Tag Archives: adultery

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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2010: Shahla Jahed, the footballer’s lover

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At 5:00 a.m. this date last year, Shahla Jahed was hanged at Iran’s Evin prison for murdering the wife of Iranian footballer Nasser Mohammadkhani.

An international human rights cause celebre from the time of her 2004 conviction in a sordid televised trial, Jahed was also Mohammadkhani’s wife under a “temporary marriage” arrangement that was secret from his “real” wife Laleh Saharkhizan. So you might say, his mistress.

Both these women’s last day of liberty was the one in 2002 that Saharkhizan turned up knifed to death while Mohammadkhani was in Europe on soccer business. Jahed was arrested immediately, beginning a “taboo-breaking” legal odyssey.

After months of refusing to talk, she confessed to the murder in prison, even re-enacting the crime.

But by the time of her trial — in which an emotional, combative Jahed conducted her own defense — she very plausibly claimed that the confession had been extracted by torture. Here’s a bit of it, from the documentary Red Card (banned in Iran) that can be enjoyed in full on YouTube:

While Jahed herself made for can’t-look-away TV, the appearance of a onetime champion athlete in a feet-of-clay turn has led this affair to be compared to the O.J. Simpson murder case.

Like the Juice, Mohammadkhani was temporarily in some danger of death penalty charges himself; he spent several months in prison. Ultimately, he avoided jeopardy to his neck as a potential accessory or instigator by Jahed’s repudiated I-did-it-myself confession — possibly another reason why Jahed confessed in the first place — but the former striker did endure 74 lashes for the revelation that he and his temporary wife enjoyed chilling out with opium. Strictly verboten in Iran, of course.

And Mohammadkhani’s brush with the law scarred his honor even more than his backside. Beyond the possibility that she took the heat for him, the celebrity athlete potentially in a position to use his pull to save a woman’s life clammed up as her case progressed and deferred to his late wife’s family’s decision whether or not to give Jahed mercy. Reportedly, Mohammadkhani even attended the hanging — where Jahed again sobbed and begged for mercy until one of Saharkhizan’s relatives personally kicked the chair out from under Jahed’s feet.

The case itself had an unusually long lifespan in the judiciary; Jahed had been imprisoned well over eight years by the time she died. In 2008, the gears were even stopped by Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi, a figure known in Iran for his support of de-escalating capital punishment generally.

Shahroudi’s ordering a new investigation provided fodder for critics like Amnesty International who considered the trial unfair.

Iranian journalist Fereshteh Ghazi, who as a political prisoner in 2004 briefly shared a cell with our principal, made an even stronger critique.

Even if Shahla had committed the crime, which she didn’t, Shahla and the murdered wife are both victims of a male-dominated society, a system that gives all the rights to men. Shahla, Laleh [the murdered wife], and all other women like them are all victims of flaws in the Iranian judicial system and Iran’s unequal judicial system. Even the person who pulled away the chair today in her execution is a victim of the system.

Apropos of the women-in-the-judicial-system theme, Jahed’s case and even her execution were to some extent overshadowed by the simultaneous headline-grabbing matter of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Azeri woman who was at the time fighting a repugnant sentence of stoning for adultery. By December 2010, Iran had backed off the stoning bit without quite agreeing that Ashtiani wouldn’t be executed in some other way; in January 2011, it remitted Astiani’s death sentence altogether.

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1330: Roger Mortimer, usurper

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The prince I rule, the queen do I command,
And with a lowly congé to the ground
The proudest lords salute me as I pass;
I seal, I cancel, I do what I will.
Fear’d am I more than lov’d;—let me be fear’d,
And, when I frown, make all the court look pale.

-Roger Mortimer in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II

On this date in 1330, Roger Mortimer’s three-year run as de facto ruler of England ended with a rope at Tyburn.

Mortimer was a key figure in the Despenser War — a revolt of nobles against King Edward II and the king’s hated-by-nobles right hand Hugh Despenser.

That war failed and landed Mortimer in the Tower. Then, things really got interesting.

Mortimer escaped his cell in 1323 and fled to France. There he took up with King Edward’s own wife, Queen Isabella, when the latter came to court on some state business.

This was, needless to say, quite a scandalous arrangement — but hey, Isabella had seen royal cuckolding right in her own family before.

So the adulterous lovebirds settled in to canoodle and set about planning some serious homewrecking.

Both Isabella and Mortimer are by every appearance among the most outstanding personalities of their day, and they had ambition to match their considerable personal gifts.

In the autumn of 1326, they invaded England and won a swift victory as those disaffected nobles from the recent wars declared for the usurpers. This time, Hugh Despenser was put to death.

