What is the benefit of clergy? According to Anne Duggan in Medieval Worlds, the benefit of clergy was often a way to avoid the death penalty and receive a trial from an ecclesiastical court instead of a secular court. The practice arose during the reign of Henry II in a dispute with Archbishop Thomas Becket. Becket thought clergymen should not be tried in secular courts when accused of a crime. Henry II was forced to give the benefit of clergy after 1170, when Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral and public opinion turned against him.
Henry VIII and his predecessor further stripped away at the benefit of clergy, and Henry sought in Roose’s case to stop anyone accused of poisoning from getting immunity from the death penalty through claiming clerical status. Only those who had the clerical rank of subcleric or above could invoke the benefit of clergy for poisoning. Previously, in 1512, Kesselring says Henry VIII removed the benefit of clergy for anyone who committed murder, a felony on consecrated ground, or robbery on the king’s highway.
Bishop Fisher opposed Henry further stripping away the privilege. And it made sense for Fisher to oppose Henry’s political maneuver — it was his household that had been targeted by poisoning, and Henry was trying to attack the rights of the clergy after a poisoning he was rumored to have supported. Roose later partially confessed to the poisoning after getting tortured.
Regardless, Henry VIII succeeded in getting Parliament to declare the act of poisoning treasonous. Since it was deemed treasonous, the benefit of clergy was stripped for any clergy accused of poisoning, particularly fatal poisoning.
On April 5, 1531, Richard Roose was executed at Smithfield. Clearly, he suffered, and he suffered a lot. One person present described the scene:
“He roared mighty loud, and divers women who were big with child did feel sick at the sight of what they saw, and were carried away half dead; and other men and women did not seem frightened by the boiling alive, but would prefer to see the headsman at his work.”
According to British journalist Hugh Chisholm, only one other person was executed by boiling in English history: Margaret Davy, who was also accused of poisoning, and was executed in 1542, also at Smithfield. In 1547, Edward VI repealed the poisoning act.
Roose simply got unlucky at suffering the wrath of Henry VIII, being thrown in the middle of a power struggle between a king and a bishop. Of course, killing two people in a poisoning was an unacceptable act that he needed to be held accountable for. But not being given a trial and having an especially vicious form of execution suggest Roose suffered the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Death by boiling stands apart from other methods of execution which tried to be more humane versions of the death penalty. If you wanted someone to suffer while they died, like Henry VIII wanted for poisoners, death by boiling was the method of choice.
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