On Monday, 1 August 1803, nineteen-year-old Martha Chapel was executed upon the New Drop behind the castle walls for the wilful murder of her illegitimate child, born some six weeks prior. Martha, described as a ‘fine-looking young woman and industrious and good-tempered’, was a domestic servant. Though the identity of the child’s father was never disclosed, some harboured a suspicion that Martha’s employer was responsible. Three or four months before her baby’s due date, Martha took up a new position – possibly forced to move on by her former and culpable employer, or fleeing before her condition became obviously visible. Whatever her reasons, she told nobody she was expecting (and of course there is always the possibility she was not even aware of the pregnancy herself). On 15th June, Martha absented herself, claiming she felt unwell. Unattended, she subsequently gave birth to a baby girl, who was found dead shortly afterwards.
Drawing from a thirteenth-century manuscript of Pseudo-Apuleius’s Herbarium, depicting the preparations for an abortion by the administration of a concoction made from Pennyroyal, historically a popular herbal abortifacient.
A domestic scene recreated by York Castle Museum – in such circumstances poor families lived and died.
While maintaining her innocence, insisting that any harm done to the child was the consequence of pain delirium and the panic of manually trying to hasten her own self-delivery, the testimony of a doctor damned Martha, claiming that she must have killed the baby with her own hands.
Quoted at her trial as saying, ‘I am a wretched woman, it was my child. I never meant it harm … I loved my child before I saw it.’ It took the jury only ten minutes of deliberation to find Martha guilty. After the execution, Martha’s body was given over for dissection.
Progress in attitudes toward illegitimacy and the recognition that childbirth could have a detrimental psychological effect on the mother were a long-time forming, and it wasn’t until 1922 that the law was changed, preventing any new mother receiving the death penalty for infanticide. Tragically, this was too far in the future to have any bearing on the case of Mary Thorpe, who was hanged on Monday, 17 March 1800 at the York Tyburn for drowning her week-old illegitimate son. While the court accepted that Mary was suffering from ‘milk fever’ (a common eighteenth-century term for mastitis), such conditions, as well as postnatal depression, were not recognised as extenuating circumstances and the jurors did not deem that Mary’s condition had any bearing on her mental well-being or that it significantly affected her subsequent actions. Mary was described as a ‘decent, respectable-looking young woman,’ who, ‘during the whole of her confinement in the castle, manifested the most sincere contrition for the dreadful crime of which she had been found guilty.’ Mary, who was not more than twenty-one years of age, was executed, alongside one Michael Simpson who had been found guilty of poisoning. Incidentally, Simpson asserted his innocence to the last, and eighteen months later the confession of the real murderer proved that Michael Simpson had been telling the truth all along. Did two innocent people hang that day?
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‘drowning her week-old illegitimate son’
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The case of another unwanted infant being drowned culminated in the execution of Lydia Dickenson, who, on 26 February 1784, had murdered ‘her female bastard child by drowning it in a pond’. Her execution on Monday, 22 March was one of those which proved a great draw, as the nineteen-year-old Lydia was hanged at the Tyburn ‘in the presence of a large concourse of people’.
Twenty-three-year-old Ann Haywood’s murder of her illegitimate child warranted a chapter in Leman Thomas Rede’s York Castle, published in 1831. The account of Ann’s life and trial numbering among the high profile capital offenders that Rede included in his ‘account of all the principal offences committed in Yorkshire from the year 1800 to the present period.’ Described as the daughter of labouring people, Ann was apparently ‘brought up with very little attention devoted to her morals’ (perhaps a judgment made with hindsight). She went into service when she was aged thirteen, but her ‘violent temper’ was the cause of her losing more than one position. It was during one of these periods of unemployment in 1802 that Ann met the father of her future child. Sadly, while Ann was hopeful that the relationship would develop into a matrimonial commitment the young man had other ideas, and ‘taking advantage of the feeling that his attention had inspired’ nature took its course, and in 1804 Ann found herself pregnant and alone. Ann was forced to leave her position in July as there was already some suspicion about her condition, but found another place in service, with the Roodhouse family of Rotherham. She was so adept at dressing to conceal her increasing bulk that not even her fellow servants suspected her pregnancy.
