A Judgement of Sir Ranulphe Crewe
This is a shorter version edited from “Blue Blood Like Blue Ink” (see About section).
Discountenanced
I thought I had found a brief memoir, some reminiscences of his life, but the few pages of notes at the back of great-grandfather’s tattered photograph album turned out to be a summary of the research he had been carrying out into the history of his aristocratic ancestors, the Crewe family. It was evident that he had dictated them and that his eldest daughter had typed them up. The purpose was, it seemed to me, to discover where all the titles and money had gone, as he was a well-off businessman but did not possess a stately home and estates or even, by the time he died, the Crewe name itself. On the final page, his daughter had tried to create a family tree but had become frustrated by the difficulty of drawing lines using the typewriter, so had resorted to a blue pen to make the connections. I remember thinking that this was more appropriate, as it looked like blue blood.
The central character from whom all lines emanated was Sir Ranulphe Crewe1, the founder of the Crewe dynasty. He was the epitome of the self-made man, who rose from relatively humble beginnings in Cheshire in the mid-sixteenth century to become Lord Chief Justice of the Kings Bench, the most powerful judge in the country, under not one, but two Kings: James I and Charles I. Not forgetting his roots – in fact he was obsessed by his genealogy – he built one of the largest houses in the North of England of the time, Crewe Hall, as well as maintaining a comfortable ‘town house’ in Westminster. I did my own brief scan of his achievements. He had his own Wikipedia page and an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and seemed to be best remembered for a quote about lost noble family names, but I noted that he received almost unanimously favourable testimonials from his peers and historians of the period. On his character: “…he did not seek to obtain the applause of the world; he was a modest man… contented with the approbation of his own conscience.” On his legal career: “…his legal honesty and political consistency raised him high in the estimation of all public-spirited men.” As Lord Chief Justice: “…there was never a more laudable appointment… he had patience in hearing, evenness of temper and kindness of heart.” There was just one flaw. In the summer of 1616, Sir Ranulphe Crewe was one of two senior judges who hanged six innocent women as witches, a decision for which they were censured by James I, a revelation in itself as the King had confirmed, and indeed broadened the scope, of the death penalty in his Witchcraft Act of 1604.
I could have left it at that. After four hundred years of praise, why not leave this unedifying stone unturned? But then I discovered that there still existed twenty-four pages of vellum manuscripts from the trial of the Bewitchment of John Smith (a Child) 1616 in the Lincoln Archives, and that a local historian had made a transcript.2
Sir Ranulphe Crewe was not meant to have been a judge at the trial at all. His colleague Sir Edward Coke, then Lord Chief Justice, had been accused of being disrespectful to King James I and as a punishment had been sent away from court to consider his behaviour and banned from presiding over the Midlands Circuit of the Assize Court. So, Sir Ranulphe had replaced him at the last moment instead. The case, heard in the Great Hall of Leicester Castle in July 1616, centred around the testimony of an eleven-year-old boy, John Smith, who was son of the Lord of the Manor of Husbands Bosworth. He had always been a sickly child but his illness had recently deteriorated into interminable convulsions, by day and night, in which he was struck blind and made strange animal noises. The doctors, having exhausted their available prognoses and treatments, were now convinced that he had been bewitched and, as an inevitable consequence, six local women had been arrested. These were named as: Randall; Lea; Hartstone; Fritter; Hawes and Halliday. Coming from a small village, they were all known to one another and, each holding a bundle of grievances, were not on speaking terms.
