After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Murder in Henry VIII's England

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

In a world before police, what happened when someone was murdered? How were murderers caught? How did the wheels of justice turn?We talk to Steven Veerapen, author of Of Blood Descended, about murder under the bloodiest King of all, Henry VIII.Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. In the dark of night, on the 30th of April 1541, John Busbrigg and his two assistants were patrolling the woodlands of his master Nicholas Pelham's estate at Lawton, Essex.

John was a gamekeeper and it was his job to make sure no poaching took place on Pelham's land. From nowhere, the familiar woodlands around him suddenly exploded with the cries of men, the rattle of sword and the thudding of hooves. They found themselves under attack. John and his companions stood their ground against this surprise assault,

but the onslaught was relentless. By the time the barrage was over and their opponents rode off, John Busbrake was fighting for his life. Hello and welcome to After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. I'm Dr Anthony Delaney. And I'm Anne Boleyn. Today we, along with Anne, are talking about murder and justice, appropriately enough, in Henry VIII's England with a couple of case studies. And our guest today is Dr. Stephen Verappen, who is our first returning guest. So Stephen, it's a landmark for After Dark. Thank you for coming back. We have Stephen back because he is the author of historical fact and fiction.

He is an expert in all things early modern and his book Of Blood Descended is a murder mystery set in Henry VIII's reign. That is a brilliant title. But anyway, I digress. Thank you. He was on our episode about Guy Fawkes and check that one out if you haven't listened to it as well. Stephen, hello. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you very much for having me back. I didn't know I was the first returning guest. So yes, I claim to fame. You were the first. It's a milestone. It's good. It's good.

But yeah, what a great title of Blood Descended. Give us a little bit about that book just before we get into things. Well, that book actually, I mean, I wish I could claim credit for that title, but I cannot. I initially had another title, which I cannot recall now. And I had to come up with several different ones. And I think actually, no, maybe I can claim credit because I'm sure that was one of several alternatives that I came up with but yes it's set in 1522 in Henry VIII's reign and it stars as the sort of detective figure Anthony Blank who's the fictional son of the real life trumpeter John Blank, who worked for Henry VII and Henry VIII, involves

lots of murder, death by unusual means and all that sort of stuff. It's good fun, but it did involve a lot of research into what kind of murders were committed in Henry's reign and how were they investigated and how were they punished, all of that good stuff. I'm really looking forward to talking about this today because for me, I mean, I'm not a historian of the Tudor period. When I think of Henry VIII's court, I think of the wives, I think of the political machinations, I think of the power struggles, all these families vying for their daughters to get the attention of the king and to keep it once they've got it are people murdering each other with regularity in this setting and also you mentioned there about a detective obviously a

useful plot device in a novel but there are no police in this period and i know we're going to go on to talk about this but is that difficult to understand in the court setting in particular in the tudor period more generally, that there are no police? And if so, who is policing crime? It's funny you should say that, Maddy. I actually found it much easier when you don't have a sort of organised police system. You almost have more freedom to think, well, how were murders investigated? Because yes, I mean, people then killed each other for the same kind of yes, I mean, people then killed each other for the same kind of motives, I would guess, as some people kill each other today.

So yes, and they were investigated and there was a lot of officers of the law. There wasn't, as I said, an organised police force, but there were trials, there were juries, there were witnesses, there were all kinds of means by which murderers were brought to justice. And I should say with the amount of law around, that doesn't mean, I guess, that there was a lot of justice around, but it means there was a lot of investigation, there was a lot of looking into crimes, some of which obviously we'll talk about today. Well, speaking of the specific case that we looked at the start of this, before we get into it, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you this, Stephen, I think. A lot of conversation often centres around our special co-host today, Anne Boleyn, and the fact that Henry VIII was a murderer.

with this topic when we're looking at Henry VIII, his relationship with Anne Boleyn, the other wives, the beheadings, and how a contemporary, we interpret what happened there, often some people interpret that as murder. Does that sit comfortably within the context of the 16th century, do you think? Not really. He was a monster, don't get me wrong. He was a horrific, tyrannical monster. I have nothing nice to say about Henry VIII, really. But what he did, given his position, was within the law, such as it was. I mean, there is that kind of stereotype. I mean, he was the king, he was Henry VIII. If he wanted you dead, you were dead, sweetheart.

