The affair began with an infant’s bearing-cloth. Richard Hunne, a merchant tailor of London, had placed his babe with a nurse in the parish of St. Mary Matfelon. The child died and was laid to rest. Thomas Dryfield, the rector, demanded the linen sheet wherein the infant had been wrapped, claiming it as a mortuary right due unto the church. Hunne refused. According to George Borrow’s narrative, he maintained that the infant possessed no property in the sheet, and that the rector had no warrant to seize it.
Dryfield cited him before the spiritual court. Fearing that justice would be denied him therein, Hunne took counsel of common lawyers. Borrow relates that they advised him to sue out a writ of praemunire against the rector and his abettors. Thus, a humble dispute over burial dues grew into an open trial of jurisdictions. The clergy of London, the chronicler notes, dreaded that a victory for the merchant might pave the way for a host of similar actions.
Shortly thereafter, Hunne was denounced for heresy before Richard Fitz-James, Bishop of London. He was cast into the Lollards’ Tower at St. Paul’s, his friends being strictly barred from his presence. The articles exhibited against him concerned tithes, the estate of priests and prelates, his alleged harboring of Joan Baker, and the possession of prohibited books in the English tongue. It was imputed to him that he had declared tithes to be born of clerical cupidity, reviled the hierarchy, and shielded a woman convicted of heresy.
At Fulham, the bishop examined him upon these articles. The register, as Borrow describes it, preserved no minute, article-by-article defense. A written confession submitted in Hunne’s name, yet in another hand, admitted that he had uttered words “tending” to such opinions, and voiced repentance. The document, however, declined to endorse the allegations in the precise terms framed by his accusers: his submission fell far short of a formal plea of guilty to every charge. The examination ended, Hunne was conducted back to the tower.
His wardens were changed. Formerly entrusted to Charles Joseph, the bishop’s apparitor, he was now delivered into the keeping of John Spalding, the bell-ringer. According to the coroner’s verdict as set down by Borrow, William Horsey, the bishop’s chancellor, straightway ordered his confinement to be made yet harsher: he was to receive but one meal a day, and no visitor was to be admitted without express license. Neither shirt, cap, nor neckcloth might reach the prisoner without rigorous inspection. The jurors would later make the keys of that tower the very pivot of their indictment.
On the fourth day of December 1514, Hunne was found hanging by the neck in his cell. The rumor first set abroad was one of self-destruction. The boy who carried his meat entered in company with two of the bishop’s servitors; upon beholding the corpse facing the wall, they fled to alarm the chancellor. Horsey presently repaired to the tower, accompanied by several of his fellows. Borrow records that the report of a voluntary death was spread abroad without delay.
Yet the ecclesiastical suit did not abate with his life. In the episcopal court, Dr. Head drew up fresh articles from the prologue of an English Bible found among Hunne’s effects. On the following Sunday, a preacher read these accusations from Paul’s Cross, admonishing the populace that whosoever possessed or had read such volumes must come forward and denounce themselves before Candlemas. Borrow recounts this public proclamation as a stern warning leveled at every owner of scripture in the vernacular. The prisoner’s demise had not closed the heresy trial; it had only widened its net.
The Bishops of London, Durham, and Lincoln sat in judgment over Hunne’s memory and condemned his corpse to the stake. On December 20, sixteen days after he was found dead, his mortal remains were burned at Smithfield. This sentence neither resolved the dispute over the mortuary sheet nor shed light upon the manner of his death. It merely provided the cause with a second public theater: the body of a captive, initially said to have died by his own hand, was now transformed into the subject of a solemn religious execution.
Meanwhile, the coroner and his jury surveyed the scene of the death. Borrow transcribes their verdict at length. They reported that they had found Hunne hanging from an iron staple by a silk girdle; they described the condition of his raiment, the knot, the position of the hands, and the state of the neck. They concluded that the stool was far too frail and unsteady to have served the prisoner to hang himself, that the girdle was incapable of breaking his neck, and that blood had flowed freely before the suspension took place. From these appearances, the jury determined that he had been murdered, thereby clearing Hunne of his own death. The set of his cap, the parting of his hair, his closed eyes, and the bruises upon his wrists struck them as thoroughly suspicious. They also noted a candle cleanly snuffed out several feet distant from the corpse, and recorded a gown of purple cloth whose owner could not be discovered. Such were the facts and deductions registered in their presentment.
The inquest did not confine its view to the articles discovered in the chamber. Charles Joseph deposed that Chancellor Horsey had himself devised the heresy articles and had been present alongside Spalding when Hunne was hanged. According to Joseph’s testimony, the chancellor had commanded the deed, and Joseph went on to describe the part each man took in contriving the semblance of a suicide. Joseph confessed to his own participation: he had cast the girdle about the prisoner’s throat, and then, together with Spalding, had lifted the body while Horsey slipped the noose over the staple. The bishop would afterward repudiate this confession, alleging that it had been wrung from Joseph through the duress and rigors of his imprisonment.
Julian Littel, Joseph’s serving-woman, supplied another piece of indirect testimony. She declared that her master had come home after Hunne’s death and confessed unto her: “I have made an end of Richard Hunne.” Prior to this admission, she had aided him in carrying certain goods to the house of one Porter. Joseph then bound her to secrecy upon her oath, and spoke to her of a wire thrust up the prisoner’s nose. Littel further recounted his furtive journeys between London and Stratford. She depicted Joseph’s terror, his horse hastily saddled, plate secreted within his sleeve, and another flight undertaken during the Christmas feast. When she had pressed him to name the others who were present at the killing, he had stubbornly refused to speak.
The bishop impugned the inquest’s verdict and took up the defense of his chancellor. Borrow’s account notes that Horsey, having been arrested and subsequently pursued, pleaded not guilty when brought to the bar. He was never tried by a jury: the King’s Attorney-General entered a nolle prosequi, discharging the bill against him, whereupon Horsey retired to live in Exeter. Though the coroner’s inquest had named the culprits and laid a formal charge of murder, the criminal proceedings chronicled by Borrow terminated without any conviction against Horsey.
The chapter likewise quotes a letter wherein the bishop besought Wolsey to shield his chancellor. In it, Fitz-James described Horsey as the victim of a “perjured” inquest, praying that select members of the Privy Council might examine the cause before any trial at law took place. He insisted that any London jury would convict a churchman though he were as innocent as Abel, asserting that the jurors themselves were favorers of heresy. In the parliamentary debates, he denounced the inquest men as false witnesses, maintaining to the last that Hunne had laid violent hands upon himself. The contest was therefore not merely between a coroner and an accused man: the bishop demanded an arbitration by judges of his own choosing, while his adversaries stood firmly upon the verdict of the local inquest.
Parliament at length intervened to succor Hunne’s orphaned children. An act was passed restoring to them their father’s forfeited estate, which Borrow valued at some fifteen hundred pounds. The disposition of the family fortune was thus redressed; yet the fate of the three men indicted by the coroner remains, in this narrative, without any judicial resolution. The bearing-cloth claimed by Dryfield had unloosed a conflict of jurisdictions. It had driven Hunne into the tower, and subsequently delivered his lifeless frame to two contrary tribunals: a heretic condemned by the bishops, a murdered victim in the eyes of the coroner. The children regained their patrimony; but no judgment at criminal law ever fell upon the three men to close the book upon this mysterious end.