Richard Roose

In early 1531, Richard Roose (also Richard Rouse, Richard Cooke) was accused of poisoning members of the household of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester for which he was subsequently boiled alive. Although nothing is known of Roose or his life outside of the case, he is believed to have been Fisher's household cook—or, less likely, a friend of the cook—at Fisher's residence in Lambeth. He was accused of adding a white powder to some porridge, which was eaten by Fisher's dining guests, as well as two beggars to whom the food was given as charity. 
The guests survived, but the beggars died. Roose claimed that he had been given the powder to add to the food by a stranger, and claimed it was intended to be a joke—he thought he was incapacitating his fellow servants rather than killing anyone, he said. Fisher survived the poisoning as, for an unknown reason, he ate nothing that day. Roose was arrested immediately and tortured for information. King Henry VIII—who already had a morbid fear of poisoning—personally addressed the House of Lords on the case and was probably responsible for an act of parliament which attainted Roose and retroactively made murder by poison a treasonous offence mandating execution by boiling. Roose was boiled at London's Smithfield in April, 1532.
Fisher was already unpopular with the King, as Henry wished to divorce his wife, Katherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn, which the Church would not allow. Fisher was vociferous in his defence of Katherine, and contemporaries rumoured that the poisoning at Lambeth was the responsibility of the Boleyn family, with or without the knowledge of the King. There appears to have been at least one other attempt on Fisher's life when a cannon was fired towards Fisher's residence from the direction of Anne's father's house in London; on this occasion, no-one was hurt, but much damage was done to the roof and slates.
Fisher himself was executed by the King for his opposition to the Royal Supremacy, and Henry eventually married Anne and broke with the Catholic Church. Henry died in 1547 and his poisoning act did not long outlive him, being repealed almost immediately by his son Edward VI. The Roose case continued to ferment popular imagination and was still being cited in law into the next century.
It is considered by many historians to be a watershed in the history of attainder, which traditionally acted as a corollary to common law rather than replacing it. It was a direct precursor to the great treason attainders that were to underpin the Tudors'—and particularly Henry's—destruction of their political and religious enemies.
Background.
King Henry had become enamoured with one of his wife's ladies in waiting since 1525, but Anne Boleyn refused to sleep with the King before marriage. As a result, Henry had been trying to persuade both the Pope and the English church to grant him a divorce in order that he might marry Boleyn. Few of the leading churchmen of the day, however, supported Henry, and some, such as John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, were vocal opponents of his plans. J. J. Scarisbrick suggests that by this time, Fisher could count both Henry and Boleyn—and her family—among his enemies.
By early 1531, Parliament had been sitting for over a year. It had already passed a number of small, but significant acts, both against perceived social ills—such as vagabondage—and the church, for example restricting recourse to praemunire and the right of sanctuary. The ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire, Eustace Chapuys wrote to his master, the Emperor Charles V, that Fisher was unpopular with the King prior to the deaths, and reported that parties unnamed but close to the king had threatened to throw Fisher and his followers into the River Thames if he continued his opposition. The historian G. W. Bernard has speculated that Fisher may have been "a target of intimidation", and notes that there were two suggestive incidents during this period. The atmosphere of suspicion at court, and the passion with which Fisher defended Katherine of Aragon angered both King Henry and Anne Boleyn; for her part, Chapuys later reported, she "feared no-one in England more than Fisher, because he had always defended the queen without respect of persons". Around this time, Anne advised Fisher not to attend parliament—where he was expected to speak passionately against the King and his mistress—"in case [Fisher] caught some disease as he had before". Dowling classes this as a threat, albeit a veiled one. In the event, Fisher ignored both Anne and the advice and attended parliament as intended. Attempts had been made to persuade Fisher by force of argument—the most recent had been the previous June in a disputation between Fisher and John Stokesley, Bishop of London but nothing had come of it. Rex suggests that "the failure of this move led some to consider more decisive solutions"; the Tudor historian Maria Dowling that "Fisher's enemies soon went beyond mere bluster".
