Category Archives: England

1644: Mary Latham and James Britton, adulterous lovers

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One James Britton, a man ill affected both to our church discipline and civil government, and one Mary Latham, a proper young woman about 18 years of age, whose father was a godly man and had brought her up well, were condemned to die for adultery, upon a law formerly made and published in print.

It was thus occasioned and discovered. This woman, being rejected by a young man whom she had an affection unto, vowed she would marry the next that came to her, and accordingly, against her friends’ minds, she matched with an ancient man who had neither honesty nor ability, and one whom she had no affection unto.

Whereupon, soon after she was married, divers young men solicited her chastity, and drawing her into bad company, and giving her wine and other gifts, easily prevailed with her, and among others this Britton. But God smiting him with a deadly palsy and fearful horror of conscience withal, he could not keep secret, but discovered this, and other the like with other women, and was forced to acknowledge the justice of God in that having often called others fools, etc., for confessing against themselves, he was now forced to do the like. The woman dwelt now in Plymouth patent, and one of the magistrates there, hearing she was detected, etc., sent her to us.

Upon her examination, she confessed he did attempt the fact but did not commit it, and witness was produced that testified (which they both confessed) that in the evening of a day of humiliation through the country for England, etc., a company met at Britton’s and there continued drinking sack, etc., till late in the night, and then Britton and the woman were seen upon the ground together, a little from the house. It was reported also that she did frequently abuse her husband, setting a knife to his breast and threatening to kill him, calling him old rogue and cuckold, and said she would make him wear horns as big as a bull. And yet some of the magistrates thought the evidence not sufficient against her, because there were not two direct witnesses; but the jury cast her, and then she confessed the fact, and accused twelve others, whereof two were married men. Five of these were apprehended and committed, (the rest were gone,) but denying it, and there being no other witness against them than the testimony of a condemned person, there could be no proceeding against them.

The woman proved very penitent, and had deep apprehension of the foulness of her sin, and at length attained to hope of pardon by the blood of Christ, and was willing to die in satisfaction to justice. The man also was very much cast down for his sins, but was loth to die, and petitioned the general court for his life, but they would not grant it, though some of the magistrates spake much for it; and questioned the letter whether adultery was death by God’s law now.* This Britton had been a professor in England, but coming hither he opposed our church government, etc., and grew dissolute, losing both power and profession of godliness.

March 21 [1643/44*]. They were both executed, they both died very penitently, especially the woman, who had some comfortable hope of pardon of her sin, and gave good exhortation to all young maids to be obedient to their parents, and to take heed of evil company, etc.

–John Winthrop‘s journals, specifically this volume

While Puritan courts were certainly known to execute for sexual transgressions, Mary and James appear to be the only documented case in the history of [what is now] the United States of an outright execution for adultery.**

The crime and the setting inevitably call to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and indeed he would likely have known about this case from Winthrop’s journals.

There are, however, even more compelling parallel cases — which, if they do not end on the scaffold, are at least as dramatic from the standpoint of posterity.

The case of the woman branded for adultery first appeared in the records of York, in what is now Maine. Dated 15 October 1651, the entry reads:

“We do present George Rogers for, & Mary Batchellor the wife of Mr. Steven Batcheller minister for adultery. It is ordered by ye Court yt George Rogers for his adultery with mis Batcheller shall forthwith have fourty stripes save one upon the bare skine given him: It is ordered yt mis Batcheller for her adultery shall receive 40 stroakes save one at ye First Towne meeting held at Kittery, 6 weekes after her delivery & be branded with the letter A.”

Beside that entry, written in the same hand, is the notation, “Execution Done.” It appears that Charles Edward Banks, in his History of York, Maine (1935), recognized the connection between Hawthorne’s novel and this case, for he refers to Mary Batchellor’s branding in a section titled “The Scarlet Letter.”

