Category Archives: Wales

1829: David Evans, in Carmarthen

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On this date in 1829 in the Welsh town of Carmarthen, David Evans hanged for savagely murdering his pregnant girlfriend Hannah Davis with a billhook, in a fit of jealousy.

As Capital Punishment UK notes, the large public audience in attendance got double the spectacle:

When the preparations had been made, Evans gave the signal by dropping a handkerchief, to draw the bolt but the hook gave way and he landed on his feet. He expected to be reprieved, telling the officials that “He had been hanged once and they had no more to do with him”, but this was not the case in law and the execution had to be carried out, which it was a few minutes later, this time without a hitch. After hanging for an hour the body was taken down and sent for dissection.

The folk belief in this notional post-botch safe space was something that the coalescing state struggled to dispel as an irrational carve-out. It was here over half a century since William Blackstone‘s seminal legal Commentaries went out of its way to dismiss the idea.

it is clear, that if, upon judgment to be hanged by the neck till he is dead, the criminal be not thoroughly killed, but revives, the sheriff must hang him again. For the former hanging was no execution of the sentence; and, if a false tenderness were to be indulged in such cafes, a multitude of collusions might ensue. Nay, even while abjurations were in force, such a criminal, so reviving, was not allowed to take sanctuary and abjure the realm; but his fleeing to sanctuary was held an escape.

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1831: Dic Penderyn, Merthyr Rising martyr

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Welsh coal miner Dic Penderyn was hanged on this date in 1831 to crush a labor rising.

Richard Lewis was his real name — he got his nickname from the village of his residence, Penderyn, which is also true of Wales’s most famous whisky — dug carbon out of the ground to serve the mighty ironworks of Merthyr Tydfil.


Satanic mill? Cyfarthfa Ironworks Interior at Night, by Penry Williams (1825).

This vital node of the burgeoning industrial revolution made princes of its masters, and paupers of its subjects. “The town of Merthyr Tidfil was filled with such unguided, hard-worked, fierce, and miserable-looking sons of Adam I never saw before,” Thomas Carlyle would write in 1850. “Ah me! It is like a vision of Hell, and will never leave me, that of these poor creatures broiling, all in sweat and dirt, amid their furnaces, pits, and rolling mills.” The broiling creatures’ surplus labor lives on to delight the modern visitor in the form of Cyfarthfa Castle, the spired mansion thrown up in the 1820s by the prospering ironmaster William Crawshay II. (His successor in the role, Robert Thompson Crawshay, would be known as the “Iron King of Wales”.)

For workers, precarity sat side by side with toil and in 1831 the pressure of contracting wages and constricting debt triggered a protest that metastasized into rebellion. The Merthyr Rising saw the town completely overrun by the lower orders, flying the red flag in perhaps the earliest deployment of this now-familiar symbol as a banner of the proletariat.

They sacked the debtors’ court and fed its obnoxious bonds to a bonfire, and formed a militia that fought off a couple of attempted state interventions before 450 troops occupied Merthyr Tidfil on June 6 to finally quell the revolt. Two dozen protesters were killed in the associated fighting.

Twenty-six people were arrested and tried for various crimes associated with the Merthyr Rising, but amid the various imprisonments and transportations-to-Australia, Westminster perceived the need for the sort of message that only hemp conveys. Two men, Lewis Lewis (Lewsyn yr Heliwr) and our man Richard Lewis (Dic Penderyn) drew death sentences for stabbing a soldier with a bayonet. The former man’s sentence was downgraded to penal transportation when a policeman testified that he’d been shielded from a dangerous moment in the riot by Lewis Lewis. That left just the one guy and never mind a widespread belief in the town that Dic Penderyn was innocent of the crime.

Prime Minister Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey — yes, he’s the Earl Grey tea guy — refused an 11,000-strong community petition to spare him. Dic Penderyn hanged at Cardiff on August 13, 1831, at the site of the present-day Cardiff Market. A plaque marks the spot.

