Married, widowed, condemned, a mother & executed by age 19
Summer Strevens examines the tragic case of Mary Channing: and one of the most gruesome episodes in the history of Dorset jurisprudence
Published in December ’17
The execution of Martha Brown – the last woman to be publicly hanged in Dorset – in front of an estimated crowd of 4000 onlookers, made such an impression on the then architecture apprentice Thomas Hardy that seven decades later, he vividly recalled the macabre scene: ‘…what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back.’
Another wife convicted of mariticide, Catherine Hayes, is ‘extended the clemency of strangulation’ as the flames engulf her
Yet the tragic end to Martha Brown’s life on that drizzly August morning in 1856, on the gallows erected over the gateway of the new entrance leading to Dorset County Gaol was not the only dark inspiration Hardy drew from local state-sponsored killing. Details of Mary Channing’s execution, the last woman to be strangled and burned at the stake in Dorset, not only appeared in The Mayor of Casterbridge, but her story was also the inspiration for his poem The Mock Wife.
The heavily attended public burning of the unfortunate 19-year-old Mary Channing took place in 1706, following her conviction for the murder of her husband. She had allegedly poisoned Thomas Channing with mercury, a little over thirteen weeks after the unsatisfactory marriage into which she had been cajoled by her parents.
When brought before the justices, she had the opportunity to defend herself and, according to the presiding judge, apparently did so very capably. She stood little chance against the two barristers and many prosecution witnesses, whose testimony was decidedly coloured by the widely acknowledged tarnish to Mary’s character; the jury took only half an hour to find her guilty. Yet on pronouncement of the death sentence, Mary ‘pleaded her belly’ which meant the postponement of her execution until after she had given birth to her child in gaol, the recourse of many condemned women, understandably desperate to delay the inevitable.
The 52-page booklet, Serious admonition to Youth… is made up of five letters, clearly written by a resident of Dorchester, given the details discussed. Given the lengthy sermons the author has included, one can also assume he was a clergyman.
After the birth of her son, whose name was intentionally omitted from the contemporary records in order to provide him with a degree of anonymity in view of his blackened parentage, though Mary was seriously debilitated after the rigours of a prison delivery. Childbirth was a risky enough business without the added complications of the prevalent conditions of filth which existed in prisons at the time. Nonetheless, her sentence was reinstated and the execution of this weakened and emaciated young woman was made into something of a county fair.
Such a public execution was a tasteless yet grim reality of 18th-century life and one that attracted 10,000 spectators, who gathered to view Mary’s barbaric ordeal upon the floor of Dorchester’s ancient Roman Amphitheatre, Maumbury Rings.
On 24 April 1705, Thomas Channing’s funeral took place in his home village of Maiden Newton. Here is the village’s Old White Horse Inn, which was demolished in 1898, much to the disgust of former architect Thomas Hardy
Doubtless, the notoriety of the condemned prisoner accounted for the large draw. The ample spectator capacity and the arrangement of this former gladiatorial venue certainly afforded the throng a good view, though the baying masses assembled that afternoon were to be kept waiting for the main event – two prior hangings had taken place at noon – as, incredible as it may seem, Mary’s execution was delayed until 5 o’clock while the under-sheriff finished
his tea.
In accordance with the death penalty handed down to those found guilty on a count of ‘petty treason’ and conferred on wives convicted of the murder of their husbands, while the law allowed that Mary be strangled to death by the noose before the faggots which had been piled up around her were lit, there is evidence to suggest that she was in fact still alive when consigned to the flames. To quote from Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge: ‘not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast
after that’.
The last will and testament of Thomas Channing
Reflecting Hardy’s interest in local history and folklore, while the fate of Mary Channing was the basis for The Mock Wife, the ballad is in fact constructed around the legend that tells the story of what was supposedly done to satisfy the dying wish of the husband whom Mary had supposedly poisoned, the crux of the poem being that Channing died happy in the belief that his wife, of whom he harboured no suspicion, had kissed him before his death.
