A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England 0817321322, 9780817321321

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A WEAK WOMAN IN A STRONG BATTLE

STRODE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Michelle M. Dowd, series editor EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Dennis Austin Britton Bradin Cormack Mario DiGangi Holly Dugan Barbara Fuchs

Enrique García Santo-­­Tomás Jessica Goethals Karen Raber Jyotsna G. Singh Wendy Wall

A WEAK WOMAN IN A STRONG BATTLE WOMEN AND PUBLIC EXECUTION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Jennifer Lillian Lodine-­­Chaffey

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-­­0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press. Typeface: Scala Pro Cover image by Vladimir Fedotov/Unsplash Cover design: David Nees Cataloging-­­in-­­Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-­­0 -­­8173-­­2132-­­1 E-­­ISBN: 978-­­0 -­­8173-­­9412-­­7

Contents List of Figures  vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1

1. The English Execution Ritual in Early Modern England  19

2. Gendering the Execution  35

3. Martyrdom and the Female Body  53

4. The Female Body on the Scaffold  72

5. Women’s Last Dying Speeches: Critiquing Social Norms  96

6. The Modesty Topos and Women’s Executions  125 Epilogue 145 Notes 153 Works Cited  205 Index 233

Figures 1. Frontispiece from A declaration from Oxford, of Anne Green a young woman that was lately, and unjustly hanged in the Castle-­­yard 43 2. “The Martyrdome of Three Women”  60 3. “The Burnyng of Cicelie Ormes at Norwich”  61 4. “A lamentable spectacle of iii. Women, with a sely infant brastyng out of the Mothers Wombe”  64 5. “The Martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow”  66 6. Mistris Turners Farewell to all women 137

Acknowledgments

I

have benefited from the support, conversations, and assistance of numerous individuals and communities throughout the process of researching, drafting, editing, and publishing this investigation of early modern women’s executions. I am most grateful to Todd Butler and Rob Bauer for their willingness to read the entire manuscript and offer pointed and fruitful suggestions. Their kindness to me and attention to my work means a great deal. I also owe thanks to a number of colleagues for reading portions of this work or helping me think through my ideas, including: Rob Browning, Casey Charles, Margaret Cotter-­­Lynch, John Eglin, Will Hamlin, John Hunt, Ashby Kinch, Debbie Lee, Ken Lockridge, Kirk McAuley, Leslie Malland, Donna Potts, Randy Prus, Rebecca Quoss-­­Moore, Richard Snyder, and Patty Wilde. In particular, I would like to thank the members of my women’s faculty writing group—Stephanie Bauman, Vanessa Cozza, and Tracey Hanshew—for their feedback, support, and friendship. This project benefited as well from an especially thought-­­provoking seminar entitled Women Writers and Political Frameworks, which was facilitated by Joanne Wright and Mihoko Suzuki during the 2020 Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting. Megan Matchinske’s feedback on my project during this seminar was invaluable. I would also like to thank my editor, Daniel Waterman, for his generosity and help in navigating academic publishing, and the series editor, Michelle Dowd, for believing in and encouraging this project. I am furthermore indebted to the anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive criticism, Lisa Williams for her assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication, and librarians Harvey Gover and Darryl Rainbolt for their help in obtaining the books and articles needed for this study. Finally, I would like to thank my current institution, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, for its assistance with procuring images. In many ways this study began when I was nine years old and my father gave me a book by Lozania Prole entitled The Two Queen Annes. This historical novel about two of Henry VIII’s wives sparked my curiosity about Tudor England and inspired my decision to study early modern literature and history. I would like to thank my parents, Mark Lodine and Gerel Goodman Lodine, for reading to me, encouraging my intellectual pursuits, and supporting my academic career. I am also thankful to my

x Acknowledgments

grandparents Wally and Nancy Lodine, who fostered my love of learning and educational goals from the time I was a child. Although they are no longer on this earth, their influence on my life remains powerful. Lastly, I would like to thank my immediate family members for their patience with me as I pursued this project. Jason, thank you for being proud of me and loving me. Darby Leigh and Hannah, thank you for attending my conferences, for watching Shakespeare performances with me, and most of all, for being my friends.

