Metta Fock was beheaded in Sweden on this date in 1810.

Fock (English Wikipedia entry | Swedish), daughter to the just-hanging-on lesser nobility, got her surname from an impecunious dullard of a sergeant with whom she shared a small farm in Västergötland. At least, she did until Johan Fock and two of her four children suddenly got violently ill and died within days of one another in 1802.

Well might one imagine the rumors that swirled around the widow Fock in these days; she was already suspected of having a lover, so the inference of a libidinous deployment of arsenic was nigh irresistible. She said her family had been stricken by a measles outbreak.

Her contemporaries were as uncertain of the conclusion as is posterity; she was thrown in Carlsten Fortress but spared a death verdict absent a confession — an unusual legal artifact at the time that might have permitted her to live out decades in a dungeon with sufficient obstinacy.

Although she finally buckled and made that confession — under who knows what extremes of misery and resignation; she vainly attempted to retract it later — the most evocative judgment has always been the manifesto of innocence that she embroidered onto 27 strips of linen in 1805, complaining of her unfair treatment. (More conventional writing instruments were being withheld from her.) It’s given Metta Fock a permanent purchase on later sympathies.

There’s a recent historical novel by Ann Rosman, Mercurium, which also casts Fock as a railroaded innocent.

On this day..

• 1888: Pedro, the pirate Ñancúpel
• 1707: Bartellemy Pichon dit La Roze, the first executed in Fort Detroit
• 1873: Captain Joseph Fry and 36 crew of the Virginius
• 1941: Francisc Panet
• 1765: Alexander Provan, half-handed
• 1898: Sokong, Lavari, and Kruba of the Imperri
• 1918: Louis Harris and Ernest Jackson, the last British soldiers shot at dawn
• 1864: Retaliatory executions by John Mosby
• 1823: Rafael Riego, Spanish liberal
• 1817: The Pentrich Rebellion leaders
• 1550: Jon Arason, the last Catholic bishop of Iceland
• 1944: Hannah Szenes, who gambled on what mattered most
• 1944: Richard Sorge and Hotsumi Ozaki