Edward Crispe returned to his brother-in-law’s house covered in blood. A little earlier, inquiries had been made after him; Arundel Coke had replied that he believed him gone home through the dark. Such an answer might well have satisfied kinsmen gathered for supper. It could not withstand the return of the very man whose absence it purported to explain. Crispe had received several blows to the face. He had lost consciousness in the adjacent churchyard. And when he had struggled to his feet, faint and faltering, his steps had borne him back to the house where his death had been prepared.
That threshold, crossed a second time, marks the true beginning of the affair. A guest ought to have been missing; men would have spoken of his departure, searched for his tracks, and discovered his body. The survivor altered everything. He could not yet answer every question that would be put to him. Yet one point he could resolve, and upon this his brother-in-law would never shake him: when the first blow fell, Coke was standing at his very side.
The Supper of the First of January
The scene is Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, at the opening of 1722. On the first of January, Coke entertained Crispe and other members of the family. Brown, who had married Coke’s sister, came accompanied by his wife and daughter. Coke was himself married to a sister of Crispe. Between these men, ties were not confined to the civil courtesies of an invitation: each household afforded the other good reason to believe itself in safety.
Brown would later recount that he found the two men drinking wine in the parlour. The women were upstairs; the company went above for the meal, and afterwards the men came down again. Nothing in this distribution of rooms and hours betokened an extraordinary scene. It is this very circumstance that renders it disquieting when reconstructed through testimony. Whilst the others followed the ordinary course of the evening, Coke went out, returned, and went out once more. Another appointment engaged his thoughts, to which his family had not been bidden.
Before supper, he had proposed to Crispe that they pay a visit to Mrs Fanny Monke. Towards ten o’clock, according to Crispe’s account, Coke called him out of the parlour and led him into the churchyard. They walked several times before the lady’s house without entering. Nothing in the trial warrants attributing to her any part in the ambuscade. Her dwelling served merely as a pretext; it would be unjust to make more of it.
The night was very dark. Crispe remembered that the moon did not shine. Coke paused and uttered a sort of call. The sound alarmed his companion, who drew closer to the wall. Someone sprang from behind and struck him. Crispe lost his senses. He did not recognise his assailant; he could not tell how long he lay upon the ground. Where the witness ceases to know, we must cease to see.
Twenty Pounds for a Man
The man lying in wait was named John Woodburne. At the trial, he confessed to having struck Crispe with a hedging-bill. To explain how he came to be in the churchyard that night, he traced the matter back to Coke’s solicitations, repeated over several months. He spoke of his refusals, his distress, and the past favours his employer had brought to his remembrance. He was poor, his wife was dead, and he had children to feed. To hear him tell it, ancient kindnesses had come to resemble a debt of which a monstrous settlement was now demanded.
Coke had allegedly promised him twenty pounds to kill Crispe. Woodburne recounted their meetings, his hesitations, the brandy given him on the day of the assault, and his wait near Morrice’s porch in the churchyard. He admitted to the blows; he affirmed also that Coke remained beside him throughout several of them. Such a narrative condemns the man who utters it. It seeks likewise to divide the guilt, a circumstance the court did not overlook.
The judge was indeed careful to instruct the jury: Woodburne’s statements availed against Woodburne, not against Coke. The two tales were so intimately intertwined that one could scarcely be understood without hearing the other; yet they did not thereby become interchangeable proofs. The caution was essential. One may relate what Woodburne asserts without surrendering to him alone the power to decide his co-defendant’s guilt.
Other witnesses spoke. Ann, his daughter, had seen her father go out that evening with the hedging-bill; the children supposed he was going to cut wood. Sarah described the frequent visits and conferences with Coke. John Carter, a blacksmith, reported a still more sinister proposition: Coke had sought to prevail upon him to cut off a man’s head. Carter had at first taken it for a jest. He had refused. Thus before the bench there emerged the portrait of a recruitment, with its proffers and its resistances; the hand that ultimately struck was not the only one that had been bid for.