Edward didn’t fare that much better. By the next January, he had been forced to abdicate in favor of his 14-year-old son, which in reality meant ceding power to his ex and her lover. And you thought your divorce settlement was bad.

In the long tradition of rival heads of state being disposed of, Edward II was, well, disposed of: strangled in captivity later that same year (allegedly! there is some doubt as to whether he really died in 1327), and given a state funeral that put Roger Mortimer into a bogus public display of mourning

(Mortimer’s kinsman and historical-fiction-biographer Ian Mortimer thinks Edward actually survived, which is neither here nor there as pertains the fate of Mortimer.)

Once he got to the top of the heap, Mortimer too had rocky aristocratic relationships. He irked the lords of the realm with his tendency to behead them. He lost the First War of Scottish Independence. Oh, and he was a regicide. All this frayed his popularity. (This just in: governance is hard.)

More than that, since he and Isabella ruled in the minority of the titular king, Edward III, they were rearing a wolf to their own destruction — a wolf with a built-in personal grudge about his father’s overthrow and murder. All young Edward needed was a plan to disencumber his fangs.

As is so often the case, the most direct solution proved to be the best. In one of the more dramatic family moments in the English royal annals, Edward joined his close friend and a small band of trusted armed men, and burst in on Mortimer at Nottingham Castle, arresting him while his mother plaintively implored Edward to “have pity on gentle Mortimer.”

But Mortimer got as much mercy as he’d given the late Edward II. A mere six weeks removed from mastery of England, Mortimer was presented bound and gagged for the formality of a condemnation by Parliament on grounds of assuming royal authority. Then he was hustled off to Tyburn dressed pointedly in the same black tunic he had once worn to mourn Edward II. It was the first documented case of a nobleman being hanged at that grim destination.

First Lord. My lord, here is the head of Mortimer.
K. Edw. Third. Go fetch my father’s hearse, where it shall lie;
And bring my funeral robes.
Accursed head,
Could I have rul’d thee then, as I do now,
Thou hadst not hatch’d this monstrous treachery!

-Marlowe’s Edward II

The French could say the same thing of Edward.

We’ve previously recommended Lady Despenser’s Scribery for its coverage of this period; true to form, it has a detailed series on Roger Mortimer: 1, 2, 3, 4

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2010: Two Afghan adulterers stoned

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On this date last year, the Taliban carried out the public stoning of an adulterous couple who had attempted to elope in northern Afghanistan.

“Even family members were involved,” the New York Times reported, “both in the stoning and in tricking the couple into returning after they had fled.”

as a Taliban mullah prepared to read the judgment of a religious court, the lovers, a 25-year-old man named Khayyam and a 19-year-old woman named Siddiqa, defiantly confessed in public to their relationship. “They said, ‘We love each other no matter what happens,'” [local farmer Nadir] Khan said.

The executions were the latest in a series of cases where the Taliban have imposed their harsh version of Shariah law for social crimes, reminiscent of their behavior during their decade of ruling the country. In recent years, Taliban officials have sought to play down their bloody punishments of the past, as they concentrated on building up popular support.

“We see it as a sign of a new confidence on the part of the Taliban in the application of their rules, like they did in the ’90s,” said Nader Nadery, a senior commissioner on the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. “We do see it as a trend. They’re showing more strength in recent months, not just in attacks, but including their own way of implementing laws, arbitrary and extrajudicial killings.”

Apparent cell phone video of the execution later surfaced.

Warning: Mature Content. It’s two filmed stonings, after all.

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1541: Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham, the Queen’s lovers

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Indictment:

That Katharine, queen of England, formerly called Kath. Howerd, late of Lambyth, Surr., one of the daughters of lord Edmund Howard, before the marriage between the King and her, led an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous, and vicious life, like a common harlot, with divers persons, as with Francis Derham of Lambeth and Hen. Manak [Manox] of Streteham, Surr., 20 and 24 May 32 Hen. VIII., and at other times, maintaining however the outward appearance of chastity and honesty. That she led the King by word and gesture to love her and (he believing her to be pure and chaste and free from other matrimonial yoke) arrogantly coupled herself with him in marriage. And the said Queen and Francis, being charged by divers of the King’s Council with their vicious life, could not deny it, but excused themselves by alleging that they were contracted to each other before the marriage with the King;* which contract at the time of the marriage they falsely and traitorously concealed** from the King, to the peril of the King and of his children to be begotten by her and the damage of the whole realm. And after the marriage, the said Queen and Francis, intending to renew their vicious life, 25 Aug. 33 Hen. VIII., at Pomfret, and at other times and places, practised that the said Francis should be retained in the Queen’s service; and the Queen, at Pomfret, 27 Aug. 33 Hen. VIII., did so retain the said Francis, and had him in notable favour above others, and, in her secret chamber and other suspect places, spoke with him and committed secret affairs to him both by word and writing, and for the fulfilling of their wicked and traitorous purpose, gave him divers gifts and sums of money on the 27 Aug. and at other times.