But that doesn't mean he could kill at will. It means he used the law almost as a weapon. There's an old cliche almost, probably because it's true, that the Medici's used poison and the Tudors used the law to get rid of people. I'm not saying the Medici's did use poison that often. We don't know how much of that has been exaggerated. But that's the kind of idea behind the Tudors is that they understood English law and they understood how to use it and they understood how to use it against people. It's such a worrying idea isn't it we often talk about the law in terms

of the after dark cases that we cover as being the thing that rectifies the crime that's taken place the situation captures the baddie and here it's being used as a tool to kill people essentially let's get into the story that we've heard anthony tell us at the beginning so this is john bus brig is that correct for listeners at home his name is spelt john obviously bus brig or bus yeah how do you pronounce this it's b u s-s-y-b-r-y-g-e i want to say busy brig busy bridge which sounds nice and colorful i think it survives into the modern day as bus brig okay i think good to establish so john is a gamekeeper in this period can you tell us a little bit more about him so yes john was a was a gamekeeper. We don't know exactly what

his station in life was, you would think somewhere. In fact, this will be a theme today, actually, some of the surviving cases we look at, they were people who were generally middle class or servants to people who were important, that kind of thing. His job was to prevent poaching, which was actually a kind of thankless job, I suppose, as it turns out, a dangerous job. But when he was attacked, he was working with someone who was possibly his brother and a third man who was also a servant, also working partially as a gamekeeper or park keeper, they were sometimes called, when this gang of men broke in upon them intent on poaching it was only john that they killed it was only john busbrigg who died the other two were injured but survived and that turned out

to be a mistake on the part of the attackers they left witnesses alive which is one of the means by which people were caught i mean one of the questions is well how were murderers caught you mentioned there were no police around doing what we'd now call detective work there were a lot of people whose job it was i suppose to keep the king's peace that was their almost their job description john busbrigg was one of them but when a murder happened a lot of questions arose i mean if you think about it let's imagine that you've killed someone. What do you do? What are your options? Hide all evidence, deny all knowledge,

all of this sort of thing. This they failed to do, these men who killed John Busprigg. As I say, they left witnesses. That meant that there were people to point out these men were responsible and what surprised everyone was who was responsible. So, well, exactly who was responsible then?

Who are we looking at that has left this evidence behind? We are looking at a nobleman and we are looking at a nobleman who actually sat on the jury at Anne Boleyn's trial. Wow. So he was not an unimportant man. He was a man of some political importance. I think he also had a role in Jane Seymour's funeral,

if memory serves. So he was known at court. He was a prominent figure. He was Thomas Fine's ninth Baron Dacre. And what he had done was organise a posse to poach, to break in and kill anyone that tried to stop them. I mean, this is dark stuff. It almost goes to the old cliche that these noblemen were almost like mafia leaders in their own turfs. How unusual is this? Why is a nobleman attacking a gamekeeper? It is fairly unusual. In fact, I almost have to say it's fairly unusual in England.

It seems like a Scottish thing almost. This kind of turf war went on quite consistently among Scottish nobility. You don't hear about it so much in England, which is, I think, why it became such an infamous case. It became an infamous case not just because it was a nobleman involved, not just because it was a murder, but because it then dragged in the king. It dragged in Henry VIII. He had an interest. The Privy Council had an interest. If you were a nobleman and you were accused of a crime, you had the right to be tried by a jury of your peers,

which is what happened. So when it came to it, he was tried by his fellow nobleman. And what did he say was his motive? What was the cause of the attack? Well, at first he denied it. At first he pled not guilty and claimed it was nothing to do with him. Then he was persuaded, or we assume he was persuaded, to change his plea to guilty. And there was a reason probably for that as well. If you were guilty, you could throw yourself on the King's mercy. One of the options you had was seeking a royal pardon. This was a world and a

legal system which didn't have the kind of appeals courts and things that we understand and assume to be part of the system today. So one of the options you had was to try and get a royal pardon. And we assume that that's what he was going for by pleading guilty. So let me get this straight. We have the gamekeeper of Sir Nicholas Pelham, who is murdered, and he's murdered by an aristocrat, an aristocrat who's poaching. Now, first of all, I would assume that people poaching in the Tudor period, as in later periods, are doing so because they are trying to access a food source that, you know, I'm thinking of the 18th century and land enclosure when people aren't allowed to hunt in the way that they previously had done.