While Mary’s end is only touched upon in the poem, Hardy seems to have been held by an enduring fascination with her story, recording some of the grislier details of his research about Mary’s execution in his personal notebooks.
There were those however who had doubts as to Mary’s guilt and it would appear that Hardy was of their number. He was not convinced that she had been given a fair and impartial trial, tainted by the detrimental aspersions universally cast upon her character, nor that the evidence brought against her was anything more than circumstantial, an uncertainty expressed in the final stanza of The Mock Wife, the thoughts of some of the anonymous witnesses to her execution obviously reflecting Hardy’s own feelings.
A portrait of the judge who pronounced the sentence of death on Mary Channing at Dorchester: the Honourable Robert Price
The sentencing and execution of Mary Channing also brings into focus the prevalent societal impact of the subordination of women in the 18th century; specifically, the prejudicial view taken of female felons by the judiciary, where even modes of execution personified the inequality of the sexes, as starkly demonstrated by the kind of death penalty reserved for females found guilty of ‘petty treason’.
Any woman who killed her husband was thought to have broken the ‘natural hierarchy’, effectively striking at the very principles of the then perceived social order; as such, a wife was not only guilty of murder but additionally of ‘petty treason’, which carried the more severe penalty at the stake.
While the capital punishment for husbands found guilty of murdering their wives (uxoricide) was hanging from the gallows, wives found guilty of mariticide (killing their husbands) were executed by strangulation and their bodies burned at
the stake.
While the law did extend the clemency of strangulation before the fires were lit, the horrific ‘live’ burning of Mary Channing was not an isolated example of where this was not the case.
The poignancy of The Mock Wife notwithstanding, the only written account dedicated solely to Mary Channing was that published in the year of her execution, a 52-page booklet compiled from five letters written at the publisher’s behest. The few, though slightly differing, brief accounts appearing in print afterwards all stem from this 1706 publication.
Certainly, the volubly titled Serious Admonitions to Youth, In a short Account of the Life, Trial, Condemnation and Execution. Of Mrs. Mary Channing. Who, For Poisoning her Husband, was Burnt at Dorchester in the County of Dorset On Thursday, March the 21st 1706 With Practical Reflections, was in much the same vein as those sanctimonious yet sensationalised accounts appearing in various compendiums such as the hugely popular Newgate Calendar.
Supposedly a moralising publication, nevertheless the Calendar gave salacious and vivid accounts of the exploits of infamous criminals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it was remarked that if an individual owned only two books, while naturally one would be the Bible, the other was the Newgate Calendar.
While more than 300 years have passed since the disturbing end to her life, Mary’s fate still holds a macabre fascination, as it did for Hardy. He certainly regarded the case against her as ‘not proven’, given the evidence on which she was convicted, Hardy’s presumption grounded on his own judicial experience; in 1883 he accepted a nomination to sit as a Justice of the Peace and sat in court at least 38 times as a magistrate.
Mary Channing has received scant literary attention, though to a degree supposition has necessarily played a large part, given the restrictions of a lack of unbiased contemporary source material.
If the colourful accounts of her life are to be believed, she was certainly of a recalcitrant inclination, what we might term today as a ‘tearaway teenager’ or ‘wild child’, and she certainly provided much for the gossips of Dorchester to capitalise on. The town was not at the time a forgiving society with regards to the transgressions of one 19-year-old girl, whose guilt to this day remains questionable.
Whether or not she was indeed one of those ‘truly judged, or false, of doing to death their men’, Mary Channing has been assured a kind of grim celebrity. To quote Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: ‘Well-behaved women seldom make history’.
This article is abridged from Burned at the Stake: The Life and Death of Mary Channing by Summer Strevens, which will be published later this month by Pen & Sword, at £12.99, ISBN 978-1473898721.
For further information, visit www.pen-and-sword.co.uk or call 01226 734222.
