London has been the site of many famed murder mysteries, both real and fictional, so it seems appropriate that its first known handgun murder should also be its first unsolved handgun murder.
Robert Packington was a perfect example of the Tudor era “solid citizen.” Born into a well-to-do Worcestershire family in 1489, he originally trained to be a lawyer, but soon switched to a mercantile career. In 1510, he completed an apprenticeship in the Mercers' Company and went to work exporting cloth and importing “sundry wares.”
Packington had no reason to regret giving up the law. He became a leading exporter of cloth, which led him to spend much time in the Netherlands, doing business. He became a Member of Parliament, where he represented the Mercers’ interests by complaining about “the covetousness and crueltie of the clergie.” Packington took a strong interest in the spirit of religious reformation which had spread to England. He was said to have imported English-language bibles from Protestant Europe, and his equally Reformation-minded brother Augustine played a well-publicized trick on Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London. He led Tunstall to believe he had bought all of William Tyndale’s English bibles from the Low Countries, for the purpose of publicly burning them. Instead, Augustine gave the money intended for the purchase to Tyndale himself, who used it to print new versions.
Robert’s political activities appear to have gone even deeper. Although the details are lost to us, Packington appears to have been acting as a spy for the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, using his many business trips abroad as a cover. Whatever services he was providing for Cromwell, Packington evidently realized they were hazardous enough for him to make a will providing for his underage children in the event of his early death.
These fears, unfortunately, proved to be far from unfounded.
On the morning of November 13, 1536, a heavy fog hung in the London air, causing a near-total lack of visibility. Most preferred to keep to their homes, but among the few exceptions was Robert Packington. At 5 a.m., he left his Cheapside residence to attend mass at the church of St. Thomas of Acre--something he was known to faithfully do every day, no matter what the weather.
As he began walking through the damp, chilly streets, a loud bang reverberated through the mist. When neighbors came to investigate the noise, they found Packington’s body on the ground. Someone lurking in the fog had shot the merchant dead.
The social prominence of the victim, as well as the unprecedented choice of weapon, caused the deed to make a great stir throughout the land. His murder became one of Tudor England’s “Crimes of the Century.” The motive for the shooting, as well as the identity of the perpetrator, became a matter of hot debate for years after the merchant was long dead and buried.
Although a “gret rewarde” was offered for any information about the killing, no one came forward. In that age of spies, gossips, and tattletales, it is remarkable that not one solid clue to Packington’s murder was ever uncovered. The cool efficiency of the attack suggests an assassination carried out by a professional hit man, but who could have been behind the slaying?
The pro-Reform activities of Robert and his brother naturally earned them the enmity of the established clergy, leading many contemporary writers to fasten blame on conservative churchmen. Some twenty years after the murder, chronicler John Foxe published the first detailed account of the slaying. He claimed that John Stokesley, who was then Bishop of London, paid a priest sixty gold coins to murder Packington. However, Foxe later gave a different version of the murder, now claiming that John Incent, Dean of St. Paul’s, hired an Italian assassin to do the job. (Incent was a close ally of Thomas Cromwell, which would suggest either that Foxe was totally mistaken, or--assuming that there was some truth to his accusation--that Cromwell himself may have had a motive to eliminate his spy.) Foxe added that there were rumors that Robert Singleton, Anne Boleyn’s former chaplain, was the murderer, but Foxe himself did not credit such talk. (Singleton, another of Cromwell’s many agents, was executed for treason in 1544.)
By the time Holinshed published his “Chronicles” in the 1570, conservative clerics were no longer the automatic “useful suspects.” He claimed that some common street thug, when being executed for another crime, confessed on the gallows that he had also murdered Robert Packington. However, as this story of the anonymous criminal only surfaced some forty years after the murder, it is almost certainly apocryphal; a perfect example of the outlandish rumors that collect themselves around notorious crimes.
Yet another theory had it that the assassin had been hired by the duped Cuthbert Tunstall to kill Augustine Packington, but got the wrong brother instead. As Augustine was already long dead at the time of Robert’s murder, this scenario seems, to say the least, unlikely.
Or were the motives behind the shooting personal, rather than political? Could the murder be traced back to an aggrieved business partner, a vengeful relative, an angry former friend?
Whoever may have been responsible for the murder of Robert Packington, it is a safe bet that if Tudor England could not identify the person--or persons--we never will.
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| 1815 engraving of St. Pancras Church, where Packington is buried |
Very interesting. The use of the firearm in the murder suggests an unusual motive or perpetrator. Handguns could not have been cheap in the sixteenth century. The same weapon must raise the question of why it was used at all, when stabbing or parroting must have been the common method of assassination then, and the dense fog would have made such close-quarter weapons not only the logical choice, but safer for someone to use than otherwise: after all, the fog would have allowed a killer to come as close as he’d like to his victim; the early hour of a November morning must have meant the sun was barely up, too. On the other hand, bad visibility would have hindered, rather than helped, a killer with a firearm.
ReplyDeleteAnybody who could use a less noisy weapon would surely have preferred that to a gun, which was certain to attract attention. Even the lowliest of the common street thugs would have had confidence in the strength of his arm and a stout cudgel, especially if he could approach unseen in the fog.
ReplyDeleteIt points to someone who lacked the fighting skills to engage his victim at close quarters and who could only use a ranged weapon that didn’t require any training. That suggests a professional or personal rival from Packington’s own social class, or one of his clerical enemies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take us any further than that.