The contemporary accounts draw you in to the bustling courtroom as the boy made his appearance before the judges, Sir Ranulphe Crewe and Sir Humphrey Winch, the jury and the crowd of onlookers. John Smith was the only witness, and at seven o’clock in the morning of Wednesday 17th July 1616, as the attention of those taking their places turned towards him, he began to twitch nervously, which soon evolved into a fit. He thrashed about wildly then stood up, whinnying like a horse, barking like a dog, mewling like a cat, and croaking like a toad. He ripped open his shirt and began striking himself violently on his stomach with his fists, hundreds of times (the consensus of those who were counting was 432 blows). He then called for each of the ‘witches’ by name, and they were paraded before him, one by one, whilst being forced to recite their ‘charms’ until he was calmed. The main prosecutor, aware that there might be some scepticism, tried to prove that the witchcraft was genuine by tricking him, making one of the women recite a different woman’s charm, but the boy was not calmed until the correct combination was re-established. Next, the prosecutor hit the child with a riding whip and, whilst others held him down as best they could, stuck a pin into his earlobe until blood was drawn, neither of which elicited a reaction. This performance lasted for two hours, after which everyone was emotionally exhausted, and the court adjourned. A small group of gentlemen involved in the case was sent to visit the accused women, now back in the jail, to confirm to the judges how they pleaded. They reported back that three admitted their guilt (Hawes; Halliday; Lea), but three were adamant of their innocence (Randall; Fritter; Hartstone), although these latter had been implicated by the former. They also noted that Hartshorne was in a particularly poor state, sitting in a corner of her cell with her tongue hanging about two inches out of her mouth, and so swollen she could not put it back in.
The verdicts and sentencing occurred on the last day of the Assize Court and, given the graphic evidence of the irreproachable child, the jury found the six women guilty of witchcraft, the judges conferred for a few moments, and the sentence of death by hanging was confirmed. The next morning, the witches were taken by horse-drawn cart to the place of execution where, seeing John Smith standing (curiously still) between his father and mother, the three who had admitted guilt begged leave to ask for his forgiveness and prostrated themselves before him. His response was not recorded.
All of these tragic events would have been just another footnote of history3 had King James I not passed through Leicester on progress almost exactly a month later and been informed about the trial and its outcome. He sent for John Smith and his father and, accounting for the nervousness of the boy being brought before him at short notice, nevertheless found him not to be a credible witness and sent him to London to be further questioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Soon afterwards, having been separated from parental influence, the boy admitted faking his symptoms and was able, upon request, to act them out. Alarmingly, in the meantime, six more women from Husbands Bosworth had been accused and arrested, and King James immediately ordered their release. He then made his anger at Sir Ranulphe Crewe and Sir Humphrey Winch apparent, for which they were said to be “somewhat discountenanced” and their reputations were seriously damaged.
The Compromise Candidate
With hindsight, and the cultural gulf of four centuries, there are grounds for questioning Sir Ranulphe Crewe’s judgement. Why could the King immediately see through the subterfuge, but he did not? Surely the symptoms exhibited by children to indicate witchcraft – the seizures, being struck blind and dumb, the evocation of animal familiars – had been exposed enough times on record as counterfeit? The pressure children were put under by their fathers, particularly in Puritan households, was already understood to lead to false accusations in certain circumstances. Despite many prominent believers in witchcraft, there were many witchcraft deniers, who wrote books (and as an educated man Sir Ranulphe must have had a large library) and plays. Ben Johnson, assuming the mantle of England’s leading playwright after the death of Shakespeare, wrote “The Devil is an Ass” which comically highlighted the gullibility of judges in witchcraft trials, and was performed at the Blackfriars Theatre in London in the same year.
Having turned over the stone and found something unpalatable, I needed to find out if this was just one fatal misjudgement in an exemplary career, or sign of an inherent weakness of character, so I began researching the primary sources for the period4 for any mention of Sir Ranulphe Crewe. The new evidence painted a quite different picture from the deferential biographical testimonials.
Ranulphe Crewe had already sustained a long and admirable, but not remarkable, career when quite unexpectedly in 1614, aged 56, he was nominated as the compromise candidate for Speaker of the House of Commons, three weeks before the new parliament began. He was not an obvious choice by any means: he was a seasoned lawyer, but had not achieved a position of seniority typically required for such a posting; he also had very little experience of Westminster, and had only just been appointed MP for the obscure seat of Saltash in Cornwall, a ‘rotten borough.’ But he must have possessed a sufficiently affable viewpoint for the job, neither too royalist nor too anti-royalist. His inexperience of the procedures, customs and etiquette of government was to cause problems though, as it resulted in an inability to control the debates and the boisterous members. What became known as the Addled Parliament lasted only a few weeks and no bills were passed, with much of the blame falling on his shoulders. Despite this, King James, who was known to distrust parliament, appeared to be satisfied and Ranulphe Crewe was knighted, and promoted to Serjeant-at-Law.
