This newsletter is pretty much entirely about the featured woodcut, which accompanied a report of a serial killing duo who would seduce men with promises of sex before bludgeoning them to death.
But there are two things I’ve come across in the past week which I found interesting enough to mention here: the first is some reportage of Tracy Borman’s claim (no doubt articulated with press coverage in mind) that James I “stole the English Crown” by succeeding Elizabeth I against her wishes and in defiance of Henry VIII’s laws of succession. The second is Matthew Lyons’ publishing of a great piece about the scholar and forger John Payne Collier on his Substack blog (which is an extended version of an older History Today article). Those interested in early modern book history ought to shudder at his name.
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Featured Woodcut
The woodcut below (which is in fact two woodcuts positioned one above the other) is one of the more striking that I have come across. It accompanied a murder pamphlet entitled Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry send after Lust and Murther (1635) which was printed by the father-and-son duo of Nicholas and John Okes.
They are nowadays most remembered for their printing of plays by Shakespeare, Johnson, Ford, and others — but in their own day were a force to be reckoned with in the production of ephemeral, topical works.
The two figures dangling at the periphery of the image are Thomas Sherwood (left) and Elizabeth Evans (right), though they were better known in 1635 as “Country Tom” and “Canberry Bess”, respectively.
Beneath them is a woodcut outline supposedly in “the form of the instrument of wood and iron that [Sherwood] used to hurt with”. This was a spiked club concealed on Sherwood’s person, with which he beat to death men who had been seduced by Evans, such was her part in the murderous enterprise.
They killed a total of three men: the merchant Rowland Holt, a London prison sub-warden called Michael Lowe (who was the son of a former Lord Mayor of the city), and the soldier Thomas Claxton. The bodies of two of these victims — Claxton and Holt — can be seen on the bottom of the woodcut illustration. It was while attempting to pawn off Claxton’s clothes that Sherwood and Evans were exposed and arrested.
They were convicted, confessing also to “many Notorious Felonies and Robberies”, and sentenced to hang. Only about a week later, John Okes entered his report of the murders into the Stationers’ Register.
The pamphlet’s author was Henry Goodcole — a particularly valuable asset to publishers at the time, being the visitor of Ludgate prison beginning in 1613 and subsequently of the infamous Newgate prison from 1620. No fewer than four murder pamphlets flowed from his pen between 1620 and 1637. If Goodcole is to be believed, his motive for writing was to dispel misinformation and promote the truth. He had been on a hiatus from writing between 1623 and 1635, justifying his return as necessary to “the Common good, and preservation of my Countries welfare”. As Randall Martin notes, however, church preferment was probably the more attractive reward — Goodcole was appointed vicar of St James Clerkenwell the next year.
Goodcole’s privileged access to Sherwood and Evans during their imprisonment allowed him to extract and publish a comprehensive narrative of their crimes and detailed confessions.
It also means the text is rife with edifying passages and biblical allusions. More interesting to a modern reader, I suspect, is his detailing of those “places in and about the city of London, that Harlots watch their opportunities to surprise men” and guidance for how to spot “lewd tempting persons”. The geographic and social factors which underpin crime are laid out presciently, if crudely.
But that was not what would make the pamphlet sell — the gory killings were. And seeing is believing, so an illustration was commissioned. The Okes duo (Okeses?) clearly thought that the woodcut impression of the murder weapon was important, since it appears not only on the frontispiece of the pamphlet, but also twice more in the middle of the text.
Here, even more so than on the frontispiece, the reader holding the book would quite literally have been grasping the dreaded instrument of butchery. Murder pamphlets frequently exhorted the reader to beware that any person, including themselves, could be lured by Satan to commit murder; to actually put the weapon in their hands was a masterstroke.
This was not unprecedented. In an article from February 2024, I mentioned that one of the issues of Thomas Walkley’s A Journall of All the Proceedings of the Duke of Buckingham his Grace, in the Isle of Ree (1627) included a woodcut illustration of a “poyson’d knife” supposedly used in an assassination attempt against George Villiers. And as Professor Elaine Scarry noted more generally in her 1985 study of the nature of physical suffering, Amnesty International discovered that including images of weapons alongside reports of violence “elicited from the public an immediate outcry against the human hurt visibly suggested by the object”.
And the report was clearly a best-seller, which was quickly devoured by London’s reading public and followed shortly afterwards by a second edition. This was apparently necessitated by a subsequent assault which took place at the site of one of the murderers’ gibbets, though the prospect of another fruitful print run was undoubtedly alluring. Indeed, Goodcole’s pamphlet is extraordinary in this regard — murder pamphlets typically had a single run in print.
Sherwood’s body had, you see, been moved from the site of execution and his corpse was publicly displayed in chains, hanging near Pancras Church. But Goodcole tells us this morbid reminder of the consequence of crime was not observed by “a company of villaines” who encountered a butcher passing by and, hearing the man say that “it was no matter if all such rogues were serv’d so”, attacked him. The “cursed crue” assaulted him, tore off his clothes, and bound him naked to the gibbet “with a gagge in his mouth”.
Evans’ body had been taken away and dissected by physicians, before “her dryed carkase or sceleton of bones and gristles” was taken to be displayed in the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall — which had an astrological ceiling. As Anna Cusack observes in her PhD thesis about the “marginal dead” of early modern London, Evans’ skeleton was “held up as an example of ‘corrupt femininity’” and was placed over the Libra zodiac sign, which was represented by judicial scales. Sherwood’s skeleton would join the collection by 1638.