The Heir Was Not Whom One Supposed
Why Crispe? The question met with an answer from the victim himself. He had neither child nor brother; his nearest relations were three sisters. Coke’s wife was one of them. Had Crispe died, she would have inherited an estate of one hundred pounds a year. It was not, therefore, a case of a testament conveying an entire fortune directly to the brother-in-law. The link between the coveted death and the anticipated gain passed through this woman, of whose consent to the design there is here no proof whatever.
A tailor, Robert Moon, swore he had heard Coke speak of this succession several years before, offering money to make away with Crispe. Coke expressly contested this deposition up to the very moment of his sentence. That longstanding malice remained, therefore, an allegation he denied. Yet his own admissions, reported by the gaoler William Wetherel, narrowed his defence in far deadlier fashion: he had acknowledged a purpose to murder, the hiring of Woodburne, and the act of delivering Crispe into his hands.
The gaoler reported further that Coke reproached the hireling for not having finished his business. Constable Charles Willett, for his part, produced an object: the hedging-bill found at Woodburne’s house upon his own directions, and subsequently identified by him. Words passed between prisoners, keepers, and the court; the instrument arrived in its turn. It required no particular eloquence. A surgeon was presently to be heard describing what mark it had left upon a human face.
The Nose Before the Jury
Sturgeon was called to Coke’s house around eleven o’clock on the night of the first of January. Crispe had lost a great quantity of blood. The surgeon described seven wounds upon the head and face. One traversed the cheek; another severed the nose into the nostril. He had closed the latter with a single stitch; the scar remained visible. At the judge’s direction, the wounds were shown to the jury. The man marked for destruction stood there in person, able to bear witness and carrying upon his own flesh the tokens of the assault.
Anatomical precision assumed an importance Crispe could scarcely have foreseen when accepting the invitation. Coke and Woodburne were indicted under a statute punishing certain malicious maimings committed by lying in wait, with intent to maim or disfigure. Woodburne answered for the blows; Coke for his presence, aiding and abetting. It was not an indictment for completed murder: the victim had survived.
In this distinction Coke imagined he had found an avenue of escape. His intention, he argued, had been to kill Crispe, not to maim him. He did not thereby pretend to have intended less harm; he maintained that he had intended something other than the specific felony defined by the Act. His defence compelled a retreat from the horror of the wounds to the technical elements of the charge. It possessed a dizzying quality: a man sued for his life by pleading guilty to a far more terrible design.
The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Peter King, replied that the two intentions might well coincide. The weapon chosen, the manner of striking, and the wounds inflicted allowed the court to consider whether the maiming was also intended as the means to accomplish death. It lay with the jury to determine the fact. If the statutory elements were not proved, an acquittal must follow; if they were, the design to kill did not efface them. After about half an hour, the jurymen returned. They pronounced both prisoners guilty.
A Final Plea
On the morrow, Coke argued once more before sentence was passed. He insisted upon the strictness with which a penal statute ought to be construed. King agreed with the principle, but observed that the jury had found all the requisite circumstances to exist. Coke then pleaded a promise of pardon published in a gazette. The judge distinguished between an advertisement and a pardon actually granted: such grace was the prerogative of the Crown. The prisoner produced no instrument to stay the judgment.
Coke asked finally for time. The sentence was hanging. The contemporary trial pamphlet, published that same year, records that both convicts were executed at Bury on the 31st of March 1722. It does not relate what became of Crispe thereafter, nor how the members of that family met after the ordeal. It is not our part to lend them a reconciliation, a rupture, or words of edifying gravity.
There remains that return, attested by two men who experienced it from vastly different vantage points: he who stepped through the door, and he who saw him enter. Brown had inquired whither Crispe was gone. Coke had furnished an explanation. Then Crispe had walked back in. The entire mechanics of the ambush had rested upon an absence; a wounded man had found the strength to give it the lie.