friends: ‘I believe that damn Palmer has been dosing me.’ The two men returned to Rugeley on 15 November, and Cook booked a room at the Talbot Arms. A day earlier, Palmer received a letter from a creditor named Pratt, who threatened to visit his mother to demand repayments.

By then, five-month-old Alfred was unwell and he died of erysipelas, a bacterial infection, on 17 November 1855. That same day, Cook thought he had recovered from his illness, met Palmer again for a drink, but became sick yet again.

At this point Palmer assumed responsibility for Cook. Cook’s solicitor, Jeremiah Smith, sent over a bottle of gin, and when a chambermaid took a sip she became ill. Cook was given the rest of the gin, and his vomiting became worse. A day later, Palmer bought three grains of strychnine from a Dr Salt, put them in two pills and gave them to Cook along with two ammonia pills. Cook died in agony at about 1 am on 21 November, screaming that he was suffocating.

When Cook’s stepfather, William Stevens, arrived in Rugeley on 23 November, Palmer told him Cook had lost his betting books, that all bets were cancelled and that Cook had £4,000 in outstanding debts. When Stevens demanded an inquest, Palmer produced a death certificate from an 80-year-old Dr Bamford giving the cause of death as ‘apoplexy’.

The Talbot Arms on the left and Palmer’s house to the right … an image of Market Street, Rugeley, at the time of Palmer’s trialin 1856

At a post mortem in the Talbot Arms on 26 November, Palmer interfered and took away the stomach contents in a jar, supposedly for ‘safekeeping’. When a second post mortem was held three days later on 29 November, the local postmaster Samuel Cheshire intercepted letters to the coroner and gave them to Palmer, and was later jailed for interfering with the mail. Palmer wrote directly to the coroner, asking for a verdict of death due to natural causes and enclosing a £10 note.

The jury delivered a verdict on 15 December saying Cook had ‘died of poison wilfully administered to him by William Palmer’. Palmer was arrested for murder and forgery, was held in Stafford Gaol, and put on trial at the Old Bailey in London on the grounds that a fair jury could not be found in Staffordshire. When the bodies of Ann and Walter Palmer were exhumed and reexamined, Walter was too badly decomposed to make any new findings but antimony was found in all the organs in Ann’s body.

Palmer’s was defended by Sir William Shee (1804-1868). The chemist Dr Salt and another chemist, Charles Roberts, admitted selling Palmer strychnine, believing he was going to poison a dog, but both had failed to record the sales in their poisons books. At the trial, Palmer’s finances and debts were detailed, showing he had only £9 in the bank on 3 November 1855. A man desperately in need of money to avoid the debtors’ prison at all costs had murdered his friend for his money and tried to cover his tracks by sabotaging the post-mortem.

It is said 30,000 people gathered at Stafford Gaol on 14 June 1856 to see Palmer’s public hanging. As he stepped onto the gallows, he looked at the trapdoor and exclaimed, ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ He was not yet 32. He was buried beside the prison chapel in a grave filled with quicklime. After his execution, his mother is said to have cried out: ‘They have hanged my saintly Billy.’ Her words inspired the title of Robert Graves's final historical novel, They Hanged My Saintly Billy (1957).

The grave of John Parsons Cook in the churchyard of Saint Augustine’s Church, Rugeley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The only victim for whose murder Palmer was convicted, John Parsons Cook, was buried in Saint Augustine’s churchyard, close to the grave of Christina Collins, who was murdered on a canal boat in 1839, close to the house where Palmer was born and was living as a child, and across the street from the ‘Old Chancel’ and the tomb shared by Elizabeth Cuting and Emma Hollinhurst, with effigies depicting them in tied, linen shrouds.

The Vicar of Rugeley had so many people visiting the churchyard to see where Cook was buried that he paid for a gravestone with two lines of Scripture: ‘Enter not into the path of the wicked. Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away’ (Proverbs 4: 14-15).

