On 29 June 1612 Robert Creighton, Lord Sanquhar was hanged on a gibbet erected outside Westminster Hall for the offence of procuring the murder of a fencing master, John Turner. Although Sanquhar's rank alone would have been enough to make the execution memorable, it was the peculiar circumstances leading to the murder that lent the affair a particular notoriety. In brief, Sanquhar had some seven years before affronted and then challenged Mr Turner to a fencing match – seemingly wishing to demonstrate his prowess with the blade. In the encounter, however, Turner had prevailed, accidentally blinding Sanquhar in one eye. To all intents and appearances, though, Sanquhar appeared to have accepted the loss equably and to have forgiven his opponent. Until, that is, some years later, when the lord had found himself at the court of Henry IV and the King had inquired as to how he had lost his eye. Sanquhar had recounted the incident whereupon, as one observer reported, ‘The king replie[d], Doth the man live? And that question gave an end to the discourse but was the beginner of a strange confusion in his working fancy, which neither time nor distance could compose.’ Unable to shake the conviction that it was shameful not to have requited the injury, but equally unable, both because of his social station and his disability, to challenge Turner to a duel, Sanquhar had then hired assassins to kill Turner. Although the fencing master had been shot in his house, the assassins had been captured and had confessed all.

At his trial Sanquhar had professed his guilt, expressed his remorse and appealed for clemency. However, he had nevertheless sought some justification for his conduct in reference to a particular system of values that had induced him to behave as he had. ‘I considered not my wrongs upon terms of Christianity, for then I should have sought for other satisfaction, but being trained up in the courts of princes and in arms, I stood upon the terms of honour.’ He declared, ‘I confess I was never willing to put up a wrong, where upon terms of honour I might right myself, nor never willing to pardon where I had a power to revenge.’