A WEAK WOMAN IN A STRONG BATTLE

I

Introduction

n his 1635 collection of sensational tales of crime and punishment, John Reynolds includes the fictional execution of Caelestina, whom authorities beheaded and subsequently burned for her role in the murder of her father, Captain Benevente. In this moral tale, Caelestina, a young Italian lady, spends the night prior to her execution “in prayer, still grieving for her sinnes and mourning for this her bloudy offence and crime.” When brought to the place of execution, her demeanor is “very humble, sorrowfull, and repentant, and with many showres of teares” she begs forgiveness of her family. Then, following tradition, Caelestina requests prayers from the audience, and “when her sighs and teares so sorrowfully interrupted and silenced her tongue, as she recommending her soule into the hands of her Redemer, whom she had so heynously offended, shee with great humility and contrition, kneeling on her knees, and lifting up her eyes and hands towards heaven, the Executioner with his sword made a double divorce betwixt her head and her body, her body and her soule; and then the fire (as if incensed at so fiery a spirit) consumed her to ashes, and her ashes were throwne into the ayre, to teach her, and all the world by her example, that so inhumane and bloudy a daughter, deserved not either to tread on the face of this Earth, or to breathe this ayre of life.”1 While Reynolds’s rendering of Caelestina’s story has no factual basis and is set in Italy, this narrative reflects early modern English understandings of how condemned women should behave on the scaffold. Caelestina here exhibits traits commonly associated with virtuous and repentant women. She is sorrowful, which is verified by her tears and sighs; humble, as signified by her kneeling posture; and devout, as shown through her belief that God will save her soul, though not her body. The focus in Reynolds’s story of Caelestina’s execution is twofold. First, the reader encounters the emotions of the condemned woman and receives numerous hints of her regret and repentance, both through the words she states at the scaffold and through her body language. Second, we confront her body; her head is removed, and her remains are burned so that they can serve as an example of the wages of sin. Reynolds, though, does not leave the reader simply with the image of Caelestina’s burning corpse. Instead, he notes the sorrow “of all who either knew or saw her” death and celebrates her godly repentance at the scaffold: “Thus albeit this wretched and execrable young Gentlewoman lived impiously, yet she died Christianly.”2 Reynolds’s narrative, although fictitious, accurately echoes contemporary reports of women executed in England during the early modern

2 Introduction

period. While authors of narratives about women’s executions typically offer mediated and often fabricated reports of these events, the stories they tell reflect cultural concerns and audience expectations about women’s bodies, speeches, and deaths. Execution narratives focused on women, although adhering to many of the generic expectations found in accounts of men’s executions, also reflect significantly gendered approaches to the ritual. Women were punished by different methods, tried for different crimes, and occasionally allowed to escape punishment because of their pregnancies. Women’s suffering and executed bodies, as signs of innocence or guilt, demonic possession or sainthood, were scrutinized and interpreted by their contemporaries, who paid attention to their demeanor, beauty, grotesqueness, agony, and fear. Sometimes women’s executed bodies continued to offer messages to the public through the display of body parts or skeletons, which extended their punishments beyond their deaths. Like other prisoners facing execution, women frequently gave last dying speeches3 that followed early modern feminine rhetorical practices such as using self-­­deprecating language and framing themselves as modest. Positioning themselves as repentant, humble, and submissive to male authorities, I argue, rather than weakening these women’s final words and posthumous reputations, allowed them a limited form of agency. Indeed, only by adhering to the expectations of early modern society—which demanded that they behave modestly, show signs of sincere repentance, and subject themselves to the authority of their husbands and monarchs—could women expect their words to carry weight and their deaths to be considered honorable. Observance of ritual conventions and gendered expectations also provided women with a chance to speak about, and sometimes critique, their social positions. Indeed, female victims frequently addressed their fellow women from the scaffold, offering them warnings of the dangers of promiscuity, disobedience to their spouses, and failure to tame their tongues. Yet many of these speeches as well as the comments of pamphlet writers and witnesses also offered subtle criticisms of the treatment of women at the hands of abusive husbands, unscrupulous masters, and unsympathetic parents. In short, women (and those writing about their executions) often used the space of the scaffold as a pulpit from which they exposed hypocrisy and encouraged submissive behavior as a route toward greater subjectivity. The accounts of women’s executions, when examined closely, suggest that the words spoken at the scaffold and the representations of their bodies worked together to help audiences understand these spectacles not only as the punishments of deviant women but also as opportunities

