The last person to be legally convicted of witchcraft appeared in Hertfordshire in 1712. Jane Wenham was a widow with a local reputation for ‘witchcraft, swearing, cursing, idleness, thievery and whoredom’.298 She quarrelled with a neighbouring farmer and was accused of causing fits and delusions in his servant, Ann Thorn. Jane Wenham asked to be swum to prove her innocence, but the local justice Sir Henry Chauncy refused the swim test and instead imposed a test of reciting the Lord’s Prayer. After she stumbled in the prayer, Jane was imprisoned and tried for witchcraft. At the trial, the jury found her guilty, but she was reprieved from hanging by the judge, Sir John Powell, who doubted the evidence and obtained a royal pardon for her. Wenham had to leave her village for her own safety, but she was lucky enough to be housed by a wealthy patron.299

  In 1735, the new law on witchcraft followed the increasing scepticism of the lawmakers: now the offence was not witchcraft, it was pretending to perform witchcraft. But suspected women were attacked until the end of the eighteenth century. Alice Green, the wife of a labourer, was swum in December 1748 after ‘malicious and evil people having raised an ill report of her being a witch’. Ruth Osborne, more than 70 years old, was publicly swum with her husband John in a pond near Tring in 1751. A crowd of 1,000 people gathered to watch, some of them paying for the spectacle. Ruth died during the ordeal and her husband died soon after. The local justices found Thomas Colley guilty of her murder, and sentenced him to death when it was proved that he had repeatedly used a stick to push Ruth Osborne underwater and collected the fees from the spectators.300

  Violence

  In 1674, a court ruled that violence to a wife was illegal in England: husbands might only scold and imprison wives. Legal expert William Blackstone disagreed and in 1764 restated that husbands could beat their wives within ‘reasonable bounds’:

  The husband also, by the old law, might give his wife moderate correction. For, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his apprentices or children; for whom the master or parent is also liable in some cases to answer. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds, and the husband was prohibited from using any violence to his wife.301

  The definition of ‘reasonable’ was key. A beating once or twice was reasonable, in private was reasonable, a beating that stopped short of attempted murder was reasonable. English common law allowed a wife to ‘pray the peace’ against a violent husband, before a magistrate who could order the husband not to assault his wife again. This was done only rarely and granted only after repeated severe and public assaults.302

  In 1669, a neighbour was recorded telling a husband that he was ‘A very ill man to beat his wife at such a rate’.303

  Public violence to wives and wife-beating became unacceptable in the middling classes as polite behaviour and etiquette were adopted; and in the working classes, community disapproval turned on violent husbands. Public demonstrations, mockery and abuse that had rained down on husbands who failed to control scolding or adulterous wives were now directed at husbands who did not control their own anger. Women led a demonstration against a known wife-beater in 1747 at Billingshurst, Sussex, and a year later in Islington, near London, but violent abuse of wives continued among the lower orders.304 Domestic violence, especially among poor and labouring people, may have been intensified by the arrival in England of strong, cheap spirits – in particular gin introduced from Holland by the Hanoverian monarchy.

  Men were the violent sex: accused of 91 per cent of all murders in eighteenth-century Surrey.305 On average, there were two murderous husbands to every murderous wife.306

  Rape now defined as a personal assault was still used as a technique of kidnap. ‘Sibble’ Morris, a 16- or 17-year-old heiress, was kidnapped by John Wheeler who – helped by two women, Mary Hendon and Margaret Pendergrass – forced a false marriage on the young woman. Richard Russel raped her, infecting her with a venereal disease. The three were accused of ‘forcibly and unlawfully marrying and defiling Sibble Morris; against her Will’ in 1728. Richard Russel was not arrested, and John Wheeler was a servant of Margaret Pendergrass so only the two women accomplices were found guilty and hanged.307

  By the seventeenth century, rape was defined as a personal assault, and the woman herself – not her guardian, husband or father – might be compensated and the rapist punished as a criminal. Even a pregnant rape victim might be believed when she said she had neither consented nor orgasmed, as understanding about conception improved. But a woman’s word remained ‘naturally’ unreliable. Many men brought to trial simply denied the act, winning an innocent verdict by giving their word.308 As a seventeenth-century Lord Chief Justice remarked, ‘In a rape case it is the victim, not the defendant, who is on trial.’309

  Although legal opinions reflected a ‘general horror of rape’,310 judges rarely found it. In the 150 years or so from 1558 to 1700, only 48 convictions for rape were recorded in Sussex, and 21 in Hertfordshire.311 Juries were far readier to convict murderers than rapists. In Surrey between 1660 and 1800, there were more than twice as many convictions for murder than for rape (2.5 times more). Eighty-five per cent of accused murderers were found guilty, but only 55 per cent of accused rapists. Convictions for attempted rape were higher: 64 per cent of the men accused of attempting rape were found guilty.312 The death penalty may have discouraged magistrates from accusing men of rape and jurors from delivering a guilty verdict, preferring an accusation of attempted rape with a physical punishment and fines, and some rapes may have been attempted and interrupted by people who then became witnesses in court to the lesser crime.

