On the eighteenth of April, 1751, a man named Nichols presented himself before William Dell, the town crier of Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. He delivered to him a paper to be read aloud. The notice announced that, on the following Monday, a man and a woman would be publicly ducked at Tring in punishment for their crimes. It did not state who they were. It set forth no manner of proof. It promised only a spectacle to which the public was invited.
In the 1887 edition consulted, the retrospective compilation of Camden Pelham recounts the affair. He names the persons targeted: John Osborne and his wife Ruth. The proclamation was likewise cried at Winslow and at Leighton Buzzard on market days; thus it traveled from town to town before the couple had ever been conducted to the pond. Its phrasing spanned but a few lines. The multitude it was destined to draw, however, would soon burst beyond the confines of the places where men sought to conceal the Osbornes.
Mr. Barton, the parish overseer at Tring, learned that the two individuals promised to this chastisement were the Osbornes. According to the narrative, he harbored no doubt as to their good character. He had them conveyed to the workhouse, the parochial establishment, in order to shelter them from those who accused them of witchcraft. The word was already passing from mouth to mouth like a sentence of condemnation: the husband was deemed a wizard, Ruth a witch. Yet the public notice specified no offense, and Pelham reports, in this regard, no fact that might lend substance to the allegation.
The first refuge appeared inadequate. On the eve of the appointed day, the master of the workhouse, alarmed by what had reached his ears concerning the temper of the populace, caused John and Ruth to be removed to the vestry of the church. He chose this chamber as offering greater security. Yet this removal did not put them out of harm’s way. Their protection remained precarious: it had neither altered the substance of the notice nor checked its circulation.
The narrative distinguishes two acts that might readily be confounded. Barton, forewarned of the couple’s designation, places them under shelter; the master of the workhouse, apprised of the threatening demeanor of the populace, subsequently removes his charges. The one acts on behalf of the parish prior to the gathering of the assembly; the other seeks a more secure room on the eve of the appointed day. Between these two determinations, the husband and wife are not brought before a magistrate: they merely shift their refuge within a village where the notice is already abroad. The chronicle thus illustrates that their protection depended upon persons and edifices within the mob's reach.
When the day came, nearly five thousand persons, according to the estimate recorded by Pelham, gathered about the workhouse. They demanded that the husband and wife be delivered up. They pulled down a portion of a wall, shattering the windows and their casings. Rumor had preceded the Osbornes; the assembly now demanded to see those it had already judged. The master affirmed that they were gone. He was not believed.
Men forced their way into the building, ransacking cupboards, boxes, and chests, down to the very salt-box. They searched likewise in the ceiling, where the plasterers had left an opening. Thomas Colley was among the most active; he proposed that this recess be examined. No one was discovered there. Thereupon the threats assumed a far graver aspect: the multitude declared they would pull down the house and set the village on fire unless the couple were surrendered into their hands.
The master of the workhouse at length disclosed whither the Osbornes had been taken. Pelham censures this course, adopted in utter disregard of their safety; at the same time, he records the duress exercised upon the man charged with their keeping. The vestry, which had succeeded the workhouse as a haven, ceased to afford protection. Colley placed himself at the head of the party that marched toward the church. John and Ruth were seized from their asylum and dragged to Marlston Mere, the pond where the improvised punishment was to be carried into effect.
The relation depicts the acts without leaving any doubt as to their brutality. The husband and wife were stripped of their clothing and wrapped separately in linen cloths. A rope was passed beneath Ruth’s armpits; two men dragged her into the water, hauling her repeatedly from one bank to the other. Colley likewise entered the pond. Aided by a staff, he turned her from side to side. She was subsequently laid upon the bank whilst John was plunged into the water.
The man was subjected twice to this ordeal; Ruth was drawn into the water three times. During the final passage, the cloth which enveloped her came undone. This circumstance is recorded in the narrative, though the violence of the episode requires no magnification to be understood. Utterly spent, Ruth endeavored to grasp the staff which Colley thrust against her breast. She expired upon the spot, according to Pelham. Having termed her “the old witch,” Colley walked about the pond to collect money from the spectators, by way of remuneration for the sport he claimed to have afforded them.
The assembly dispersed. The body was drawn from the water and examined by Mr. Foster, a surgeon. At the coroner’s inquest, he deposed that he had found no inward or outward hurt, save for a small abrasion of the skin upon one of the breasts. He ascribed her death to the water and mud that had suffocated her. The report does not convert this finding into a sensational description: it suffices to distinguish the collective violence from the words that had preceded it. The accusation had heralded an ordeal; the surgeon described a death.
Colley was committed to custody. When his trial came on, Foster reiterated his testimony. Pelham adds that there existed other substantial proofs against the prisoner, though without recounting their details here. Colley’s defense was that, far from intending any harm to the couple, he had sought to preserve them from violence. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and he was condemned to death. The discrepancy between this assertion and the acts related was now laid before the court: Colley had led the party to the vestry, and had thereafter borne his part in all that occurred in the pond.
Following his condemnation, Pelham presents him as a man who appeared penitent. This judgment belongs to the 1887 narrative; it does not warrant our probing the internal thoughts of the condemned. The chronicle records, however, with great precision the final stages of his removal. On the eve of the execution, one hundred men of the Oxford Blues, commanded by seven officers, escorted him from Hertford gaol to that of St Albans. At five o'clock the following morning, he stepped into a cart alongside the executioner; they arrived at the place of execution toward eleven.
His wife and daughter came to bid him farewell. The minister of Tring attended him in his final moments. Thomas Colley was executed on the twenty-fourth of August, 1751; his body was subsequently hung in chains at Gubblecut, near the spot where the offense had been committed. The narrative concludes with this punishment, without establishing the judicial fate of the remaining actors or reckoning the thousands who had assembled.
The affair had begun with a proclamation, as though opprobrium might supply the place of evidence and numbers the role of judges. It passed from the workhouse to the vestry, from the vestry to the mere, each haven overthrown by a renewed surge of the multitude. Judgment fell upon Colley. In Pelham’s pages, the voices that clamored for John and Ruth remain nameless; their sheer number, however, endures. Thus it was that the paper of Hemel Hempstead, conceived to gather spectators, became the opening act of a collective death for which but a single man was led to the gallows.