Two years later, in the spring of 1616, a few months before he headed out for Leicester, Sir Ranulphe Crewe had a prominent role in one of the most notorious trials of the reign of King James I. The first royal ‘favourite’ Sir Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and his wife Frances Howard, had been accused of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury who had stood in the way of their marriage. This involved allegations of a conspiracy with others – the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, a Jailer, a Widow, an Apothecary, and a deceased Doctor dealing in sorcery – to put arsenic in his food that would slowly, and therefore deniably, kill him. The proximity of the King to these accusations caused alarm, and the trials were closely stage managed. Frances Howard pleaded guilty, taking everyone by surprise, but Robert Carr’s trial went ahead, and it was Sir Ranulphe Crewe’s role to prove that he had attempted to cover up all evidence of the crime, by coaching the co-accused in what to say, altering or destroying evidence, and seeking a general pardon from the King for a whole raft of possible crimes, into which he had surreptitiously inserted a clause on poisoning. Sir Ranulphe’s input, along with his fellow prosecutors, achieved its aim and Sir Robert Carr was found guilty, although this led to a long spell in the Tower of London, and not to the scaffold. Sir Ranulphe, celebrating as a member of the King’s victorious team of senior legal advisers, would have entered that fatal summer in a positive, possibly arrogant, mood.
In 1617, in the wake of the fall-out from the scandalous John Smith trial, Sir Ranulphe Crewe returned to private practice and appeared, briefly, in the diary of Anne Clifford, wife of the 3rd Earl of Dorset and owner of Knole in Kent, as the lawyer representing her in the long-running legal battle to regain her ancestral lands. This seemed to suit both his professional expertise, and his personal interest in legacy and inheritance, to such an extent that he must have been mortified when the case was lost and only resolved in her favour decades later. Anne Clifford’s father, a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, had left her a sizeable dowry on his death, but had bequeathed his estates – consisting mainly of four dilapidated castles in Westmoreland and one in Yorkshire – to his brother Francis. Anne would spend the majority of her life fighting to regain these territories, and in doing so, quite inadvertently created a set of unique resources for future historians including her diary (initially begun to record the various legal conversations and agreements), the “Great Book of Records” containing all of the stories and legal documents relating to her family going back to the twelfth century, and “The Great Picture”, a huge painting sixteen feet wide and nine feet tall from 1646, which was commissioned to celebrate the much longed-for repossession of her lands. This had three panels: one representing her as a young woman when she should have inherited her castles; the central panel showing her parents and two brothers who had both died young; and the final one of her as a proud middle-aged woman who had taken on the male establishment – in particular her husband, and King James I – and won, albeit after a long wait.
A few years later, his past misdemeanours having been forgotten or forgiven, Sir Ranulphe Crewe was elevated to Lord Chief Justice in 1525 by James I. This was yet another example of being the compromise candidate, as he was promoted from a small pool of potential applicants as being acceptably equidistant between the excesses of his two predecessors – neither too obnoxious nor too open to outside influence. However, James I was already ill with a fever, and died of a stroke a few weeks later, after which Charles I succeeded to the throne. As with his father, he was perennially short of funds and fought with parliament, eventually resorting to imposing an emergency tax – a forced loan – on his citizens. As the chief judge, it fell to Sir Ranulphe Crewe to make the final decision as to the legality of this and, possibly having witnessed Anne Clifford stand up to institutional power, he declared that no tax in whatever form could be laid upon the people without the authorisation of parliament, and was unceremoniously sacked by Charles I.
The dismissal left him without a job and a pension, which only exacerbated his financial problems. In the background, Sir Ranulphe Crewe had been building his legacy – a large red brick and stone mansion with twenty bedrooms and a huge stacks of chimneys for its forty fireplaces, standing on five hundred acres of land. He had managed to purchase the Manor of Crewe in 1608, but construction did not begin until 1615. Ten years later progress was already well behind schedule – due mainly to its scale, the lack of local workers with the necessary skills, and the tedious decision-making process between London and Cheshire – and as a result of his reduced circumstances it would take a further twenty-one years until 1636 to complete, at which point Sir Ranulphe was an old man of 78 and his wife had died several years earlier. His fear of missing out on any recall to office meant that he had rarely left his London house from where he pleaded directly by letter to the King and his main adviser the Duke of Buckingham, who both ignored him, and sought patronage from friends in Westminster. But there was no way back, and worse was to come when Civil War broke out in the 1640s and the newly completed Crewe Hall was ransacked and plundered of all his possessions and occupied by Parliamentarian forces. When he revised his will for the final time before his death in January 1646, noting in the margins where the money was now gone and the legacies missing, Sir Ranulphe was convinced that his credit would fail and that his heirs would inherit only debts.
