The Lives of Tudor Women by Elizabeth Norton

Author:Elizabeth Norton [Norton, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784081744
Publisher: Head of Zeus

‘To Muddy Death’

In steadfastly adhering to her own Biblical interpretations, Joan Bocher knew the ultimate retribution that lay in wait, and so she quite consciously sought out death. But this was not quite the same as suicide, or ‘self-murder’ as contemporaries described it, which was a shocking act in the Tudor era.

When Shakespeare’s Ophelia, driven mad by Hamlet’s rejection of her, meets a ‘muddy death’ after she ‘fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide’, the two grave-diggers later question whether someone who ‘wilfully seeks her own salvation’ can receive Christian burial.36 In Ophelia’s case, it is only the evidence of her madness that compensates for her actions and allows her body to be so honoured. In reality, to the Tudor Church suicide was a sin, leading only to damnation, and under English law it was a crime.37 The punishment was confiscation of the deceased’s goods and the denial of a Christian burial.

Few questioned this state of affairs. In the late sixteenth century, Elizabeth I’s godson, Sir John Harington, turned his attention in a short handwritten treatise to whether suicide should always lead to damnation.38 In his work, which was written as a dialogue between the Biblical Saul, Samuel and Solomon, he failed to reach a conclusion, ending with Solomon leaving it to the ‘secret judgment of God’. There was a possibility of salvation, but no guarantee. His idea did not, though, catch on. As in the case of Ophelia, the only valid excuse for suicide was evidence of madness.39 But in a world where all suicides were considered to be carried out at the instigation of the Devil, proving mental illness was a challenge.

Given the legal and spiritual prohibitions, it is perhaps surprising that as many as 12 per cent of violent deaths in the Tudor period may have been the result of suicide.40 The rates were worryingly high, and in one period, between May and November 1590, 20 per cent of violent deaths in London were accounted self-murder.

Women took their lives in the same numbers and manners as men. In August 1563, Margaret Chaunte of Brantford in Middlesex, ‘at the instigation of the Devil’, cut her own throat with a knife, dying later that day. Nearly thirty years later, on 7 July 1590, Agnes Mitchell drank ‘rat’s bane’ (white arsenic) with her breakfast in her house in Bell Alley, near London’s Holborn Viaduct. She lingered, painfully, before dying twelve hours later. She was a poor woman; indeed, the coroner’s jury that assembled on the following day was unable to confirm whether she owned any property at all. Anything she did possess, however, would have been confiscated.

By far the majority of male and female suicides hanged themselves in various ways, usually in their own homes. On 8 July 1554 a spinster named Elizabeth Avery was found hanging by a piece of rope in Poplar, Middlesex, and was accorded by the inquest a verdict of suicide. In November 1563, Margaret Yeoghen hanged herself in the parish of St Martin’s

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