Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History's Deadliest Women: The Husband Killer

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Until the 19th century in Britain, a woman killing her husband was guilty of worse than murder, she was guilty of petty treason.So what is petty treason? What is its very harsh punishment? And why was women killing their husbands so terrifying?Kate is joined by Rose Wallis, a social historian of crime, criminal justice and social protest at the University of the West of England. They discuss the particular case of Elizabeth Herring, and why she ended up at the stake.This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fantastic news, betwixters. Thanks to your votes, we are through to the final 20 of the Listeners' Choice Awards at this year's British Podcast Awards. We still need your help, though. Of course we do. We've got to keep those votes rolling in. And if you voted before, apparently, you have to vote again. It wasn't my idea.

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It is 1773, and we are in central London, heading out for a family day at the executions. Fun for all the family, the good old days, eh? it's actually quite a big case today, that of Elizabeth Herring, a woman who is controversially sentenced to death for the murder of her husband. Now, that wasn't the controversial bit, by the way. She definitely killed him. Definitely did that.

There were loads of witnesses and everything. The controversial bit is how she's going to be killed, because Elizabeth has been found guilty, not just of murder, but of petty treason. As could all women be who would oft their husbands. And how did the refined and genteel? 18th century deal with such a crime? Well, they burnt them to death.

Of course they did. I'm ready to find out more if you are. Hello and welcome back to Bitwix Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. For several hundred years under British law, if a woman killed her husband, she wouldn't be charged with murder or manslaughter. She would be charged with, drumroll please, petty treason.

So what is that crime? a man killing his wife get the same charge? Spoiler alert. No. And why did this crime warrant being burnt at the stake, which felt outdated even in the 18th century? Well, today I'm joined by Professor Rose Wallace, a social historian of crime and she is going to tell us all about petty treason and the case of Elizabeth Herring. Are you ready to do it? Well, let's crack on. Well, hello and welcome to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Professor Rose Wallace. How are you doing? babes. I'm very good, Kate. How are you? Oh, thrilled to be talking to you. I think the last time I saw you, we was at Sheffield, wasn't it? We were doing the Crossed Wides podcast festival with the awesome Lucy,

Lucy Walsley. Yeah, all sex and crime and ranting. Yes, yes. That was good fun, actually. That was a hot day if memory serves. Yeah. So it's fab to have you back. Not only today, we work together on the podcast thing, but we also work together on Lucy Walsley's Murder Club. We were the Murder Club, you, me and Nadefa. Yeah, absolutely. That was a great, great one to be involved with. That was good fun, wasn't it? More rantey chats, actually, about horrible things.

It was a behind-the-scenes fact about that shoot is that I had the worst flu in my entire life. Do you remember you were so nice to me and so patient? Like, I honestly thought I was so ill. I thought I was drunk. But you honestly, you wouldn't have known. You wouldn't have known, Kate. you'd absolutely soldiered to.

I think there was quite a lot of ginger shots, if I remember right. Yes, yeah, lots of ginger shots. And the lovely runners on the show were, like, standing by with like backup lem sips of every time, like it sort of counted down in the four hour mark. They were like, drugger, drugger, get more drugs into her. Ice packs up the skirt, ginger shots.

Yeah. There we go. That's how we roll, isn't it? It is. And it all came together. I remember watched it thinking, oh, this looks really good. This absolutely looks like we really know what we're talking about.

So you are Professor. of crime, criminal justice, social protest at the University of West England. So, Rose, how did you get into that? So I've always been interested in crime, I suppose, and crime stories. I loved reading thrillers and novels like that when I was younger. But when I came to university,

I was very much kind of into international political history. And then I did one amazing module called Crime and Protest with two wonderful historians, Professor Steve Paul, and Dr. Moira Martin, and that just changed everything because it was not so much about the whojadnets, like what I've been reading, but actually thinking about the way that investigating crime and the courts and criminal justice is this extraordinary insight into ordinary people's lives, into the way that society works.

And it really, really matters. So that's kind of what got me hooked. I love origin stories like that when people could kind of pinpoint it. Like it was this one course that I did. It was this one person. And then it was literally just like my eyes were opened and that was it. It was it for me. We could talk to you about so many things.

But we're actually here to talk to you about this crime, which I was aware of, but I've never looked that deeply into, of petty treason or petite treason. What is that gross? So as petite being from the French and Thet being a correction of that. Oh, is that right? So it could be petite. or petty and it both means like little.

Variant spellings and it means little. So we are talking about a kind of lesser or inferior type of treason. I'm learning already. So I treason, which we may have heard of. So if you're planning to do in the monarch or head of state, that's legislated against in this context we're looking at anyway under the Treason Act of 1351. It also creates this inferior offence of petty treason.

an inferior sort of thing, which is where you're killing someone, not you specific, but the person who the perpetrator, is killing someone to whom they owed faith and obedience. So it's quite specific. So if a servant kills his or her master, or mistress, that's petty treason.

If a clergyman kills his superior, that's petty treason. And if a woman kills her husband, that's petty treason. Oh, fuck off. That's basically, the majority of cases, certainly in the kind of early modern period, until 1828 when it ceases to be an offence. 1828?