Also the said Queen, not satisfied with her vicious life aforesaid, on the 29 Aug. 33 Hen. VIII., at Pomfret, and at other times and places before and after, with Thos. Culpeper,† late of London, one of the gentlemen of the King’s privy chamber, falsely and traitorously held illicit meeting and conference to incite the said Culpeper to have carnal intercourse with her; and insinuated to him that she loved him above the King and all others. Similarly the said Culpeper incited the Queen. And the better and more secretly to pursue their carnal life they retained Jane lady Rochford, late wife of Sir Geo. Boleyn late lord Rochford, as a go-between to contrive meetings in the Queen’s stole chamber and other suspect places; and so the said Jane falsely and traitorously aided and abetted them.

On this date in 1541, Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham paid the penalty for their indiscretions; the former queen would see her lovers’ severed heads mounted on pikestaffs on London Bridge as she was rowed to the Tower.

The onetime court favorite Culpeper was beheaded for cuckolding the royal person, and that’s no more than one would expect. But the political pull-less Dereham — who had slept with (and possibly “pre-contracted” to wed) the willing young Kate before she meant anything to the king — enjoyed the full measure of the traitor’s torture: hanged, emasculated, eviscerated, and dismembered, all of it basically for having failed to anticipate that his little conquest would one day grow up to turn the monarch’s head.

What a time to be alive.

* Catherine Howard’s confessional letter to Henry VIII … desperately attempting to limit her indiscretions to the time before her marriage:

I, your Grace’s most sorrowful subject and most vile wretch in the world, not worthy to make any recommendation unto your most excellent Majesty, do only make my most humble submission and confession of my faults. And where no cause of mercy is given on my part, yet of your most accustomed mercy extended unto all other men undeserverd, most humbly on my hands and knees do desire one particle thereof to be extended unto me, although of all other creatures I am most unworthy either to be called your wife or subject.

My sorrow I can by no writing express, nevertheless I trust your most benign nature will have some respect unto my youth, my ignorance, my frailness, my humble confession of my faults, and plain declaration of the same, referring me wholly unto Your Grace’s pity and mercy. First, at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox, being but a young girl, I suffered him a sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body which neither became me with honesty to permit, nor him to require. Also, Francis Derehem by many persuasions procured me to his vicious purpose, and obtained first to lie upon my bed with his doublet and hose, and after within the bed, and finally he lay with me naked, and used me in such sort as a man doth his wife, many and sundry times, and our company ended almost a year before the King’s Magesty was married to my Lady Anne of Cleves and continued not past one quarter of a year, or a little above.

Now the whole truth being declared unto Your Majesty, I most humbly beseech you to consider the subtle persuasions of young men and the ignorance and frailness of young women. I was so desirous to be taken unto your Grace’s favor, and so blinded by with the desire of worldly glory that I could not, nor had grace to consider how great a fault it was to conceal my former faults from your Majesty, considering that I intended ever during my life to be faithful and true unto your Majesty ever after. Nevertheless, the sorrow of mine offenses was ever before mine eyes, considering the infinite goodness of your Majesty toward me from time to time ever increasing and not diminishing. Now, I refer the judgment of my offenses with my life and death wholly unto your most benign and merciful Grace, to be considered by no justice of your Majesty’s laws but only by your infinite goodness, pity, compassion and mercy, without which I acknowledge myself worthy of the most extreme punishment.

** Early the next year, parliament declared, “to avoid doubts in future” — read: “retroactively legislated” — that “an unchaste woman marrying the King shall be guilty of high treason.” This also made anyone who knew about said unchastity guilty of (at least) misprision of treason for failing to report it.

† Surviving letter from Howard to Culpeper:

Master Culpeper,

I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send me word how that you do. It was showed me that you was sick, the which thing troubled me very much till such time that I hear from you praying you to send me word how that you do, for I never longed so much for a thing as I do to see you and to speak with you, the which I trust shall be shortly now. That which doth comfortly me very much when I think of it, and when I think again that you shall depart from me again it makes my heart die to think what fortune I have that I cannot be always in your company. It my trust is always in you that you will be as you have promised me, and in that hope I trust upon still, praying you that you will come when my Lady Rochford is here for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment, thanking you for that you have promised me to be so good unto that poor fellow my man which is one of the griefs that I do feel to depart from him for then I do know no one that I dare trust to send to you, and therefore I pray you take him to be with you that I may sometime hear from you one thing. I pray you to give me a horse for my man for I had much ado to get one and therefore I pray send me one by him and in so doing I am as I said afor, and thus I take my leave of you, trusting to see you shortly again and I would you was with me now that you might see what pain I take in writing to you.

