Odd this day
On this day in 1682, Thomas Thynne, owner of Longleat, known as Tom of Ten Thousand because of how unfeasibly loaded he was, was shot dead in Pall Mall, through which he was passing in his carriage. It was a noteworthy event at the time, and not only because not that many people were shot in Pall Mall. One of the accused, you see, was a Swedish Count, Karl Johann von Königsmark, who had a thing for Tom’s wife.
Four men were arrested – Königsmark, Christopher Vratz, John Stern and Charles George Borosky. The latter three, who were not from the nobility, were hanged, and — according to the writer John Evelyn:
that base coward, Count Koningsmark, who had hopes to marry his widow, the rich Lady Ogle … was acquitted by a corrupt jury, and so got away.
I know! People with money getting away with crimes! That never happens.
The following century, Robert Chambers (in his Book of Days) suggested it was someone else in the courtroom, putting the blame on “the favourable summing-up of Chief Justice Pemberton, who seemed determined to save him”. Either way, the plebs got done in, and the corpse of Borosky, who actually pulled the trigger, decorated the streets of London for some time, hanging in chains. The Count paid his legal fees and legged it to the Continent.
Perhaps if this were to happen now, more attention might be paid to the girl (and I choose the term carefully) over whom the two principals were apparently squabbling. Thynne, you see, was either 33 or 34 when he died, and the widow he left behind, Elizabeth, Baroness Percy, was 14. What’s more, this was the second time she’d been widowed. In 1679, at the age of 12, she had married 20-year-old Henry Cavendish, Earl of Ogle. (Yes, if this was fiction, that would be too on the nose, but that really was his name.)
Königsmark — a mere slip of a boy of 23 — had heard that her second marriage was unhappy, and obviously didn’t put it down to a 20-year age gap and the bride still being a teenager. Good Lord, no. Clearly, what she needed was a man who was a mere nine years older, and who had chosen her, rather than vice versa. She, apparently, had disabused him of this idea, and he had taken the only sensible course of action. Taking the girl’s ‘no’ at face value was obviously plain silly. What he would do was murder her husband.
Yes, thank heavens we live now in happier, more enlightened times.
For her part, Elizabeth, sole heiress of the 11th Duke of Northumberland, married the 6th Duke of Somerset, and — at the age of 16 — began to have children with him (a man only five years her senior).
In 1711, Jonathan Swift immortalised the whole thing in The Windsor Prophecy:
And, dear Englond, if ought I understond,
Beware of Carrot from Northumberlond.
Carrots sown Thynne a deep root may get,
If so be they are in Somer set:
Their Conyngs mark thou; for I have been told,
They assassine when young, and poison when old.
‘Carrot’ was a reference to her red hair. You’d think Swift could do better, but perhaps that was a new joke in the early 18th century. The main thrust of the poem, though, was to suggest that Elizabeth had been involved in the murder of Thynne, and now had plans to poison Queen Anne. This did not go down well with Anne, who was friends with Elizabeth. As a result, Swift never became a bishop.
For her part, Elizabeth became one of the royal court’s most dedicated gossips, but sadly did not, at the third attempt, enjoy a happy marriage. The duke appreciated her wealth enormously; her, not so much.