But here we have someone who presumably has no difficulty accessing food. You mentioned a turf war. Is this a tension between Thomas Fiennes, who's part of the murder posse, and Sir Nicholas Pelham? Is this aristocratic courtly tension playing out in the landscape? What is going on here? It just seems like such a strange thing for a baron to do. It does. I mean, one thing is very, I suppose, possible. And you see it sometimes amongst people of all stations, which is they do bad things for fun and because they can so it's possible that he was doing this because he liked to hunt and he liked hunting and there were good game available in nicholas pelham's land so that's a possibility the other possibility is as you point out this

could have been a political move now there is no evidence of that is the problem there's no evidence that doesn't mean it never existed just perhaps mean it doesn't survive so he might have been involved in some sort of small-scale turf war about which we just don't know anymore i tend to think he was doing this because he could because he was doing it for fun you do see that kind of thing my only caveat there is he had enjoyed this privileged position at court he'd enjoyed a courtly position why would he risk that why would he risk his life in that way for fun and we don't know is the answer we don't know why do people kill why do people kill we don't know we know that he was taken up and we know that he as you say he had denied it at first

and then he admitted his guilt but what does that trial look like what does a 16th century trial feel look like what's the process how does it differ from what we would understand as a trial today well that's a really good question because it differed vastly for multiple reasons the biggest one was it depended on who you were as a murder suspect so if you were pulled up in court because you'd killed someone or because you were suspected of killing someone depending on your station in life you might not go to the same kind of court as someone else so as I said if you were a nobleman or of particularly high station you had certain rights that didn't exist to lesser folk you had the right to trial by your peers you may in some cases if it's a murder trial have access to legal counsel

which we assume that he did because he certainly was counseled to change his plea. If you were of a particularly low station in life, there was no such thing as legal aid or anything like that. You had no right to a lawyer. If it was murder, you would be tried by one of the central courts, either in quarter sessions or the travelling assizes where the judges travelled around England at certain times of the year. But you might have no lawyer, you might have no defence, you had the right to trial by jury, that might just involve a judge and a jury stacked against you and you had really no right. I mean, when a body was found, the weight of evidence differed vastly. I mean, let's take, for example, a coroner's jury,

vastly. I mean, let's take, for example, a coroner's jury, which might be convened. Coroners at the time were appointed and their overriding goal was to see if this mysterious or suspicious death was murder, if the Crown had an interest in that murder. And then what they might do is hold a jury to decide yes or no, yes, it's murder, usually in a local tavern. And what might happen then is well the locals would point out a suspect we think so and so did it so and so would then very probably just be taken up just arrested very possibly sent to trial again a stacked trial against them so Stephen we know in Dacre's case that he does actually plead guilty to the murder and I wonder if he is expecting by pleading guilty to come up against maybe a friendly jury that the king in particular

might take pity on him but this doesn't happen does it in his case? No it doesn't and I think that's exactly right I think he was going for mercy. He was going for the kind, I mean, Henry VIII's mercy. Why would you presume upon Henry VIII's mercy? He'd been on a trial of peers. So that's what I think he's going for. I mean, there are certain ways of getting away with murder that he couldn't. So he could have played chance medley, they called it, where I suppose it was a forerunner to manslaughter. This sort of thing happened due to provocation. He can't claim that because they had discovered that he had planned this attack on Pelham's land and on Pelham's men. So certain avenues were cut off to him.

So he goes for guilty. I think he's going for mercy. And it's Henry VIII, so not only does he not not get it but he gets a particularly gruesome punishment. As a nobleman you generally could assume that you would have a fairly swift death by beheading or something like that but what apparently happened in this case was that they made a point of not executing him as a nobleman but dragging him out to Tyburn and strangling him as a common criminal. So it's all about reducing status, I think there. Right. I was going to ask why, why would they, well, I say they, why would Henry VIII specifically not give him some kind of special treatment? Why was he so publicly executed in that way at Tyburnburn i suppose psychoanalyzing henry the eighth why did he do

