1780: Elizabeth Butchill, Trinity College Cambridge bedding-girl
2 comments March 17th, 2019 Headsman
A Cambridge University servant was hanged on this date in 1780 for infanticide.
Elizabeth Butchill made her way turning down the beds for the boys attending Trinity College, work she had secured via her aunt who held the same position. She somehow got pregnant, an event which does not appear to have inordinately exercised her eventual judges perhaps by virtue of its very obviousness; as Frank McLynn wryly observes, “It does not need the imagination of a novelist to reconstruct the events that led her to the gallows.”
She was surely desperate to avoid social opprobrium and unemployment, so we find from the Newgate Calendar that “she confessed that she was delivered of a female child on Thursday morning [January 6, 1780], about half past six o’clock, by herself; that the child cried some little time after its birth; and that, in about twenty minutes after, she herself threw the said infant down one of the holes of the necessary into the river, and buried the placenta, &c. in the dunghill near the house.”
“Modest, patient, and penitent” during her confinement awaiting the noose, Butchill died
firm, resigned, and exemplary. She joined with the minister in prayer, and sung the lamentation of a sinner with marks of a sincere penitent, declaring she had made her peace with God, and was reconciled to her fate. Desiring her example might be a warning to all thoughtless young women, and calling on Jesus Christ for mercy, she was launched into eternity amidst thousands of commiserating spectators, who, though they abhorred the crime, shed tears of pity for the unhappy criminal.
Whether the nameless infant’s nameless father shared those tears is a matter for the novelist’s imagination.
On this day..
- 1542: Margaret Davy, poysoner - 2020
- 1830: Robert Emond - 2018
- 1784: Anne Castledine, infanticide - 2017
- 1706: Matthias Kraus, Bavarian rebel - 2016
- 2015: Twelve in Pakistan - 2015
- 1713: Juraj Janosik, Slovakian social bandit - 2014
- 1662: Rose Cullender and Amy Denny, Bury St. Edmunds witches - 2013
- 1995: Flor Contemplacion, OFW - 2012
- 1999: Andrew Kokoraleis, the last ever in Illinois? - 2011
- 1834: Fusilamientos de Heredia - 2010
- 2006: Yuan Baojing, gangster capitalist - 2009
- 1915: Four French Corporals, for cowardice - 2008
Entry Filed under: 18th Century,Abortion and Infanticide,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,England,Execution,Hanged,Murder,Public Executions,Sex,Women
Tags: 1780, 1780s, cambridge, cambridge university, elizabeth butchill, infanticide, march 17, trinity college
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