To latter-day descendants, both those of blood and those of insurrectionary spirit, Dic Penderyn is a seminal working-class martyr. Commemorations, and efforts to officially exonerate him, continue down to the present day.

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1292: Rhys ap Maredudd

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Welsh lord Rhys ap Maredudd was executed as a traitor at York on this date in 1292, for leading a failed rebellion in his homeland.

Rhys ruled the Cantref Mawr, a fragment of the larger region of Deheubarth his house had once ruled as a united principality.

Our guy was working a project to augment this reduced patrimony by allying himself to King Edward I of England against Dafydd ap Gruffydd. But the English king made only a miserly bestowal, and insult to injury even booted him out of Dryslwyn Castle. Chafing at the domination of Edward’s men, the frustrated Rhys rebelled against English domination in 1287.

The inconstant lord was crushed in a siege at Newcastle Emlyn. Although able to escape and stay on the run for a few years, he was eventually captured in 1291 and executed as a traitor.

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1872: Joseph Garcia, for the Llangibby Massacre

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Spanish seaman Joseph Garcia was hanged at Usk Prison on this date in 1872, for the Llangibby Massacre.

It occurred in the Welsh village of that name, inland from the mouth of the Severn where Garcia had alit as a mariner at Newport nearly a year before.

He’d committed a burglary there, and been committed to jail for his pains. His sentence was nine months … followed by release to a foreign land whose language he barely spoke, his ship long gone and no friend or occupation to direct him.

A “short, thin man, just five feet five inches tall, with a swarthy complexion, coarse black hair and beard,” Garcia trudged the road in to the farming town. Several times he was observed loitering there but his presence was really announced by the billows of smoke pouring from the home of William Watkins, a farmworker — and neighbors who rushed to the scene beheld the horror of its owner dead from a stab wound through his throat, his wife similarly dealt with, and all three of their small children also put to the blade — their wee corpses already partly charred from the fire.

The stranger’s foreignness invited attention, of course, and when he was arrested back at Newport circumstantial evidence appeared to confirm the connection: he had some injuries and bloodstains that suggested a scrap, a pair of boots that might have been stolen from Watkins, and some stolen household articles that a surviving daughter of Watkins fortunate enough to be away from the house at the fatal hour recognized as the family’s own. He also possessed a knife that he hadn’t been discharged with.

Then as now the fury for a swarthy outlander come uninvited to go a-viking among law-abiding Britons was potent; while legal proceedings were entirely regular, “the noise outside the court was powerful enough at times to prevent the witness from being heard, and from the character of the exclamations which permeated to the interior of the court the crowd appeared ready to lynch Garcia.” (Period press quoted here.) Indeed, such a sentiment was openly published in at least one broadsheet murder ballad:

May the murderers to justice quickly be brought,
And suffer the penalty they surely have sought,
Lynch law in some countries they would very soon find,
And their bodies be swinging on the trees to the wind.

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1230: William de Braose, bold paramour

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In this year William de Breos the Younger, lord of Brycheiniog, was hanged by the Lord Llywelyn in Gwynedd, after he had been caught in Llywelyn’s chamber with the king of England’s daughter, Llywelyn’s wife.

-Chronicle of Ystrad Fflur

The Welsh king Llywelyn the Great had William de Braose hanged on this date in 1230 near Bala for — well, the aforesaid.

The lords of his Norman house patrolled the Welsh marches, and our man — Gwilym Ddu (“Black William”) to the Welsh — was Llywelyn’s prisoner from 1228 via capture in some skirmish. All in a day’s work for the feudal nobility, for whom “captivity” meant honored hospitality while waiting around for their relatives to raise the ransom for their relief.

Black William made time in more ways during this spell, not only seducing Llewelyn’s wife Joan, Lady of Wales, but playing matchmaker between Llywelyn’s son and his, da Braose’s, daughter. This marriage still went off notwithstanding Llywelyn’s discovery that his own had been violated, something the Welsh prince allegedly found out by walking in on the two in the middle of the night, when an already-ransomed Black William had gone back to pay an Easter visit to his future in-laws.

