Sir Thomas Overbury’s nephew, also called Sir Thomas
Overbury, was a magistrate who presided over one of the strangest cases in
English legal history – that of the Campden Wonder. It all started in 1659,
when John Perry, a servant of William Harrison, claimed that he had been
attacked by two swordsmen dressed in white in a field at Chipping Camden,
Gloucestershire. He had fought them off with his pitchfork, which showed cut
marks on the handle, although none of the other residents of Campden had seen
anyone suspicious in the neighbourhood.
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| Chipping Campden |
Chipping Campden was then a quaintly
straggling one-street village in the heart of the Cotswolds, noted mainly for
the ruined manor house that had been built by Sir Baptist Hicks, a wealthy silk
merchant, and had been deliberately burned down during the Civil War, to
prevent it falling into the hands of Parliamentarian soldiers. William Harrison
lived in what remained habitable of the manor, where he was the steward, or
‘factor’, of Lady Juliana Hicks, Countess Campden, daughter of Sir Baptist. One
market day in 1659, William and his family were ‘at the lecture’ in
church, a Puritan form of worship, when someone put a ladder up to window of
their home, climbed in and stole £140, belonging to Lady Campden. Now, it could
have been a wandering Cavalier or Roundhead soldier, expediently robbing the
quiet house, or it could have been John Perry, who made up the story of the two
swordsmen in white to deflect suspicion from himself and to inspire rumours
that there were thieves active in the area. We will never know, (but we can
guess).
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| Ebrington |
On August 16th 1660, William Harrison, then seventy years
old, left his home at Campden to walk to Charringworth, just two miles away, to
collect rents from Lady Campden’s tenants. When he didn’t return in the
evening, Mrs Harrison sent the servant, John Perry, to look for him. Neither
man nor master returned that night, which was not particularly unusual -
perhaps the old man had got talking to his friends and the hour had overtaken
him, so he decided to stay with them until daybreak. There is every chance that
he had done this before and so no questions were asked.
On the following
morning, Edward Harrison, son of William, walked out to find his father, and
met Perry on the road, who said he had not found the old man. Together they
walked on to Ebrington, a mile from Campden and midway to Carringworth, where
they were told that William Harrison had indeed called to collect the rents on
the previous evening. Then came the report that a hat, a shirt collar band and
a comb (a hat cockade, a kind of badge of office), had been found by a poor woman in a
gorse brake, between Campden and Ebrington. Edward and John sought the woman
out, identified the items as belonging to Harrison, and went to where they had
been found.
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| Gorse, Furze or Whin |
The hat and comb were both cut and there were
bloodstains on the collar band, but there was no blood found at the place where
the things were found. The whole village of Campden was roused, and everyone
set out to look for Harrison, but no body was found. Obviously, suspicion fell
on Perry, who was arrested and questioned by Justice Overbury. He had, he said,
gone from Campden between 8 and 9 pm, but had returned after looking in the
fields, had spent some time sheltering in Mr Harrison’s henhouse, then when the
moon came out, at about midnight, he had set out again for Carringworth, but a
mist had descended, he had got lost and slept under a hedge.
In the morning, he
went on to Carringworth, where he spoke to tenants who had paid £23 in rent to
Harrison on the previous evening. Harrison had set off for home, and had been
seen at Ebrington, but had then disappeared. Perry had then met Edward
Harrison, and the rest was as already stated. Perry was held in custody as more
enquiries were made.
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| Lady Juliana Hicks, Countess Campden |
Then, strangely, Perry told Overbury, that his brother,
Richard, and his mother, Joan, had long planned to rob Harrison of the rent
money, and when he had gone out to find his master, John had met his mother and
brother and the three of them had gone together, found Harrison near Ebrington,
where Richard had strangled the old man and given the rent money to his mother.
They had then taken the body into a garden and thrown it into a pond. Searches
were made in all the ponds around Campden but no body was forthcoming, but Joan
and Richard Perry were taken into custody. They proclaimed their innocence
vehemently, and upbraided John for lying, but he stuck to his story, declaring
that everything he said was the truth. He also told Overbury that Richard had
robbed the £140 from Harrison’s house, whilst John ‘had a Halibi’, in that he
was in church with his master. The Perrys were held until the Spring Assizes of
1661, when they were tried for the murder of William Harrison.
To the surprise
of all, John Perry pleaded ‘not guilty’ to the charge, saying that when
he gave his previous evidence, he was, “… then mad, and knew not what he
said.” Nonetheless, and notwithstanding that the body of William Harrison
had not been found, the jury found the Perrys guilty of murder and they were sentenced
to death. Joan Perry was hanged first – it was thought that she was a witch,
who held power over her sons, and if she were dead, this power would die with
her, enabling her sons to confess. Richard went to the gallows on Broadway
Hill, within sight of Campden, pleading with his brother to confess his
innocence but was hanged anyway. John, ‘dogged and surly’ was hanged in
chains on a gibbet on Broadway Hill, but immediately before he died, he said,
“…he knew nothing of his master's death, nor what was become of him, but they might hereafter possibly hear.”
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| Hanged in Chains |
So imagine the surprise of Sir Thomas Overbury JP,
when two years later he received a letter from William Harrison. It told a
story even stranger than the garbled sound and fury told by the idiot Perry.
Harrison claimed that he had left Campden in the afternoon of August 16th
1660, and had walked the two miles to Carringworth, where he found the tenants
were out in the fields, gathering the harvest. Unable to collect the full
rents, had had managed to take just £23, and had walked back to Campden. At the
furze brake at Ebrington, he had been attacked by three men in buckram, who had
stabbed him with their swords, beaten him and put him behind one of them on his
horse, securing his hands with something with a spring lock on it that had
snapped shut.
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| Robbery |
They covered his head with a cloak and rode away, and after
staying at various places along the way, they arrived eventually at a place by
the sea called Deal, where two of the men spoke to a sea captain – Harrison
heard the sum of seven pounds mentioned – and he was then taken aboard, and
sailed away for six weeks, during which time his wounds healed. One day,
Wrenshaw, the sea captain, sighted three Turkish ships, two of which came
alongside, and Harrison and others were transferred aboard them.
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| Smyrna |
They then
sailed on to Smyrna, where Harrison was sold as a slave to an eighty-seven year
old Turkish physician, who said he had once lived in Lincolnshire. Harrison was
made to work in cotton fields and to mix medicines for this Turk, who gave him
the name Boll and presented him with a double gilt silver bowl. One day, the
old Turk died and Harrison ran away, eventually using the bowl to pay for his
passage home, via Lisbon, Portugal.
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| Turkish Slave Market |
What are we to make of this? It is so mad and filled
with inconsistencies that it is obviously a tissue of lies. Why on earth would
three kidnappers target a seventy-year-old man? Why not just kill him and rob
him of the £23, rather than carry him on horseback across the south of England,
a distance of nearly two hundred miles? And why stab him, obviously making
their task that much harder? If they intended to sell him into slavery, why
damage the goods? Who would buy a seventy year-old slave, anyway? Que diable
allait-il faire dans cette galère? Are we to believe slavers were stealing
enough old men from England to make up a cargo-ship full of them?
These are
just the initial questions that spring to mind. Other more interesting
speculations are, where did Harrison actually go, and just what did he do for
two years? What caused him to write to Overbury – why admit to being back? What
could he gain from this? If he did it to steal the money, why not wait until he
had collected the full rents, rather than just £23? And why did John Perry make
up a story that eventually hanged not only himself, but his mother and brother
too? Was it some sort of misplaced Münchausen’s? Pure spite? Madness? We will
never know – but, as I have already said, we can guess.
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