Yours as long as life endures,
Katheryn.

One thing I had forgotten and that is to instruct my man to tarry here with me still for he says whatsomever you bid him he will do it.

Though this letter is far from conclusively inculpatory, Culpeper confessed that he “intended and meant to do ill with the queen and that in like wise the queen so minded to do with him.”

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1986: The Stoning of Soraya M

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It was on this date, according to French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s The Stoning of Soraya M, that 35-year-old mother Soraya Manutchehri was stoned to death in an Iranian village.


In a scene from The Stoning of Soraya M, the titular character awaits her titular fate.

In Sahebjam’s telling, a journalistic trip to the Islamic Republic chances upon a mountain village with a terrible secret.

The story he uncovers features one Ghorban-Ali, nasty husband par excellence who grows tired of the arranged wife he’s spent 22 years beating and (falsely) accuses her of adultery in order to put her out of the way so that he can remarry a younger bride.

With the complicity of the local mullah, the impolitic silence of the accused, and the structural misogyny of the law, Soraya Manutchehri quickly finds herself condemned to death on this date, and stoned within hours — Soraya’s own father casting the first stones.

This powerful story, officially denied by Tehran, has just been released in cinematic form. The Stoning of Soraya M. (movie homepage) features an unsubtle dramatic tableau, a stomach-churning 20-minute stoning sequence, and Iranian-American actress Shohreh Aghdashloo as Soraya’s aunt Zahra Kahnum, fearlessly giving the foreign journalist this explosive story

As it happened, this cinematic condemnation of the reduced status of women in the Ayatollah’s Iran made its American debut the same week that cell phone footage of Neda Agha-Soltan, bleeding to death after being shot dead during protests against Iran’s recent election results, became an Internet sensation.

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1997: Zoleykhah Kadkhoda survives stoning

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On this date in 1997, Zoleykhah Kadkhoda was tried, condemned, and immediately stoned in the West Azerbaijan (Iran) city of Bukan.

Less commonly used but still to this day among the execution methods in Iran, stoning involves burying the victim in a hole — a man to his waist, a woman to her chest — and pelting him or her with rocks until dead. Plainly a horrible way to go, stoning is typically associated with adultery, which was Kadkhoda’s crime.

Kadkhoda made international headlines by surviving her attempted execution, either (accounts differ) because of popular intervention in the heavily Kurdish town, or by reviving at the morgue after being taken for dead.

International pressure caused the death sentence to be lifted; Kadkhoda was released later in that year.

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1542: Kathryn Howard, the rose without a thorn

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(Thanks to Lara Eakins of the TudorHistory.org Blog for the guest post. -ed.)

On this date in 1542, Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Kathryn Howard, was beheaded in the Tower of London for high treason. She was the second of Henry’s queens to face this fate, the other being Kathryn’s first cousin Anne Boleyn.

This Hans Holbein miniature is generally thought to be Kathryn Howard, though the identification is uncertain. From the TudorHistory.org blog Kathryn Howard gallery.

Kathryn Howard* was born sometime between 1518 and 1524 to Lord Edmund Howard (a younger brother of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk) and his wife Joyce Culpepper. Joyce died while Kathryn was young and her father took a post in Calais, leaving Kathryn in the charge of her step-grandmother, Agnes Tilney the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. The Duchess oversaw Kathryn’s education, but apparently didn’t keep as close an eye on other aspects of the girl’s life.

Kathryn’s first physical relationship that we know of occurred in around 1536 with her music teacher Henry Manox. In her later confession she told of “the fair and flattering persuasions of Mannock, being but a young girl, suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body…”. In late 1538, Kathryn began a sexual relationship with Francis Dereham, which was to become part of her downfall as Queen.

The next year, 1539, Kathryn took a position at court, becoming a maid of honor for Henry’s soon-to-be fourth Queen, Anne of Cleves. The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk later recalled that Henry first took notice of Kathryn at Greenwich in December of 1539 during the preparations for Anne’s arrival. Henry was famously disappointed by his new foreign bride and by early July 1540 the marriage was annulled. During the short marriage to Anne of Cleves, Henry had already begun to send gifts to Kathryn and took her as his fifth Queen on July 28th at Oatlands Palace.

Henry was 49 years old and Kathryn was no older than 22 (and more likely around 19). For all that can be said against this match, the vivacious young girl brought back some of Henry’s zest for life. The King lavished gifts on his young wife and called her his ‘rose without a thorn’ and the ‘very jewel of womanhood’.