Introduction 3

for women to form subject positions. The idea that the scaffold provided women with a chance to speak publicly and with authority is not new. Nor is the argument that narrative reports of women’s executions at times prompted questions about gender equality and highlighted the often-­­unequal treatment of women under the law. Scholarship over the last three decades has expanded our understanding of women’s executions during this era, particularly regarding their positions as subjects. Frances Dolan, emphasizing the “generic slippage” of executions, notes that the scaffold, as a liminal space where the victim is both an actor and acted upon, offered women “possibilities for agency.”4 Because the public execution ritual called for a speech, condemned women were, according to Dolan, represented as subjects in extant accounts and often used their final moments to fashion themselves as authors of their own endings. Yet, for Dolan, female martyrs and execution victims were allowed to truly assert themselves only by transcending “bodily suffering.”5 Thus, Dolan, while arguing that executions provided female offenders with a chance to challenge social constraints by communicating publicly, contends that the painful bodily experiences and sexuality of these women were omitted from textual accounts. Other scholars of early modern women have also suggested that public executions and the narratives written about them provided women (or at least those writing about them) with an opportunity to control the crowd’s reactions to their deaths and a chance to voice societal concerns. Sandra Clark, in her study of female crime and punishment, explores the relationship between gender and agency in popular publications.6 She provides examples of execution narratives in which women displayed their agency by refusing to confess, expressing defiance, explaining extenuating circumstances that led to violent acts, and exhibiting exemplary penitence at the time of their deaths. Like Clark, Randall Martin also finds that the gallows confessions of female offenders varied greatly, noting that “although submissive or terrorized co-­­operation between the condemned and state authorities was not uncommon, active defiance was not unusual either.”7 What interests Martin most, though, is how news accounts of these women’s crimes and executions shifted over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, resulting in greater attention to female voices and a new focus on questions of gender equity. Martin contends that most accounts of women’s executions contained “resistance in some form of reserved personal memory and agency,” meaning that many narratives emphasized women’s subjectivity by highlighting not only their final words but also the fraught circumstances of their individual lives.8 Martin believes that by giving voice to women’s concerns about unequal

4 Introduction

legal treatment, abuse from spouses, and coerced sexual activity, these sources eventually “generated a paralegal culture of equitable perspectives” that altered the legal handling of women’s crimes.9 My work extends the arguments put forth by Dolan, Clark, and Martin by recognizing that the specific rhetorical practices used by women (or those penning accounts about their executions) allowed them to carve out a limited type of subjectivity. As I will show, though, such agency and the recognition and celebration of a woman’s last dying speech necessitated the woman’s adoption of conventional gendered language, physical posturing, and behavior. Indeed, the forms of language and bodily gestures expected of women dying on scaffolds are mirrored and upheld by examining other fraught situations early modern women found themselves in, such as appearing before courts, writing letters of petition regarding economic disputes, composing literary texts, and managing households. Employing a modesty topos, or language that positioned them as properly subservient, modest, and self-­­effacing, allowed women and their narrators opportunities to question the treatment of women by their husbands, lovers, and parents and sanctioned executed women’s ability to serve as godly examples to witnesses and readers.10 Just as important, though, and often working in conjunction with women’s use of the modesty topos in their execution speeches, are the descriptions of women’s bodies. Exploring representations of women’s bodily demeanor, attractiveness, physical deformities, and sexuality within these narratives provides a more complex view of how women (and their authors) could transform their executions into moments of limited agency. Of interest, then, are the accounts not only of women’s words but also of how women undergoing execution and those who recorded and responded to these events used the female body to carve out subjectivity. The body of the female execution victim, I argue, functioned as a text, meant to be read by the audience. It could signify feminine modesty and repentance or imply deviance and monstrosity. Building on the growing body of work about women’s bodily agency during this time, as well as contemporary understandings of beauty, deformities, and ugliness, I investigate how representations of women’s bodies impacted the execution narratives. On the one hand, positive depictions of women’s bodies on the scaffold allowed for greater female agency and acceptance of women’s words. On the other hand, authors using discrediting strategies focused on the less desirable characteristics and grotesque understandings of women’s bodies to cast doubt on their speeches, including their repentance and claims of discrimination or mistreatment.11 These different readings of the female body on the scaffold point to not only the importance of the rhetorical oral