things i think it was in that case very much a political move i think it was henry throwing his not inconsiderable weight around and pointing out i dole out justice fairly because henry was i think in his own head the kind of arbiter of justice and legally he was legally he was the of all justice in england he wanted to be seen as someone who was very much in control of his nobility who could not just punish them but reduce them as well if they misbehaved if they got out of line i wonder as well if there's an element that because of the nature of the crime because it's been an attack on a gamekeeper so on someone who is responsible for the game on an aristocratic estate, if that is seen by extension as an attack on Pelham himself, on the aristocrat owning the land himself, and if there's a sense that Henry

wants to shut down very emphatically that kind of aristocratic infighting or that kind of attack on elite property, maybe? I think that's the case very much. And I also wonder if Henry was making a point about particular localities as well. He was Dacre, he was of the north. I wonder if there was something going on there, particularly in this period, the early 1540s he was proving a point to northern nobility that he was just as capable of reducing them of punishing them as anyone else closer to home i think that's pretty interesting actually that idea of exerting himself up north it's not looking good for dacre because he has been executed in a way that one would think does not fit his status. So nothing, nothing has come up roses for him, unfortunately. Listen, I think

that's a good point at which to take a break. And when we come back, we'll look at how the law springs into action or not when aristocracy is not involved. And if it's murder that's committed by more everyday people. Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet.

Catherine of Aragon. Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour. Anne of Cleves. Catherine Howard. Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not

Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. A saw pit was the name given to a deep pit over which large pieces of wood could be cut with giant saws, the blades rising in and out of the pit below. Michaelmas 1517. And as summer turned to autumn, the body of Alan Osborne was dragged into one of these pits by his wife Elizabeth and her lover Thomas Bennett. They covered him in dirt and left him there to rot. For a year, logs were sown above his corpse, the sawdust doubtless helping turn his body into compost. Soon, however, the long arm of Tudor law such as it was would reach down into the pit and uncover the crimes of Elizabeth and Thomas.

So we're getting into a very different story here. We've moved away from political ins and outs at court and these tensions between aristocratic men playing bloody pranks on each other on their land and we're dealing with three more ordinary people in the Tudor period we have Alan Osborne who turns up dead in this pit and we have Elizabeth his wife and then her lover Thomas Bennett who I think I'm right in saying does the killing is that, Stephen? That's right, yes. It was her lover that killed her husband and then she and him lived in semi-open secrecy for a while until tongues began to wag and it began to be said her husband has been murdered. Wow, so let's just establish this. Alan Osborne, the husband, disappears from the scene. Elizabeth takes up semi-openly with Thomas Bennett she's

living with him why is that not immediately suspicious how does it take so long to find the body it's a very good question and I think the answer is because no one was looking for it and what's really interesting about this case one of the things I love about it because it's so human really it's so it's the kind of thing that you could imagine happening now, anytime. It was a crime of passion. What we find is that they killed and supposedly tried to conceal the body in a brook and then they went back

and moved the body sometime later. This is EastEnders stuff that they were getting into. They moved the body to the sop it, but then they came up with this really weak story and yet there's still a little element of genius in it they claimed oh alan ran off and he was wearing these very distinctive clothes presumably a doublet or something like that that's what i like to imagine a colorful doublet he was wearing that and he went off with that i mean why add that detail i think it was to really create a story.

They were creating a narrative by which, oh, he's not dead. He's certainly not dead. Who said dead? He has run off. We can even remember what he was wearing. Why this fell apart is that these were presumably all middle-class people.

We know that because they employed servants and the servants began to talk. This is Alan and Elizabeth's servants. This distinctive clothing that he was supposedly wearing employed servants and the servants began to talk this is um alan and elizabeth servants this distinctive clothing that he was supposedly wearing when he ran off it's in a drawer upstairs it's in a coffer upstairs we still have it so people began to speak and what i like about this case is there was no police that the servants could go to there were no real police that were willing to investigate that neighbors could go to so it were no real police that were willing to investigate that neighbours could go to.