Thomas Culpepper, a distant relation of Kathryn’s through her mother, sought favor from the Queen in early 1541 which was probably when their secret meetings began. Their rendezvous were aided by Kathryn’s lady of the privy chamber, Jane Boleyn, sister-in-law to the late Queen Anne Boleyn through Jane’s marriage to Anne’s brother George.** Also at this time, Francis Dereham returned to England from Ireland and gained a position in Kathryn’s household, possibly arranged to keep his silence about their earlier relationship.

During the summer of 1541, Henry and his young queen went on progress to the north of England and returned to Hampton Court on October 29. Just a few days later everything would begin to unravel. On November 2, Archbishop Cranmer sent a letter to the King telling him of his wife’s previous lovers. Henry seemed reluctant to believe the charges at first, but upon the questioning of Dereham and Manox –- who confirmed the allegations –- Henry left Kathryn at Hampton Court and returned to London. He never saw her again.

During the interrogations of the men, Francis Dereham said that Thomas Culpepper had replaced him in the Queen’s affections. Kathryn was presented with these new allegations and admitted to secret meetings with Culpepper (as well as the relationships with Manox and Dereham before her marriage), but denied that a sexual relationship had existed between them. Culpepper was imprisoned in the Tower of London and Kathryn was moved to the former abbey at Syon and deprived of her queenship.

Dereham and Culpepper were found guilty of treason on December 1 and were executed on December 10. Dereham was hanged, disemboweled, beheaded and quartered at Tyburn. Culpepper fared better, owing to his status, and was only beheaded. The former queen and her lady Jane Boleyn never faced a trial for their actions but instead had acts of attainder passed against them. On February 10, 1542, the ladies entered the Tower of London to await their executions.

Kathryn was told on the 12th that her execution would be the next morning and according to Imperial Ambassador Chapuys, she rehearsed the execution for several hours and even requested that the block be brought to her so she would know how to place her head. A merchant named Ottwell Johnson was an eyewitness to the execution on the morning of the 13th and wrote in a letter to his brother that Kathryn and Jane both “made the most godly and Christian end” and that Kathryn, in her scaffold speech, said that her punishment was worthy and just. (The letter is among period correspondence printed in this public-domain book.)

Kathryn’s head was struck from her body with one stoke of the axe, as was Jane’s, a merciful outcome compared to other ladies who shared their fate, such as Margaret Pole and Mary Queen of Scots. Kathryn and Jane were both quickly buried in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower precincts, joining Henry’s other beheaded queen, Anne Boleyn and Jane’s husband, George.

[flv:https://www.executedtoday.com/video/Lynne_Frederick_as_Katherine_Howard.flv 440 330]

* Or Catherine Howard, or Katherine Howard, or Katheryn Howard. Spelling at the time, even of proper names, was fluid.

** Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, is popularly supposed to have supplied the explosive incest allegation against her husband, George Boleyn, and his sister Anne Boleyn. Being subsequently hoisted on her own petard in the game of courtly purging, she tends to get short shrift in the sympathy department — though the fact is that we really don’t know much about her.

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1928: Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray

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On this date in 1928, a suburban femme fatale and the corset salesman who had murdered her husband were electrocuted at Sing Sing prison.

“A cheap crime involving cheap people,” one writer called it.

“Ruthless Ruth,” as the press inevitably called her, was on the wrong side of 30 and married to a wet blanket on the wrong side of 40 from whom she couldn’t even get away during the day because they worked for the same boating magazine.

The banal hell of the bourgeoisie.

Ruth had a banal solution: commence affair with handsome, limp-willed corset salesman (also married) from New Jersey.

Given a large enough metropolis with a large enough pool of adulterous data points, it must be statistically inexorable that a certain proportion will resolve the love triangle by throttling the cuckold with a wire.

But only that remorseless calculator in the sky can compute why these two, of all those thousands, were the ones not to run off together, or let the affair fizzle, or just continue to rendezvous indefinitely into the future. They certainly weren’t constitutionally cut out for crime; they set up the room in a poor simulacrum of a robbery, and told of a couple of unknown Italians* who’d broke in and done poor Albert Snyder to death.

For their poor judgment and for the speedy collapse of their crummy alibi, journalism owes them a debt of gratitude.

The execution of a woman was quite sensational; Ruth Snyder was to be the first electrocuted since 1899.

For the occasion, The New York Daily News hired a Chicago Tribune journalist to witness the execution … and at the moment the current struck, Tom Howard hoisted his pant leg and secretly snapped with a one-use camera one of the most indelible images the death chamber offered the 20th century, to be splashed in a few hours’ time on the Daily News‘ cover under the headline

DEAD!

The Snyder-Gray adulterous melodrama and its violent conclusion inspired novelist James Cain‘s Double Indemnity, and the noir film of the same title with Barbara Stanwyck as the black widow at the center of the web.