As for the Talbot Arms, where Palmer murdered Cook and where the sabotaged post-mortem had taken place, it took its name from the Talbot family, a local family of titled magnates who were descended from John Chetwynd, a first cousin of Dorothy Chetwynd, the alleged husband-killer.

John Chetwynd’s great-granddaughter, Catherine Chetwynd, who inherited Ingestre Hall and 10,500 acres in Staffordshire, married John Talbot (1710-1756) in 1748. The Talbot family owned coalmines, collieries and large tracts of land in Rugeley, Brereton and Cannock, and the Crown, a coaching inn on Market Street in Rugeley, was renamed the Talbot Arms.

It is part of the local lore in Rugeley that the name of the Talbot Arms was changed to the Shrewsbury Arms after Palmer’s hanging because of the embarrassing associations with Palmer’s murder of Cook and the subsequent inquest.

However, once again, this is probably another example of myth trumping history. The pub had been known as the Crown until 1810, when its name was changed to the Talbot Arms in honour of the grandson of Catherine Chetwynd and John Talbot, Charles Chetwynd Chetwynd-Talbot (1777-1849), 2nd Earl Talbot and later Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1817-1821).

In the next generation, his son Henry John Chetwynd-Talbot (1803-1868) was Conservative MP for Armagh (1831), Dublin (1831-1833) and South Staffordshire (1837-1849). He succeeded his father as the 3rd Earl Talbot and 3rd Viscount Ingestre on 10 January 1849. Then, on 19 August 1856, a mere two months after Palmer’s execution, Talbot succeeded a distant cousin in the Talbot family as the 18th Earl of Shrewsbury and 18th Earl of Waterford.

The line of succession was not clear or obvious, and there were other claimants to fend off, including distant Talbot Irish kinsmen in Co Wexford and in Malahide. The House of Lords eventually ruled in favour of the Rugeley claimant, and the Talbot Arms in Market Street celebrated the occasion, changing its name to the Shrewsbury Arms.

Today the pub boasts the more trendy but less classy name of ‘The Shrew’ … possibly in the hope that the name will tame any future potential imitators of William Palmer.

Palmer is less well-known than Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen (1862-1910) nor is he as notorious as Dr Harold Shipman (1946-2004). But he remains the most prolific murderer in Rugeley and part of local lore and history.

The Talbot Arms, where Palmer murdered Cook, later became the Shrewsbury Arms and is now called ‘The Shrew’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The Chetwynd murders in Rugeley: but did Dorothy strangle her husband, and was she burned at the stake?

Brocton Hall, between Rugeley and Stafford … home to generations of the Chetwynd family of Rugeley

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 and one-time Master of the Guild at Lichfield, 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.

The effigies in Elford of Sir Walter Smyth and his first two wives, Anne Staunton and Lady Isabella Neville, in Elford … but what happened to his third wife? (Photograph Mike Searle, 2015, CCL licence)

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 Rugeley area lived at Ingestre Hall

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.

Saint Michael’s Church, Brereton … the site was provided by Earl Talbot almost 200 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

A return visit to Wolseley after 55 years and lunch in the Wolseley Arms

The Wolseley Arms, by the River Trent, near Rugeley in Staffordshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

I think it must be about 55 years since I previously Wolseley and interviewed Sir Charles Wolseley for the Lichfield Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury.

I was supposed to be training as a chartered surveyor through Jones Lang Wootton in Dublin and London and at the College of Estate Management, then part of Reading University, Charles Wolseley even offered to take me on as a trainee with him at Smiths Gore in Lichfield. Butat that age I had my heart set on becoming a journalist instead.

I was about 19 at that time, and that interview and feature secured my first freelance contract, writing a short series of features for the Lichfield Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury.

I have since passed Wolseley on the route between Stafford and Lichfield a number of times, but some inexplicable reason had never paid a return visit in all those years. I revisited it for the first time last week, when I decided to hop off the Stafford-Lichfield bus at Wolseley Bridge to have lunch at the Wolseley Arms, to walk by the River Trent and the lakes, and to visit the Wolseley Centre on the former Wolseley estate.