Yeah. So it's technically a kind of separate offence until 1828. So we are talking predominantly, and guess what, predominantly working women who are the ones, you know, it's not like you see them every time. day these cases, but it is working women and women up for husband murder that constitutes most petty treason offences. Wow. So would this also cover like if you wanted to kill your boss at work?

Yes. So if you are servant to your mistress or master and you kill them, then that would constitute petty treason. The other way around, it's just murder. Of course it is. Just murder in massive infertive. Of course it is. Sometimes we talk about it as being a kind of speech.

of murder, but it's actually quite different because there are slightly different rules of evidence as it's kind of legally constructed. Yeah. Because it can't be that like every time a wife has bumped off her husband and she's got caught, they've done her for petty treason. Or maybe it is. I don't know. Well, Pedicate could be prosecuted as such, but you have to have two prosecution witnesses to make a case of petty treason. I hope everyone's taking notes about this, right? Okay. If you're the accused, then they are interested in your intent. to kill someone.

You can't use what we might think of as a positive defence. So you can't say there were mitigating circumstances I was provoked. In its original legal construction, it's all about intent. So this is where it is kind of really different from murder, where they would look at malice intention, but also provocation, circumstances that might mitigate the offence. That's in its original construction. By the point that we're looking at today,

so by the time we kind of get to the mid-17th century into the 18th, entry, the courts start to treat it more like murder. They are more interested in whether, for example, a woman was provoked to attack her husband, whether there was malice, whether it was premeditated. So if there is, so if, let's say I've bumped off my husband and now I think that most people would go, fair enough, I don't even need to know what happened. But like they would be looking at, so if there was malice of forethought and if there was witnesses, then it could be petty treason.

But if I'd done it in the spur of the moment, like if I'd just hit him around the back of the head and killed him, then that wouldn't be petty treason. Well, if it was a sparing at the moment and you'd been provoked, then it might be that you could be tried for a lesser charge of murder. Although what tends to happen is that if they're kind of in the thick of this discussion, actually what we're looking at is whether they'll acquit you because it was self-defense, for example.

Right. Or they might do you for manslaughter, which isn't a capital offence at this point. And for that, you would, that's accidental killing, you were provoked. You know, he came for you. You hit him around the head. Yeah. Then it could be found to be manslaughter. In which case, then you would be branded on the hand, potentially, as a kind of mark, though, that you couldn't do it again and get away with this.

That seems like a rather light sentence, really. As I've got to say. Or by the time we get to the 18th century, you might, or certainly the end of the 18th century, they might say, well, we'll send you to prison for not necessarily very long. You might receive a fine as well. So there is a huge distance between murder and manslaughter. And we haven't even got onto the fact that if you're done for petty treason, the punishment is different to murder as well.

All right. So you're not going to get a branded hand or a couple of months in prison for this. If they manage to get you on petty treason, which sounds like the. going to have to prove that this was, it sounds like what they're after is premeditated murder. It's just like he was an asshole. I decided and wanted to kill him and it did. Yeah. Right. So with the punishment for petty treason, we're talking about a traitor's death, basically. Oh, no. So if a man was found guilty of petty treason, he could be hung, drawn and quartered. So quartering being basically disemboweling. But for a woman, um,

she'd be burned at the stake. What the fuck? Burnt at the stake. And this was on the books until 1828. So we stopped burning women at stake in 1790. So they make that legislative change earlier marginally. And then they consolidate it in 1828. But yeah.

So right up until 1790, women could be burned at the stake as traitors. Fuck. why the difference in the two styles of death? This is where it kind of gets really, really perverse, actually, because it's almost kind of chivalrous. So rather than exposing the bodies of women to this process of being drawn to the place of execution, hanged and then disemboweled,

you know, they don't want to expose women's bodies in that way. Oh, right, yeah, of course. We wouldn't want anything obscene to be witnessed. So what they'll do is drawn. a woman to the place of execution and then burn her at the stake instead. Well, thanks for that. By certainly the end of the 17th century,

there's a further sort of mercy, if you want to call it, which is that most women were strangled before they were burned, so they aren't alive when they're set on fire. My brain, I just, wow. That, it's just wild. Just for the longest time,

I thought that hanging, drawing and quartering, I thought the drawing bit was the pulling out of the end trails. I'm just not a bit of a side quest now, but that's not quite right, is it? No, the drawing is the drawing kind of, you know, you'd be dragged to the place of execution. So this would be kind of on, certainly about the 18th century, like a hurdle or kind of a sledge. And you're dragged and it's about kind of the exposure.

I'll be back with Rose after this short break. How many people were got for this crime of petty treason? Do we know? Well, they're very few. And the period that we're looking at today, sort of from the mid-18th century to when they stop burning women at the state for petty treason, there's 13 women who are tried for that. But only one of them is executed. Certainly as we kind of go into the 18th century and beyond the kind of legislative change, you see fewer and fewer and fewer women. being prosecuted in the jury courts, fear and few women being executed, and very few numbers facing these sort of extraordinary charges and being condemned.