In the record of the Abbott of Vaudey, “On 2nd of May, at a certain manor called ‘Crokein’, he was made ‘Crogyn’, i.e. hanged on a tree, and this not privily or in the night time, but openly and in the broad daylight, in the presence of more than 800 men assembled to behold the piteous and melancholy spectacle.”

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1827: Sarah Jones, firm infanticide

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From the Bristol Mercury of April 16, 1827:

EXECUTION OF SARAH JONES.

This unfortunate victim to seduction was 26 years of age, and lived with her father and mother, Thomas and Mary Jones, who resided in a small cottage, forming one of a row of houses, situated on the side of the Sirhowy tram-road, called Pye-corner, in the parish of Bassalleg, in the county of Monmouth.

On Tuesday morning she took a farewell leave of her wretched parents, which she bore with considerable firmness, being the least affected of the three. — A neighbor, who spoke to her character, was, at her desire, permitted to see her the same morning, and speak to her in the Welsh language. She was particularly communicative; detailing the circumstances most minutely, which led to her present situation. She said it was not her intention to have destroyed the hapless infant, until three months before her confinement, when she discovered her seducer, Flook, had married another woman; she then formed the diabolical plan of having her revenge in the murder of his infant.

On Monday, the 23d of October, at breakfast, she found herself ill, and went up stairs; about ten or eleven her mother came up, disturbed by her voice; she sent her down for some fresh linen; and whilst the mother was going down stairs, the child was born: — she immediately seized one of two pen-knives which were in her pocket by her bedside, and in a minute or two after the birth, gave it two gashes in the throat; the mother coming up with the linen, she hid the body between the sacking and the bed, on some straw lying between, and lay on it until the Friday night. On that night Flook came to see her, — she was then down stairs in the chair (her father asleep) — he immediately noticed the alteration in her size, on which she told him of the horrid deed she had committed, and entreated him to assist her, by burying the body; — he consented; and, having sewed it up in some spare sacking, she gave it him through the window.

She positively declares her father knew nothing of the transaction, till Potter, the game-keeper, brought the body to the house; that she had concealed her situation from her mother, denying her pregnancy, even the Sunday evening before her confinement; and that the mother believed the child to have been still-born, up to the time of the coroner’s inquisition.

Sarah Burley, a fellow prisoner, under sentence of imprisonment, for stealing money, at Newport, slept with her during the night; — she slept remarkably sound, being only disturbed by supposing she saw her coffin lying by her bedside: she asserts, she has felt ever since her sentence, the sensation of having a rope round her neck, and that she often lifted her hand to remove it. She spoke in the most flattering manner of the attentions of the keeper, Mr. T. Phillips, to whose humanity and instructions she was indebted for her firmness of mind; — she took a prison farewell of the friend to whom she revealed her mind, without tears, and viewed the prospect of the near approach of her death with the greatest resignation.

Additional Particulars. — This unfortunate woman was of short stature, stout made, with nothing in her countenance indicative of ferociousness, she stood during her trial without any perceptible emotion, but on receiving sentence was obliged to be supported by one of the officers in attendance, and was carried from the bar to the chaise which conducted her to the gaol; she has asserted that even then, she was as collected as she ever was in her life, and was only exhausted from the joy she felt that her mother was acquitted. She had made up her mind for the worst on first entering the gaol, and her whole anxiety was, lest her poor mother should be found guilty, and she should be thus accessory to another death.

She slept soundly the last night, awaking about 6 o’clock, and on viewing the fatal spot observed that every thing was ready and she was so herself. After divine service she received the sacrament with several other criminals, and was from thence ushered to the drop, walking with a steady step, on arriving at the lodge she took a last farewell of several around her, expressing her confidence of being in a few minutes happy, she then ascended the place where the executioner awaited her, in the performance of his painful duty, the only observation she made, was not to draw the rope too tight, and having kissed those around her, begged the cap might be then pulled over her face, she then stept on the platform with firmness, on the rope being adjusted, she begged the executioner to draw her clothes tight around her, which he did by tying a handkerchief, having retired, the drop fell, and in about a minute vitality ceased.