So it became almost a case of a kind of grassroots movement of people that knew, OK, this story that this couple have come up with, it doesn't hang together, it's not true, something has happened. And this over time just snowballs until Thomas's master, Sir John Raynham, takes notice of it and thinks. And what he apparently was annoyed about was not that murder might have taken place, but that his man, Thomas, was living in sin with this woman, Elizabeth, whose husband had vanished. What's fascinating about this is that in both cases you're talking about tongues are wagging. That can also translate into community involvement slightly, that there are people in society in and around these killings who have an opinion on them and who get to express those opinions. And by expressing them influence the outcome of a trial of sorts.

of sorts. Whereas nowadays, if you have something like this that happens, the public and that community idea is kept as far away as possible in most cases because of that contamination, because of the unreliability of evidence that they're putting forward. But in this time period, it's kind of all we have going, really. And there's something there about it's the very structure of that community. It's the moral structure, that community it's the moral structure the hierarchy of class of you know that we've got servants we've got the masters and then we have the master of thomas so sort of three different social ranks going on here and that it's when people step out of those roles they're assigned by that society and behave oddly that people start to notice the anomalies that are cropping up and it's community that catches them out. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. It's almost as if there was an expectation

that communities would or should police themselves to some extent. And that makes sense if you think about it, if you think about the kind of courts and legal systems and things that were going around, it wasn't just law courts, there were ecclesiastical courts that were looking after people's morals, supposedly, and their spiritual health and all of that sort of stuff so there were again lots of legal systems it was sometimes activating them that could be the difficulty getting them to swing into gear if we were to leave those two particular cases behind just for a moment steven one question which is occurring to me, which I'm just morbidly interested in, I suppose. If a murderer was then introduced back into a

society in the 16th century, be that a noble society or middling or more common, do you know anything about how they would have been received back in post? Say there was a trial where Henry VIII had pardoned Dacre, which we know he had pardoned other people and they were allowed back into society. Did they just go about their business every day or was there kind of this stigma hanging around them because of what they had done? That's a really good question. And the answer to it, I suppose, is yes, it was almost as if they had done their penance they had paid their dues now whether that really translates into yes so everybody just ignored it is impossible much more difficult to

say yeah was there still prejudice i think there probably was i think there was still probably an idea this person has done wrong in the past they might do again it actually goes to a bigger question i think about early modern concepts of good and evil is this person evil they've done this bad thing are they there for evil forever can they be shriven of it and how does that work it's something that you see actually in a bit later than this but in some of shakespeare's plays is are people just bad or are they is there a motive behind it is there some sort of reasoning behind it can it be corrected atoned for that kind of thing so you get big moral questions I think going back to this case in particular one thing that's really jumping out

for me is that it gives us such a sense of multiple crime scenes and often when Anthony and I are looking at different case studies for this show, we have something of the landscape, the building, the crime scene left, if we're talking about the 18th or 19th centuries. And we spend a lot of time thinking about how they may have looked in the period that we're speaking about with the Tudor townscape, cityscapes.

That has often disappeared. It's really difficult to reconstruct that and i think this story you know we've got them i assume maybe killing alan maybe at home but then they're putting his body into a brook then they're moving it to a saw pit we get a real sense not only of the population this community surrounding them but the landscape itself and this all really adds up to a huge body of evidence doesn't it But we think that he was killed in a wood and that would probably explain... He was hit with a wooden shaft in the woods where he was...

The record says where he visited. I can't help but wonder, was he lured there? Was he invited there? Was this a planned murder? And that would explain why he was hidden in the brook at first. The move to the saw pit, again, yes, it's adding more crime scene to it. And then what i think is really interesting is both of them supposedly kept going back to the sop it and you see a kind of

paranoia and throwing more dirt on him and trying to sort of bury him deeper and deeper down so there was an anxiety about him being found about the discovery of a body and we can almost see why that's the case there were all kinds of beliefs extant in the period if for example a murdered body was left in a room and the murderer was brought into that room there was a kind of pseudoscience belief that it will start bleeding afresh so there were reasons to not let bodies be found if you were guilty if you were a murderer and tell me this how was his but alan's body discovered then in the end if it is covered in all this sawdust and all this dirt what is it that brings him to back to the surface as far as we know it was eventual confessions it was eventual confessions on the part of either one or both of

them they were separated so this dragged on for some time this suspicion hanging over the couple people knew what they'd done people knew what they'd done and they wanted legal recourse involved and what this led to eventually was more panic and this was very much on the part of thomas was the murderer. He eventually decided to sail up and flee and his master Sir John Raynham agreed with him on this. We assume because he was sick of the gossip that was flying around he released him from service and said pretty much just go just flee and he attempted this but he didn't flee far and he made a bit of a mistake I think here he fled to Buli Abbey now that seems like a good idea because at this time you could claim sanctuary

