“The business is done,” Charles Drew said to Humphreys as they turned their backs upon the house. They had come thither at eleven o’clock that night, armed with a fowling-piece loaded with leaden slugs. Humphreys had crept towards the dwelling, but his nerve had failed him, and he refused to pull the trigger. Drew thereupon seized the weapon himself and struck his father down the instant the door was unbarred.
The father was discovered dead on the 1st of February, 1740. Borrow’s account opens upon a household long fractured. The elder Drew lived apart from his wife and maintained a sullen, hostile reserve towards his children. He had five daughters and an only son, Charles. The latter, having come of age, had formed an attachment to Elizabeth Boyer. She pressed for marriage; he urged patience, protesting that his father would disinherit him were he to wed precipitately. In the exchange recorded by the chronicle, Boyer expressed the wish that someone might shoot “the old dog.”
This discourse was overheard in January, on a day unspecified. Borrow nowhere affirms that Boyer was subsequently privy to the pact struck with Humphreys; her reckless utterance does not suffice to implicate her in the contrivance of the murder. The narrative proceeds to relate that Charles had repaired to the Chelmsford assizes, where he fell in with smugglers, among them Humphreys—a fellow described by Borrow as ever ripe for desperate undertakings. Drew opened to him a scheme whereby, he asserted, the man might make his fortune, promising him an annuity of two hundred pounds, together with a further sum, if he would make away with his father.
Humphreys wavered, then consented. On the night of the 31st of January, they walked together towards the house, the gun primed and charged. Their parts had been concerted beforehand: Charles was to remain at a distance while Humphreys knocked at the door and discharged the piece the moment the old man came to parley. Yet, as they drew near the threshold, Humphreys’ courage faltered. He flung down the fowling-piece, declaring he would have no hand in the slaughter.
Drew commanded him to hold his peace on pain of death. Picking up the weapon, he advanced to the door and waited until his father opened it. The discharge killed the old man upon the spot. Humphreys did not retract his refusal; Drew had taken the deed upon himself. The two men fled together, and the son made known to him that the business was done.
Humphreys made for Dunmow, where he was appointed to meet certain smugglers that night, and thence pushed on to London. An inquest was held over the body. Learning that suspicion had fallen upon him, he returned into the country and was taken into custody. He did not immediately denounce Drew. It was the interception of their letters that laid bare the nature of their traffic. In his subsequent deposition, Humphreys related that, upon meeting Drew some a fortnight after the crime, he had asked whether he felt no remorse for his father’s death. Drew replied that he felt none: had his father lived, he averred, he would have brought the entire family to ruin.
Humphreys thus wore two faces in the proceedings. He had entered into the bloody covenant, then balked at the trigger; yet he was also the man who later delivered to the magistrates the tale of the shot fired by Drew. The chronicle itself invites the reader to weigh his credibility, nor does it absolve him of the preparatory design. Yet his initial flight, his return upon discovering he was pursued, and the seized correspondence bound the two men fast long before his testimony at the bar.
As the net tightened about Humphreys, Drew laboured to cast suspicion far from himself. He took coach for London and petitioned the Crown for a royal pardon to be granted to any accomplice who had not personally struck the blow. A proclamation was inserted in the London Gazette under the authority of the Secretary of State. Drew then went so far as to publish an offer of a hundred pounds reward to whosoever should bring the murderer to conviction. The gesture wore the colour of civic zeal; in truth, the chronicler discerns therein a stratagem to divert inquiry from his own person without directly accusing Humphreys.
The depositions against Humphreys mounted nonetheless. Drew strained every nerve to have them suppressed, seeking to discredit what evidence had already been gathered. He publicly maintained that Humphreys had never fired the shot, and threatened to sue the officer who had apprehended him. All the while, he remitted money to the prisoner—twenty pounds, with the promise of a hundred more. Humphreys was thus induced to bide his time or recast his tale, while Drew’s survival rested upon sealing his accomplice’s lips.
Living obscurely in London, Charles went by the name of Roberts; Humphreys, with whom he corresponded, had assumed that of John Smith. Letters passing between these feigned names fell at length into the hands of one Timothy Drew, a gentleman who bore no kinship to the family beyond the accident of a common surname. He journeyed to London resolved to run the murderer to earth. Charles was apprehended, examined for upwards of six hours, and committed to Newgate under a formidable guard.
Within the walls of the gaol, he sought once more to purchase his deliverance. He delivered to the turnkey, Jonathan Keate, a bond assigning half his estate, upon condition that the gaoler suffer him to escape and bear him company into France. To bind Keate yet more firmly, he executed a further security for a thousand pounds. Keate feigned compliance, and the hour of their flight was appointed; yet he straightway revealed the plot to the keeper. Drew was immediately transferred to the old condemned hold, watched night and day.
Upon the approach of the assizes, he was conveyed under escort to Bury St Edmunds. Humphreys, admitted as King’s evidence, testified against him. Drew was found guilty. Even after the verdict, he justified his crime by the penury to which his father had subjected him, and the old man’s refusal to settle an estate upon his name. He sought thus to reduce parricide to a dispute over patrimony and charges he claimed he could no longer bear.
Charles Drew was executed near Bury St Edmunds on the 9th of April, 1740, being then twenty-five years of age. The concourse of spectators, Borrow observes, was the greatest ever witnessed at an execution in those parts. At the homestead, the murder had been contrived to make it appear that the son was innocent of the deed; in London, the counterfeit reward and the feigned correspondence had prolonged the imposture. It required the accomplice who had shrunk from firing the shot to turn King’s evidence before the law could unravel the deceitful web Drew had woven between them.