Poisoning.
Cases of deliberate, fatal poisoning were relatively rare in England—known more by reputation than experience—particularly when compared with traditionally high-profile felonies such as rape and burglary. It was considered an "un-English" crime, and although there was a genuine fear of poisoning among the upper-classes—which led to elaborate food tasting rituals at formal feasts—food poisoning from poor hygiene or misuse of natural ingredients was far more common an occurrence than deliberate poisoning with intent.
Poisonings of 18 February 1531.
In the early afternoon of 18 February 1531 Bishop Fisher and a number of guests were dining together at his house—the episcopal palace—in Lambeth Marsh. The act of parliament later described the official account of events: "on the Eighteenth day of February, 1531, one Richard Roose, of Rochester, Cook, also called Richard Cooke, did cast poison into a vessel, full of yeast or baum, standing in the kitchen of the Bishop of Rochester‘s Palace, at Lambeth March, by means of which two persons who happened to eat of the pottage made with such yeast died". A member of Fisher's household, Benett (possibly Burnet) Curwen, gentleman, and a woman who had come to the kitchens seeking alms called Alice Tryppyt, had eaten a porridge, or pottage, and became "mortally enfected". Fisher, who had not partaken of the dish, survived, but about 17 people were violently ill, including members of his dining party that night and the poor who regularly came to beg charity. It is not known why Fisher did not eat; he may have been fasting, or simply not hungry. Fisher's first biographer, Richard Hall reports that Fisher had been studying so hard in his office that he lost his appetite and "bid his household dine without him". On the other hand, says Bernard, Fisher was well known for his charitable practice of not eating before the supplicants at his door had; as a result, "they played the fatal role of food tasters".
Richard Fisher—the bishop's brother, and also household steward—ordered Roose arrested immediately. Roose, who by then seems to have put some distance between himself and the palace, was swiftly captured. He was placed under examination in the Tower of London.
Theories.
A "shockwave of horror" struck London and Westminster. Chapuys, writing to the Emperor in early March 1531, stated that it was as yet unknown who had provided Roose with the poison; Fisher's most recent biographer, Richard Rex, also argues that Roose was more likely a pawn in another's game, and had been "unwittingly tricked into the deed". Chapuys believed Roose to have been Fisher's own cook, while the act of parliament noted only that he was a cook by occupation and from Rochester. Many details of both the chronology and the case against Roose have been lost in the centuries since.
Bernard notes that Fisher had, for some time before the deaths, been something of a thorn in the King's side over his Great Matter, and it is not impossible that Henry—possibly acting through the Earl of Wiltshire, or with the latter working independently, perhaps through his own agents—intended to frighten or perhaps kill the bishop. The scholar John Matusiak argues that "no other critic of the divorce among the kingdom’s elites would, in fact, be more outspoken and no opponent of the looming breach with Rome would be treated to such levels of intimidation" as Fisher.
Misguided prank or accident.
Roose was tortured on the rack, where he admitted to putting what he believed to have been laxative—he described it as "a certain venom or poison"—in the porridge pot as a joke. Dowling notes that he failed to provide any information as to the instigators of the crime, despite being severely tortured, which she argues is an indication that he was persuaded to act on another's behalf. Bernard argues that an accident of this nature is by no means unthinkable. Roose himself claimed that the white powder would cause discomfort and illness but would not be fatal and that the intention was merely to "" Fisher's servants with a purgative, or as Chapuys reported, to "make his fellow servants very sick without endangering their lives or doing them any harm".
Roose was persuaded to poison.
Bernard suggests Roose's confession raises a number of questions: "Was it more sinister than that? [...] And if it was more than a prank that went disastrously wrong, was Fisher its intended victim?" Bernard posits that Roose may have been persuaded, by some means, to poison the food; or conversely, that a stranger did so while Roose was absent from the kitchen (for example, on a trip to the buttery). Chapuys himself expressed doubts as to Roose's supposed motivation, and the extant records do not indicate the process by which the authorities settled on Roose as the culprit in the first place.