… the similarities between Hester Prynne and Mary Batchellor are so outstanding that is is tempting to argue for a direct source. For example, Mary Batchellor’s adultery is the only known case involving a child that can be linked to Hester’s plight. By postponing execution of the sentence until six weeks after Mrs. Batchellor’s delivery, the officials of York obviously considered the health of the unborn child. Hawthorne suggests a similar delay in the novel, for when Hester and Pearl appear in the opening scaffold scene, Pearl is “some three months old”.

It’s rather interesting to notice that in Latham and Britton’s case, even the judges who ultimately sentenced the lovers to die were overtly reluctant about doing so: the subtext of Winthrop’s narrative suggests to this reader that, had the pair not confessed, everyone would have been more than happy to use the “two witnesses” loophole to avoid noosing a concupiscent teenager stuck in a barren marriage. Whatever our caricature of them, Puritan elites too had some sense of proportionality about these things.

Even in Hawthorne, where the protagonist is punished only with public shaming, one of the crowd complains,

“This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their won wives and daughters go astray.”

And they have, ever since.

Thanks to Laura James of the (alas) dormant true-crime blog CLEWS for bringing this case to our attention.

* 1643/44: England was observing the legal new year on March 25 at this point.

** See the Espy file.

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1677: Thomas Sadler and William Johnson, mace thieves

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On this date in 1677, Thomas Sadler and William Johnson were hanged at Tyburn for one of the most impudent burglaries in English history.

“Thomas Sadler alias Clarke, William Johnson alias Trueman and Thomas Reneger … broke burglariously into the dwelling house of Heneage Lord Finch the Lord Chancellor of the said Lord the King and then and there stole and carried off a silver mace gilt gold worth one hundred pounds and two velvet purses imbroydered with gold and and silver and sett with pearles, worth forty pounds, of the goods and chattels of the said Lord the King.”

That’s right. They robbed the Lord Chancellor of his ceremonial mace while he slept, and a couple of embroidered ceremonial purses. (Representative pictures here.) The only reason they didn’t make off with the Great Seal of the Realm too was that the Chancellor had it under his pillow while he slept, for safekeeping. That’s some security.

The robbers, to their misfortune, were little better conscious of this crucial precaution.

They paraded through the darkened streets with mace poised on shoulder, a glorious revelry of knaves celebrating what they surely anticipated was the signal achievement of their lives — and the knell of their deaths.

Upon return to their lodging-house, and having no particular place to stash this hottest of loot, they just stuck it in a cabinet. There, the landlady ran across it while cleaning, and raised the alarum.

So Sadler and Johnson died for the astounding crime — Reneger, who didn’t, hadn’t been involved in a previous robbery that Sadler and Johnson committed, which might have helped mitigate his guilt — along with three distinctly undercard common criminals whom even the Newgate Ordinary scarcely noticed.

Johnson left a mournful little self-eulogy, many centuries since lost but preserved for us in that Ordinary’s evocative text.

Before his Tryal, having an excellent fancie, and a hand no less happy at Limning, he had drawn most lively on the wall of his Chamber in Newgate, a pair of Scales, and in one balance the Mace, and in the other Tyburn; the last much over weighing the first: But since his Condemnation, he drew in one Scale the Gallows, in the other a Crucifix; the first mounted up by the greater weight of the last, and these lines under-written, as I have been informed.

My Precious Lord, from all Transgressions free, Was pleas’d, in tender pity unto me, To undergo the Ignominious Tree.

I Suffer justly; but his Sacrifice, I trust, shall make my groveling Spirit rise, And from the Gibbet mount the glorious Skies.

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1555: John Hooper

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On this date in 1555, English Calvinist John Hooper fell victim to Mary Tudor’s abortive bid for Catholic restoration.

A onetime monk on the receiving end of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Hooper got the evangelical bug by reading Zwingli and became more un-Catholic than the anti-pope.

That meant that in quasi-Catholic Anglican England, he had to hot-foot it over to the continent a couple of times to keep out of trouble.