After hanging an hour her body was delivered to her friends, for interment in Bassalleg churchyard; on its being made known that the part of her sentence relating to her dissection was remitted, she felt much gratified and hoped they would let her body remain one night at her father’s house. Thus died this unhappy woman in her 26th year, her fate has excited much commiseration and miserable must be the recollections of her seducer; her resignation was praiseworthy, her repentance contrite, and her conduct firm and decided beyond precedent under such circumstances; endued with great strength and presence of mind, she only wanted the advantages of education, and to have been under the moral restrictions of the Christian code to have been an useful character in society, may her end be (in the impressive language of the Learned Judge who tried her) a warning to the unguarded of her age, and to those wretches unworthy the name of men who have, or who may seduce females to a similar state of degradation; throughout the trial the humanity of the Learned Sergeant was apparent, and the feeling manner in which he pronounced the dreadful fiat of the law drew tears from the eyes of a majority of the largest assemblage of spectators within that court. The crowd assembled at her execution was unusually large, and, as is customary, but no ways creditable to them, two thirds were females.

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1531: Rhys ap Gruffydd

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On this date in 1531, a Welsh nobleman whose grandfather had been instrumental in raising the Tudor dynasty up caught the downswing of the Tudor dynasty’s axe.

Gruffydd ap Rhys ap Thomas (“son of Rhys, son of Thomas”) was the Welsh patriarch of an illustrious house who had taken the Lancastrian side during the English Wars of the Roses.

When the Lancastrians lost, he took the necessary oaths to the likes of Richard III but his reputed promise to defend Wales for his king with such ferocity that an invader must needs “make his entrance and irruption over my belly” was discharged in a ceremony equally literary and lawyerly — when he stood under a bridge while his invading ally, the Welsh-descended Henry Tudor, marched over it.


There’s always a loophole when one fails to insist on direct language.

Together the two would win the crown for Henry — and in a sense very much win it for Wales — at Bosworth Field, where Gruffydd is sometimes credited personally with the blow that felled King Richard.

He lived on to 1525, a loyal supporter of Henry VII and his son Henry VIII. But the reciprocal gratitude of the kings did not outlive Gruffydd’s passing, for the Welsh offices that he designed to pass to his grandson Rhys ap Gruffydd were instead foisted on Water Devereux, Baron Ferrers.*

The consequent hostility would set Rhys on his way to the block. In 1529, our man drew a blade on Devereux, and their respective bands of retainers skirmished violently with each other over succeeding months.

Attempting to elevate his frustrated political claim by assuming the name “Fitz Urien” — in reference to a half-legendary ancient Welsh king — finally got him clapped in the Tower. His subsequent trial on a fanciful charge of conspiring with Scotland to form a Celtic league against the English asserted the central royal authority against a noble loose cannon who also happened to be part of the Catholic, anti-Anne Boleyn faction; at a stretch it could arguably** be read to make him one of the earliest victims of the still-nascent English Reformation. Be that as it may, his countrymen did not much mourn the fall of a vaunting and greedy line, however spurious the grounds.

And indeed many men regarded his [Rhys’s] death as Divine retribution for the falsehoods of his ancestors, his grandfather, and great-grandfather, and for their oppressions and wrongs. They had many a deep curse from the poor people who were their neighbours, for depriving them of their homes, lands and riches. For I heard the conversations of folk from that part of the country that no common people owned land within twenty miles from the dwelling of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, that if he desired such lands, he would appropriate them without payment or thanks, and the disinherited doubtless cursed him, his children and his grandchildren, which curses in the opinion of many men fell on the family, according to the old proverb which says — the children of Lies are uprooted, and after oppression comes a long death to the oppressors. (Source)

* An ancestor of Elizabethan loverboy Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.