Why do you think that was? I mean, the 18th century, as far as I understand it, they're not known for their merciful court proceedings. In fact, wasn't this like the great bloody time or something because they were executing the bloody code? That's the one. You know, your lovely Victorian historians love talking about this. You know, at the beginning of the 19th century,

there's like over 200 capital statutes for which you could lose your life. But we know that very few, relatively speaking, of those are actually used. And what happens is you might be charged with a capital offence, but fewer and fewer people are being executed. And this is through the use of discretion within the courts, which is another lesser-known hallmark of the 18th century criminal justice system. You can't just go around hanging everybody if you didn't. No.

Everyone would kick off, right? Because like the sheer numbers of that. I mean, if they're trying to burn every single woman who's bumped off her husband, it's like the fires would never go out. So this is the thing. It's about the discretionary use of justice. And, you know, historians like Douglas Hay have talked about this being a kind of really carefully calculated decision making process where you make particular sorts of examples of people.

Right. So there are examples in the 18th century where you have people who are of much higher social status being executed. So Earl Ferris, who kills his steward. Now, that's not petty treason, because he's the boss and the steward is a servant, but he is still found guilty and executed as a murderer at Tyburn in London in front of a huge concourse of people. And that's one of those examples that communicate nobody is above the law.

I see. Similarly, you get people being let off, and this is a great act of mercy, and this is there to support the rest of society to go, do you know what? our English law is just, even if we do have 200 capital statutes. Is this a famous example of that now infamous phrase, death recorded? No. We shouldn't laugh, should do that? It's really bad.

Some historians have misread that as being the actual death sentence. No, that death record doesn't come in until the early 19th century, so kind of went away from from what we're talking about. So, no, no, these people were fully condemned and then reprieved. Oh, interesting. Imagine being on that emotional rollercoaster. Like, you've been nicked. They've got you for Petitreason.

Fuck that. I'm going to be burnt at the sodding steak now. You're guilty. But then the idea is like, well, look, we're going to say that you're guilty. But we're actually, we're not really going to go through with it. It's just because we want people to think that we're on this. And you might get a recommendation from mercy from the jury or the judge, but also if it's murder or indeed, I mean, petter treason might take a bit longer to organise the execution.

The window in which a reprieve could be made is actually. really small. So it is, it's terrifying. That is terrifying. Yeah. Like you wouldn't even sentenced to like a hideous death, but like you might, is it actually going to happen? Is it not going to happen? And then conversely, like other people might get sent caught for a crime and they'll think, oh, they'll let me off. They don't really hang people for this. And then some judge just because actually we are going to make an example of you this time. I mean, we've kept out of another case at another point where that happens. But that's much later. We don't need to talk about No, but no, you do this.

And again, it's part of that sort of theatre of the law as well. Like I said, it's really calculated decision-making process. Sometimes it's based on evidence. Sometimes it's based on evidence and they can manipulate that to make a point. And they do. This is very careful. It's all in public. Is it ever influenced by the fact that like the deaths themselves to hanged around

court of somebody and to even to have them drawn and then burnt alive? these enormous hideous spectacles. And I know that we often like to think of the pastors. It was just a gory time back then. But that would have been as hideous then as it would have been now to actually see somebody subjected to this. Is there perhaps a reluctance in the law to actually go through with this because it's so hideous?

I mean, if a judge is there going, right, that's it. I'm going to burn you to death. There must have been like the underlings of the court going, for fuck sake. Now we have to go and get the firewood. Do we have to go to do it? It's a whole thing. Yeah, you've got to get the pie.

No, absolutely. you're right. Certainly by the kind of end of, well, the middle of the 18th century, particularly when you're looking at places, you're like big urban centres like London. This is a five and a half, yeah. If you've got to draw the condemned from Newgate out to Tyburn, so that's where Marble Arch is now.

And it's like three miles, but this is through a big urban centre. Huge crowd. And it's supposed to be going slow. Huge crowds. Tens of thousands of people. We've got to get the executioner in. This is it. It costs money. It has to be policed.

It has to, you know, you have to build it all. So these things are, you know, it's one of the kind of arguments for the end of the procession from Newgate, Tyburn. It's this kind of the disorder it engenders, both in terms of the crowds, but also the disruption to commerce and trade and traffic. There's the expense of all of these things as well. I love that with the British, it's actually traffic considerations that made us go rid of the death penalty. But they are becoming worried as well, this sort of idea which is pertinent, but perhaps not in the way that it has been argued, you know, now some decades ago. I think most people have got over this, this idea of the civilising process,

the impact of enlightened thought. We are concerned with how it looks to be doing these sorts of things. Yeah. But this is not something that a civilised nation would be doing. So there are those commentators who feel this. But then, and I'm not. I think this is probably more significant. And again, we could go side quest, but this is pertinent.