Even when more aggressive reformers took the lead after Henry VIII died, Hooper proved a gadfly; he’s noted for setting off the decades-long “vestments controversy” with his denunciation of the “Aaronic” ceremonial garb donned by priests.

(Hooper himself had to work out a compromise just to be ordained in garb sufficiently modest to satisfy his conscience.)

He survived the fall of his patron Edward Seymour, but the death of Edward VI and the ensuing succession of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor was Hooper’s demise. Historians may debate whether “Bloody Mary” really deserves her unkind nickname, but had she left a proto-Puritan loose cannon like Hooper unmolested, she would have indeed been a little lamb.

Hooper — naturally — took solace from the Word, “as St. Paul that loved the policy, laws, order, and wisdom of the Romans, yet disliked very much the vice and naughtiness of Nero, unto whom he submitted, and willingly brought into servitude both his body and goods, and rebelled not, though Nero was a naughty emperor, for his office sake, which was the ordinance of God.”

A large collection of Hooper’s writings (including the foregoing) is available at this Google books freebie.

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1579: Thomas Sherwood, Catholic martyr

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On this date in 1579, young Catholic layman Thomas Sherwood was hanged at Tyburn, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, and quartered.

This casualty of the Elizabethan era’s dangerous struggle for the soul of Britain had popped across to the continent to begin his studies under the church’s auspices.

He had not yet completed them when, on a return trip, a Protestant recognized him and got him locked up in the Tower, where Sherwood was tortured for information about the whereabouts of the underground Catholic Mass — but “he was brave beyond his years, no racking, no cross-examination could make him name any one.”

Sherwood had the distinction during his confinement of being one of the last earthly creatures to receive the (attempted) aid of octogenarian fellow-Catholic William Roper, Sir Thomas More‘s son-in-law and first biographer. (Roper’s attempts to send money to the imprisoned Sherwood were intercepted, however.)

Sherwood’s brother recalled of the martyr,

He was of small learning, scarcely understanding the Latin tongue, but had much read books of controversies and devotion, and had used much to converse among Catholic priests, and by reason thereof, having a good wit and judgment, and withal being very devout and religious, he was able to give good counsel, as he did to many of the more ignorant sort, being much esteemed for his virtuous life and humble and modest behaviour: besides God did give a special grace in his [conversation] , whereby together with his good example of life, he much moved and edified others. He was a man of little stature of body, yet of a healthful and good constitution, and very temperate in his diet.

After his first racking in the Tower (which was said to be rigorous), being visited by a Catholic gentlewoman, he showed himself of that joyful and comfortable spirit as she was astonished thereat. As also his keeper with compassion giving him warning that he was to be racked again, he was so little moved therewith, as merrily and with a cheerful countenance he said these words: ‘ I am very little, and you are very tall; you may hide me in your great hose and so they shall not find me; ‘ which the keeper did afterwards report to divers, much marvelling at his great fortitude and courage. He was about the age of twenty-seven years when he was martyred.

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1839: Amos Perley and Joshua Doane, for the Upper Canada Rebellion

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On this date in 1839, Amos Perley and Joshua Doan(e) were hanged in London, Ontario for a feeble armed invasion from Detroit.

The Battle of Windsor was pretty much the last gasp of Canada’s Rebellions of 1837 — touching Lower Canada (Quebec) as well as Upper (Ontario).

The effort saw stateside refugees of the Upper Canada Rebellion, also known as the Patriot War, organize an attempt to overthrow British-Canadian authority between Windsor and Niagara. But a brief incursion (a few houses were captured) failed to trigger a general response in a populace that was all risings’ed out, while United States authorities stayed well clear of these troublemakers. Officials had little difficulty mopping them up.

Six different people (named here) were executed at intervals in London, Ontario, beginning on January 7, 1839 — and ending with the two this date.