Woseley Bridge replaced a mediaeval bridge swept away in a flood in 1795 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Family tradition says the Wolseley estate was given to the family in Anglo-Saxon times by King Edgar in 975 AD as a reward for ridding the area of wolves. As a reminder of that tradition, the Wolseley family adopted the motto Homo Homini Lupus (‘Man is a wolf towards his fellow man’), with a hunting dog in the shield of their coat of arms and a wolf’s head as the crest.

The Wolseley Arms sits on the banks of the River Trent, beside Wolseley Bridge, about 3 km (2 miles). A mediaeval wayfarers’ chapel was built on the bridge, supposedly on the central arch, but it was swept away with the rest of the bridge in 1795.

The pub is said to date back to the 15th century and originally was a hunting lodge on the Wolseley estate before being transformed into a coaching inn on the Liverpool-London route, and at one time, as a staging post for coaches, over 100 horses were kept at the Wolseley Arms.

The Wolseley Arms, said to date back to the 15th century, was known for some decades as the the Roebuck Inn (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The Wolseley Arms was the regular meeting place of the founder members of the Trent and Mersey Canal Co over 250 years ago. The first public meeting of the canal company, chaired by Granville Leveson-Gower (1721-1803), Earl Gower and later Marquess of Stafford, met there on 30 December 1765. When work on building the canal started, the inaugural spade-full of soil was dug out by Josiah Wedgewood at a point close by the inn. The stone section of the canal was completed in 1771.

Much to the chagrin of Sir Charles Wolseley (1769-1846), the seventh baronet, the coach traffic at the Wolseley Arms included the ‘Convict Van’ that stopped there in June 1834 to change horses and feed the convicts. The 18 prisoners were each offered a meal of white bread, cold beef and half a pint of ale.

Wolseley had a radical reputation and might have been expected to be more sympathetic to the plight of prisoners: as a young man in Paris, it is said, he took part in the storming of the Bastille in 1789; and in 1820, a year after his election as an MP, he was jailed for 18 months on charges of sedition and conspiracy.

A faded image of Wolseley Hall in the Wolseley Arms (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The Wolseley Arms changed its name to the Roebuck Inn after the original Roebuck on the other side of the road closed in the 1870s. Apparently, the pub had become known as a place of ill-repute and the Wolseley family did not want their name linked with a place like that.

The old name was partly restored and it became the Roebuck and Wolseley Arms around 1952, and it was still known as both the Wolseley Arms and the Roebuck Inn in 1963, when the Rugeley Times suggested it was one of the few pubs in England known by two names and with two signs to reflect this.

However, only the Wolseley Arms sign remained by 1973. The Wolseley Arms was enlarged that year and given a makeover with a mediaeval theme. It was renovated again in July 1982 when it was officially opened by the photographer Patrick Anson, 5th Earl of Lichfield.

Viscount Wolseley’s coat-of-arms from his ex libris bookplate

The interior decorations and fittings include many mementoes of the Wolseley family, including a faded and jaded image of Wolseley Hall, the seat of the Wolseley family, which was damaged by fire in the 1950s and finally demolished in 1966.

Interestingly, the only portraits on the walls of the Wolseley Arms of members of the Wolseley family are two of Field Marshal Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833-1913), 1st Viscount Wolseley. But he was actually from the Irish branch of the family, seated at Mount Wolseley in Co Carlow, and was born in Golden Bridge House, Inchicore, Dublin. When his military career was recognised with a peerage in 1885, he paid tribute to his family’s roots in Staffordshire, taking the title of Viscount Wolseley, of Wolseley in the County of Stafford.

In a similar vein, the only heraldic emblem of the Wolseley family decorating the interior of the Wolseley Arms is Viscount Wolseley’s coat-of-arms from his ex libris bookplate.