Another culprit poisoned the food.
Hall—who provides a detailed and probably reasonably accurate account of the attack—suggests that the culprit was not Roose himself, but rather "a certain person of a most damnable and wicked disposition" known to Roose. Hall relates the story of the buttery, suggesting that this acquaintance had despatched Roose to fetch him more drink and while he was out of the room, poisoned the pottage.
The King's plan.
The King, says Lehmberg, was "greatly disturbed" at the news, not only because of his own paranoia regarding poison but also perhaps fearful that he would be suspected of having paid Roose to kill a royal enemy. Chapuys at least suspected Henry of over-dramatising Roose's crime in a machiavellian effort to distract attention from his and the Boleyns' own poor relations with the bishop. Henry may also have been reacting to a rumour—a slander—that he was at least partially responsible. Such a rumour seems to have gained traction in parts of the country already ill-disposed to the Queen, and had probably been propagated by parties in favour remaining in the Roman church. It is also likely that although Henry was determined to bring England's clergy directly under his control, the situation had not yet worsened to the extent that he wanted to be seen as an open enemy of the church or its leaders.
Anne Boleyn or her father's plan.
Chapuys suggests the culprit to have been less likely the King and more likely to be the family of Anne Boleyn, headed by Wiltshire. In his letter of March 1531, he told the Emperor,
Chapuys seems to have believed that, while it was realistically unlikely that the King had been involved in the conspiracy—being "too noble-minded to have recourse to such means"—Anne was a different matter. Bellany argues that, to contemporaries, while the involvement of the King in such an affair would have been incredible, "poisoning was a crime perfectly suited to an upstart courtier or an ambitious whore" such as she.
The Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneira—writing in the 1590s—placed the blame firmly on Anne Boleyn herself, writing how "she had wished to see Rochester dead ever since he had defended the cause of the queen with such valour. Out of this hatred, she had previously tried to murder him, bribing one of the bishop’s cooks, called Richard Roose". It was, says de Ribadeneira, only God's will that the bishop did not eat as he was presumably expected to, although he also believed that "all the servants who did eat died".
Elizabeth Norton argues that while Boleyn "was no murderess", the case of the poisoned pottage is indicative of her unpopularity, "that anything could be believed of her".
Legal proceedings.
No common law proceedings.
Roose was never tried for the crime he was accused of, and had no opportunity to defend himself. Rather, on 28 February the King addressed the Lords of parliament for an hour and a half, mostly on the matter of the poisonings, "in a lengthy speech expounding his love of justice and his zeal to protect his subjects and to maintain good order in the realm". This highly individual response to a felony—based purely on the King's opinion of it—was presented as an expression of the King's own virtues: care for his subjects and God's peace. Roose was, therefore, effectively condemned on the strength of Henry's personal interpretation of the events of 18 February rather than evidence, witnesses or confessions.
Bill expanding the definition of treason.
The bill was probably written by Henry's councillors—although its brevity suggests to historian William R. Stacy that the King may have drafted it himself—and underwent adjustments before it was finally promulgated; an earlier draft did not name Roose's victims or call the offence treason (rather it was termed "voluntary murder"). Kesselring suggests the shift in emphasis from felony to treason stemmed from Henry's political desire to restrict the privilege of benefit of clergy. Bishop Fisher was a staunch defender of the privilege, and, says Kesselring, "would not have welcomed an attempt to use the assault upon his household to justify an attack on clerical immunities". As a result, the "celebrated" "An Acte for Poysonyng"—an example of 16th-century "knee-jerk" legislation, according to the historian Robert Hutchinson—was passed. Indeed, Lehmberg suggests that "despite its barbarity, the bill seems to have passed both Houses easily". This is likely to have been because, despite its cruelty, it was seen as politically useful to have a law "which enabled the crown to strike down quickly individuals it perceived as particularly threatening and dangerous, and to do so without recourse to the common-law courts". Henry's legislation not only "enacted a host of capital statutes" but eleven such pieces expanded treason's legal definition. It effectively announced murder by poison to be a new phenomenon for the country and for the law.