Amos Perley was a New Brunswick native who had been an American resident (citizenship status is unclear) for some time, but fell in with the Patriots.

Joshua Doane was a Quaker — a sect ordinarily leery of armed conflict and liable to be considered disloyal as a result — who abandoned the whole pacifism thing in favor of the Patriot cause. He’d had to beat it over the border when the last round of Upper Canada disturbances had been put down the previous winter: he wouldn’t get another chance after the 1838 invasion fizzled.

Doane’s touching last letter to his soon-to-be-widow survives.

London, January 27th, 1839

Dear Wife,

I am at this moment confined in the cell from which I am to go to the scaffold. I received my sentence today, and am to be executed on February 6th. I am permitted to see you tomorrow, any time after 10 o’clock in the morning, as may suit you best. I wish you to think of such questions as you wish to ask me, as I do not know how long you will be permitted to stay. Think as little of my unhappy fate as you can; as from the love you bear me, I know too well how it must affect you. I wish you to inform my father and brother of my sentence as soon as possible. I must say good-bye for the night, and may God protect you and my dear child, and give you fortitude to meet that coming event with the Christian grace and fortitude which is the gift of Him, our Lord, who created us. That this may be the case, is the prayer of your affectionate husband,

JOSHUA G. DOANE.

At this point, “people [in London] were so fed up” with the intermittent public hangings they’d been subjected to that the remaining condemned had their sentences commuted instead to penal transportation, and got shipped to Australia instead.

The disruptions did, however, help to contribute to the 1840 political unification of Upper and Lower Canada.

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1537: “Silken Thomas” FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare

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On this date in 1537, an Irish lord and his five uncles were hanged and beheaded at Tyburn for revolting against Henry VIII: the last act in an entire cycle of executions.

The Rumored Execution

Thomas FitzGerald‘s father, the king’s Lord-Deputy of Ireland, had been summoned to London to answer the complaints of his rivals and there committed to the Tower.

Said rivals then cunningly circulated reports that dad had been beheaded, inducing the hot-headed (and finely-appareled) heir Thomas to renounce his allegiance and rebel with a dramatic retinue of 140 silk-bedizened gentlemen.

The Summary Execution

The Earl of Kildare hadn’t really been executed at all: he just died of shock and grief upon reading the reports of what his son had got up to in his absence.

Stuff like, besieging Dublin Castle where he hunted down the fleeing Archbishop (a longtime enemy of the Kildares) and had him instantly put to death.

(This might have been more pardonable had he at least managed to take Dublin Castle.)

The Maynooth Pardon
(Euphemism for Execution)

Instead, Silken Tom holed up in Maynooth Castle where he soon found himself on the receiving end of a siege.


Maynooth Castle in its present, romantically ruined state. (cc) image from Bart Busschots.

Thomas and his silk went off to find some allies to relieve it, hoping to play a Catholic-resentment card against Henry VIII’s rift with Rome.

But the local response was desultory and while the new Earl of Kildare was busy beating the bushes, the English took the castle — issuing to its garrison the “Maynooth Pardon”, the ironical sobriquet for executing most of the lot.

Silken Thomas’s Execution

His rebellion having been all downhill since the big silken resignation, Thomas was eventually induced by promises of safekeeping to surrender himself to the royal mercy.

But said mercy was not forthcoming, and he endured a year-plus locked up in something less than his trademark finery — “I have had neither hosen, doublet, nor shoes, nor shirt but one; nor any other garment but a single frieze gown … so I have gone wolward, and barefoot and barelegged,” he complained in a letter — until, attainted by the Irish Parliament, he was executed with his kinsmen.

Although the Kildare title disappeared for a time, Thomas FitzGerald’s young but hunted half-brother escaped to the continent, bounced all over Europe for a decade, picked up an education, fought the Turks, and returned to receive his family’s peerage re-granted so he could practice alchemy in his castle as “the Wizard Earl”.

