Damn His Blood (5 page)

Here we catch a glimpse of Parker and Sanders together at their parting, two figures suspended in the landscape, almost like characters from a Wordsworth poem. The clean south road stretches out before them. There’s a cool Midland breeze, a roadside inn with its jutting sign, the fingerpost pointing the way to Bristol, the clatter of horses’ hooves, the rattle of the mail or the Birmingham coach with its pack of weary horses pressing on along the turnpike. And among them all this little party of travellers on foot: Parker, perhaps in a cassock or with his Geneva gown billowing, holds a pipe in his right hand and is in deep conversation with Sanders, who is warmly and soberly dressed for the voyage in his greatcoat and heavy leather boots, perhaps gripping a bag of keepsakes or a purse of guineas for the ship’s captain. There is a hint of excitement and an element of sadness as Parker confides his plans to marry. They know that they will never meet again.

It’s an evocative account and about as close to Parker as one can get. Sanders depicts the young clergyman as a kind-hearted man, easy in the company of friends and capable of inspiring feelings of loyalty and trust. That Parker quickly fashioned a lasting emotional bond with Sanders – a man who was socially beneath him, as a member of the mercantile classes – pleading with him to stay in Worcestershire, comforting him for half a year prior to his departure and then accompanying him on the road for the opening stretch of a journey that would see him cross the Atlantic, evokes the image of a caring, altruistic personality.

Sanders’ description tallies with other accounts of Parker. For the poor in Oddingley he was an attentive minister, ready to aid them with a glass of brandy, or to care, advise and comfort. He was compassionate enough to forfeit his tithe of milk to the old or the infirm, prompting a labourer, William Chance,
¹³
to declare Parker ‘was good to the poor, and as good a man that ever lived’. Another farmhand, William Colley, echoed this sentiment, claiming, ‘Parker was as good a master to him as ever he had, and that he had never heard any ill of him except from two or three of the large farmers.’

Such noble qualities manifested themselves in Parker’s friendship with Sanders. Perhaps the clergyman felt a kinship with the button maker, who was about to embark on a voyage of hope just as he had done himself 15 years before. Perhaps his motivation for trying to stop Sanders flowed from regret at his own ambition, or even a mournful longing for the quiet farm and settled life that he had left behind.

But subtle evidence of Parker’s vanity also escapes from Sanders’ account. Parker tells him that he was a parson of ‘two livings’, one that Sanders incorrectly records as Hoddingley and a second at Dorking. That this was the case is possible. At the turn of the nineteenth century pluralism – the practice of drawing a salary from more than one ecclesiastical living at a time – was rife and a tolerated way for clergymen to top up their annual incomes. There is, however, no evidence that this is the case with Parker, and this detail supports the image of an aspiring man keen to document his successes and perhaps embellish the truth. This suspicion can only be strengthened by Sanders’ mention of ‘his fortune’. Clearly Parker and Sanders had discussed money during their brief friendship and evidently they shared some traits: they were both young, financially ambitious and willing to surrender the emotional ties of their homes and extended families in pursuit of a better existence elsewhere. But although Parker had certainly fared well in life thus far, talk of a fortune in the 1790s was presumptuous, and the lasting image of the two together, walking south along the turnpike road towards Bristol, is one of a pair of able thinkers driven on by ambition and fixed upon their own self-improvement.

These were the qualities that would shortly drive Parker into a long and exhausting conflict with the Oddingley farmers. For them he had a problem of temperament: a maddening haughtiness that displayed itself at its very worst in his strict collection of the tithe, an ‘eternally vexatious subject’ which entitled Church of England clergymen to a tenth of the produce of the parish farms and formed the majority of their annual income. The tithe dispute deepened as the years passed, and by September 1805 of the seven ratepayers in Oddingley parish only two of them – Old Mr Hardcourt and John Perkins – could still sustain a conversation with Parker. By the rest he was seen as a rapacious swindler who stretched his powers to their furthest limit. The most militant farmers, Thomas Clewes of Netherwood, John Barnett of Pound Farm and Captain Evans of Church Farm, had come to consider each of Parker’s new demands as a test of character they were compelled to resist and challenge at every turn.

The fallout from the quarrel was profound. Parishioners were caught between the factions: forced to choose between their spiritual leader and their employers, whom they were dependent on for subsistence. Previous years had been pockmarked by furious arguments, outbursts of violence and poisonous court cases. The situation had been exacerbated by the absence of a local squire who may have mediated between the parties, by Commeline’s absence, which had enabled the farmers to cultivate their independence, and by the fact that Parker was an outsider. The two parties were further separated by politics, with Reverend Parker’s ties to the Duke of Norfolk and Thomas Foley connecting him with the Whig cause in a countryside which remained overwhelmingly and staunchly Tory.

Politics mattered during the 1790s. The French Revolution had fed a reformist movement in England which cleaved the country in two, with loyal Church and King enthusiasts,
¹⁴
known as scrats, rising in noisy patriotic opposition to revolutionary sympathisers branded either Painites (after Thomas Paine’s
Rights of Man
) or Jacobins. This split dominated Parker’s first years in Oddingley, and was only soothed when the French Republic veered away from its early ideals and Bonaparte appeared as a common enemy. Divisions and uncertainties endured, however, and since the failure of the Treaty of Amiens in 1803 the Worcestershire countryside had throbbed with news about the renewed French war. Fears of a brutal English revolution had long simmered, with Robert Southey grimly confessing, ‘I believe that revolution inevitably must come,
¹⁵
and in its most fearful shape.’ By the end of September 1805 parishioners in Oddingley were feeling the same anxieties as those in other corners of the United Kingdom. They were determined and nervous, patriotic yet on edge.

