Damn His Blood (27 page)

I don’t usually encourage superstitious
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notions in others, nor harbour them myself, but somehow or other I felt a disagreeable, uneasy sensation during my stay here, and had any one of the two or three farmers who met together at the church invited me to dinner, I think I must have declined with a polite excuse. Indeed the village appeared as melancholy and deserted as though lying under the ban of some unatoned crime, and the few persons who formed the congregation hastened to and from the church, and avoided the stranger’s gaze, as though it were painful to them. Some of the windows of the church, too, were broken, and the wind moaned through the shattered panes of the north transept like a sad spirit of the other world, raving round the walls of God’s house in the sorrow of remorse and despair.

More worldly troubles awaited several of the farmers. The inflationary cycles that had swirled in the years before Parker’s death continued to haunt them for years afterwards. A disastrous harvest in 1812 plunged Worcester to the brink of famine, leaving county-wide supplies of wheat and potatoes perilously low. At its worst, wheat was selling for the extraordinary price of £1 a bushel in the market, meaning that wheaten bread was almost impossible to obtain. Most villagers and townsfolk were forced to survive the winter on scanty rations of bran and root vegetables, and in Worcester the Bacon and Pease Charity was hurriedly established to feed the 8,000 helpless poor.

Worcestershire
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had barely recovered from the effects of famine by 1815, when the Napoleonic Wars concluded with Wellington’s victory at Waterloo. The peace was greeted as an ‘unnatural blessing’, but the more prosperous age that was anticipated failed to materialise. Thousands of returning troops and the sudden influx of foreign imports combined to flood both the labour and commodity markets at a stroke, plunging the economy into a devastating recession. Its effects were felt right across the country, and in Oddingley it was enough to ruin several of the farmers. By 1815 John Perkins had fallen into debt and had been forced back into the labouring ranks. The next year Thomas Clewes suffered the same fate. Having pawned and mortgaged all of his land, he filed for bankruptcy and, leaving a large number of creditors unpaid, he left Netherwood Farm for good.

Clewes had never been skilled with money, but his profligacy at Netherwood had been compounded by a terrible run of bad fortune that had seen several of his most valuable animals die unexpectedly. ‘As for Clewes,’
⁹
recalled one of Erskine Neale’s characters in
The Bishop’s Daughter
, ‘He warn’t to thrive. A higher power was agen him!’ Clewes had begun the decade as Netherwood’s master; he ended it as a woodman struggling to survive with his wife in a little cottage on the outskirts of Trench Wood. He drank more, the locals noted, and struggled to sleep.

Not all the farmers suffered. William Barnett’s move to Church Farm in 1809 reaffirmed the family’s ascendancy in the parish. The younger brother soon established himself in the Captain’s old property beside the church, where he was to remain for decades to come. Within a few years of his arrival the village was altered for ever with the appearance of the Birmingham and Worcester Canal. This enormous engineering project sliced right through Oddingley, from Dunhampstead to Tibberton, passing just 50 yards from Church Farm’s door and dividing it from Netherwood, which was left more isolated than ever.

At Pound Farm John Barnett’s position as the most powerful village farmer had been confirmed in 1814 when his mother died, enabling him to assume full control of the business which he had already stewarded for nearly two decades. Several years later Lord Foley decided to reward him for his contribution to parochial life and to recognise the family’s long-standing loyalty to him as tenants by constructing him an expensive new property named Park Farm in the north of the village. Pound Farm, the Barnetts’ former home, was rented out to the poor.

The 1820s was a decade at a pivot of British history, poised between the fading Georgian era and the modern Victorian age which would replace it. The Britain of these years was purposeful and pointed, spearheaded by revolutionary technological evolutions such as the telegraph, the steamship, macadamised roads and the railways. In north Wales Thomas Telford’s Menai suspension bridge was one of the first of its kind in the world and was admired as a paragon of brilliant engineering. When the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened four years later, in September 1830, it meant that the 30 miles that lay between the two cities could be negotiated in little more than an hour.