Concerns about the crowd. Execution crowds. You know, if you imagine the Hogarth's image of the execution crowd, the execution of Tom Idle, no one's looking at him being taken up to tie then. They're all boozing, drinking. They're at pickpockets. It's a fun day out. And there's this erroneous, like incorrect characterization of the crowd being populated entirely by working people, the lower orders.

and that they don't care. They don't give a toss. Yeah, they're there for the party that is kind of, you know, they're into this sort of barbaric, brutal kind of spectacle. And again, that's not true. People did go and watch. These were spectacles they were calculated to be so. But the demographic there is much, much broader.

It's not all just prostitutes and thieves, thank you very much, even though you all get these commentators who say it is. And people behave in different ways. No one execution crowd is uniform. There will be people who are taking advantage of the trade opportunities or the, you know, picking pockets and things like that. But there will be people there that watch an object silence. There will be people, Vic Gaptsil writes about this.

You know, people who might laugh because they're nervous. You don't get overseeing something like that. It might be more normal than it is now because we don't do it. But you don't get able watching someone die. No, and die horribly as well. Do we know the demographic of the women that were charged with petty trees? Is this something like a rich woman might get accused? of doing or is it, I just sort of get the sense that this is going to be a largely working class

women who are condemned for this. It is. So most cases that we can kind of dig into, if you're looking, for example, the old Bailey proceedings, plenty in there to dig into. They're quite often working women or women from not particularly affluent backgrounds. And most of the time, these altercations that result in death happen during some sort of quarrel. There are a minority of quite infamous cases is where you have a woman of higher social status who's killed her husband, or if it's a kind of particularly sort of devious and well-planned crime.

Catherine Hayes is a really famous example. She was burned at stake in 1726. And again, it's questions around this, but whether it was an instruction or just what happened, but she wasn't successfully strangled before she was burned. Oh, no. Her case is considered worse, because she has two accomplices.

who help her, and they get her husband drunk, he falls asleep, and they bludgeon him to death in his sleep, and then they dismember the body. It's not an accident, that one, is it? So it's not really an accident. It's complicated further by the fact that one of her accomplices, is alleged anyway to be both her illegitimate child and her lover. Definitely not an accident.

And her husband is, you know, a man of some standing kind of middle class-ish, if you will, at a period where we don't really say that. So it's much, much worse by those kind of social measures of the day. And there is much more evidence of premeditation. And as I say, the encompasses as well. So she is written about and held up as a kind of horrendous example. But actually, most of the women we're looking at are, like you say, Kate, working women. Are there cases in there?

Well, like you've read it. I mean, apart from Catherine Hayes where it feels like that is kind of like, all right. Like that is quite an open and shut case, even by the standards of the time, which is often like from a modern perspective, if you're looking at a lot of these cases going, Jesus Christ, like the evidence being presented. But sometimes it's like, yeah, that's definitely them. Have there been cases like in there where you look at it and you go, yeah, that was, that's,

yeah, she definitely. Not that she deserved to be killed like that, but yeah, she definitely did kill him. Or are they all kind of a little bit he said, she said, there's an argument happening. We're not quite sure what's going on. I think what tends to happen, certainly in the cases that I've looked at and one that we could talk about today as well, Elizabeth Herring, he's the last woman to be burned at the stake. for petty treason.

These things, there is very little doubt that their actions caused the death of their husband, but it's the circumstances in which that occurs. Right. That's different. So that this is in the course of a physical fight. Yeah? Okay. So they have lashed out with a weapon or they've hit back.

And again, in spousal murders, so husband or wife murders, generally you quite often see. instances where there's an injury and it's not immediate that the person dies as well. So again, that sort of question around premeditation, it starts to kind of unravel or get more complicated to answer, I think. Okay. Just before we get on to her, is it true that you could be accused of petty treason for forgery for defacing the face of the king on a coin? Yeah.

So coining, counterfeiting gold and silver currency, so kind of your more valuable currency, that's a species of treason. It's not actually petty treason as defined, but it is a species of treason. And this is the thing. Elizabeth Herring is the last woman to be hanged for petty treason in terms of husband murder. But after 1773,

we see people who continue to be burned at the stake for what for women being burned at the stake for coining. Again, it's the nature of a traitor's death. So male coiners don't get burned at stake. Female coiners do. was the last person we'd burnt at the stake then? The last person to be burned at Newgate, so in London, is Christian Murphy, and that was for coining in 1789.

Just seems alarmingly recent, doesn't it? Coining as well, like, that is such a harsh punishment, that one, like, you know, do a bit of counterfeiting, and they're going to chuck you on a bonfire? But again, you know, at the risk of disappearing off town of rabbit hole, boarderies, these sorts of crimes, are always treated incredibly seriously because it's kind of attacking the root of commerce, you know, and messing with increasingly what becomes increasingly important, the markets and, you know, our economy. All right, let's try and stay focused. Let's write Elizabeth Herring. Tell me her story then. Whatever happened, I'm on her side. Yeah, no, I feel a bit like this.

