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The fire has been burning for hours. You can feel the heat from 20 ft away. A shimmering wall of it rising off the cauldron, distorting the faces of the people crowded around it. This is Smithfield, the bloody heart of London. For centuries, this open space outside the city walls has been a place of commerce and a place of carnage. You have seen men hanged here. You have watched the flames take heretics, watched them go still in the choking smoke of the p. But nothing prepared you for this. Nothing prepared anyone. The water in the massive iron vat, some records say it was lead. Others say oil is already churning with a violent white hot heat. The man above it is bound and heavy rusted chains. He isn't a nobleman.
He isn't a highranking rebel. He is a cook. And as the winch begins to turn, the sound of the metal rattling against the wooden scaffold is the only thing louder than the beating of your own heart. That moment, April 5th, 1531, would be witnessed by hundreds. It would be remembered by all of them, and it would be recorded in the Grey Friars's Chronicles. With a devastating five-word economy, he roared mighty loud. Before we step onto the scaffold, where are you watching from? It's incredible that this 500year-old story is reaching you today. Drop your location below and hit subscribe for more deep history. To understand what happened at Smithfield that spring morning, we have to go back
exactly 46 days to a kitchen, a bowl of porridge and a white powder that nobody could fully explain. England in 1531 was a kingdom held together by proximity and suspicion. King Henry VIII was locked in a grueling atier political war to dissolve his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Bulah. The city was a powder keg. Every household was divided and one of the most prominent men standing in the king's way was John Fiser, the bishop of Rochester. Fiser was a man of another era. He was a scholar, a theologian, and a personal friend of the king's late grandmother. But he was also one of the only senior churchmen willing to say openly in Parliament and in writing that to Keen's
great matter was an affront to God. He had spoken on Catherine's behalf, he had submitted letters to the Pope. He had in the brutal language of the tutor court made enemies of consequence. His household sat at Lambbeath just across the river from the nerve centers of tutor power whiteall in Westminster. It was a house under constant surveillance and on the 18th of February Milkin to strango that household became a crime scene. It was an ordinary midday meal. Potty jaik vegetable and grain porridge was prepared in the bishop's kitchen and served to his guests as was the custom of a highranking churchman. The same food was offered to the deserving poor, the beggars who gathered at the kitchen
door seeking charity. Fiser himself was a man of aetic habits. That afternoon long hours of study had killed his appetite. He stayed in his library, hunched over his manuscripts while his guests ate that one unremarkable detail. The habit of a man too absorbed in his work to stop for lunch is the only reason John Fiser did not die that day within no worse. The house was in chaos. 16 of Fischer's guests had fallen violently ill, clutching their stomachs and vomiting blood. A household member named Bennett Kerwin was dead by nightfall. A bigger woman named Alice Trivet, who had come only for a meal,
died in agony. Shortly after, suspicion fell on the kitchen immediately. Fischer's brother, Richard, who managed the household affairs, ordered the cook arrested within the hour. But the man they were looking for, was already gone. He was known by many names. Richard Rouse, Richard Rose, or simply Richard Cook. His true identity is lost to history, buried under the weight of his crime. He had fled the house before the illness had even fully spread, which told the investigators that this was no accidental food poisoning. This was intent. He was tracked down in the shadow of the London docks, brought into custody, and thrown into the deepest cells of the Tower of London.
There, the king's justice began its work. Under the shadow of the rack, Ruse confessed, but his confession raised more questions than it answered. He claimed that a mysterious stranger had approached him and handed him a white powder. The stranger told him it was a purgative, a strong laxative that would cause his fellow servants discomfort, embarrass them at the table, and provide a bit of sport. Ruse insisted he was a prankster, not a murderer. He claimed he had no idea the powder was lethal. Whether this was the truth or simply the only story a terrified man could construct to avoid the executioner, we will never know.