Judgement
Just three portraits, and some printed derivatives, of Sir Ranulphe Crewe are in the public domain. In all three, he is an elderly man – in his late sixties and then mid-eighties – pale and grey. In the first, he has been appointed Lord Chief Justice, and you can imagine the painting hung on a long gallery wall, just one of a succession of similar images of previous and subsequent holders of that post. In the others, which are similar in pose and style, he is nearly twenty years older and coming towards the end of his life – living out of the public eye, and purse – so he is wearing black to reflect his poverty and anonymity, and only his face and hands stand out. These seem destined for his spiritual home at Crewe Hall, over a large stone fireplace in a wood-panelled study, tucked away down an infrequently visited hallway, as an understated reminder of the former owner.
As well as the context of the sitter, there is also the context of the viewer to consider. When I first learned that he was an ancestor, I regarded Sir Ranulphe’s portraits, especially the first, with awe and respect. I saw a great man dressed in his robes of state, with his firm, but fair, lawyerly gaze; who had created a lineage that generations later included barons and lords and, down a minor branch, along gradually fainter blue lines, my family.
But now – armed with knowledge of his failings and the flimsiness of his success, of his being promoted out of his depth as the eternal, last minute ‘compromise candidate’, of his blind pursuit of legacy at all cost, but most of all of his gullibility and guilt for the murder of six innocent women in what was, in effect, a lynching – those same brush strokes and pigments seem to reveal a different man. Instead, I perceive physical signs of spinelessness: a weak chin behind a sparse, white beard; a spindly body hidden under voluminous red fabric and ermine; crooked fingers that had pointed at each accused and co-signed their death warrants. It is this miscarriage of justice that plays on my mind; the sheer magnitude of the judgement and the lack of due diligence behind it. Where was the reported “patience in hearing, evenness of temper and kindness of heart?” He might have argued that he was never meant to be there and was given no time to prepare himself. He might point out that he had to rely on the evidence gathered by the prosecution, the admissions of guilt from (some of) the accused, and the conviction that he was following the directions of the King and the Law. He might seek to assign blame to his more assertive fellow judge. He would insist that I was not there to see the child – a boy of similar age to his own younger son – tortured by evil spirits before his very eyes. But I wonder if he ever relived those few aberrant days in 1616, over and over, trying to pinpoint the moment when he should have known he was being tricked? Or whether, on the journey up to his half-built mansion in Cheshire, he ever took a detour to the gallows at Leicester, or wandered incognito around the lanes of Husbands Bosworth, and repented? Or did a Jacobean legal mind simply not think like that?
Footnotes
- Ranulphe Crewe is referred to by a wide range of names: Ranulphe; Ranulf; Randolph; Randolf; Randulph; Randle, Randal and Randall. There were fewer variations of his surname: Crewe; Crew; Crue. In official documents he is often ‘Serjeant Crew’. In his will, he signed himself Ranulphe Crewe. ↩︎
- Ethel Ruskin (1893-1985), a writer and historian from Lincolnshire. Transcript provided by the archivists. ↩︎
- A letter from Robert Heyrick, an Alderman and former Mayor of Leicester, to his brother, dated July 18th 1616, summarises the same events. The mystery is that he mentions nine women who are hanged as witches. He does not appear to have been personally present at the trial and had received his information in a letter from an unknown source (“…and the examinations and finding out of the matter came to my hand in writing just as I began your letter.”). The archival documents only refer to the six named women. ↩︎
- The Calendar of State Papers; Cobbett’s State Trials; The Lives of the Chief Justices; Ormerod’s History of Cheshire; John Chamberlains Letters; and several others. ↩︎