  Forced, violent or unwanted sex in marriage was not a crime because a wife’s consent was understood to be given once and for all on her wedding day and could never be withdrawn. But children under the age of 12 were not able to consent – any sexual intercourse with a child was rape. In the 1751 Account of the Proceedings of the Governors of the Lock Hospital for Venereal Disease, it was noted that more than 50 children aged between 2 and 12 had been treated in the four years since the hospital’s opening, having contracted the disease because of sexual attack. The governors believed this to be the result of rapists attempting to cure themselves of venereal disease by having sex with a virgin, and campaigned against the myth.313

  Health

  Epidemics, including the great plague of 1665, continued to sweep the country. In London, probably about 20 per cent of the city’s population died of the plague, with especial impact on women, since working city women were particularly poor and underfed, and they often worked in dirty and cramped quarters in nursing, health and the sex trade. ‘Searchers’ employed by the parish to identify plague victims and close up their houses were mostly women, so women experienced a small peak in employment in these ill-paid (4d a day for searchers), highly dangerous and unpleasant jobs.314

  The greatest danger to women’s life came from childbirth. In an age when marital rape was not a crime, without efficient contraception and with no understanding of how infections were transmitted, childbirth was a constant threat to wives.

  The arrival of male physicians to replace traditional female midwives did not make childbirth any safer, despite the claims of the all-male guilds and colleges. While Dr Peter Chamberlen invented forceps, a mechanism to grip a baby stuck in the birth canal and pull it out, he kept his life-saving invention a strict secret: three generations of his family – Chamberlen, his three sons and a grandson – made their fortunes from the suffering of women and babies.315 The Chamberlen doctors would only produce the forceps in the birthing room after they had blindfolded the labouring woman so that she could not see their instrument and – if she survived – describe it to rivals.

  Without forceps, the only way to deliver a baby stuck in the birth canal was to wait for the mother to die and then perform a Caesarean section on her dead body. It says much for the attention to women and babies that the Royal Society of Physicians allowed the Chamberlen men to profit from the exclusive use of his invention while physicians and midwives without the life-saving equipment continued to supervise dying mothers and babies.316 The average death rate for women in childbirth in the eighteenth century was about one in 40 women.317

  Conception, pregnancy and birth remained a mystery and not even the greatest women in the land trying to give birth to a royal heir could be sure of a safe outcome. Queen Anne endured 17 pregnancies and died without producing a Stuart male heir. She had seven miscarriages, five stillbirths and two babies died as newborns. Two toddlers died of smallpox, and her only surviving child died aged eleven.318

  Condoms were used to protect the man from infection, not to prevent pregnancy; and herbs causing miscarriage, and surgical abortions, were the most readily available contraception. In 1732, abortionist Eleanor Beare, a herbalist (and alleged poisoner), was sentenced to the pillory by a court in her home town of Derby. She was pelted with vegetables and eggs and then stoned by an outraged crowd who were said to have been ready to kill her if the parish officers had not protected her. She was one of several abortionists reported in the Newgate Calendar.319

  Renaissance thinking, which had identified men as reasonable and self-controlled and women as unreasonable and highly emotional, made allowances for occasional irrationalism in men. ‘Love-sickness’ was a male disorder, when a man might lose his usual reason in the grip of desire – the character of Romeo provided a recognisable male sufferer in Romeo and Juliet, written in the 1590s. Love-sickness could be described by the more bawdy commentators as exaggerated lust: ‘cunt-struck’.

  But by the middle of the eighteenth century, influenced by the Romantic movement, high emotion came into fashion for both sexes, and symptoms of mental illness were suitable for everyone. Men of heightened sensibility, like the heroes of the sentimental novels, could act-out their emotions with tears, despair, running away, anger, sleeplessness, fasting and even suicide – as in Johann Goethe’s hugely popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Men of sensibility expressed despair at the cruelty of the world.

  In the case of women, emotion was expressed more modestly. They did not have the option of travel or escape, and they did not violently commit suicide with guns; women in the novels modelled self-harming in more passive ways, like fasting, neurotic behaviours, starving themselves or declining into exhausted or even catatonic states.

  A cluster of symptoms shown by young women were named ‘greensickness’, said to be caused by sexual frustration and cured by penile penetration.320 But as young ladies were expected to be increasingly sexually cool, ‘greensickness’ could not be caused by a young lady pining for sex. Instead the symptoms of ‘greensickness’ were normalised and considered to be part of female maturing. Menstruation, or delayed and irregular menstruation, eating disorders, fainting, tearfulness, exhaustion, depression, fragility and malaise became increasingly seen as normal elite female behaviour.