That was until the morning of 30 November, when Ann’s labour began and she subsequently gave birth unaided in an outhouse, where she later stabbed her newborn daughter to death. She then concealed the body and fabricated the plausible excuse of preparing a fowl for the pot to account for the presence of bloodstains on her person and on the outhouse floor. However, Mrs Roodhouse’s intuition led her to believe otherwise and a subsequent search revealed the infant’s buried body.
At the inquest Ann confessed the child was hers, but denied murder. Held in York Castle until the next Spring Assizes, at her trial Ann pleaded ‘not guilty’. But the evidence was stacked against her, and the ‘body of a very large, full-grown newborn, female infant’ found ‘in a very lacerated state’ coupled with the blood-smeared pen knife found concealed under Ann’s bed was enough to condemn her. After the judge’s summing up, the verdict of ‘guilty’ was immediately returned by the jury, probably helped along by the examining surgeon’s description of the wounds that had been inflicted on the baby, namely, ‘Two small punctures on the left side of its face, a small cut on the left angle of the mouth, a puncture on the back of the right soulder [sic], and a deep incision from the right ear to within an inch and a half of the navel, by which laceration the child was disembowelled, and the collar bone and ribs entirely cut through.’
Perhaps because of the brutal way in which Ann had murdered her child (although the apparent frenzied level of the attack could have been attributed to the pain and panic induced by the self-delivery) the crowd that gathered to witness Ann’s execution on Monday, 18 March 1805 at the New Drop, was described as ‘unusually great’ and that ‘the number of females in the crowd was very great’.
A typical infant’s cot from the 1800s.
However, the termination of illegitimate offspring was not exclusively a maternal remit, as many fathers were also responsible for the act of infanticide, as was the case with John Rodda who, on 19 April 1846, murdered his eighteen-month-old daughter, Mary, by poisoning her with oil of vitriol (sulphuric acid). In this instance the motive was financial, as Rodda, a dealer and hawker of mats in Skipton, murdered his little girl for the £2 and 10s burial fee he would be entitled to receive as a member of a burial club (or ‘dead clubs’ as they were sometimes known). Such clubs were a popular notion in a time of high mortality rates, especially among children, and when poor working-class families were fearful that they would be unable to pay for a decent funeral for their loved ones, leaving them to rely on the local Poor Union to provide a pauper’s burial, which meant interment in a common grave without a headstone.
The initial inquest into Mary’s death was reported in the May, in an edition of the Illustrated London News, under the headline: ‘A child murdered for her burial fee.’ The report stated:
It appears that [John Rodda] is a member of a burial club and that he would have been entitled to 2.l0s on the death of the child. Under pretence of killing vermin he purchased some oil of vitriol which he poured down the throat of his child whilst she was at home in the cradle, which caused her death. The jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against the father who was committed to York Castle, to take his trial for the horrid offence at the next assizes.
Rodda, who protested his innocence, was tried at York Castle on Fr
iday, 17 June. The prosecutor, Mr Hall, told the jury that the accusation of murder was, ‘A charge so unusual and so repugnant to the ordinary feelings of human nature that he must caution them against being prejudiced against the prisoner’ – the jury returned a verdict of ‘guilty’ after deliberating for an hour and a half. A few days prior to his execution, Rodda, who was a Roman Catholic, made a full confession of his guilt and stated, ‘that avarice was his only motive.’
The Criminal Chronology of York Castle, published in 1857, detailed Rodda’s execution thus:
At an early hour on Saturday morning, August 8th, the workmen commenced erecting the drop in front of St George’s Field, and the solemn preparations for the awful ceremony were speedily completed. At the usual hour the wretched man, with blanched cheek and dejected look – his arms pinioned – appeared on the scaffold. After spending a few minutes in prayer, the executioner proceeded to perform the duties of his office, by drawing the cap over his eyes and adjusting the rope, when the fatal bolt was withdrawn – the drop fell – a convulsive struggle ensued – and the mortal ceased to exist.