It also inspired the state of New York to begin searching official witnesses to its electrocutions.

* Blame-the-Italians here is a Roaring Twenties Queens version of fingering the black man. The murder was committed in May 1927, just as the Sacco and Vanzetti case was approaching its climax.

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1634: Anna Tait, “trublit in conscience”

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(Thanks to historian and witchcraft expert Louise Yeoman for this guest post on an obscure and once-forgotten “witch” whose human tragedy all but leaps off the page. This post was originally an article prepared for the National Library’s now-defunct journal Quatro. Her work has appeared in many more high-falutin’ places than this here blog, and she is a co-creator of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.)

On the trail of Anna

If you look in Christina Larner’s Sourcebook of Scottish Witchcraft, you won’t find Anna Tait. That’s because she was one of many accused witches whose names were unknown to the compilers of the sourcebook. The details of Anna and almost a hundred others were recorded in a National Library of Scotland Advocates manuscript, which was overlooked many years ago when the huge edition of Scotland’s Privy Council records was in preparation. In the closing years of the last century, the editors of the Privy Council volumes carefully combed the holdings of the National Archives of Scotland for their material. What they didn’t realise was that a single volume of the Register of Commissions for the years 1630-42 had escaped them. In it were hundreds of records of Privy Council commissions to try criminal trials.

In it was Anna Tait.

I first came across Anna and Adv. Ms. 31.3.10 when my friend and fellow researcher Dr Michael Wasser of McGill University, Montreal showed it to me in the Library’s North Reading Room. Michael was (and still is) a historian of crimes of violence in 16th-17th century Scotland, and he was instantly aware of the significance of the manuscript. Almost the first thing he pointed out to me in it was a remarkable story of family tragedy. Out of hundreds of records, this one tale of domestic misery, horror and a woman’s life stood out. It stood out to the clerk who wrote the volume too. A commission is normally a bare record of who is accused of what crime and who is to try them. But the commission to try Anna contained harrowing detail. Almost straight away I agreed to transcribe her commission and to edit it for Scottish History Society. Why was it so remarkable?

Anna Tait ‘alias ‘Hononni’, was in the Scots of the original ‘thrie several times deprehendit putting violent hands to herself at her awne hous,’ in Haddington in 1634. In other words, she was caught trying to kill herself.

In 17th century terms suicide was one of the most heinous acts one could commit. It was like witchcraft, considered to be a particularly odious crime against God’s law and it was punishable by forfeiture of the entire goods of the victim and by a dishonourable burial in unconsecrated ground. What drove Anna to such terrible lengths?

The rest of the commission made the reasons clear. When Anna was apprehended for attempted suicide, she told a terrible tale of adultery, poisoning, domestic murder, unwanted pregnancy, botched home-abortion and death. Here is this part of the commission slightly adapted and with the spelling modernised.

She was for that cause, upon the 18th of December, taken and committed to ward within the tolbooth of the said burgh where being demanded and examined why she put hands to herself, she answered that the intolerable trouble of her mind, which she conceived for the murder of her first husband called John Coltart, nolt driver [cattle drover], and for the murder of her daughter, moved her thereto.

Confessing plainly that about 28 years ago, she being married to the said John, ane aged man, before the marriage she had sundry times committed fornication with William Johnston, her present husband, and that within the time of the marriage she had likewise committed adultery with him. To be quit of her first husband, she consulted with the Devil for his destruction, and that the Devil having directed her to make a drink of foxtrie leaves [foxglove leaves], she did the same, and gave it to her husband to drink who within three hours departed this life.

Concerning her daughter, she confessed that the daughter being with child, and she [Anna] having a purpose to murder the infant in the mother’s belly, at last she consulted with the Devil. He gave her direction to buy wine and to mix it with salt and give it to her daughter to drink, which she having drunken, she shortly thereafter departed this life.

So far, so sadly comprehensible, except for the inclusion of a character whose presence might seem unnecessary to modern readers — The Devil. The Commission finally proceeds ‘upon the 8th of December instant; she had carnal copulation with the Devil in her own bed, and that upon the 11th of December the Devil came to her bedside, gripped her by the hair of her head and did nip her cheek’. Suddenly a classic case of domestic murder and family tragedy is turned to that strangest of all 17th century phenomena to the modern mind: a witchcraft accusation. This was not just a case of three in a marriage, but three plus the Prince of Darkness. However, this wasn’t a strange notion to 17th century people. Where two, three or even just one person were engaged in works of wickedness, it went almost without saying that Satan was somehow present too. Anna was tried not as an adulteress or a murderer but as a witch – the commission was the licence to the magistrates of Haddington to try her, but where was her trial?