When next in Kildare Town, stand a drink or two for these hearty bygone Geraldines at the Silken Thomas pub.

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1697: John Fenwick, bitter

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The Franco-Dutch War of the 1670s lifted to power the young stadtholder William of Orange, and made him a couple of noteworthy lifelong enemies.

One was the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, whose decades-long rivalry with William tracked William’s interesting career all the way to the throne of England.

William III, equestrian. Consider yourself foreshadowed.

Another was Sir John Fenwick, an English nobleman whom William supposedly slagged* when they were fighting together in the Low Countries — and who likewise still carried the enmity when William had become his sovereign.

On this date in 1697, the latter rivalry came to a fatal end for John Fenwick on the headsman’s block. The funny thing was that the stroke turned out to cost King William III his own life as well.

You couldn’t say that Fenwick came late to the Jacobite cause; he’d been a strong adherent of the beleaguered Catholic-esque Stuart dynasty, and signed off on the 1685 execution of its previous Protestant challenger Monmouth.

But if it prosper, none dare call it treason. In 1688, the Low Countries prince with the low estimation of Baronet Fenwick hopped the channel and successfully overthrew the last Stuart monarchking James II.

With the Glorious Revolution, Fenwick’s personal and political were very conveniently aligned in loyalty to the exiled James … except that his formerly patriotic loyalty to James was now the traitorous cause of Jacobitism.

Fenwick kept up his Jacobiting in the 1690s, got arrested and released once, and then finally found himself implicated in a plot to murder William. Though his allies managed to spirit one of the potential witnesses against him away to the continent, Parliament passed — ever so narrowly — a bill of attainder to condemn Fenwick to death. (There’s a more detailed account of the legal and political maneuverings here and here.)

The State his Head did from his Body sever,
Because when living ’twas his chief Endeavour
To set the Nation and its Head together.

That’s politics. Even kings themselves are in mortal peril around here.

A failed assassin in life, Fenwick would blunder Gavrilo Princip-like into accidental success … but only after his own execution.

As a condemned traitor, Fenwick’s estate was seized by the crown, and the king personally claimed his prey’s equine ride (either a horse with a sorrel coat, or a horse named Sorrel, or both).** Not long after Fenwick’s death, this horse stumbled on a molehill, throwing its royal rider. William broke his collarbone in the accident, developed pneumonia, and died — leading Jacobite sympathizers to dote on the animals (both horse and mole) who had authored their enemy’s misfortune.

Illustrious steed, doubtless most worthy of the sky,
To whom the lion, bull, and bear would give place;
What happy meadows bore thee happily?
What happy mother gave you her nutritious teats?
Is it from the land of Erin you are come to oblige your country,
Or is it Glenco or the Fenwick race which produced you?
Whoever thou art, mayst thou prosper, I pray memorable one: and
May saddle never more press thy back, nor bit thy mouth.
Avenger of the human race, when the tyrant dies,
Mayst thou thyself enjoy the liberty thou wilt give to others.


A lovely sorrel enjoys the liberty of a happy meadow. (Nutritious teats not pictured.) (cc) image from SMALLORBIGOFMEN.

* During the Dutch campaign, William “had reflected very severely upon his [Fenwick’s] courage, which occasioned his making returns that provoked the Prince to say, that if he had been a private person he must have cut Sir John’s throat.” Just your basic primate poo-flinging.

** Leaving aside his ultimate fate, quite an understandable move by William: the Fenwicks were famous for their horse husbandry.

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1961: Wasyl Gnypiuk, sleep-killer

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 1961, a Polish/Ukrainian immigrant with the unpronounceable name of Wasyl Gnypiuk was hanged for murder in Lincoln, England.

The 34-year-old Gnypiuk was living in a toolshed in Worksop when he murdered his 62-year-old landlady, Louise Surgey, on July 17, 1960. He had spent some time in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and suffered terrible nightmares as the result of his ordeal. The night of the murder, he broke into Surgey’s house while she was sleeping, drank some of her liquor, and passed out.