** That argument is made by Ralph Griffiths in Sir Rhys ap Thomas and his Family: A Study in the Wars of the Roses and Early Tudor Politics.

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388: Magnus Maximus, minimized

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On this date in 388, Magnus Maximus, partially successful usurper of the western Roman Empire, was put to death by Emperor Theodosius.

The late centuries of Rome witness many a rebellious general but the smart money in a civil war rarely fancied the guy whose power base was distant Britannia. With his bombastic name and balls to back it, Magnus bigly bucked those odds, defeating and murdering the western Augustus Gratian in Gaul in 383. From there he bossed Africa, Britain, and his native Spain for several years.

The departure from Britain of this local chancer made good would prove to correspond approximately with the empire’s crumbling foothold on on the island, with the sandal-shorn Roman feet in ancient times last walking upon England’s mountains green in 410. As the last, most scintillating representative of Roman Britain, Magnus Maximus has survived into legend — extolled for example by Geoffrey of Monmouth as the title hero of “The Dream of Macsen Wledig”. In it, “Macsen”/Maximus weds a Welsh princess and sires a native dynasty, granting Brittany to the Britons in gratitude for their aid as he conquers Rome.

But forget living in legend. The real Magnus Maximus, like every aspirant to the dangerous purple, mostly just worried about living out the next campaign season.

He had a spell of tense peace with his eastern opposite number, during which time Maximus — a staunch Nicene Christian — had the distinction in 385 of decreeing the trial on trumped-up sorcery charges of the dissident bishop Priscillian. It’s widely, if loosely, accounted the very first intra-Christian heresy execution. (Saint Ambrose of Milan and St. Martin of Tours both intervened strongly to oppose this precedent which has spawned so very many imitations.)

Meanwhile Maximus and Theodosius maneuvered toward inevitable civil war and it is obvious from his presence on this here blog that Maximus on this occasion did not rise to his nomens. As Zosimus describes,

Theodosius, having passed through Pannonia [routing Maximus in the process -ed.] and the defiles of the Appennines, attacked unawares the forces of Maximus before they were prepared for him. A part of his army, having pursued them with the utmost speed, forced their way through the gates of Aquileia, the guards being too few to resist them. Maximus was torn from his imperial throne while in the act of distributing money to his soldiers, and being stripped of his imperial robes, was brought to Theodosius, who, having in reproach enumerated some of his crimes against the commonwealth, delivered him to the common executioner to receive due punishment.

Such was the end of Maximus and of his usurpation.*

The poet Pacatus thereafter paid the conquering Theodosius homage for this victory in one of antiquity’s great panegyrics. (Enjoy it in the original Latin here.) Sure he lost the war, but how many figures are both magnus and maximus in fields as disparate as Celtic mythology and classical rhetoric?

Audiophiles might enjoy history podcasters’ take on Magnus Maximus: he’s been covered by both the British History Podcast (episode 31) and the History of Rome Podcast (episodes 156 and 157).

* After the post-Maximus arrangements Theodosius made in the west also went pear-shaped, necessitating yet another conquest and execution, Theodosius established himself as the emperor of both the eastern and western halves of the Roman world in 392. He was last man ever destined to enjoy that distinction.

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1723: Thomas Athoe the Elder, and Thomas Athoe the Younger

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On this date in 1723, the 58-year-old former mayor of the Pembrokeshire town of Tenby was hanged along with his quarrelsome 23-year-old son.

This classic from the Select Trials annals finds Thomas Athoes Elder and Younger out at market-day when the young hothead picked a fight with, and got his ass kicked by, George Merchant. Merchant was Athoe the Younger’s own cousin, for his mother was Athoe the Elder’s sister; not only this, but in explaining their conduct to the chaplain endeavoring to save their souls, the Athoes would allege that Merchant had also swiped young Athoe’s girl.

