When William Hartgill refused to act as mediator between Charles, Lord Stourton, and his mother, he laid down a condition that ought to have seemed unexceptional: that the young peer should secure unto Dame Elizabeth an annual jointure. The widow of William Stourton and mother to Charles, she was then residing beneath Hartgill’s roof at Kilmington. Charles required that she enter into a bond in a heavy sum never to marry again; Hartgill would lend no hand to the design without assured provision for her maintenance. A domestic grievance, sprung from questions of dower and wardship, was thus to swell into a train of outrages that neither the Privy Council nor the Court of Star Chamber could arrest.
Charles Stourton was no ordinary neighbour. His father had held high royal command near Boulogne; he himself was a magnate girt with an extensive retinue of liveried servants and retainers. Following his breach with Hartgill, he rode one Sunday morning to Kilmington church attended by men armed with bows, arrows, and guns. John Hartgill, William’s son, receiving word of his coming during divine service, quitted the church sword in hand and ran to his father’s house hard by the churchyard. Shafts were loosed at him, yet they missed their mark.
William, his wife, and sundry servants had sought refuge within the church tower. John gained the house, took down his longbow, bent a crossbow, and caused a piece to be primed. He hastened forth bearing his bow, a gentlewoman following behind with the other engines. Stourton’s men had forced an entrance into the church. One of their number being wounded in the shoulder by a charge of small shot, the company drew off. The father urged John to ride post-haste to Court and lay the outrage before the Council. By Monday night the young man reached London and delivered his complaint.
The Council dispatched Sir Thomas Speke, High Sheriff of Somerset, to set at liberty those besieged and to apprehend Stourton. The lord was committed to the Fleet Prison, but his confinement was of brief duration. His retainers hung about Kilmington until the sheriff’s approach. Seizing Hartgill’s favourite gelding, they led it to the pale of Stourton Park and dispatched it with a crossbow bolt, spreading the rumour abroad that Hartgill had ridden the beast to hunt within the enclosure. Throughout the reign of Edward VI, the chronicle relates, Stourton continued by open violence to spoil William Hartgill of his goods and cattle.
Upon the king’s demise, William and John preferred their suit to Queen Mary and her Council, Her Grace being then in Hampshire. Both parties were summoned into the royal presence; Stourton gave his word that the Hartgills should be restored to his favour and recover their goods, would they but repair unto his house. They went not unattended: John Dackcombe, a gentleman of worship, rode with them to bear witness to their submission and to the reconciliation tendered.
As they drew near Stourton’s seat, half a dozen men burst from an ambush in the lane. They suffered Dackcombe and elder Hartgill to pass, but barred the way against John. When the young man wheeled his horse to flee, six others encompassed him before and behind. Ere he could draw his blade or alight, they struck him down with three or four grievous wounds and left him for dead upon the ground. Half an hour later, John regained his senses, remounted, and found harbour at Maiden Bradley in the house of Richard Mumpesson.
This bloody assault was carried before the Star Chamber. Stourton was adjudged to pay a heavy fine in damages to the Hartgills and was once more remanded to the Fleet. He shortly obtained leave to return to his country seat, upon some pretext which the chronicler leaves unstated. Days after arriving at Stourton Caundle, he let the Hartgills know that he was ready to pay down the monies ordered by the Court and make an end of all contention. The parley was appointed at Kilmington church for the Monday following the Epiphany, at ten of the clock.
Stourton came attended by fifteen or sixteen of his own servants, diverse tenants, neighbouring gentlemen, and justices of the peace, his entire company numbering, according to the depositions, some sixty men. The Hartgills kept within the church. They were bidden to come forth into the church-house, upon the plea that the sacred precincts were no fit place for the transaction of secular traffic. They refused to parley under cover, save within the church itself. A table was thereupon set out upon the open green. The Hartgills’ caution did not prevent the meeting; it merely dictated its ground.
Stourton laid upon the table a cap-case and a purse, as though he would tell out the gold. He called the two men forth, declaring that the Council had commanded him to pay them their monies, whereof they should have every penny. Thereupon he turned upon them, upbraiding them as unfaithful subjects, and laid hands on them for felony. His followers thrust them by main force into the church-house; Stourton himself rifled their purses. He had two cords ready to hand. The Hartgills were bound fast, and the lord struck the younger man across the face.
John’s wife tarried without at the door. Stourton drew his rapier and smote her between the neck and the head, so that she fell down well-nigh dead. The two prisoners were carried to the parsonage, their arms pinioned behind their backs, and left without meat or drink. Towards one of the clock in the morning, they were conveyed to Bonham, a manor-house hard by Stourton. There they were thrust into separate chambers, still garrotted, without fire, bed, bread, or water. In that chill room, the pretence of settling a debt had long since dissolved; there remained only two captive men awaiting their fate.
At ten o'clock, Stourton dispatched four of his servants: William Farree, Roger Gough, John Welshman, and Macute Jacob. He commanded them to lead the Hartgills to the place appointed, enjoining them to dispatch their charges if they made any outcry. The four brought them into a close adjoining the house and beat them about the head with two clubs until they believed them dead. Stourton stood a little way off, by his gallery door. The knaves then wrapped the bodies in their own cloaks and carried them through the garden into the gallery, and thence into a room at its further end, Stourton walking before them, candle in hand.
The bodies yet groaned, more especially the old man. Farree swore aloud that they were not dead. According to the judicial record, Stourton straightway commanded their throats to be cut, lest a French priest lodging nearby should overhear them. Farree took out his knife and did the deed while his lord held the candle aloft. One of the murderers forthwith lamented what he had done, protesting that no land on earth would have tempted him to such an act had he foreseen the end. Stourton answered him that he needed make no more conscience of it than of killing a couple of sheep. The corpses were then cast into a dungeon. Henry Sims and Roger Gough descended with ropes, dug a pit, and buried both men together, while Stourton stood above, urging them to make haste.
Sir Anthony Hungerford caused the bodies to be exhumed at a later date. They were discovered in the apparel they wore on the day of their capture, buried deep beneath the earth, covered by two courses of thick paving-stones and a mass of wood-chips and shavings estimated at two cartloads. The chronicle further recounts other outrages laid to Stourton’s charge: the firing of a barn belonging to Thomas Chaffin, followed by the forcible driving off of twelve hundred sheep and other cattle after Stourton had recovered a hundred pounds in damages against him; it notes also the felonious seizure of a team of oxen at Willoughby. These matters belong to the catalogue of his local tyrannies, distinct from the slaughter of the Hartgills.
Brought to trial at Westminster in February 1557, according to the modern calendar, Stourton long stood mute at the bar. The Lord Chief Justice warned him that if he persisted in refusing to plead, he would be subjected to the peine forte et dure and pressed to death. He answered at last; he and four of his servants were condemned to the gallows. Borrow’s account still assigns the arraignment and execution to 1556, following the ancient English practice of commencing the year on Lady Day, the twenty-fifth of March; contemporary registers place the trial in 1557. Stourton was brought down from the Tower to Salisbury with his four accomplices. There he was executed on the sixth of March, as recorded in a contemporary broadside; before his death, as Borrow writes, he made lamentation for his wilful and ungodly life. The promise to restore the Hartgills their goods had been but a final snare; it brought two lives to a bloody close and conducted their slayer to the scaffold.