This is why I would never be a jury member ever. or why I gave up all hope of doing law at any stage. Yeah. Elizabeth Herring is the last woman to be burned at the stake for petty treason for murdering her husband. And as I kind of alluded to you before, she's a bit of an anomaly really because in sort of 50 years spanning her trial 1740 to 1790, she's the only woman who's executed for petty treason. There are others. There are 13 others. and she's the only one who doesn't get acquitted or reprieved or sentenced to her. And I think that's why it's worth, you know,

aside for the fact, you should be worth digging into these people who lost their lives in appalling ways, but actually digging into her story as far as we can, because rather frustratingly don't know a huge amount about her background. We can infer a bit. So the newspaper reports of her trial and executions say that she was originally from Scotland. She's known her neighbours for a really long time. So either they've all come to London together or she's been in London for some time.

And she lived in Wapping in the East End of London with Robert Herring, who was her husband. And they'd been living together for about 11 years. So she's been there for some time. And she's clearly probably an adult woman. Again, don't know her age. You know, she could have been 25. She could have been 35. It's hard to tell.

But she's been with Robert for 11 years. And he worked as a war. So on the water, we don't know what Elizabeth did. There's no kind of occupation listed for her, but we kind of get the sense that they're laboring people. In terms of what happened, pretty much like most petty treason cases, really, the accounts vary a little bit, but the kind of the death resulted from a quarrel. Robert and Elizabeth had been in the Thistling Crown pub, which in King Street in Wapping on the 5th of August, and they were having dinner.

there was an altercation, a quarrel, and she stabs or throws a knife that she's using to eat with at him. In the pub? In the pub. And it wounds him in his throat and she gets him right in the neck and he dies really quickly from blood loss. That doesn't sound premeditated to me. No. If you were going to premeditated a murder, you wouldn't do it over a pub lunch with multiple witnesses, would you? Would you?

No, no. Doesn't sound right. Yeah, but you're right, Kate. This is what the prosecution are focusing on is this kind of question of premeditation. So they have got two key witnesses, a guy called John Boyle, who had worked with Robert, and he'd been with Elizabeth and Robert in the pub.

And they've also got the landlady, Anna Darling, who certainly Elizabeth thinks it's a bit stuff. They both say that they didn't hear any sort of quarrel. Boyle's asked, did you think she intended? tended to kill him and he's absolutely adamant that she did. But his reason is because otherwise he wouldn't be dead. So it's not bad convincing. The problem is Hannah Darling comes out with something much more kind of condemning.

She says that she heard Elizabeth say earlier that day that she would spill his blood and be hanged for him. Oh, how convenient, Anna. Right. Okay. Not so good. Darling also says that once Robert had been wounded, Elizabeth kind of chucks the knife down. runs out of the pub with a hands clasped together in front of her crying she'd done it. So again, not looking great.

No. There's a third witness, Thomas Duncan, he's a bricklayer, he's doing some work at the pub. And he said he heard the herrings jawing together. Joring, what's that? Joring. So it could be talking, but it tends to be kind of derogatory kind of, you know, that they were arguing. But then he says she was jarring him. So the implication that here is that she's having a go at him,

that she's nagging him. Doesn't mean she's going to stab him in the neck, though. No. And Lovely Thomas is the one who at least tries to stop the bleeding in Robert's neck. He leaves his work, comes over, and literally holds the wound together to try and stop it happening. There are also two surgeons who testify for the prosecution, but they're really there just to confirm the cause of death, which is absolutely definitely this winged in the neck. Right.

Elizabeth then has to make her defence. Now, I don't think she had any defence counsel, which isn't necessarily that unusual. But it does mean she is having to cross-examine witnesses. She's having to do it. She's having to do it. Shit. She asks Thomas Duncan, she's like, didn't you hear us quarreling, though?

And he's like, no, I couldn't hear what you were actually saying. Oh, no. Which is, it's horrible. She does this extraordinary thing of having to defend herself for her life. But I think in some respects, she's quite astute in the way she puts this together. It's thought through. So the first thing she does,

or one of the first things she does is she introduces the fact that her and Robert weren't actually married. And there's a good technicality. If they're not married, it's not technically husband murder, is it? Well, this is what you'd like to think. That being said, proof of marriage wasn't required. Oh, no. For the charge of petty treason.

People, you know, as you know, Kate, quite often would cohabit and live together as man and wife without ever actually being married officially. So the understanding was if you cohabited and you treated each other as husband and wife, that was enough. Now, I wonder, shouldn't do counterfactions like this, but perhaps if she'd had a lawyer, whether there could be more kind of push on this. But she introduces it. She said we weren't married. It doesn't seem to matter.

But then she gives a really kind of detailed account of what had happened that day, the day that he died. So she talks about the morning of the accident. That's her words. So it's like, yes. Yes. So you're thinking carefully about us, Elizabeth. And Robert treated her absolutely abominably. She said he came home and called me a great many bitches and hauls

and used me very ill and break every little thing belonging to the apartment that I had. He ran a fork into my arm, which she showed people the wound. He struck me and knocked me down and used me very ill in every shape in the world. So they've had this physical fight or warning. They both go off to the pub, but Elizabeth says that he continued to verbally abuse so she goes and sits away from him. He then calls her back to join him when the food is served. And she says, he said, you bitch, come and eat a bit.