The appearance of Worcester was also changing. In 1819 the city’s new gasworks had opened, and for the first time its streets were illuminated at night. One resident described the ‘splendid’ spectacle of the city streets, ‘the shops sparkling with vivid lustre’.
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He delighted at how the ‘inflammable vapour winds its way into our domestic circles and surprises us with its sudden ignition’. Elsewhere, in 1821 Michael Faraday demonstrated the principles of the electric motor. The following year Charles Babbage delivered a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society describing his design for a ‘difference engine’ or mechanical calculator. In London and the growing industrial areas of the Midlands and the north-west a collective spirit of innovation, optimism and industry was converging to form a potent zeitgeist that swept scientists and engineers along with it. Canals, which had so recently been treated as wondrous advancements, had already lost their sheen and much of their practicality to the railways. Britons were on the brink of a new age: never had the old seemed so old and the new so new.

Parker’s murder was now a fable lost in time, a crime that belonged to a different age. By the 1820s fewer than four out of ten living Britons had been born in the eighteenth century and very few remained wedded to the old customs that had governed society for so long. A new better-mannered society was emerging as a contrast to the uncouth, expressive and decadent England of King George III.

In 1803 Colonel Despard had been the last man condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Over the following years Sir Samuel Romily had conducted an energetic campaign against the death penalty, and when the Cato Street Conspirators were tried for high treason in 1820, they became the last men to be hanged and publicly beheaded. The pillory, stocks, public whippings and all the other trappings of the old brutal methods of punishment would also soon be banned.

In 1822 the able young administrator Robert Peel
¹¹
was appointed home secretary and embarked upon a long policy of dismantling the Bloody Code and simplifying English law. The desire for such reform predated Peel, but it was his zeal that would be remembered. A total of 278 statutes were repealed or consolidated over the next eight years in a sustained attack on what Peel considered an obsolete chaotic jungle of legislation, altering for ever a system that had meant around 200 different offences were punishable by death. The statute of 1702 which had prevented the Captain and Barnett from being tried after Parker’s murder was one superseded during this time. In May 1826 a new criminal justice act was passed, allowing accessories to be tried even if the principal was not present. The law was not made retroactive.

The decade also brought changes in Oddingley. In 1824 Reverend Charles Tookey arrived to replace John Marten Butt, and the following year the Foleys were succeeded as patrons and landowners after selling the entire estate to John Howard Galton. This man acquired a parish in gentle ascendancy. After the dip at the beginning of the century, the village population had slowly begun to rise. Farms lost in the 1810s were replaced by others in the 1820s, most controlled by a new generation of farmers. By now John and William Barnett were the only two surviving agriculturalists from 1806. Samuel Jones disappears from the parish records
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around 1815; John Marshall died in 1816; and Old Mr Hardcourt’s long life in the parish came to an end in 1823.

The Oddingley story belonged to the past. Arguments about tithe payments had rumbled on across the country, but by now even the Church was accepting that reform was inevitable. Parker and his ratepayers were among the last to fight over the tax in such a way. And for the new generation reports of the swearing, expressions of hatred and malice and the left-handed toasts seemed scandalous. As the world’s leading power, Britain was desperate to shake off the embarrassments of its past. Nostalgia was confined to the older generations, with the poet and novelist Horace Smith one of the few left to lament, ‘We have no longer any genuine quizzes
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or odd fellows, society had shaken us together in its bag until all our original characters and impressions have been rubbed out, and we are left as smooth and polished as old shillings.’

