The Execution of the Holy Maid of Kent

Journal of British Studies, 2012

Bishop, and the Anomaly of 1726 Farid Azfar O n 9 May 1726, a milkman by the name of Gabriel Laurence (sometimes spelled "Lawrence") was hanged at Tyburn after being prosecuted for committing the crime of sodomy. 1 Laurence was one of forty men arrested when the authorities raided Mother Clapp's molly house in the Holborn district of London; of these forty, three were executed, including Laurence, who was the first to be sentenced. 2 Many came forward to attest to his character, among them his father-in-law and the man who supplied him with milk. "Several others deposd," the Old Bailey noted, "that he was a very sober Man, and that they had often been in his Company when he was drunk; but never found him inclinable to such Practices. Guilty. Death." 3 He was hanged alongside two other men present that night at Mother Clapp's molly house: William Griffin and

American Journal of Legal History

This article analyses and compares the defences, verdicts and punishments of both men and women tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of their spouses or commonlaw partners from 1674 to 1790, a period that witnessed the gradual if ultimately momentous 'lawyerisation' of criminal trial. The vast majority of these cases continued, however, to resemble 'sentencing hearings', focusing less on an adversarial contest over guilt or innocence than on mitigating circumstances and the character of defendants, witnesses and victims. While an emerging eighteenth-century culture of sensibility contributed to a decriminalisation of female passion and sexuality, these trials also testify to the continuity and vitality of a discretionary regime and more resilient assumptions about gender and class. In marked contrast with the handful of sensational murder trials that generated media attention and outrage and tended to end in execution, a large proportion of these more pedestrian and representative cases of domestic homicide-particularly women accused of murdering husbands after 1740-ended in acquittal or manslaughter verdicts, especially in cases where provocation could be established. This study suggests that this relative lenience speaks less to the compassion accorded to defendants than a lack of sympathetic identification with their largely working-class victims, especially those of perceived bad character.

Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture, 23.1 (December 2019), pp. 45-61, 2019

Whilst in the Fleet in the summer of 1639 the Leveller John Lilburne made a dramatic claim: ‘I have read a great part of the Booke of Martyrs, with some Histories of the like kinde: and I will meantaine it, that such an unparaleld Act of crueltie and barborous tiranie, as have been exercised upon mee, is not to be found in them all’. Lilburne was not alone in depicting his prison suffering as far exceeding those recorded in John Foxe’s sixteenth-century martyrology 'Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Dayes' (1563), or the ‘Book of Martyrs’ as it was more commonly known at the time. When imprisoned in Oxford Castle in 1643, the Parliamentarian soldier and later General Baptist leader, Edmund Chillenden, exclaimed that his prison ordeal would ‘fill divers hundred sheets of Paper to make a second Book of Martyrs’, one that would even surpass it ‘with more sadder Stories then are to be found in Queen Maries cruelties’.This essay investigates how Nonconformist prison writers, contrary to the statements above, did inevitably and irresistibly re-do rather than out-do Foxe. By examining the Foxean cues they re-used and recycled, we can begin to see how their accounts were a complex palimpsest of conceptual, mnemonic and journalistic representations of imprisonment in early modern Britain.

The common understanding of heresy is dependent upon the assumption of a fixed and well-disseminated mainstream discourse (legislative or propagandist) aimed at soothing the paranoia of the powerful. What, however, happens when dominant ideology is itself in flux? Anne Askew's martyrdom coupled with the textual record of it in her two Examinations (1546, 1547, ed. Elaine Beilin, 1996) is illustrative of one of the many answers possible to this question. Askew was one of the earliest English female Protestant martyrs, tortured in the Tower of London and burnt at the stake for heresy in 1546. Here I want to take a closer look at the state-sanctioned illegal torture and execution of this 26-year old woman in order to tease out the workings of law and gender in the category of the heretical as it obtained in early modern England. England went through a period of ideological instability during the 1500s that is uncomfortably similar to events in our own times courtesy of a mercurial, hyper ambitious and paranoid tyrant. Henry VIII had famously broken with the Catholic church in 1534 and forced his subjects to acknowledge him as Supreme Governor of the Church of England in the Act of Supremacy (26 Henry VIII c. 1, 1534). This Act categorically claimed that common practice would not 'decline or vary from the congregation of Christ's Church in any things concerning the very articles of the Catholic faith of Christendom' (225), thereby reassuring the Catholic populace that anticlericalism did not necessarily imply dissent. Nevertheless, a prominent casualty of Henry's battle with Rome was Thomas More, who was executed for treason on charges of praemunire, i.e. the offense of introducing foreign authority in the kingdom (the pope in this case) in 1535 because he refused to acknowledge Henry's supremacy over religious matters.

Parliamentary History, 2007

British Catholic History, 2015

This essay considers the life, death, and afterlife of William Cowbridge a religious eccentric executed for heresy in 1538. It explores the significance of his religious beliefs, which became the source of a heated controversy between the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe and the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Harpsfield. The case casts light on a range of issues, including the dynamic between Protestant and Catholic controversialists, the use of the label of ‘madness’ in argument, and the value of archival documentation alongside the use of oral sources in Reformation-era polemic. It also yields insight into Thomas Cromwell’s authority over the English Church during the late 1530s, and highlights his position among Henrician evangelicals as a source of influence and aid. Finally, it offers a critique about interpretations of early modern belief and the designation of the label ‘Lollard’.

2018

The drama of martyrdom places emphasis on the moment of death, but equally important is the judicial interrogation or trial that precedes the martyr's final, living moment on earth. In the case of early modern England, the examination of the martyr was an essential forum in which the martyr could prove the validity of the cause for which he or she was dying. Subsequent martyro-logical writers well knew this, and exploited the dramatic potential of the tribunal or courtroom to convey the kind of complex theological truths unavailable in simple descriptions of stoic deaths. This essay will use the example of England to argue that martyrdom was above all constituted by a legal rhetoric, in a judicial drama that involved different claims on and visions of the law. The martyrs themselves, and the martyrologists who shaped their stories, were able to emphasise the importance of the law by continually hearkening back, throughout the proceedings, to scripture and the early church, and to ideas-of witness, testimony, and the true and false law-that were established alongside Christianity itself. By exploring the parallels between Protestant and Catholic martyrs under Mary I and Elizabeth I, and their forerunners in scripture and the early church, one may better understand the deeper layers at work in episodes of interrogation that have been entirely overshadowed by the death scene and, as such, largely overlooked by early modern scholars.

Historicizing homicide in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England, this paper examines changes in its incidence, legal definitions, and reporting in 'true crime' pamphlets. In addition to surveying the punishment of such relatively new forms of homicide as death by witchcraft and by dueling, it traces the developing distinctions between murder and manslaughter, including the new emphasis jurists placed on provocation over hotbloodedness. Highlighting novelties in a story that can seem unchanging, it argues that murder's meanings proved particularly malleable in these years, not least in becoming clothed more completely in a rhetoric of 'public' interests.