It was also reported that:
There was a large concourse of spectators in St George’s Field to witness the spectacle, amongst whom were a number of the lower orders of the Irish, who had congregated to witness the last moments of their countryman.
Another father to kill his illegitimate daughter was Martin Slack, who did so by poisoning her with aqua fortis (nitric acid) claiming that the baby’s mother, Elizabeth Haigh, had poisoned the child herself and framed Slack in vengeance for his refusal to marry her. Slack maintained his innocence up to the last moment, protesting, ‘Mine was not the hand that administered the poison; it was given by the mother of the child.’ Slack was hanged at noon on Monday, 30 March 1829 at the New Drop before a large number of spectators, with women making up a large percentage of the onlookers.
George Howe, a railway labourer from Yarm, was found guilty of the murder of his infant daughter Eliza Amelia Howe by poisoning her with oxalic acid on 25 January 1849. Eliza Amelia was Howe’s daughter by his second wife who had died shortly after the child’s birth the previous October. Howe’s neighbours already suspected his neglectful tendencies toward the baby and so it came as no surprise when Howe was found guilty of poisoning his infant daughter with a substance that was commonly used as a cleaning agent at the time.
On Saturday, 31 March 1849 at twelve o’clock, Howe walked out on to the scaffold erected early that morning in the usual place in front of St George’s Field. It was reported that:
He appeared to pray most fervently for a few minutes, after which the executioner placed the cap over his head, and put the rope in its proper position. He then withdrew the fatal bolt – the drop fell – a momentary thrill of horror passed through the immense mass of people – there were a few short heavings of the shoulders – and the body of George Howe was a lifeless piece of clay – his spirit had fled into the boundless depths of an eternity whose mysteries have now been fully developed to his criminal soul, and whose blessings, we trust, he has received through the merits of a crucified Redeemer.
Eliza Amelia’s existence was cut short before she could enjoy such toys.
Both Mother and Child
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In some instances, the expectant mother was killed before the baby was even born, and in many cases it was the result of the father wishing to avoid responsibility and the financial burden for the unwanted, usually illegitimate, child.
On 21 March 1774, John Scott of Northowram poisoned his partner Hannah Stocks, mother of Scott’s child and six months pregnant with their next baby. This was a particularly brutal case; Scott had forced Hannah to take arsenic at knifepoint after she refused, despite his insistence, to take a poisonous draught that would have induced a miscarriage. The couple were not married, although Scott had ‘followed or kept company’ with Hannah since the birth of their son some years before. Visiting Hannah the week before her death, apparently with the intent to pay a weekly allowance toward the upkeep of his son, it would seem that the realisation that there would soon be another hungry mouth to provide for proved too much for Scott, who was clearly willing to go to any length to avoid supporting a second child. He paid the ultimate price, however, when he was hanged at the Tyburn on Monday, 25 July 1774, and his body was given to the local hospital for dissection.
The hospital would gain another cadaver following the shocking case of thirty-three-year-old John Robinson, who had murdered his former servant girl, Susannah Wilson, who had been eight months pregnant. The Newgate Calendar, supposedly a moralising publication that gave vivid accounts of notorious criminals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did not fail to disappoint in this instance, giving a full report of Robinson’s case:
About eight o’clock they sat down together: the deceased continued frequently to lament in the most affecting terms her unhappy situation, unconscious of the fate that awaited her. At this moment the prisoner stole unobserved behind her and, with an axe he had previously furnished himself with, gave her a mortal blow on the back of the head, which penetrated through the skull to the brain, and instantly killed her; but the prisoner, to make more sure of her death, mangled her dead body with the murderous axe, inflicting now on her lifeless corpse many deep wounds. The body was then deposited by him in the place where it was afterwards found, covered with whins.