The Athoes bided their time for the rest of that day, November 23 of 1722, and “advised by some Pettifogger, to bring an Action against the Deceased .. .answered, No, no, we won’t take the Law, but we’ll pay them in their own Coin.” And so when night fell, they followed Merchant and his brother Thomas (that’s the third Thomas on the pitch here, for those keeping count) to Holloway’s Water, the estuary of the river Ritec that in the 18th century swelled so high when the tide came in that the river became navigable four miles inland. The road that traversed it could only be crossed at low tide.

So it was in this muddy coastal defile, on a nigh-moonless night,* that father and son rounded on brother and brother as the latter watered their mounts.

The evidence in the case was given by Thomas Merchant, who survived the attack so narrowly that “at the Time of the Trial, tho’ it was four Months afterwards, he was in so weak a Condition that he could not stand, and therefore the Court permitted him to give his Evidence sitting.” Squeamish readers might wish to do likewise before proceeding to the rending of flesh he developed for the court.

The Prisoners coming up with great Sticks, I owe thee a Pass, and now thou shalt have it, said young Athoe to the Deceased, and knock’d him off his Horse. Thomas Merchant was serv’d in the like Manner by old Athoe, who, at the same Time cry’d out, Kill the Dogs! Kill the Dogs!

The Brothers begg’d ’em for God’s Sake to spare their Lives; but the Prisoners had no Regard to their Cries. Old Athoe fell upon Thomas Merchant, beating him in a terrible Manner, and taking fast hold of his Privities, pulled and squeezed him to such a violent Degree, that, had he continued so doing a few Minutes longer, it had been impossible for the poor Man to have survived it. The Pain he suffered, is past Expression, and yet it fell short of what his Brother endured.

Young Athoe, when he had tired himself with beating him, seized him by the Privy Members, and his Yard being extended, he broke the Muscles of it, and tore out one of his Testicles; and calling to his Father, said, Now I have done George Merchant’s Business! This horrible Action occasioned a vast Effusion of Blood: But young Athoe’s Revenge was not yet glutted, — for catching hold of the Deceased’s Nose with his Teeth, he bit it quite off, and afterwards tied a Handkerchief so tight about his Neck, that the Flesh almost covered it.

The last Words the Deceased was heard to say were, Don’t bite my Nose off. He lived a few Hours in the most grievous Agony imaginable, and then expired.

Although the younger Athoe briefly took refuge in Ireland, father and son were remanded to London for trial, convicted with ease, and doomed to hang at St. Thomas’s Watering on Old Kent Road in Surrey.

When they came to the fatal Tree, they behaved themselves in a very decent Manner, embracing each other in the most tender and affectionate Manner; and indeed the Son’s hiding his Face, bedewed with Tears, in his Father’s Bosom, was, notwithstanding the barbarous Action they had committed, a very moving Spectacle.

* November 23 maps as a full moon … but recall that England at this time was still on the Julian calendar, so the local date corresponds instead to December 4, at nearly the opposite end of the lunar cycle.

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1805: Mary Morgan, anomalously

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On this date in 1805, servant Mary Morgan, age 17, was hanged at Presteigne for murdering her bastard child.

An undercook in M.P. Walter Wilkins‘s Maesllwch Castle, Morgan had that achingly typical infanticide story: an unwed youth down the servants’ quarters desperately concealing the pregnancy until her coworkers sniffed her out, barged into the room where she had locked herself up to surreptitiously give birth, and discovered the newborn, “cutt open, deep sunk in the Feathers with the Child’s head nearly divided from the Body” by the efficient hand of a young under-cook who had often used that same pen-knife to slaughter chickens.

“I determined, therefore, to kill it, poor thing!” she would later confess of the (unnamed) father’s refusing her any aid. “Out of the way, being perfectly sure that I could not provide for it myself.”

That was in September of 1804. She would remain imprisoned until she could be tried at the Radnorshire assizes the following April.