Britain had been sustained throughout the war years by the career of Admiral Lord Nelson. His great victories at Cape St Vincent, the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Copenhagen had become a source of national pride, a symbol of British courage, brazen skill and daring. Excited crowds had swarmed the streets during his brief visit to Worcester in 1802, where he had been granted the freedom of the city and had Copenhagen Street named in his honour. Three years later with Britain once again at war, the
Worcester Herald
had spent the summer months following his pursuit of the French fleet of Admiral Villeneuve across the Atlantic.

Nelson had returned in late August, but there still remained a prospect of the French and Spanish fleets breaking out from their blockaded ports and massing in the English Channel. On Sunday 15 September Nelson was dispatched on what was to be his final mission from Portsmouth in the
Victory
. The newspapers reported that the admiral had sailed before a light breeze and at sunset was off Christchurch, to the west of the needles. At nightfall fog had come down and he was gone.
¹⁶

All England followed developments, but locally there were other concerns. Many believed the country was being subverted by an organised network of French spies and conspirators. In Worcestershire a slew of robberies had been noticed and there were concerns over the rising number of animal thefts. Perhaps the worst indicator that the countryside was becoming more dangerous was the growing number of footpads and highwaymen who worked the county’s rural lanes. Particular attention had been given to the fate of a butcher named John Hilcox, who had been apprehended on his way northwards from Bristol the previous year ‘by a genteel-dressed man,
¹⁷
mounted on a bay horse’ who had troubled him for his money and then shot him through the head.

Then, on 28 September 1805,
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
carried a piece concerning the discovery of a concealed subterranean den in the Trench Wood, a thick oak and ash wood which sprawled across the long parish boundary between Oddingley and neighbouring Crowle.

The following extraordinary and interesting discovery
¹⁸
was made … in Trench Wood, near Oddingley, in this county. As a boy was gathering nuts among some bushes, at that place, his foot suddenly slipped into a hole, and he lost his shoe … Not being able to recover it, he informed a person of circumstance, who came to the place, upon searching the hole he found that the sides were covered with soot; this, of course, induced him to search further, and, upon clearing away some moss, he discovered a door in the ground … large enough for a man to descend through, and, a few feet further, some clay steps, which led to an apartment being about six feet square; the covering was made of black poles running across, which were closely covered on the outside with moss and bushes: it had also a fireplace and one small seat: in it were found some meat, which appeared to have been lately dressed [and] some cheeses.

Trench Wood was a dwindling relic of the long destroyed Forest of Feckenham and for generations had endured a mean reputation in the area, with one local writer observing wistfully that it had ‘inherited all the romantic terrors of the ancient chase’.
¹⁹
Children were warned against straying too close to its edge, and many believed it was inhabited by criminals from the murky Georgian underworld: smugglers, poachers and burglars, mythically gaunt and sallow men who lurked in the shadows and waited for their chance. For years there had been suspicions that such criminals operated from a base hidden deep among the trees. Now, it seemed, there was proof.

The discovery was also reported in the
Worcester Herald
, and both publications noted that the hideout had been planned with such ‘care and ingenuity’ that its detection seemed at once both captivating and disturbing. For how many years had criminals – sheep stealers, petty thieves or worse – slipped unnoticed along the country lanes? Did the den belong to strangers who practised their mischief in the cities and towns or was it a meeting place for, perhaps, familiar faces living in parishes nearby?
Berrow’s Journal
concluded it was most probably the work of a single, slinking individual, observing, ‘the road which the occupier appeared to have used was not by any regular path, but through a small brook, so that everything was contrived in the most artful manner’. The
Worcester Herald
disagreed, declaring archly, ‘There cannot be doubt that this den had been the receptacle for thieves of all descriptions.’ They added, ‘We trust we shall shortly have to publish their apprehension,
²⁰
and thus put an end to all further depredations which have been seen very frequently committed in this part of the country.’

Whether the work of one man or many, at the moment of discovery all the den’s recent occupiers were gone, and little hope was placed on their return and apprehension. For the inhabitants of Oddingley, it must have been a disquieting matter. Both sheep stealing and robbery were capital offences, and those convicted often paid with their lives, a fact that added extra menace to the situation and made fugitives all the more dangerous. Yet the autumn of 1805 had brought signs of a fresh start for the parishioners of Oddingley. The harvest had been a successful one, Napoleon’s invasion had still not materialised, and most surprisingly of all there had come a conciliatory offer from the farmers that promised to bring a conclusion to their feud with Parker.

The exact timing of the farmers’ offer is not recorded, but it seems likely that it was in the autumn of 1805 when they approached him with a proposal to renegotiate payment of the tithe. The moment would come to represent a crucial turning point in the story, as it was an opportunity Parker would miss. This incident, coupled with the discovery of the den in Trench Wood, marked the definite beginning of a sequence of events that terminated in the terrible attack just nine months later. Reverend George Parker, a precocious child from the distant Cumberland hills, would become the figure at the centre of one of the great criminal cases of the early nineteenth century. The crime was very much of its time: encouraged to its conclusion by a fragile climate of war, of patriotism and revolution, and committed by a terrible concoction of personalities who had been thrown together by fate.

^fn1
Although the £135 stipend was not an extravagant parochial salary, it was still substantial and compared well with other professions. Just a few years later, in 1801, the brilliant young chemist Humphrey Davy would resign his post at the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol to accept the role of director of the Chemical Laboratory at the Royal Institution in London for a far more modest salary of £100 per annum, plus ‘coals and candles’.

^fn2
Parker muddles the date of his arrival. All other sources agree that he was presented to Oddingley on 3 May, and in any case 31 April is an erroneous date.