Robinson was executed at the New Drop on Saturday, 8 August 1807 in a state of ‘evinced contrition’ for his crime.
John Bolton, a Lieutenant in the 1st Regiment of the West Riding Militia, though found guilty of the murder of his pregnant serving-girl Elizabeth Rainbow, cheated the crowds of the public spectacle of his hanging by taking his own life before his sentence could be carried out. Bolton had hired Elizabeth from the Foundling Hospital at Ackworth, and clearly getting her pregnant was not part of the employment plan. On the afternoon of Sunday, 21 August 1774, while his wife was out of the house visiting friends, Bolton killed Elizabeth and buried her body in his cellar. Bolton strangled the unfortunate Elizabeth with a length of cord, and her untimely death would go on to inspire a popular thirteen-verse ballad, sung to the tune of ‘Fair Lady lay your costly robes aside’.
Following Bolton’s trial held at the Lent Assizes at York Castle on Monday, 27 March 1775, it is recorded that the following Wednesday, on the morning designated for his hanging, Bolton had ‘found means to be his own executioner in the cell’ employing a garter, a piece of cord and a handkerchief to end his life – he was found between six and seven o’clock in the morning, strangled, rather than hanged, as his feet were still on the floor of the cell. The account ends with the coroner’s inquest turning in a verdict of Felo de se, Latin for ‘felon of himself’, which is an archaic legal term meaning suicide, and that Bolton’s body was given over to the county hospital for dissection. However, Knipe’s Criminal Chronology states that Bolton, ‘Was buried at the three lane ends near the York Barracks, at ten o’clock at night, and a stake driven through his body in the presence of the turnkeys of the castle.’ This crossroads burial was in accordance with the custom and law that suicides and convicted criminals be denied burial in consecrated ground – clearly Bolton qualified on both counts.
In the nineteenth century, Rachel Crossley was murdered by William Shaw, the father of Crossley’s three-year-old child while she was carrying another child by him. Considerably behind with maintenance payments (4s a week) and under increasing pressure to marry Crossley, Shaw’s crime inspired the lengthy verse ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy’, a cautionary tale imploring ‘young lovers all pray now attend’ and detailing how Shaw battered the pregnant Rachel and disposed of her body down a pit:
Her body fair he mangled sore,
But still she was alive,
And down a pit full sixty yards,
To hide her did contrive.
When the colliers went to work,
They stagger’d to behold
A fe
male form upon the ground,
All bloody, wet and cold.
Shaw had murdered twenty-two-year-old Rachel on 9 March 1830, and in this instance the law and retribution were swift. The accused was tried on the morning of 2 April in an ‘intensely crowded’ courtroom and despite his plea of not guilty Shaw was hanged at the New Drop the following Monday.
Yet more fathers were driven to the most deplorable of actions in the face of maintenance demands and arrears of upkeep payments. On 5 February 1814, Robert Turner poisoned Margaret Appleby, who was pregnant with his child, because she was on the point of registering a claim for child maintenance. It was suggested after the trial that Turner had in fact intended merely to induce an abortion with the potion he gave to Margaret. She had readily imbibed it when Turner offered her a rum and warm water procured from a nearby alehouse after Turner had waylaid Margaret on her way to the magistrates, where she intended to secure the order to commence upkeep. Immediately after taking the drink, Margaret ‘was seized with violent vomiting’ and with the limited effectiveness of medical intervention at that time, Margaret vomited continually until she died seven days later, on 12 February. Turner had already absconded on the day he had administered the poison to Margaret, but was apparently ‘afterwards found concealed in a cupboard in South Shields’. Denying his guilt, stating that he had administered no poison and the child was not even his, Turner was executed at the New Drop on the 31 March 1814, protesting his innocence to the last. Of course, it may well have been that Turner himself was unaware of the true nature of the substance he had given to the unfortunate Margaret Appleby, who nevertheless died in agony.
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