A portrait of Dublin-born Field Marshal Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833-1913), 1st Viscount Wolseley, in the Wolseley Arms (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Outside, the Wolseley Arms has managed to mistakenly present the Wolseley coat-of-arms that gives the pub its name. The original arms display a white shield with a red talbot or hunting dog (argent, a talbot passant gules), but on the pub sign the dog has turned in colour to black (argent, a talbot passant sable), the helmet is that of an untitled man rather than a baronet, black and white feathers – seen often in ‘bucket shop’ or AI generated cheap versions of heraldry – have replaced the wolf’s head that was a play on the family’s name and the legend of clearing wolves from this part of Staffordshire, and the displays are devoid of the motto echoing the family legend, Homo Homini Lupus.

I admit to being a heraldry nerd, but I also have a life-long familiarity with the Wolseley arms in heraldry: they are an inversion of the colours on the Comberford and Comerford coat-of-arms (gules, a talbot passant argent), and there were close links between the two families over many generations.

I remember an earlier sign with the correct colours, and hope that this mistake in presenting the Wolseley arms can be rectified by the Wolseley Arms, of all places.

The Wolseley arms at the Wolseley Arms … with the wrong colours and missing the wolf's head crest and the motto referring to the wolf legend (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The Wolseley Arms is a charming country pub and one of the 180 country pubs in Vintage Inn group that includes the Hedgehog in Lichfield and the Fish and Eel at Dobb’s Weir, near Hoddesdon.

After an enjoyable lunch there, I walked along the banks of the River Trent and under Wolseley Bridge, and then across to the Wolseley Centre in the former gardens of Wolseley Hall. Sir Charles Wolseley took a brave step in 1987 when he returned to Wolseley with plans to open the 45-acre landscaped gardens, attracting 250,000 visitors a year.

Wolseley Garden Park cost £1.73 million and was opened by Lord Rothschild in 1990. But the place only took in between £26,000 and £30,000 on gate receipts in its first year. The bank withdrew funding before the garden park was completed, and so had little chance of succeeding. Charles was made bankrupt in 1996 with mounting debts of £2.5 to £3 million, which he blamed on the recession and high interest rates.

The sad failure of that promising venture ended with the Wolseley family losing the 1,490 acre estate and a home that had passed down through successive generations for 1,000 years or more – the latest generation had failed to keep the wolf from the door.

The Wolseley Visitor Centre and Nature Reserve opened in the ground of the former Wolseley estate in 2019 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The Wolseley Visitor Centre and Nature Reserve has been a nature reserve and the headquarters of the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust since 2003.

Sir Charles Wolseley died at the age of 73 on 5 March 2018, and his funeral took place in Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda Catholic Church, Rugeley. The site at the Wolseley Centre was redeveloped later that year, and opened as the Wolseley Visitor Centre and Nature Reserve in 2019. The grounds extend to 11 ha (26 acres), including woodlands, lakes, pools and marshland with wildlife habitats, a boardwalk around the pools and marshland, wildflower meadows and display gardens, a sensory garden a café with views across the lake.

In the afternoon April sunshine, I hopped back on the Stafford to Lichfield bus outside the Wolseley Centre, and on a whim decided to stop off in Rugeley before continuing on to Lichfield and Evening Prayer in Lichfield Cathedral. But more about Rugeley, its churches, and some more memories from 55 years ago in the days to come, hopefully.


A walk in April sunshine by the lakes at the Wolseley Centre and nature reserve (Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Martin Noell’s almshouses in Stafford, his legacy in slave-trading and bribery, and his death in the plague

Sir Martin Noell’s Almshouses on Earl Street, Stafford, built in 1660 for 12 poor residents of the townn (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

Close to the town centre of Stafford, Saint Mary’s Church, the courts, Victoria Park and the train station, Sir Martin Noell’s Almshouses form an impressive set of stone buildings on Earl Street. Their small scale contrasts with the large modern block of flats on the opposite corner and the even larger court building next door.

Behind the doors of the almshouses is a hidden chapel. But behind those walls too are stories of slavery and the slave trade, political intrigue and buying office and favour, pirates and debt, plague and death.