I was overjoyed that he should ask me to come to eat with him after we had quarreled. I went to him with as much joy as I should go into the kingdom of heaven this moment. And she, again, we might be like, really, did you really feel that pleased? But it's an important point to be making because what she's doing, she's saying, there's no resentment. there's no malice. She was happy to go back to him. She's doing good wife, right?

Happy to go back to him. So this is quite an important sort of legal way, I suppose. He then, according to Elizabeth, throws his pipe in her face. Then he chucks a pint of beer over her, at which point she says she took the night that she was eating with and screw it at him. So she thought quite carefully about this.

She's tried to establish kind of provocation. Is that plausible, Rose? What do you think? I know that we're not lawyer. Blushes pretend my lawyers. Like, is it possible that she was, I don't know what, I don't know what eating knives in pubs

in the 18th century would have looked like? I mean, would they've been sharp enough to just like, you just throw it at somebody and then it goes into their neck? I think the throwing is probably not necessarily the most accurate statement. So it's a case size.

It sounds sort of like, like she's just gone, ugh, like that. Yeah, no. I think it's Thomas Duncan says he thought she was going to get up and slap him. Right. But she had the knife in her hand. She has stabbed him, aren't she?

She has stabbed him, yeah. But it's a question of, how far, certainly in this instance, the jury would be concerned with the fact that he'd provoked her. Not just this history of abuse that day, but the fact that he'd provoked her in that moment. And that's where the kind of problems for Elizabeth start to happen

is that none of the prosecution witnesses are saying that they saw him provoke her. Now, she does have defence witnesses, which is great. She's got this organised, she's got it sorted. and she's got her friends, her neighbours, to come and testify, which is really important because the evidence is so damning. Like she's in the pub, everyone saw this happen.

She's clearly responsible. It's a question of deciding what level that is. She brings in character witnesses. So her neighbours, who've said that they'd witnessed Robert knocking her down, they'd heard her screaming out in the night, that he'd kicked her out into the street in the night, barefoot. One of her other neighbours talks about how Elizabeth used to go and stay with her to avoid Robert to get away from him beating her.

And another neighbour who'd stayed with Elizabeth and witnessed Robert beating her with a poker that the night watch were called out and that actually this witness had said she was terrified of him and didn't want to kind of confront him because he was safe violent. That sounds like pretty solid evidence to me. Yeah, and you know, these women are very sort of clear on there.

So this could stand in her favour and you see it in a lot of cases where this sort of provocation defence and domestic violence comes into these cases all the time where this is quite successful that it could result in acquittal or certainly in a lower charge of manslaughter, but no one can prove that this happened in the pub. One of the defence witnesses says, oh, well, the landlady, Hannah Darling, who we've met before,

she told her that she'd seen Robert throw a pint at Elizabeth, this kind of immediate provocation. So Hannah Darling is immediately asked again, is this true? She says, no, absolutely not. I didn't see that. Why would she lie about that? What's going on there? I don't know, but Elizabeth claims that Hannah has a problem with her.

She said that she has had a spite against me for six months. But Darling absolutely persists saying, nope, didn't it? She says, you know, they were of the jangling order. So they were a bit kind of rowdy, but I never thought it would come to blows. So she keeps saying, and even the newspapers pick up on the fact that, that had Elizabeth been able to prove this provocative assault in the pub, things might have been different for her. Shit, man.

Yeah. Now, I think there's a class dimension here too, and that poor old Elizabeth wasn't necessarily the most kind of credible witness. But I mean, like, there's not liking somebody. There's taking a spite against somebody. And then there's, like, knowing that if you do this, they're going to get burnt to death in the fucking street. That's, that's why.

wild to me. Yeah. And I mean, again, I've seen other cases where the witnesses are clearly concerned about what's going to happen, you know, but Boyle and particularly darling seem absolutely adamant. I didn't know what to make of that. No. Okay. But the newspapers are quite interesting because they sort of, you know, there isn't necessarily

a huge stir about this, but there is this acknowledgement that had she been able to prove the provocation, things might have been different. So there's a sense that that's how the law works in this context. But there's other comments around, you know, men shouldn't be beating their wives, but they kind of go on to imply that maybe working class women are just as bad. Like, you know, amongst the lower order, women are a bit like this. And this is the problem, I think, for Elizabeth,

she's also written about as being someone who was prone to passion. Yeah? So she's not meek and wrong and passive. Yeah? In Oils' testimony, he said that she called Robert a bugger, You know, she's swearing at him in the pub and that she'd called him boil a futter, which is, it's a corruption of a French word.

It has all sorts of slang meanings, but it's somewhere around like fucker or wanker, basically, I think. She's not delicate, is she? She's not demure. No, she's not demure. And she stood up there and led her own defence. And, you know, she said, no, no, you're lying to some of the witnesses. I'll be back with Rose after this short.

break. You know what's really upsetting about this? You know if she'd had a lawyer that this would have gone so much different. Like, any lawyer could have got her off on this. Even a bad one, surely. Like, once you've got, like, the evidence in that, like, no, he has been abusing her. It has been, you know, we do have this evidence that there was provocation. Like, bringing the fact that, like, this is in a pub.