Introduction 5

strategies used by women and those who reported on or fictionalized their deaths but also the significance of women’s rhetorical bodily choices at the time of execution. Women’s physical bodies on the scaffold provided witnesses and readers with clues about how to interpret their mortal ends. For the audience, the way women comported themselves and how they looked told a story either of proper penitence or of rebellion against social norms. Although traces of bodily agency are often fragmentary, many accounts do mention the attire, facial expressions, gestures, and demeanor of executed women and interpret subtle shifts in body language as signs of interior regeneration, innocence, or damnation. This is important because it revises our understanding of the execution ritual and reveals that the female body, rather than being absent from the execution narrative or simply an object of governmental control, was a vital component of the ritual and something that both women and those writing about them could use to influence reactions to individual executions. Furthermore, the reception of women’s speeches and the allowance of their claims to greater legal and social equity depended on their enactment of accepted female behavior, which was constructed both verbally and physically. Performances of modesty and repentance, then, rather than simply replicating contemporary ideologies of patriarchal control, opened up a space for women and those writing about them to subtly critique the treatment of women in early modern England. The sources used in this study vary greatly in terms of reliability, audience expectations, purpose, and genre, but taken together these documents reveal how individual women and their authors deliberately framed execution narratives. During my research I found narratives about women’s executions across genres—both those obviously fictional and those purporting to provide readers with true or eyewitness accounts of events. The reasons for relying on not just chronicles, court proceedings, and official accounts but also on literary source materials are twofold. First, consulting representations of female victims in a wide range of sources broadens our understanding of how authors represented these women as well as the differing ways that women comported themselves on the scaffold, as each genre focuses on different aspects of the event. In her discussion of the source materials consulted in her study of petty traitors, Frances Dolan notes that official records during this time period are often pithy and lack detail, while broadsides, ballads, and pamphlets more frequently provide in-­depth information about women’s motives, final speeches, and emotional states.12 Dolan convincingly argues that consulting a range of sources provides researchers with a “composite story” that

6 Introduction

fills in the details of individual lives and deaths, allowing for a more complete picture of a woman’s movement from crime, to court, to gallows.13 I also found that different types of sources offered contrasting vantage points from which to view female execution victims. Ballads, for instance, provide affective depictions of women’s experiences on the scaffold and often represent the victim speaking directly to her readers, while martyrologies focus on religious symbols and rhetoric. Additionally, comparing differing accounts of these events in various genres can reveal the biases of authors and the expectations of the audience. By using evidence from different generic treatments of women’s executions, then, a more comprehensive understanding of the legal, religious, and emotional aspects of these women’s experiences emerges. Second, literature and the actual lives of individuals at any given point in time exist in an interpenetrating relationship. In the early modern period, the accounts of executions within works alleged to be truthful, like pamphlets, chronicles, and martyrologies, often influenced fictional works and vice versa. Indeed, a number of dramatists based their plays on contemporary accounts of crimes, executions, and martyrdoms. Thomas Heywood’s A Warning for Faire Women (1599), for example, drew heavily from Arthur Golding’s 1573 pamphlet concerning Anne Saunders’s murder of her husband and subsequent execution. Likewise, John Webster and Thomas Dekker, in their historical play The Famous Historie of Sir Thomas Wyat (1607), rely on the historical record to reimagine the executions of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley. Many early modern texts we would classify as fiction, from poems to ballads to plays, were shaped by accounts of real-­life martyrdom, murder, and execution. The awareness of the connections between the theater and public executions is also evident in the words purportedly spoken from the scaffold by execution victims, which include comparisons between the stage and the scaffold, and the condemned’s references to the performative nature of the execution ritual.14 David K. Anderson additionally points to the language of martyrdom that many individuals condemned to death for nonreligious reasons employed in their final moments, noting “the common sacrificial ground shared between stage and scaffold.”15 In short, literary sources, even though deemed unreliable or fictitious, provide useful information about how society operates and how people in the past thought about death, the ritual of execution, and the roles of the participants. Chronicles, such as those written by Raphael Holinshed and Charles Wriothesley, provide broad, comprehensive descriptions of British history and often include reports of the executions of well-­known individuals, such as queen consorts, noblewomen, and noteworthy religious

