Thomas Dangerfield

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The pillorying and the whipping of Thomas Dangerfield, June 1685

Thomas Dangerfield (ca. 1650 – 22 June 1685) was an English conspirator and one of the principal informers in the Popish Plot.

Biography

Dangerfield was born about 1650 at Waltham Abbey, Essex, the son of a farmer. At the age of 12 around 1662, he ran away from home to London, and never returned to his home.

He began his career by robbing his father, and, after a rambling life, took to coining false money, for which offence and others he was many times imprisoned: it was said that to describe his career one need simply list every capital crime in English law. [1] A judge later referred to him with contempt as "that fellow from Chelmsford gaol", and he also spent time in Newgate Prison.[2] He used a nunber of aliases, notably Willoughby.[3]

Popish Plot

False to everyone, he first tried to involve James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth and others by concocting information about a Presbyterian plot against the throne, and this having been proved a lie, he pretended to have discovered a Catholic plot against Charles II. This was known as the Mealtub Plot, from the place where the incriminating documents were hidden at his suggestion, and found by the king's officers by his information.[4]

Mrs Elizabeth Cellier, in whose house the meal tub was found, was a well- known midwife and almoner to the Countess of Powis, and had rescued Dangerfield from a debtors' prison and befriended him when he posed as a Catholic. She was, with her patroness Lady Powis, actually tried for high treason and acquitted (1680). [5]

For a time Dangerfield was used as a secondary witness in the Popish Plot trials to supplement the evidence of Titus Oates and William Bedloe, but his character was so unsavoury, even compared to the other informers, that Chief Justice William Scroggs, who knew his record thoroughly, soon told juries to disregard the evidence of "so notorious a villain". [6] Dangerfield, when examined at the bar of the House of Commons, made other charges against prominent Roman Catholics, and attempted to defend his character by publishing, among other pamphlets, Dangerfield's Narrative.

Murder

The publication of his Narrative led, once public opinion had turned against the existence of the Plot, to his trial for libel, (Kenyon notes that he could not be tried for perjury as no-one had ever believed his evidence)[7] and on 20 June 1685 he received sentence to stand in the pillory on two consecutive days, be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and two days later from Newgate to Tyburn.[8] On his way back he got into an argument with a barrister, Robert Francis, who struck him in the eye with his cane; the cane seems to have entered the brain, and Dangerfield died shortly afterwards from the blow.[9]

Francis was tried and executed for murder.[10] While several witnesses testified that he had deliberately stabbed at Dangerfield's eye, and there was evidence that he said that "he would save the hangman the trouble of killing Dangerfield"[11] the verdict came as something of a surprise to the public, the general view being that the death "could hardly have been even called manslaughter". King James II was solicited strongly for a royal pardon, but, despite his low opinion of Dangerfield, said that it would be wrong to let the crime go unpunished.[12]

The Narrative

In 1684 Sir William Williams, later Solicitor General, who as Speaker of the House of Commons had authorised the publication of Dangerfield's Narrative in 1680, was heavily fined for libelling James II and Lord Peterborough as a result.[13]

In fiction

He is the subject, and perhaps the author, of Don Tomazo, or The Juvenile Rambles of Thomas Dangerfield (1680), a comic, self-consciously literary novel that presents Dangerfield as a clever and resourceful rogue. It is reprinted in Spiro Peterson's The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled and Other Criminal Fiction of Seventeenth-Century England (1961) and in Paul Salzman's Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction (1991).

Notes

  1. ↑ Kenyon, J. P. The Popish Plot Phoenix Press reissue 2000 p.216
  2. ↑ Kenyon p.227
  3. ↑ Kenyon p.216
  4. ↑ Kenyon p.216
  5. ↑ Kenyon p.228
  6. ↑ Kenyon p.227
  7. ↑ Kenyon p.295
  8. ↑ Kenyon p.295
  9. ↑ Howelll State Trials London 1811 Vol. XI p.505
  10. ↑ State Trials p.506
  11. ↑ State Trials p.506
  12. ↑ State Trials p.506
  13. ↑ Milne-Tyte, Robert Bloody Jeffreys-the Hanging Judge 1989 André Deutsch p.188

References

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