Richard Parker, Ringleader of the Nore Naval Mutiny,

Hanged for Treason in 1797 … and his fake heir.

by

Peter Selley

29 November 2020

One of Exeter’s more notorious eighteenth-century citizens was Richard Parker. He was born on 16 April 1767, in his parents’ house in “Little Style” - an alleyway at the west end of the Cathedral Green. Three houses of that row remain and are now known as “The Three Gables”. The Parkers lived at Number 1 which was the last house of the row, and adjoined South Street. Their home was rented from the Dean and Chapter of Exeter and was a bakery belonging to his father – also Richard, and his mother Sarah. (They were a “respectable” family. His father’s first wife Hannah Skibbow had died in 1756; her father probably had previously run the bakery. Richard Parker senior remarried, to Sarah Gale, in 1759.) There was a bakery at that address from before 1759 until at least 1915. Burnt down and rebuilt in 1820, it was finally demolished after the Second World War.

Richard was the youngest of their six children. He was privately baptised when eight days old in St Mary Major Church (demolished in 1971) by the Curate, Revd Theophilus Blackall (1734-1781). The church was just a few steps from his birthplace. His mother died when he was five months old. From the age of eight he was a pupil at Exeter Free Grammar School, taught by Revd John Marshall MA who was the Master between 1763 and 1793. Leaving school when aged about 12, he was taught navigational skills by John Osborne, the harbour-master at Topsham. In 1782, aged 15, he joined the navy as a midshipman on HMS Mediator, where his cousin, Samuel Arthur (1758-1792), was second lieutenant. He later served on several other ships, but on his return from the west coast of Africa in 1784 became unwell and was admitted to naval hospitals in Portsmouth and Plymouth. He returned to Exeter to convalesce and later worked on two Topsham-built schooners sailing out of Exeter: the ‘Arno’ (owned by a consortium of Exeter merchants: the Kennaways, the Barings and Swiss-born Samuel Mandrot) to northern Italy in 1785, and then on the Kennaways’ ‘Queen of Naples’ to Naples, returning via Málaga in 1787. For the next six years he was a sailor on various ships and then recruited men for the navy.

At that time, Alderman Edward Walker (1719-1803), an apothecary, lived in Exeter. His second wife was Elizabeth, the sister of Admiral (Viscount) Samuel Hood. Parker sought their advice before he joined HMS Assurance (where he was later to be court-martialled for disobedience) and later HMS Hebe. He also spent some periods in debtors’ jails.

In 1794 he was discharged from the navy and shortly afterwards married Ann McHardy who he had met in Leith, Scotland. She was the 29-year-old daughter of a farmer in Braemar, Aberdeenshire. The wedding was in St Sidwell’s Church in Exeter by licence on 10th June 1795. He was styled as a “gentleman” and signed the marriage record, but Ann could only make her mark. Richard’s older brother, John, born in 1762, was a witness at this wedding. He now ran the bakery; their father having retired to St Sidwell’s in 1787.

In March 1796 Richard and Ann’s son, John, was baptised at St Sidwell’s, but he died as an infant.

Parker divided his time between Exeter and Scotland where he was again imprisoned for debt, which he paid off in May 1797 with a bounty he received for rejoining the navy as a supernumerary on HMS Sandwich, which was soon to sail to the Nore, where the Thames estuary joins the North Sea.

The story of the Nore Mutiny, of which he was the leader, and his subsequent trial is well documented. At one stage it was feared that he might escape so a reward of £500 was offered for information leading to his capture, with this description:

“Richard Parker is about 30 years age, wears his own hair, which is black, untied, though not cropt; about 5 feet 9 or 10 inches high, has rather a prominent nose, dark eyes and complexion, and thin visage; is slovenly dressed in a plain blue half-worn coat, and a whitish or light coloured waistcoat, and half-boots.”

At his trial he was sentenced to death. He was hanged from the yard-arm of the Sandwich on 30 June 1797 aged 30. The night before he was executed, he wrote a letter to his wife and drew up his (recently rediscovered) will, leaving all his possessions to his wife.