Who does a premeditated murder? her in a pub over a pie. That's like, that's not premeditated. You've just lost your temper. Although I think she did stab him though. And this is the thing that still kind of stands out. It's still not quite clear because there's a lack of commentary on this. Still not quite clear why, you know, the jury was so against her.

Like, okay, so they couldn't prove the assault, but there was this history of abuse. Yes, she's a bit kind of rowdy. One of the defence witnesses says she's very sober woman, but she has been in the pub for three hours. But that's not unusual at this point. It's really hard to kind of discern why the book was thrown at her in particular. Because, yeah, like you're saying, like most cases is like, you know, they're found guilty, but then it's commuted. Why? Why? Because this case is, well, this doesn't sound like a cut and dried, like she absolutely definitely meant to kill him.

Why this one? But I think this is the sort of the tension around it is there's enough here. should they kind of, I don't know, maybe I'm reaching a little bit here, but very few women are being successfully prosecuted for this. Because they had this history of fighting with each other, that there isn't a sense of her being quite the victim in the way that perhaps was more comfortable to look at. The fact that she had said things, the fact that she was a violent person,

it's a kind of useful example to say, no, you cannot behave like this, that it's reinforcing all those sorts of ideas and structures. You'd need to look at wider discussions that were happening at the time, I reckon, to see what this is tapping into. Why was this? Why does she need to be made an example of what was happening? And you said that this was discussed in the press, so it's clearly a case that's getting some attention. Well, it's interesting because in the press, it's noted.

But we're talking about column inches like literally an inch. And what they tend to focus on, they say two things, three things, one that she's praying to passion. one that if she'd been able to prove the assault in the pub, it might have been different. And then they go on to talk in quite specific detail about the mechanics of her execution. We should talk about that then. So go on, what happens to Elizabeth? So, yeah, it's horrible. There is one letter, I should say, Kate, one letter I've found him so far from a guy who is writing about the barbarity of the spectacle of the execution.

Right. And how horrendous the impact is on the crowd. and then goes off on a complete tangent almost, saying that actually it's probably just prostitutes who are the women in the crowd and actually prostitutes are infecting all our menfolk. And it's like you've gone from barbaric punishment of a woman to... Come back. Wow, okay.

And, you know, that prostitutes are just destroying all of our families and, you know, literally infecting. Is there any discussion at all that Elizabeth might have been selling sex? No. They'd have mentioned that, wouldn't they? They'd love that detail. Her defence witnesses talk about her being a sober and honest woman. So that's just a complete random tangent then.

Random tangent man, yeah, who's just lost his shit, basically, and decided that he will use his letter space. It's a shame we're burning women to death, but if they weren't all on the game, we wouldn't have to do it. What a fantastic reasoned argument that is. I reread this and I was like, hang on a minute, mate, you've gone for the standard, you know, this is a barbaric spectacle, and like, fair enough.

And then you've just lost it and gone off on one about text work. Fuck. So was there any attempt at like a last minute reprieve for Elizabeth? Well, she tries to kind of instigate one for herself. So she pleads the belly. So she says that she's pregnant. So the idea being that at least then there would be a stay of execution until she'd had the child. And what quite often happened after that point is you didn't get executed anyway. So they impanel what's called a jury of matrons. So this is a group of older, very respectable. women who will investigate this proposition and they come back and say,

no, she's definitely not pregnant. So what happens to Elizabeth then? They really go through with this, the whole kit and caboodle. Absolutely. They go through with it. So she is dragged on a hurdle on this sledge that's pulled by four horses from Newgate up to Tyburn. And then she's chained to a stake. So they've put kind of a chain round under her arms.

And then they put a rope round her neck. and she's standing on a stool and the ropes fastened around the back of the stake. So they kick the stool out from under her. So she is strangled to death. So she strangled about 15 minutes. Jeez, Louise. And then when they're satisfied that she's dead,

they burn off the rope and her body kind of falls forward so it's supported by the chain. And then they put the wood faggots onto the fire and set fire to it. And her body's burned to ashes. And how many people came along to watch this? So newspaper restaurants are like 20,000 people. people and they, yeah, it's meant to be chaotic that there are coaches overturned. There are newspaper reports of a young lad who was trying to scramble up to get a better viewpoint.

He slips and impales himself on railings. It sort of feels very chaotic. But then the newspaper reports do tend to kind of go one flavour on this. But it is a huge deal. There haven't been another execution of burning at the stake in London for like 15 years. So this is not necessarily something people would have seen. No, this isn't normal. No, it's not normal.