in Buli Abbey there were multiple places in England where if you were a murderer or a criminal of any kind you could claim sanctuary and what that meant is that you could hide out in this place and evade justice nominally for 40 days but people were clearly spinning it out beyond that he spun it out into about a year and he sent a servant so again he clearly had money he'd sold up his goods he was able to employ people he sent for Elizabeth to join him but as far as we know she didn't and that was probably the point at which they were separated and she could be interrogated so who broke first we don't know but this led to the discovery of the body in the sop it now the reason this was a mistake fleeing to bule is sanctuaries in this

period were a kind of political hot potato hen Henry VIII did not like them. He made no secret about this. He said in the 1510s that previous kings of England and previous popes had never intended for sanctuaries to be abused in the way that criminals were currently abusing them. So he was annoyed at this. We know in the 1530s, so over a decade later,

he abolished all but seven of them. He abolished all but seven sanctuaries again for those reasons he claimed that criminals were abusing them they were hiding out evading justice all of that sort of thing so thomas hung out in this sanctuary spun out to about a year but by this time again it had become a big deal the reason this case has survived unfortunately as i'm sure we'll get to, sadly, we don't know the penalties for either of them. Such an anti-climax.

It always is. So many legal records are missing the outcomes. But given the confessions that they eventually made, it's probable that they were executed for it. But he hung out there and then this case eventually went all the way to the Privy Council. It had become a big issue. We have a murderer hanging out in Beaulieu Abbey, deliberately evading justice. We have his co-conspirator in custody. We have confessions. We have a body. This eventually went all the way to the top.

And one of the big names involved in investigating it was Thomas More, actually. Thomas More took an interest in it. Do you think it would have reached the eyes and ears of Henry VIII and someone like Thomas More if Bennett hadn't hidden out in Beaulieu Abbey? Do you think it's the fact that he claims sanctuary? I mean, we know Henry VIII's relationship with the abbeys more generally throughout his reign. Is that the issue here is

that the thing that catapults what is quite a local story even though it's the you know the story of a murderer who hasn't been brought to justice is it the issue of the abbey and sanctuary that makes that as prominent as it is I think that's probably the big issue that brought it to the king's attention and Thomas More's attention i think the fact that it involved sir john raynham as well because it involved a knight it might have reached henry the eighth that might have reached the top would it have sparked such an interest would it have got the privy council involved in investigating it i don't think so i think that really was probably to do with the means by which they tried to evade justice or or certainly Thomas tried to evade justice. I think that brought in much more intense interest. And so to round out our conversation then, Stephen,

you alluded to it there previously. If you were found guilty of having murdered somebody, and if you had been now convicted, what are some of the outcomes of those trials that you could expect if you were sentenced if you were found guilty hanging was the general outcome i mean you couldn't really expect much more you could again maybe hope for mercy you could hope for a pardon you could hope for something like that you could hope to be found not guilty now there is a kind of stereotype of

the period that you were almost by virtue of being in the courtroom in the first place you were going to be found guilty we have that kind of view of tudor justice that everyone was guilty as soon as they got there but no there are cases of people being found not guilty there are cases of people being not let off but people proving that they weren't guilty so you could plead not guilty and almost have faith that justice would prevail chances are it would not but it doesn't mean in every case it was going to not work for you I guess there must be people I'm certain there were people who got away with murder just as I'm certain there were people who got away with murder, just as I'm certain there were people who were found wrongfully guilty and executed when they hadn't done anything. It's been absolutely fascinating to hear about a different kind of death, I think, in this period.

We think about plague, we think about state executions. I'm thinking about Anne Boleyn, for instance, being the most famous example of someone being executed by the king, by the state in the Tudor era we don't really think much about murder in this period and this has given me a whole other insight so thank you so much Stephen for that thank you very much for having me thank you you're very welcome thank you listeners for joining us for After Dark today you can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and if you feel so inclined do leave us review. We always love to hear from you. fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap, just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet.

Well, thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can listen to all these podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And as a special gift, now don't say we never give you anything, you can also get your first three months for £1 a month when you use the code AFTERDARK at checkout.