Gnypiuk — so he later claimed — had a dream where he was fighting Nazis. When he woke up, Surgey lay dead at his feet: he had strangled her in his sleep.

The authorities treated his claims with understandable skepticism. He didn’t help his case by trying to hide the body and stealing some money that had been lying around the house. He had a two-day trial in November and was duly convicted and sentenced to death. Gnypiuk was the last person to be hanged in Lincolnshire before the UK abolished the death penalty in 1965.

The truth about what happened will never be known for sure, but Gnypiuk is still regularly listed among cases of homicidal sleepwalking.

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1902: Gideon Scheepers, Boer guerrilla

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“Scheepers lives because they shot him.”

-Hermi Baartman, Graaf-Reinet Museum

On this date in 1902, Kommandant Gideon Jacobus Scheepers was shot by the British for his exploits in the Boer War.

The young Dutch-descended Scheepers (here’s his Afrikaans Wikipedia page) was a soldier from the still-independent Boer states which were being reduced in this war to British dependencies.

In 1901, late in the proceedings, Scheepers took a column of irregulars into the British Eastern Cape Province and wrought havoc behind the lines. Some exploits are the stuff of legend, like the time he rode into a town, released all the Boer prisoners, locked up the British magistrate, and hauled down the Union Jack — to the delight of the Boer locals.

He would spend that year giving the British much better than he got, but the war was also infamously dirty.

According to David Harrison’s The White Tribe of Africa: South Africa in Perspective, “Scheeepers’ men also flogged and shot natives who helped the British, looted as well as burned farms, and executed Boer ‘traitors’.”

Was any of that criminal?

Since Scheepers was over enemy lines, the Boers who joined him could be held liable for treason … but that didn’t hold for Scheepers himself. His execution turned on holding these unsavory acts as war crimes: his 30-count charge sheet included seven arsons, seven murders, and various and sundry abuses of prisoners and blacks. Scheepers was really sore about the last; natives were supposed to be kept out of the fighting, but the prisoner very credibly insisted that the ones he “murdered” were under arms as scouts for the British.

“We Afrikaners will never find justice under the English,” Scheepers wrote as a prisoner. “Everything is for the kaffirs.”

(There’s a vociferous defense of Scheepers from a pro-Boer history here, and a more sober one by a London press correspondent here.)


Scheepers is read the death warrant on January 17, 1902 — before Graaf-Reinet townspeople assembled by British orders.

For non-Loyalist Boers and for many throughout the world — the U.S. House of Representatives even moved a resolution calling for Scheepers to be accorded POW status according to the Geneva Convention — it smacked of a setup.


Gideon Scheepers (mostly obscured by his guards) tied to a chair for execution.


Just shot, Gideon Scheepers slumps backward in his chair.

While martyrdom guaranteed Scheepers a lasting legacy, bizarre posthumous turns helped elevate it into legend. When the dead man’s family turned up after hostilities to retrieve his bones, the grave turned out empty, leading to a years-long saga with colorful frauds presenting bogus remains, a mentally ill man doing the Grand Duchess Anastasia act and claiming to be Scheepers, and the actual corpse remaining stubbornly elusive.

The bereaved mother’s ultimately fruitless search for her son’s final resting place inspired the poem “Gebed om die Gebeente”(“Prayer for the Bones”), by D.J. Opperman. (Here’s a translated version.) That verse was recently set to music as a cantata by composer Hendrik Hofmeyr.

Scheepers’ allies, however, had simply been beaten in the field. On May 31, 1902 they capitulated to the British.

If we are asked why in 1978 a memorial should be erected for a man who died in 1902, then the answer is simple. The life and work of this man was such that history placed him in the heroes’ gallery and nothing and no one can deprive him of that place.