Morgan expected lenient treatment — more on that in a moment — and must have been shocked to have the death sentence pronounced on April 11, with no more than two days to prepare herself for the ordeal. She was reportedly in a state of near-collapse when hanged at Gallows Lane.


Mary Morgan’s grave marker in St. Andrew’s parish church. A much longer and more sanctimonious stone, erected by a friend of the judge, also stands in the same cemetery.

We have seen elsewhere in these pages that executing women for infanticide was becoming distinctly uncomfortable for Europeans at this period, and Great Britain was no exception.

The most recent executions for infanticide at this point in London appears to be those of Jane Cornforth in 1774 and Sarah Reynolds in 1775. According to Anne-Marie Kilday’s A History of Infanticide in Britain, c. 1600 to the Present, hanging Welsh infanticides was practically ancient history at this point: the last such execution ordered by the Court of Great Sessions in Wales had been way back in 1739 — and the court would not order another one before its 1830 abolition.

During those many decades, close to 200 infanticide cases came to its bar. Hardly any of the accused women were even convicted, never mind condemned.* All the more surprising, then, that the one and only prisoner to merit a death sentence was a 17-year-old. Why did Mary Morgan hang when other Welsh infanticides walked?

The (presumably unobtainable) answer has occasioned a good deal of modern-day speculation.

One possible reason was a cruel judgment on Mary’s unbecoming nonchalance in the court. The presiding judge, George Hardinge,** wrote in private correspondence to the Bishop of St. Asaph that young Miss Morgan “took it for granted that she would be acquitted; had ordered gay apparel to attest the event of her deliverance; and supposed the young gentleman (who I well knew) would save her by a letter to me.” Judges like to see a little cowering.

The young gentleman Hardinge alludes to is another person of interest with respect to Mary Morgan’s surprising fate: Walter Wilkins, Jr. — the heir in the household where Mary served. This man seduced Mary but was not — so said both Mary and Walter — the father of the unfortunate child. In an egregious conflict of interest, Wilkins served on the grand jury that found his lover guilty. Was he playing a double game, posing as a potential intercessor even while keen to eliminate the evidence of his misdeeds?

Kilday suspects that in the end it was nothing but the calculated caprice of Judge Hardinge — who, although he often acquitted accused infanticides, was also alarmed by the prevalence of the practice and wanted to stake out at least one deterrent instance of truly exemplary punishment. As he said in his sentencing address to Mary Morgan, “many other girls (thoughtless and light as you have been) would have been encouraged by your escape to commit your crime, with hopes of impunity; the merciful turn of your example will save them.”

Hardinge himself might not have been fully at home with this rationale. He’s reported to have visited the grave of his “thoughtless and light” defendant several times, even composing a verse “On Seeing the Tomb of Mary Morgan”:

Flow the tear that Pity loves,
Upon Mary’s hapless fate:
It’s a tear that God approves;
He can strike, but cannot hate.
Read in time, oh beauteous Maid!
Shun the Lover’s poisoning art!
Mary was by Love betray’d,
And a viper stung the heart.
Love the constant and the good!
Wed the Husband of your choice,
Blest is then your Children’s food,
Sweet the little Cherub’s voice.
Had Religion glanc’d its beam
On the Mourner’s frantic bed,
Mute had been the tablet’s theme,
Nor would Mary’s child have bled.
She for an example fell,
But is Man from censure free?
Thine Seducer, is the knell,
It’s a Messenger to thee.

* Kilday makes it 149 indictments from 1730 to 1804, with seven convictions and two executions — Jane Humphries in 1734 and Elinor Hadley in 1739; and, after Mary Morgan, another 46 indictments up until 1830 without a single conviction.

** Look for Judge Hardinge in Lord Byron’s Don Juan:

There was the waggish Welsh Judge, Jefferies Hardsman,
In his grave office so completely skill’d,
That when a culprit came for condemnation,
He had his judge’s joke for consolation.

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