Records of such witchcraft trials held in local, rather than central, courts rarely survive. Whilst I was working on the commissions, I happened by chance to be helping someone with a totally different enquiry. Dr John McGavin was researching records of early modern Scottish drama. We discussed his research on poet and minister James Melville and Melville’s account of a dramatic performance in St Andrews. Hearing that John was soon going to be searching through the Haddington Burgh records in the National Register of Archives, I asked him if he would keep an eye out for Anna and any other witches he might happen to spot. To my delight, I soon had an e-mail from John telling me that her trial records were in the Haddington burgh court book.

Researching witchcraft cases can be an intense mixture of horror and delight for a historian. On the one hand to find unexpected light on a unique case is a matter for rejoicing. On the other hand, the details I found in the court book were even grimmer than those of her commission.

Anna had tried several times to hang herself using her own head-dress (her curch). When she was taken into custody, her suicidal behaviours became even more extreme. She attempted suicide again, both by trying to cut her own throat and then ‘when your hands were bound and your feet maid fast in the stocks, no other meanes being left to accomplish your devilishe designes, ye knocked your heid to the wall and stocks, wherby thinking to dispatch your self.’ The court book went into more detail, it claimed that Anna had sex with the Devil in the form of a black man and in the form of the wind and had made a covenant with him. Shape-shifting was a not uncommon piece of Scottish popular belief about Auld Nick, but on top of it were overlaid the sinister assumptions of European theories about demonic pact. One didn’t just meet the Devil according to the demonologists, one had sex with him, took his mark and swore one’s soul away to him. Anna was explicitly accused of all three actions.

The trial also gave more personal information about Anna to add to that from the commission. Taking both sources together we can say a little about her. She had married her first husband John Colthard, the cattle drover, 28 years ago at a place called ‘Furd Kirk’ in England in 1606. Cattle drovers went far afield in the course of their work and Anna had obviously travelled too. Interestingly enough she was accused of having made an appointment to meet the Devil at ‘Ellerslie’. The only places of this name are to be found over in the West of Scotland and not near her home in Lothian. Given 17th century spelling this may also have been the little Lanarkshire village of Elderslie, famed as the birthplace of William Wallace. Whichever it was, Anna’s world clearly stretched well beyond the confines of Haddington.

Age of marriage could be quite late in 17th century Scotland, so Anna was probably about or just under 50 years of age. Her second husband William Johnston was a miller who had lived at Winram, nearby Anna and her first husband. The proximity had assisted their illicit affair. Millers and cattle drovers could be prosperous members of an early modern community, so it is likely that Anna too had some standing in her community to keep up. She was probably very far from the stereotypical portrait of an accused witch as a poor begging woman going door to door looking for alms.

At sometime in her life Anna had acquired the alias ‘Hononni’, a Scottish variant of the English ‘Hey nonny no!’ a popular nonsense refrain in songs. It was an ironically jolly nickname for someone whose life was characterised by murder, tragedy and despair. We find the name of her beloved daughter too –- Elizabeth Johnston who died from the botched abortion. The records of this are chilling

The said Elizabeth, being as ye confessed with child (to whom, few but yourself knows and neither will ye reveal the truth of it), and apparently being loath to let it be known to whom the child belonged, she and ye sought all means to kill, to murther the child in her belly, that it might not come to light who was the father thereof, or how it was gotten, whether in adultery or incest, or what other unlawful way.

To that effect ye consulted with diverse of your confederates fra whom, ye got sundry feall [evil] counsel and by their advice, administered feall drinks to your daughter. But these not doing your turn and all other means failing you, ye went to your old maister the devil … who gave you advise to buy ane mutchkin of white wine, and mix a pint thereof with salt and minister the same unto your daughter, and it would do your turn. The which cruel and devilish counsel ye willingly obeyed and fetched the wine, mixt with the same with salt and gave it to your daughter to drink. By which she presently swelled and shortly thereafter both she and the child died.

In token wherof, you have confessed that the devil gave you as much money in true and real turners [small copper coins] as would buy the said mutchkin of wine and salt. And this deed only of all the devilish and abominable actions has most troubled you, and been the greatest cause of your desire to murder yourself.

In trying to cover up her daughter’s unwanted pregnancy, Anna ended up killing her child. Blaming herself for Elizabeth’s death, Anna no longer wanted to live. She tried repeatedly to kill herself. When it was put to her that the Devil had advised her do all this and that she had become a witch, it seems she barely bothered to defend herself. After all, even though she might have wanted to avoid the shameful death of being strangled and burned at the stake, at least it would have the virtue of ending her life. When the court asked whether she wanted anyone to speak in her defence, she answered ‘none but God in heaven’.