So it attracts an awful lot of attention. Why is the crime of killing your husband so utterly, utterly terrifying to these people? It's that total kind of upending of the social order. It's, you know, the microcosm of patriarchal authority that you are kind of absolutely turning on its head. And that's how it's, you know, when it's talked about in terms of condemnation, it is all about the fact that you have killed the person you are supposed to be obedient to, that you have destroyed the home, that you have destroyed proper relationships, that, you know, it's the worst thing that a woman could do, basically,

absolute kind of antithesis of her nature. And it's interesting as well that, like, the other people that could be prosecuted for this is like people killing their masters, people that they work for. So you've got the capitalist society being protected as well. Yeah, absolutely. It's just that social order that's being protected and even kind of pre-capitalist, that idea of, you know, the places that you have in society,

that there are those figures of authority where their authority is almost unchallenged, that that is what is reinforcing that subordination of particular people that upholds patriarchal authority. And I think what happens from the 17th century, Matthew Lockwood's written some interesting kind of legal discussion around this, particularly, obviously 17th century, it's a period of challenging some of those ideas, which is perhaps where the provocation defence comes from. But even when we don't have petty treason anymore, the kind of inheritance of it, the legacy, the way it's evoked when women commits violent crimes, particularly against their husbands, it still comes back that idea. that this is unnatural, that it's a breach of, yeah, the kind of proper order of things. And that it's a threat to society.

That's the kind of key thing, that it's that danger to those stretches, I suppose. So the final question then. Why did they change the law? I love stuff like that. Like, you look at this has been on the books since like 1,400. They were doing it for 500 years or however long. And then all of a sudden somebody goes, maybe we shouldn't put women on the bonfire. Maybe that's a bad idea.

Like, what, was it Elizabeth's case that particularly changed it? Was it just that there was a shift in different feeling around public execution? What was it? So, sadly, I don't think Elizabeth's case particularly made an in-road, although it is part of this wider discussion, like you say, or we've implied, Kate, around kind of concerns about public executions that we've had certainly from at least the middle of the... Parking is terrible.

Parking is the nightmare, right? Your country gets down over Kate. going to do? So British. You might have like a small child land on it because they've impaled themselves. It would be awful. It's absolutely chaos. But there is this kind of, it feeds into this kind of wider discussion about whether or not we should have these sorts of public executions and particularly these very violent deaths.

What's it doing to the people who watch them? What are the lower orders going to do? They're going to be hardened to violence. They might even be compelled to do it, especially if you keep letting people up. So there's those questions around public executions more broadly and particularly the barbarity. then there's also the question of gender and particularly because obviously burning at the stakes only for women

there is a general reluctance amongst judges, juries and it seems to kind of grow I mean there are really notable and important exceptions to this but tends to grow as we kind of go through the 18th century and into the 19th century fewer women are facing this sort of punishment or they're being reprieved

I don't think it's necessarily anything other than kind of squeamishness or this idea of not wanting to punish female bodies in public. At the same time, you see the decline of other public physical punishments, like whipping women in public. That's reducing. And there is also a question of equality in the punishment. So by the time we get to the 1780s and you get this concentration of cases 1786 and 1788, there's several women who are burned at the stake in London. And it feels like that's a lot.

you know, that's really focusing people's attention, it is a lot. But because they've stopped the procession by this point from Newgate to Tyburn, and they don't really do the disemboweling anymore, if a man is facing a traitor's death, then he's pretty much just being hanged, whereas we're still burning women at stake. And considering all these other kind of contexts around the way they feel about women, punishing women's bodies,

and public execution, they want to kind of equalize it as well. So there's this sort of idea that this is, it needs to be kind of, yeah, equalised. I'm not suggesting that this is any sort of real gender equality. It's a win for feminism. Yeah, we don't burn them at the state. Anyway, but there's also the practicalities of it. And I know we've sort of joked about this,

but Simon Demeroy's done quite a lot of work on this, that the sheriffs who were responsible for organising it, certainly in the 1780s, they start charging to attend these things for their time. And which is kind of, they've never done that before. It's an expression of them not wanting to do it. This is the burden. but also, perhaps more importantly, there are people who complain about it,

the populace that is in and around Newgate, there are complaints about the smoke making people sick. Oh, God. It takes hours for a body to be reduced to ashes. I mean, when you think of like the practicality of it, of like the effort that has to go into that, like attempting, if we can, to take aside the abject horror of someone actually being burnt to death,

but like the logistics of that, of setting it up, of organising it, of putting everything in place, getting the people there that can do that, of the actual, like, what that means. And it's an hours-long spectacle, isn't it? And then, like, smoke going everywhere, the smell of it, the shouts and the screams. It's, like, it's real horror stuff. I'm not surprised the neighbours were complaining. No, and this is it.

So you have these practicalities. So I think really and realberforce, I think, tries to get a bill to stop burning at the stake in 1786 after Phoebe Harris is burned. And that doesn't pass. but it does in 1790 and this is after you've had this kind of concentration through 88 and 89 so it does kind of get through

and then what the law does in 1828 is it actually kind of just consolidates this to say we now treat these crimes as murder and we don't burn women at the stake anymore. Rose, you have been fabulous and horrifying to talk to, but absolutely wonderful. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

So you can look me up on the university website or I'm on Instagram at Dr Rose Wallace. Thank you very much for coming along. You've been marvellous. It's been a total pleasure, Kate. Love talking to you, you know that. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Rose for joining us. And if you like what you heard,

don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer is Freddie Chick.

Join me again, but Twix O'Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.