  The growing belief in female asexuality, and uninterest in sex, meant that doctors finally observed that female orgasm was not necessary for conception. They went further – there was no female contribution to conception at all! Experts believed that the whole embryo was contained in the sperm, and the ovum in the woman was merely a passive receptacle for the baby to grow321 – it was a nest, not an egg. A woman was indeed an empty vessel. As Lady Peregrina Chaytor complained of her pregnancy in 1701, in a letter to her husband, ‘I must wish you had not given it me at this time, when I would think of better things.’322

  There were still no anaesthetics, and medical opinion in the eighteenth century stuck firmly to the view that pain in childbirth was ordained by God as part of the punishment of Eve. So to offer pain relief went against the will of God and was therefore a sin, ‘to contravene the operations of those natural and physiological forces that the Divinity has ordained us to enjoy or to suffer’.323

  Not even the determination to strengthen the health of aristocratic heirs, so that a vigorous nobility might be restored alongside the returning king in 1660, had any impact on childrearing practices and failed to persuade elite families to let mothers breast-feed their babies. The belief that breast-feeding prevented conception meant that for those men determined to get more heirs, it was more efficient to send a baby to a wet nurse and conceive another child than to keep the first baby with the mother. The working-class woman who became a wet nurse had to send her own child away, or feed it after the client baby, displacing her own newborn baby and endangering its health. Wet nursing used the working-class mother as a milk-producer, like a cow. It was a cruel and expensive elite practice; ironically, it caused a higher death rate among aristocratic babies than among those of the poor. One in five elite babies died in infancy, but one in seven lower-class babies. The increasing emphasis on female frailty as a sign of being a ‘lady’, and the sense that genteel women disliked physical functions, meant that the use of wet nurses expanded down the classes. Social climbers did not breast-feed any more than aristocrats. Jane Austen herself – that expert on bourgeois ladylike behaviour – was sent away from home as a newborn at the end of the eighteenth century to a wet nurse.324

  Part 6

  1765–1857

  Making a Lady

  Slavery

  In 1761, an African girl, aged only seven years old, was sold in Liverpool, nearly 4,000 miles away from her family in The Gambia. She had survived kidnap, separation from her parents and a six-week voyage from Africa to the Sugar Islands imprisoned below decks. At the Sugar Islands, most of the slaves had been dragged up into the sunlight, washed and cleaned for sale, as the homebound load of sugar, rum and molasses was loaded into the stinking hold; but she was kept on board, probably part of the ‘Captain’s perks’, an allowance of slaves given to slave-trading captains for their private use or sale. She was bought by Henry Hervey Aston and his wife Catherine, a Liverpool business family, to be a playmate-slave for their two daughters. They named her Chloe Gambia for her lost homeland, and she served as a domestic slave and then their housekeeper. She died at the age of 68, and – as a baptised Christian – was buried with a headstone in St Peter’s churchyard, in Aston, Cheshire.1

  Chloe was one of many millions of men and women kidnapped in Africa and one of the thousands shipped to England, to work as slaves and domestic servants, or even (in the case of little children) as companions in white English households. Slaves were a sign of high status among the elite from the mid-seventeenth century until the abolition of slavery in England in 1833 and though boys and men were preferred as footmen and page boys, enslaved girls and women were also brought into the country. According to Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, there were at least 14,000 African-born slaves in England in 1772.2

  Although the work was lighter than the fatal labour of the American and West Indies plantations, the treatment of men and women slaves in England was often intensely cruel, sometimes ending in death. Black women as well as men were branded and whipped, as proved by the scars on runaways described in advertisements for their return: ‘Run away from Mr. Shute, Merchant in Pudding Lane, near the Monument, a Young Negro Woman, Yellowish Complexion, Middle-Stature, and Slender, with two Fl[e]sh Marks one above the Shoulder, the other above her Breast below her Collar-bone.’3

  It was widely believed that the state of slavery in England had been abolished with feudalism, but in practice slaves brought into England from the colonies – where slavery was a legal state – were not automatically freed on arrival. Most slaves freed themselves by running away, but those who managed to escape found it hard to survive in a society where there was little help and support for the native poor, let alone newcomers. Newly free women had no home parish, no right of residency anywhere and nowhere to claim charity. Many had no education and little training in English domestic work. ‘Charlotte’ was brought to England by her owner Captain Howe who died. ‘Charlotte’ was refused poor relief by the parish overseers of Thames Ditton, and the case went to court, appearing before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1785. Mansfield supported the parish and not the destitute woman, ruling that since she had not been hired for a wage, she was not entitled to charity.4

  One woman escaped from slavery on the death of her owner and became, for a time, a hugely successful prostitute and brothel-owner. Her life was described in a guide to the sex workers at a London brothel at King’s Place. The pamphlet, Nocturnal Revels, describes an African girl, born in Guinea, West Africa, who was kidnapped very young, sold into slavery, survived the Atlantic crossing to Jamaica and was sold to a planter. He gave her a schoolmaster to teach her to read and write and made her the supervisor of the house slaves. He raped her repeatedly, and she gave birth to two of his children; after three years in Jamaica, he brought her to England as his slave – some accounts say he married her and that she was known as his wife.

  The guide to London’s prostitutes was written under a fictitious name. The ‘Order of St Francis’ probably refers to Francis Dashwood’s high-society gentlemen’s clubs