To modern eyes, Anna’s situation seems clear-cut. She had done some terrible things and for very understandable human reasons she wanted to die. Even in 21st century Scotland we would insist that, at the very least, Anna should go to jail for murdering her first husband and that she should be prevented from killing herself. Yet in 21st century Scotland, Anna would have been able to obtain a divorce from her first husband and her daughter would have been able to obtain an abortion (whatever you think of that). So the whole catalogue of tragedy might not have happened at all, or then again, perhaps it might. Was Anna a victim of a society which stacked the cards against women through its interpretation of the Bible or was she the sort of callous person who might have murdered a spouse despite all the advantages of a modern legal system? After all, the murders of spouses still occur. These are questions the historian can only raise and cannot answer.

Even in today’s society, however, a female criminal who had committed crimes of violence comparable to Anna’s would be unusual. To a 17th century society she was such a paragon of horror that the Devil had to be invoked to explain her conduct. In a society which stressed a woman’s subordination to her husband and saw her only rightful adult roles being those of a wife or a mother, Anna was a monster. To her community, she was not only an attempted self-murderer but also an adulteress and the unnatural murderer of her husband, daughter and unborn grandchild. By confessing to witchcraft, she had just about collected the set of the most appalling crimes a 17th century woman could commit. To be regarded with such horror in contemporary society, a woman would probably need to be accused of a string of serious offences against children or young people.

However Anna’s case also raises the question of her mental state and how issues of mental disturbance and suicidal urges were dealt with in her society. Such a suicidal defendant in a modern case might be found unfit to plead, but how did Anna’s contemporaries see her mental distress? Anna was ‘trublit in conscience’ and this points to the beliefs which probably helped to seal her fate. Despair as to whether one was part of the Calvinist ‘Elect’ or whether one was going to hell was a perfectly respectable state in Early Modern Scotland –- even to the extent of repeated suicidal impulses. This can be seen from the diaries, books, letters and sermons of radical Presbyterians and Covenanters. It was a very common phase of the Calvinist conversion experience of the 17th century. Demonic or even suicidal temptations were an almost a normal complication of the road to heaven. To despair over committing terrible sins worthy of hell-fire was not seen as being mentally unstable but as being eminently sane. Any reasonable Bible-believing person might think that way.

So Anna’s despair may have made her seem more culpable, rather than less culpable, to her interrogators whose beliefs would be that in her agony she had done utterly the wrong thing and turned in absolutely the wrong direction. She had, in their minds, turned to the Devil and not to God. Instead of despair proving to be a half-way stage for Anna on the road to conversion and eternal glory, Anna, it seemed by her confession, had failed to choose eternal life and had instead perversely chosen the ultimate dead-end: Hell. This was an offence made all the more horrible, as heaven in its Calvinist form, was no doubt being held out to her every Sabbath in their local church. Perhaps the reason it was necessary to punish the despairing so emphatically was pour encourager les autres; to make sure that when people experienced despair, they would in the Church’s eyes make the right choice: that they would resist the temptation and intensify their piety until the threat was overcome.

Faced with the reality of burning large numbers of accused witches amongst whom they found the suicidal and the mentally disturbed, later generations of Scottish Privy Councillors increasingly doubted the wisdom of this approach. In 1662 in the midst of a nation-wide witch-panic the council issued commissions under strict orders that to proceed with executing a convicted witch, it must be found that ‘At the tyme of their confessions they were of right judgement, nowayes distracted or under any earnest desyre to die’. Almost 30 years after Anna’s death, Scotland’s elite were becoming sensitive to the issue of attempted suicide by witch-confession and the mental state of the accused. It came much too late to affect Anna and because of her murder confession wouldn’t have saved her anyway, but it shows a little how things moved on even in that relatively short time frame. For Anna there could only be one ending — execution. Because she had confessed she was not burnt alive [burning alive tended to be reserved for those who died ‘impenitent’ ie. they refused to confess]. Her sentence was as follows:

It was given for doom [sentence] by the mouth of William Sinclair dempster [pronouncer of sentence] that the said Anna Tait should be taken, her hands bound behind her back and conveyed by William Allot, lockman [executioner] of Haddington to the ordinary place of execution, and there wirried [strangled] to the death at ane post and thereafter her body to be burnt in ashes, desuper act.

Note on sources

The commission for Anna’s trial is edited from Adv.Ms.31.3.10, f.102v. Her trial records may be found in National Archives of Scotland, Haddington Burgh Court Register B30/10/13, fos.24r-26v. A calendar of the witchcraft commissions in Adv. Ms 31.3.10 (including transcriptions of Anna Tait’s commission and her trial records) has been prepared by the author for Julian Goodare (ed.), Miscellany XIII, Scottish History Society, forthcoming.

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