An attainder was presented against Roose, which meant that he was effectively found guilty with no common law proceedings being necessary even though, as a prisoner of the crown, there was no impediment to placing him on trial. As a result of the deaths at Fisher's house, parliament—probably at the King's insistence— passed an act determining that murder by poison would henceforth be treason, to be punished by boiling alive. The act specified that "the said poisoning be adjudged high treason; and that the said Richard Roose, for the said murder and poisoning of the said two persons, shall stand, and be attainted of high treason, and shall be therefore boiled to death without benefit of clergy. And that, in future, murder by poisoning shall be adjudged high treason, and the offender deprived of his clergy and boiled to death". The act was thus retroactive, in that the law which condemned Roose did not exist—poisoning not being classed as treason— when the crime was committed. Through the act, Justices of the Peace and local assizes were given jurisdiction over treason, although this was effectively limited to coining and poisoning until later in the decade.
Death by boiling.
In what has been suggested may have been a deliberate "symbolic retribution" intending to demonstrate the crown's commitment to law and order, Roose was boiled to death at Smithfield on 15 April 1532 over a period of about two hours. The contemporary "Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London" described how Roose was tied up in chains, gibbeted and then lowered in and out of the boiling water three times "tyll he was dede". Although Roose was not the first to suffer such a fate, it was with him that boiling as a form of execution was placed on the statute book. Stacy suggests that in the manner of his execution, there was more intended than "simply to mock Roose's occupation as a cook or in a spirit of blind revenge to increase his suffering". Rather, Stacy suggests, the method of execution was carefully chosen to re-enact the crime itself, in which Roose boiled poison into the broth. This inextricably linked the crime with its punishment in the eyes of contemporaries. A contemporary described the scene as Roose died:
Aftermath.
Edward Hall describes a curious event taking place shortly after the poisonings. Volleys of gunfire—probably from a cannon—were apparently shot through the roof of Fisher's house, damaging rafters and slates. Fisher's study, which he was occupying at the time, was close by; Hall alleges that the shooting came from the Earl of Wiltshire's house directly across the Thames. However, the distance between Wiltshire's Durham House on London's Strand and Fisher's palace was, as Dowling remarks, "a long one indeed". Victorian antiquarian John Lewis also calls the story "highly improbable". J. J. Scarisbrick noted the close timing between the two attacks, and suggested that the government or its agents may have been implicated in both of them, saying "we can make of that story what we will". As a result, suggests Hall, Fisher "perceived that great malice was meant toward him" and declared his intention to leave for Rochester immediately. Chapuys reports that he departed London on 2 March.
Scholar Miranda Wilson suggests that Roose's poison "did not prove particularly effective as a weapon" in what was a "botched and isolated attack". Had it succeeded, argues Stacy, through the usual course of law, Roose could at most have been convicted of petty treason. The King's reaction, says Bernard, was "extraordinary", and may indicate a guilty royal conscience, particularly with the punishment being so outlandishly over the top. The change in the legal status of poisoning has been described by Stanford Lehmberg as "the most interesting" of all the adjustments to the legal code in 1531. Hutchinson has contrasted the rarity of the crime—which the act itself acknowledged—with the swiftness of the royal response to it.
Cardinal Fisher had been ill ever since the clergy had accepted Henry's new title of Supreme Head of the Church, reported Chapuys, and was further "nauseated" by the treatment meted out to Roose. Fisher left for his diocese before the raising of the parliamentary session on 31 March. Chapuys speculated on Fisher's reasons for wishing to make such a long journey, "especially as he will get better attendance of physicians" in London. He considered that either the bishop no longer wished to witness the attacks on his church, or, possibly that "he fears that there is some more powder in store for him". The ambassador believed Fisher's escape from death to have been an act of God, who, he wrote, "no doubt considers [Fisher] very useful and necessary in this world". He also suggested that, for his cause, it was a bad time for Fisher to leave Westminster, and wrote that "if the King desired to treat of the affair of the Queen, the absence of the said Bishop and of the Bishop of Durham would be unfortunate".