Sir Martin Noell (1614-1665) built the almshouses in 1660 for 12 poor residents of the town, and the 12 residents were also given a small pension and a coal allowance from Stafford Corporation.

Noell’s almshouses in Earl Street, also called ‘The College’ or ‘the Old Almshouses’, were built in a Tudor or Jacobean style on a U-plan with a central chapel. This is a group of single storey units with attics, with a central chapel, grouped around three sides of a quadrangle. They have a symmetrical six-window central range, with the chapel breaking forward under a shaped gable with short flanking embattled parapets.

The chapel has a pointed entrance with continuous mouldings in a square-headed architrave, flanking pilasters. A segmental pedimental feature over a drip has a raised panel supporting an architraved panel with the Noell arms, and flanking Doric columns on enriched plinths. The mediaeval stained-glass windows in the chapel are said to have come from the old chapel in Stafford Castle, and in the past the Sub-Rector of Saint Mary’s Collegiate Church held a weekly service there.

The substantial garden in front of the almshouses has shrubbery but no boundary wall, leaving a clear view of the 17th century stone building.

The almshouses have a central chapel with a pointed entrance (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Noell had specific demands about the residents who should benefit from his almshouses. He wrote that one should house an ‘ancient, impoverished minister or some other unblamable Christian qualified with the ability to read and pray daily with the poor.’ Another of the 12 properties should be for ‘a matronly woman who should have an oversight of such as at any time fall sick.’

Noell also made provision for coal and an annual pension for the six poor men and six poor women who were residents. But due to his substantial financial losses before his death, funding for the almshouses and its 12 resident had to be sourced from other benefactors.

The almshouses remained in the hands of Noell’s family until 1691. They were then conveyed to the Mayor of Stafford and four burgesses as trustees, but no ‘alms-folk’ were appointed until 1701. They were later administered by the rectors of Saint Mary’s Collegiate Church and trustees.

The whole building was completely restored around 1866. During alterations in 1925, the front wall was lowered, the old stables and outhouses were demolished, and paving from Bank Passage was taken up and re-laid there. The almshouses were extended in 1960-1962, when the number of apartments was increased from 12 to 23. Today, Sir Martin Noell’s Almshouses are a Listed Grade II* building.

The mediaeval stained-glass windows in the chapel are said to have come from the old chapel in Stafford Castle (Photograph: John Dixon)

Sir Martin Noell (also spelt Noel), the younger son of Edward Noell, a mercer, was born in Stafford in 1614 and was baptised in Saint Mary’s Church on 11 March 1614, when his surname was spelt Nowell. He was MP for Stafford (1656-1659), a London alderman and a successful merchant, entrepreneur and financier who rose to prominence during the Parliamentarian era. He was also notorious for enriching himself through piracy, the slave trade and extracting taxes, and he played a prominent role in Cromwell’s colonial plans.

Noell climbed rapidly from provincial life in Stafford to dominate the transatlantic trade in sugar and other colonial merchandise. He used his brother’s business connections in London and his own marriage to the daughter of a wealthy City draper to enter that trade. While he never travelled far from his London countinghouse, by the late 1640s he was one of the merchant-planters on Barbados, the island at the centre of England’s sugar boom.

After Charles I was executed in 1649, Noell used his contacts to secure lucrative government contracts and to profit from a variety of customs and sales taxes. He collected taxes on salt while he was an investor in salt-production, profiting from both sides of the industry. Oliver Cromwell’s son Richard Cromwell described him as ‘the great salt-master of England’.

Noell’s friend and business partner Thomas Povey said Noell was ‘considerable everywhere … a person of the most spacious interest of any merchant or citizen’ in England’. With his vast financial resources, Noell made substantial loans to Cromwell’s government for its day-to-day running costs, and the Cromwellian regime may have depended on Noell for ready cash and credit more than on any other person. Noell also acted as private money-lender to Oliver Cromwell.

