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.
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.
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’.
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 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.