What Bellany calls the "English obsession" with poison continued—indeed, probably increased—and "hysteria" over poisoning continued for many years. Death by boiling, however, was used only once more as a method of execution, in March 1542 for another case of poisoning. On this occasion a maidservant, Margaret Davy, suffered this form of execution for poisoning her master and mistress. The act was appealed in 1547 on the accession of Henry's son, Edward VI, whose first parliament described it as "very straight, sore, extreme, and terrible", and reclassified it as a felony as thus subject to the more usual punishment—usually hanging for men and burning for women.
Most of the more well-known attainders which followed that of Roose were matters of state, but two—introduced by Thomas Cromwell—were directly influenced by the precedent of the 1531 attainder. These both favoured a parliamentary attainder absent of the need for prior judicial proceedings. This, says the legal scholar Molly Murray, made attainder "an efficient means of confining and condemning his enemies without cumbersome and time-consuming judicial proceedings".
Perception.
Of contemporaries.
The case made a significant impact on contemporaries—Chapuys called it a "very extraordinary case"—who found it "fascinating, puzzling and instructive". Lipscomb has noted that, whereas attempting to kill a bishop in 1531 was punishable by a painful death, it was "an irony perhaps not lost on others four years later", when Fisher, in turn, was sent to the block. The case remained a cause celebre into the next century.
It was seen as an innovative form of crime to the English political class—A. F. Pollard says that "however familiar poisoning might be at Rome, it was a novel method in England"—and the case "transformed [poisoning] from a bit part to a star performer", and that while all murder was a crime against God and the King, there was something about poisoning that made it worse, for it was against "good obedyance and order". Poison was seen as infecting not just the bodies of its victims, but the body politic generally. Stacy has argued that it was less the target of the attempted murder than the method used in doing so that worried contemporaries, and so it was this that accounts for both the elevation of Roose's crime to treason and the brutality with which it was punished; Alison Sim describes how "poison made no differentiation between the life of a "gentlyman" and that of a "pore Woman"; it was also linked to the supernatural in contemporary imagination: the Latin "veneficum" translated both as poisoning and sorcery.
Edward Coke, Chief Justice under King James I, said that the punishment was "too severe to live long". Nevertheless, he referenced the Roose case several times, as did Francis Bacon, in their prosecution of Robert Carr and Frances Howard for the poisoning of Thomas Overbury in 1615; Bacon called the crime of poisoning "grievous beyond other matters". Specifically Bacon argued that—as the Roose case demonstrated—poison can rarely be confined to its intended target, and that often "men die other men's deaths". He also emphasised that the crime was not just against the person, but against society. Notes Wilson: "for Bacon, the 16th-century story of Roose retains both cultural currency and argumentative relevance in Jacobean England". Roose's attainder was cited in the 1641 attainder of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford.
Of historians.
Wilson argues that historians have under-examined Roose's case, except when discussing broader historiographies, such as that of attainder, or relations between Henry and Fisher; Stacy suggests that it has been "overshadowed by the multitude of attainders soon to follow". It is also significant, Wilson says, as being the point where poisoning—both legally and in the popular imagination—"does acquire a vigorous cultural presence missing in earlier treatments". Bellany suggests that the case "starkly revealed the poisoner's unnerving power to subvert the order and betray the intimacies that bound household and community together". In other words, the former was a microcosm of the latter. The secrecy with which the lower-class could subvert their superior's authority, and the wider damage this was seen to do, explains why the "Acte for Poysonyngs" directly compares poisoning as a crime with that of coining. Penry Williams suggests that the Roose case, and particularly the elevation of poisoning to a crime of high treason, is an example of a broader, more endemic, extension of capital offences under the Tudors and Henry VIII in particular.