-Nationalist Prime Minister John Vorster upon the unveiling of a Scheepers monument

This interesting “On the Trail of Gideon Scheepers” series has a detailed and richly illustrated narrative of the man’s final year.

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1900: Louisa Josephine Jemima Masset

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 1900, 36-year-old Louisa Josephine Jemima Masset (also called “Louise” in some accounts) was hung for the murder of her young son the previous year. She was the first woman, indeed the first person, to be executed in London in the brand spanking new 1900s.

Her crime, even by today’s standards, was shocking and there is little doubt that had it occurred today, Louisa would be featured on blogs with names like People You’ll See In Hell. (Actually, she got a TV miniseries in the early 1990s.)

The story of the murder and Louisa’s trial and death were recorded in detail in John J. Eddleston’s A Century of London Murders and Executions. Capital Punishment U.K. provides additional details, and the trial records can be seen here.

Our story begins a little after six on Friday, October 27, 1899, when a lady at the Dalston Junction train station in London found the body of a small boy shoved behind the door to the women’s lavatory. The child was naked, bloody and partially covered with a black shawl, and a bloodstained brick lay nearby.


Dalston Junction: Mind the gap. (cc) image from Matt From London

The post-mortem determined that the child had been beaten “with much violence” on the head and face, but the actual cause of death was suffocation. He probably died only about an hour or two before his body was found. There was no indication of his identity, so his description was published in the newspapers with hopes that someone would recognize him.

Someone did: the following Monday, a children’s nurse named Helen Eliza Gentle came forward and identified the murdered boy as Manfred Louis Masset, age three and a half, who had been in her charge until the previous Friday.

Manfred was illegitimate and had been in Helen Gentle’s care since shortly after birth. Louisa, his mother, doesn’t seem to have been the maternal type. She paid 37 shillings a month for his care and would visit him once every two weeks and take him to the park. The money supposedly came from Manfred’s father in France; Louisa herself earned a living as a day governess and gave piano lessons.

The arrangement with Helen Gentle ended when Louisa told Helen that she was sending Manfred to France to be with his father. Helen handed the child over to her at 12:45 p.m. on October 27, only hours before his death.


The day before giving him up, Helen Gentle took this picture of the tot to remember him by.

When she was tracked down at her brother-in-law’s house, Louisa denied having harmed her son and stated she didn’t even know he was dead until she read about it in the newspaper. She admitted the story about taking Manfred to France a lie and said she only wanted to transfer him to another carer, as she thought Nurse Gentle wasn’t educating him properly. Louisa claimed she had met two women, one of them a schoolmistress, in the park a few weeks earlier. She arranged to enroll Manfred for the price of £18 per annum, and handed the little boy over on October 27.

When pressed, however, Louisa couldn’t remember much about these women or their school. The police smelled a rat and took her into custody for murder.

At Louisa’s trial in December, she stuck to her story about giving Manfred to a schoolmistress. She said she’d handed him over at the train station at 4:00 p.m., along with a £12 deposit towards his school tuition, then took the 4:07 train to Brighton. No one at the station saw the two women Louisa described. However, three witnesses at the train station remembered seeing Louisa and Manfred, who was crying, hanging about the station for over an hour on the afternoon of Manfred’s death: one of those same witnesses saw and spoke to Louisa at the station at 6:50 p.m., nearly two hours after Louisa claimed to have left, and said her little boy wasn’t with her anymore.

The icing on the cake was when the brick used to batter Manfred was shown to be same kind as those in Louisa’s garden.

Louisa’s story was partially true; she did go to Brighton that day, hours later than she said, and Manfred’s clothes turned up in the waiting room of the train station there. Eudor Lucas, Louisa’s next-door neighbor, said they had spent the weekend together in Brighton, sleeping in the same bed, and he had “had connection” with her.

The jury must have been outraged by their blatantly immoral behavior, and in any case the evidence against Louisa was overwhelming. The jury got the case on December 18 and took thirty minutes to convict her. She was hung just three weeks later.

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