Burned at the Stake by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
ISBN: 9781473898745
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2017-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

It would not have been unusual at this time to go into a grocery shop and ask for rat poison as this would have been carried in addition to the full range of other household comestibles stocked. The stumbling point came however when Mary’s witness was questioned as to the quantity of mercury obtained, Whiten replying ‘about the bigness of his finger’, this statement supported by Whiten’s daughter who had accompanied her father and swore almost the same as his testimony.

The testimony of Whiten and his daughter certainly supported Mary’s having valid pretext for the purchase of the poison, other than that of the intent to murder Thomas Channing, and was certainly her best hope of acquittal, taken in conjunction with Thomas Channing supposedly having been responsible for his own demise by handling poison himself in his own shop. But it fell short of the measure, literally. Mr Justice Price instructed Mary to take note that her witnesses were mistaken about the quantity, the prior evidence given against her affirming that the poison obtained was as ‘big as a walnut’, while the evidence supporting her claim stated ‘no bigger than the top of a finger’. Though she must have been tired at this point, after hours of concentrating on every detail of the evidence presented against her, questioning and counter questioning, Mary still had her wits about her, and put forward to his Lordship that there were indeed ‘nuts of several sizes, and that the bigness of the nut was not at all described by the evidence; and so the quantities of her evidence, and that of the Queen [the prosecution] might be the same.’ However, even if Mary’s principal witness had been more exact in the quantity of poison he described, Thomas Channing’s father was poised and ‘had persons enough in court to invalidate their testimony, by giving such an account of them as their past actions deserved’ – at this time, there were no rules governing how evidence was obtained. Not surprisingly, the consensus was that the weight of evidence presented by the prosecution in this case was irrefutable.

Nevertheless, Mary continued undaunted, calling many other witnesses, ‘and made such an extraordinary defence for herself that the Judge declared he thought himself not capable of making a better [one]’. In variance to the prevalent contemporary chauvinistic attitude to female criminality, Justice Price’s admiration counted for much, and indeed was in itself impartial and not grudgingly bestowed. In a moralising climate where it was held that while women were ‘naturally much more amiable, tender and compassionate than the other sex, [they] become, when they pervert the dictates of nature, more remorseless and cruel, and can conceive and execute the most diabolical of crimes’, this supposition summed up the feeling of the age and Mary’s presumed guilt was bolstered by this universal view. While murder was representative of the ultimate crime, a murder committed by a woman was regarded as wholly more shocking. A situation in which a woman was exposed as a murderer violated the expectations of femininity and turned the world upside down.

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