Elton suggested that the 1531 act "was in fact the dying echo of an older common law attitude which could at times be negligent of the real meaning of the word". Kesselring disputes Elton's interpretation, arguing that, far from being an accidental throwback, the act was "a conscious decision made to circumvent the law and to avoid political difficulties." Kesselring also questions why—although it may be understandable why the King pressed to attaint Roose—parliament so easily agreed to his demand, or broadened the definition of treason as they did. It was not as if the change brought profit to Henry: "the act stipulated that
forfeitures would go not to the king but to the lord of the fee, as in cases of felony". This, Bellamy suggests, may have been Henry's way of persuading the Lords to support the measure, as in most cases they could expect to receive the goods and chattels of the convicted. Bellamy considers, that fundamentally, although the act was an innovation in statute law, it still "managed to contain all the most obnoxious features of its varied predecessors". Elton argues that Henry and Cromwell had "a rigid regard for the forms of trial and conviction at common law"; if the Roose attainder had been the only example of its kind, argues Stacy, "it might be regarded as no more than an interesting if abhorrent aberration". However, it was merely the first of many such circumventions of common law in Henry's reign, and calls into question the suggestion that the period was "an age of legalism, with respect for due process of law and conformity to past practice".
Stacy has argued that the Roose case is the first example of an attainder intended to avoid resorting to the common law, and that although it has been overshadowed by subsequent cases of greater political import it was the precedent upon which they were prosecuted. Although attainder was a common parliamentary weapon for late-medieval English kings, it was effectively a form of outlawry, usually to supplement a common or martial law verdict with the confiscation of land and wealth as its intended result. The scholar Suzannah Lipscomb has argued that not only were attainders increasingly used from the 1530s but that the decade shows the heaviest use of the mechanism in the whole of English history, while Stacy suggests that Henrician ministers resorted to the parliamentary attainder as a matter of routine. Attainders were popular with the King, Lipscomb suggests, because they could take the place of common law rather than merely augment it, "without needing to cite specific evidence or name precise crimes". The Roose attainder laid the groundwork for the famous treason attainders that punctuated the rest of Henry's reign.
Cultural depiction.
Shakespeare referenced Roose's execution in "The Winter's Tale" when the character of Paulina demands of King Leontes:
<poem style="margin-left: 2em;">What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels, racks, fires? What flaying? Boiling
In leads or oils? What old or newer torture
Must I receive...</poem>
Poison, argues Bellany, was a popular motif among Shakespeare and his contemporaries as it tapped into a basic fear of the unknown, and poisoning stories were so often about more than merely the crime itself:
Roose's attempt to poison Fisher is portrayed in the first episode of the second series of "The Tudors", "Everything Is Beautiful" in 2008. Roose is played by Gary Murphy in a "highly fictionalised" account of the case, in which the ultimate blame is placed on the Earl of Wiltshire—who provides the poison—with Roose merely his catspaw. The episode suggests that Roose is bribable because he has three daughters for whom he wants good marriages. Having paid Roose to poison the soup, Wiltshire then threatens to exterminate the cook's family if he ever speaks. Sir Thomas More takes the news of the poisoning to Henry, who becomes angry at the suggestion of Anne's involvement. Both Wiltshire and Cromwell witness the "particularly gruesome scene" where Roose is executed; the latter is shown to walk out halfway through. Hilary Mantel includes the poisoning in her fictional life of Thomas Cromwell, "Wolf Hall", from whose perspective events are related. Without naming Roose personally, Mantel covers the poisoning and its environs in some detail. She has the poisoned broth, the only dish that the victims had had in common that night, according to serving boys; Cromwell, while understanding that "there are poisons nature herself brews", is in no doubt that a crime had been committed from the start. The cook, captured, explains that "a man. A stranger who had said it would be a good joke" had given the cook the poison.