A map of Hispaniola by Nicholas Comberford of Ratcliffe in 1653 … Martin Noell was involved in organising and financing Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ against the Spanish colony of Hispaniola in 1655

Noell and Povey were involved in shaping government policies on the Caribbean colonies, particularly Barbados. Noell played a leading role in organising and financing Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ of 1655 against the Spanish colony of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and it is said Noell suggested the ‘Western Design’ to Cromwell.

However, the ‘Western Design’ was a fiasco, partly because profiteering by Noell and other contractors deprived the expedition of vital supplies and equipment. Driven out of Hispaniola with heavy losses, Cromwell’s troops took Jamaica instead.

But Noell, who owned a plantation in Barbados, managed to profit from the failed expedition and was further rewarded by Cromwell with a grant of 20,000 acres in Jamaica. These gave him a major stake in the English sugar industry and the slave trade that was part and parcel of it.

Noell’s plantation in Barbados had a large number of enslaved Africans working with the sugar-canes. He euphemistically referred to them as his ‘Christian servants’. However, after his re-election as MP for Stafford in 1659, the slaves and their conditions in Barbados brought Noell into conflict with other MPs in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament.

Noell was forced to defend himself against accusations in the Commons that he had violated English ‘liberties’ as a contractor by transporting royalist prisoners to indentured servitude on Barbados. The victims of his ‘most unchristian and barbarous usage’ alleged that they been ‘bought and sold … from one planter to another … as horses and beasts’.

Noell admitted transporting prisoners to the island, but denied he had sold them into slavery or that they had been treated harshly. He claimed the labour conditions for indentured servants on Barbados were better than those of the ‘common husbandman here’. The really hard work, the ‘grinding at the [sugar]-mills and attending at the furnaces or digging in the scorching island’ was mostly undertaken by African slaves, he protested.

Noell, who was joint Postmaster General from 1657 to 1659, survived the challenges in Parliament, and he continued to prosper after the fall of the protectorate and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The diarist Samue Pepys was surprised to hear that Noell had been knighted on 6 October 1662, but conceded that the Noell was still ‘a very useful man’.

A year later, in 1663, Noell invested heavily in England’s largest slave-trading venture, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa. He and Povey lobbied in the early 1660s for the establishment of a royal-sponsored West Indian company ‘for the better regulating and improving of foreign plantations’.

Noell was one of the first recorded victims of the Great Plague of London in 1665. Samuel Pepys wrote in his Diary in late September: ‘I hear for certain this night that Sir Martin Noell is this day dead of the plague in London, where he hath lain sick of it these eight days’. He was buried at Saint Olave, Old Jewry, on 30 September 1665.

A commemorative plaque and Sir Martin Noell’s coat-of-arms (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Noell’s debts at his death in 1665 amounted to over £30,000 – over £5.75 million in spending power today – including £1,747 (over £335,000 today) he owed ‘on a contract’ for slaves. Debts led to a major lawsuit by his children that was not settled until 1682.

An inventory of his mansion in St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, indicates Noell’s taste for exotic objects. The contents of his ‘Green Chamber’ included two cabinets, one of ebony, the other an Indian cabinet set on a frame. Many of the most exotic objects were in ‘Yr Lady’s Chamber or Closet’ and included Spanish tables, ‘Jappan trunks’, five figures of wood, two ‘China jarrs’, a snake’s skin, East India flower pots, furniture decorated with ‘East India beasts and birds’, two pieces of corral and one ostrich egg.

Through his loans and dealing with the Cromwellian regime, Noell drew the state into what had previously been the private business of colonisation and trade in the Atlantic. This marked an important step in developing British bases in the Caribbean and Cromwell’s role in growing a global empire.

Despite founding and endowing the almshouses in Stafford, Noell’s most enduring legacy is his role in colonialism, slavery and the slave trade, a legacy that Britain continues to struggle to come to terms with today.

Despite founding and endowing the almshouses in Stafford, Noell’s most enduring legacy is his role in colonialism, slavery and the slave trade (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)