Captain Evans, though, lived on at New House. Now among the very oldest of men, his existence was increasingly secluded and there is little sight of him in the records. On 22 September 1825, at the extraordinary age of 92, he performed his final duty as a magistrate at the George Inn in Droitwich. It was now around half a century since he had served in the American conflict, 42 years since he had retired from the army and 30 since he had been elected to the magistracy in Droitwich. During the Captain’s three decades of unbroken service the British government had been led by six prime ministers and the United States by six different presidents. Such dazzling longevity was to become almost as notable as any of his many social achievements.
^fn2

This last stretch of Captain Evans’ life was touched by loss. Catherine Banks, who had remained with him after the departure of George and her mother, had served as his housekeeper for around 20 years when she died on 13 October 1822. She would have been aged about 50, and the Captain took her passing badly. In a life of bluster, adventure and many changes, Catherine Banks had remained with him longer than anyone else. She was buried in a fine vault he had prepared for her at St Peter’s Church in Droitwich, and it seems her funeral stirred some religious feelings within him. Never a churchgoer during his Oddingley days, the Captain is known to have attended St Andrew’s in Droitwich shortly afterwards and received the sacrament.

These events heralded the beginning of the final phase in the Captain’s life. The semi-retirement of his quiet existence at New House was now replaced by near-total withdrawal from local society. In 1826 he left Oddingley altogether and moved to a cottage on Friar Street near the centre of Droitwich, which he seldom left. He would remain here for three years until the early summer of 1829, when a strange and miserable illness brought a swift end to his long life. It was an unhappy death. Those who saw him in May 1829 encountered a troubled man. He swore and cursed from his bed, falling into desperate spells of quiet contemplation or murmured prayer. He seemed stricken by a shadowy terror against which he raged but could not escape. Early one spring morning he gripped his housekeeper’s arm and begged her to turn ‘these two Devils out of the room’.
¹⁴

A record of his last weeks was left behind by this housekeeper, a woman named Catherine Bowkett. Her account is both powerful and revealing, and there is little reason to question its veracity. She recalled that the first symptoms of his malady appeared at three o’clock on the morning of 12 May 1829. It was instantly clear that he was seriously unwell and she sent for assistance as soon as she could. In the afternoon the knocker on the cottage door fell once again and George Banks was shown upstairs.

Whatever ill feeling there had been between Banks and the Captain had by now dissipated, and on seeing his old bailiff, Evans confessed he was gravely ill. They asked Bowkett to leave them alone, and from the bottom of the stairs she listened as 35 guineas, heavy golden coins of more than half an inch in diameter, were counted out. She heard the Captain tell Banks ‘he had had the money in his hand all day long’. When this was finished, Bowkett was called back and ordered to fetch a silver cup and a set of spoons that had been promised to Banks. The Captain instructed her to fill the cup with ale.

This was the first of Banks’ visits to Evans’ cottage during his final weeks. Bowkett did not know the farmer but later recalled that he would sit with the Captain in his bedroom, where they would hold long whispered conversations. Whenever she entered the room, they would fall silent.

Within days it became clear that the Captain’s illness was not just attacking his elderly body, but also his mind. Bowkett saw Evans grow ever more tempestuous, veering between violent outbursts and periods of calm. At times these moods were interspersed by tortuous visions, and Bowkett later recalled his trembling appeals from his otherwise empty bedroom to ‘take these two men away’.

The bleak scenes at the Captain’s cottage were at odds with the mood outside in Droitwich, as the market town crept through late spring towards early summer. Horsedrawn carts hauling loads of freshly mined salt clattered between the pits and the canal, milling on the town streets with farmers’ traps, drovers to and fro between nearby villages and the town market, wagoners calling at the harness makers and tradesmen heading south to the cathedral city of Worcester or north towards the smoking chimneys of the Black Country and Birmingham.

Amid the gossip was the testimony of a man named Doone, who had previously worked as a servant for the Captain and claimed to know his habits well. Doone told the
Worcester Herald
that Evans was an eccentric who had spent years brooding moodily in his cottage, drinking as much as a bottle of brandy each day. Visitors would always face some ‘delay and difficulty in gaining admission’
¹⁵
Doone said, a fact he attributed to Evans’ fixation with security and his insistence that all of his doors remained closed and bolted.