Introduction 7

figures like Anne Askew; these accounts were often composed for educated readers with an interest in history. While these works rely on letters, official documents, and eyewitness reports, government censorship or at least some level of state control of these works calls into question the authors’ ability to provide unbiased accounts.16 Therefore, within chronicles, the descriptions of women’s executions often show properly penitent speeches and typically uphold the official governmental position on the condemned’s guilt. Hagiographies offer a different approach to the execution ritual. John Foxe’s famed Acts and Monuments, for example, sought not only to provide a history of martyrdom that extended into the early modern period but also to present readers with examples of how to live and die for their faith. Foxe, in particular, created a work that combined history and theology because he believed that “in these events of the great and simple folk of society the purposes and plans of God are being worked through.”17 The women that Foxe celebrates are presented as examples of godliness and constancy in the face of persecution. His martyrologies not only provide extensive textual accounts of the martyrdom of Protestants but also contain a number of woodcuts depicting the executions and punishments of martyrs, thereby extending the impact of his texts. Foxe’s work became immensely popular and was read by not only the elite but people from all walks of life. As Sharon Achinstein notes, “aside from the Bible, this work was the key printed text that shaped English Protestantism.”18 Foxe’s portrayals of female martyrs, while sympathetic and commemorative when depicting executions, often focus more on the religious debates these women engaged in than on their final speeches before the pyre, making it difficult to determine the range of last dying words offered by these women, although Foxe’s works frequently convey the physical sufferings of female martyrs through both textual and visual representations. In addition to Foxe’s influential accounts of Protestant martyrs, Father John Mush’s biography of Margaret Clitherow offers an account of Catholic martyrdom.19 As Megan Matchinske notes, this narrative, written by a man without the input of a woman, “represents one of the most common forms of early modern women’s history available to us” and can be characterized as “an unauthorized biography.”20 Mush’s purpose in composing his text included the encouragement of recusant Catholics and the construction of an ideal female Catholic martyr whom he represented in his text as “humble, soft-­spoken, and obedient.”21 Clitherow’s characterization throughout the narrative, though, seems to negate the assertive qualities she probably needed in order to die for her faith. This stereotypically femininized portrayal of a female victim highlights a reoccurring problem

8 Introduction

with nearly all extant sources relating to women’s executions in this time period—the mediation of the female experience through the male writer. In addition to chronicles and published accounts of martyrdom, contemporary news pamphlets provide detailed, although frequently embellished, accounts of women’s executions. Often written by prison chaplains who visited with and attempted to elicit confessions from the condemned, pamphlets typically appealed to mass audiences through sensational titles and through the use of woodcuts depicting murders or executions. Peter Lake even suggests that the pamphlets bordered on the “pornographic” and aimed “not merely to edify but also to shock [and] titillate.”22 Yet, as Sandra Clark notes, most of these accounts have been studied in terms of their “strong emphasis on the providential” and their didactic goals, including upholding the governmental authorities as agents of the Divine and encouraging proper behavior from citizens.23 However, even though pamphlets typically included moralizing lessons about the dangers of sin and the importance of confession, and frequently incorporated sensational elements, such documents are also, as Randall Martin notes, “more complex semiotic artifacts,” due to their ability to present readers with legal and forensic evidence of crimes and to correct other less factual reports about the same events.24 Additionally, David Stymeist contends that many crime pamphlets, because they “directly depict inequitable and class-­ biased legal decisions were instrumental in the development of increasingly sceptical and resistant public attitudes towards the judicial status quo.”25 Martin’s work, in particular, assesses contemporary crime pamphlets about female violence and finds that “discourses of equity supplied readers with the conceptual means of plausibly explaining, and in certain cases partially justifying or mitigating, the motives of women.”26 In analyzing pamphlets about female criminals, Stymeist likewise asserts that, at least in Henry Goodcole’s murder pamphlets, the author humanized the women convicted of witchcraft and murder by including details about their domestic lives and physical abuse, as well as the unique circumstances that motivated them to commit crimes.27 Such pamphlets proved popular in sixteenth-­­and seventeenth-­­century England, offering a wide range of perspectives on individual women’s scaffold behaviors, including stereotypical confessions, as well as defiant denials of wrongdoing. Indeed, these texts often provide readers with a more nuanced way to understand the social and individual contexts that led to women committing crimes.28 While pamphlets provided contemporary news and publicized the legal process involved in the punishment of female offenders, broadside ballads often ventriloquized the speeches and experiences of executed women. Typically, such publications were aimed at the least literate