The stranger was never identified. The powder was never recovered. But the political implications were explosive. The question everyone whispered in the taverns of London was simple. Who wanted John Fiser dead? The answer was obvious. The Bullan family made no secret of their frustration with the bishop. To them, Fiser was the primary obstacle to end becoming queen. Only weeks after the poisoning, cannonballs were actually fired at Fiser's house. Their trajectory suggested they came from Darham House, the residence of Thomas Bolan and father. Was Ruse a hitman hired by the Bolans? The Spanish ambassador Eustus Chappies, a man who lived for court. Gassup wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor that the king himself was terrified of the rumors. If the public
believed the Bolins had tried to poison a holy man, there would be a riot. Henry VIII needed to shut the story down. He needed to make Richard Ruse so monstrous that no one would look past him for a higher conspirator. On February 28th, Henry VIII did something unprecedented. He appeared before the House of Lords and delivered a speech that lasted over an hour. He didn't just talk about murder. He talked about the nature of poison. He argued that a sword or an axe was an honorable weapon because you could see it coming. But poison was the ultimate cowardice. It worked through the hands of those you trusted, your cooks, your servants, your family. If the kitchen was no longer safe, the foundation of society was gone.
Parliament, trembling under the king's gaze, did exactly what they were told. They passed the act for poisoning 22 hen 8 C 9. This law was a legal anomaly. It reclassified poisoning not as murder but as high treason. And it mandated a punishment that had never been part of English common law, death by boiling. But the most terrifying part of this law was how it was applied to ruse. He was attained by Parliament. This meant there was no trial. No jury, no witnesses were called to defend him. The government simply wrote his name into a bill and voted him to death. He was also stripped of the benefit of clergy. In the 16th century,
this was a spiritual death sentence. No priest would hear his confession. No last rights would be given. He would go to the cauldron with the weight of his sins still on his soul, facing eternal damnation by the logic of his own faith. Before we witness the end of Richard Ruse, we must understand what boiling actually does to the human body. When a human is lowered into boiling water, the nervous system is immediately over. The heat causes the skin to blister and peel away in seconds, a process known as sloughing. But because the water surrounds the entire body, the core temperature rises rapidly. If the water is at a rolling boil, the victim's blood begins to cook within the veins.
The brain swells against the skull. But here is the most horrifying part. If the executioner wants to prolong the agony, they don't submerge the head. They keep the victim conscious. Contemporary accounts of this punishment in Europe describe a repeated dipping method. The victim is lowered until the legs and torso are scalded, then raised back into the cold air. The shock of the temperature change causes the nerves to fire with a pain that is indescribable. It is the slowest, most calculated form of thermal trauma possible. The morning of the execution was cold and gray. The crowd at Smithfield was silent. They were used to the theater of the scaffold, the quick drop of the gallows,
the sharp strike of the axe, but they had never seen a cauldron. Richard Roose was brought out, tied with heavy chains. He was a broken man, likely barely able to stand after his time in the tower. He left no final words. He made no grand speech. He was fastened to a crane-like device and moved over the steaming vat. The executioner began to lower the chain. The witness accounts are spars because the site was too much for most to describe. They don't talk about his face. They don't talk about his struggle. They only talk about the sound. He roared mighty loud. The execution reportedly lasted for 2 hours.
2 hours of dipping and screaming before the body finally gave out. The crowd, usually boisterous and prone to cheering at executions, left Smithfield in a state of shock. Even for the tutors, this had crossed a line. The act for poisoning did not last long on the statute books. Shortly after Henry VIII died, his son Edward V 6th repealed it. The official reasoning was that the punishment was too extreme an admission that even in an age of burnings and dismemberment. Boland was a bridge too far. But the story of John Fiser did not end with his survival of the pottage. The man who accidentally avoided the poison could not in the end avoid the king.
Four years later in 1535, John Fischer was dragged to Tower Hill. He had refused to acknowledge Henry as the supreme head of the church. The king, who had once protected him by creating a law to boil his cook, now ordered the bishop's own head to be struck off with an axe. Fischer's head was placed on a spike on London Bridge. It was said that even in death, his face remained ruddy and lifelike, drawing such crowds of pilgrims that the guards eventually had to throw the head into the river to stop the miracle. The stranger who gave Ruse the powder was never found. No one was ever charged as an accomplice. The case stopped exactly where Henry VIII wanted it to, at the feet of a nameless kitchen servant. Was Richard Ruse a murderer?
almost certainly. But was he the only murderer? History suggests that he was a pawn in a game played by kings and queens. A man caught between the gears of a changing world. What lingers five centuries later is not the law or the politics or the bishop's manuscripts. A man whose real name we barely know, whose guilt was decided by a vote rather than a verdict, left the world with a sound that London could never forget. We are still standing at the edge of that fire today trying to understand what justice looked like in the 16th century and what it truly cost.