His body was quickly buried by the naval authorities in a graveyard just outside the garrison at Sheerness, but that night Ann Parker, with the help of some women, exhumed his coffin, hired a horse and cart and conveyed it to the Hoop and Horseshoe public house in Queen Street, Little Tower Hill, London. She explained she wanted him to have a decent funeral, in Exeter or Scotland. The next day hundreds of people lined up to see his corpse, and probably paid to do so. A death mask was made, it is thought by William Clift, and this is now in the Hunterian Museum in London.

Four days after his death, with his widow’s approval, there was another funeral and his coffin was placed in the vaults of St Mary Maftelon in Whitechapel. There it remained until June 1875, when that church was demolished in preparation for a new one. Parker’s coffin was again moved and was later placed in the crypts of the new church. In the Blitz of December 1914, this church was destroyed, and Parker’s remains probably with it. The area around the church is now the Altab Ali Park.

Richard Parker’s father died in St Sidwell’s in 1799, leaving his remaining son John, the baker, and two daughters, Sarah and Mary Ann. Mary Ann had been “insane” since her brother’s execution and was looked after by her widowed sister Sarah Dore. (Previously married to James Dore, she later remarried to John Bartlett, a Bristol surgeon, who died in 1801. Sarah Bartlett trained as a midwife in London and practised in Exeter for several years.)

From before 1782 John Parker had received a rental income from a property at Shute in Shobrooke, near Crediton. He had sold it to his cousin James Arthur, but it reverted to the Parker family when James’s son John Arthur died intestate in 1822, with no close relatives.

In July 1823 Ann Parker returned to Exeter where she won a court case awarding her possession of the property on the basis that she and Richard had had a child named John Charles Parker born in Scotland in 1794, and who was still alive. Several witnesses travelled down from Scotland to give evidence. Her sister, Jane Cumming, stated that she had looked after John Charles, now 29 years of age, since he was twelve months old. There was an entry in the baptism records for Crathie and Braemar in Aberdeenshire showing a John Charles Parker, son of Richard of St Sidwell, Exeter, and Ann, born on 10 October 1794. But no-one in Exeter had ever heard of this son.

Sarah’s son Frederick Dore set off for Scotland and found that the person alleged to be John Charles Parker was in fact Ann Parker’s sister’s son, Alexander Cumming, born in 1800. Alexander Cumming later wrote to Sarah Bartlett’s solicitor in Exeter, confessing to his part in the fraud. His father, Donald Cumming, had forged the baptism entry. Ann Parker and her family were censured by the local Kirk which ordered the baptism entry to be erased.

The verdict was overturned at the Court of the King’s Bench in London in November 1823, when Sarah Bartlett, Richard Parker’s sister, was recognised as the rightful owner of the property, there being no male descendants of John Parker.

Ann Parker relied on charity and was in and out of London workhouses. In October 1838, blind and destitute, she was admitted from the Westminster workhouse to the King William Street Ophthalmic Hospital. In 1841, aged 75, she was back in Scotland with her sister and probably died shortly afterwards.

Sources:

"Private papers of George, Second Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, 1794-1801". Nabu Press, (11 Sep 201) [SBN-13 : 978-1245095037].

Demolition Exeter - A Century of Destruction in an English Cathedral City (a blog by "wolf paw").

The trial of Richard Parker, complete; president of the delegates, for mutiny, &c. on board the Sandwich, and others of His Majesty's ships, at the Nore, in May, 1797: Before a court martial, held on board the Neptune, of 98 guns, laying off Greenhithe, near Gravesend, on Thursday, June 22, 1797, and following days. Parker, Richard, 1764?-1797., Sibly, Job., Great Britain. Royal Navy. Court-martial (Parker : 1797)

“Baptism” of John Charles Parker: "Scotland Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XYXQ-37V : 12 February 2020), John Charles Parker, 1794.

Richard Parker's Purported Will.

Property in Shute dispute:

    Exeter Flying Post Thursday 30 October 1823 p4, and Thursday 20 November 1823 p4