Introduction 9

members of society, for not only were they cheap but they were also usually set to music and frequently delivered to audiences via song. Often displayed in inns and taverns, crime ballads became increasingly standardized in the seventeenth century as particular tunes became associated with scaffold speeches and violent crimes.29 Una McIlvenna notes that the tune “Fortune My Foe,” for example, was “used more than any other tune for ballads about murder, disaster, and execution.”30 Moreover, ballad printers usually commissioned woodcuts to aid in their sale and make these documents more accessible to the nonreading public. Common images in ballads included the execution of the condemned and “a woman stabbing a man at the prompting of a nearby devil,” which offered prospective readers titillating images of crime and its consequences.31 Usually didactic, ballads warned readers and listeners to adhere to societal rules while lamenting the downfall of the condemned; the sensationalism and exaggeration of these accounts, however, often inspired criticism, even during the early modern period.32 Finally, the messages of repentance and sadness, and sometimes the inclusion of social critique, were offered in first-­­person voice, which may have allowed “the singer of the ballad to assume momentarily the persona of the condemned and thus experience vicariously the thrill of fear at the thought of imminent death.”33 Ballads, in particular, often highlighted the suffering body of the executed woman and attempted to elicit audience sympathy. In his consideration of female impersonation in ballads, Bruce Smith finds that “there was a persistent association of ballads with women” that offered singers “an intense first-­­personhood.”34 Importantly, this identity was understand as embodied, due to the female singer’s focus on “hands, knees, bosom, but above all a mouth.”35 Due to the embodied aspects of these works, Christopher Marsh argues that at least one popular ballad writer, Thomas Deloney, created broadsides that articulated compassion for women. Although Marsh notes that “it is difficult to know whether Deloney was driven by a sympathy for the opposite sex . . . or by an eye for the main chance during an economic crisis,” his mediated female voices allowed women singers and audience members to “wrestle with the problems caused by their unequal status.”36 Finally, a number of literary sources drew from contemporary accounts of women’s executions, commented on the spectacle of a woman’s death on the scaffold, or considered the treatment of the female body after death. These include poems and plays about the beheadings of prominent women like Lady Jane Grey and Mary, Queen of Scots, domestic tragedies about husband murderers and their ignoble ends, and elegies written in response to watching women’s executions. While these sources

10 Introduction

are obviously less valuable as documentary evidence, they do reflect societal views of women’s executions and reveal the pervasive contemplation of these events. Dramatic representations of executions often sought to elicit emotional responses from viewers, including the typical cathartic release of fear and pity, but also sometimes feelings of anger toward and disapproval of the condemned. Additionally, plays that dealt with recent historical events such as the executions of women often sought to raise questions about contemporary issues, including the fears of women who rebelled against their husbands, the nature of the power of earthly rulers, and the meanings of religious martyrdom. Not all of these dramatic works offer simple didactic messages to their audiences; rather, many literary works that include women’s deaths or executions subtly critique the treatment of the victims and often provide executed women with some amount of limited personal agency. It should also be noted that while writers usually reported on the charges, crimes, arraignments, and deaths of executed women, they sometimes omitted these women’s final speeches and physical demeanor. Therefore, for many individual women, records of their behavior on the scaffold or pyre and the final words they uttered remain unknown. However, some authors did include statements made by the condemned women prior to their deaths, provide details about final gifts they made to family members, or mention the treatment of their bodies before, during, and after their executions. And these narratives reveal the wide range of responses from not only the executed women but also from those who wrote about them and recorded their last words. Although constrained by convention, which dictated moralistic and didactic messages, women’s speeches could, through careful use of verbal and physical language, facilitate the formation of female subjectivity. This study examines the execution narratives of women from roughly the start of the Reformation (1530) until the Restoration (1660). The reasons for focusing on this time period are threefold. First, attitudes toward death and execution altered considerably with the start of the English Reformation. As numerous scholars have noted, the early modern period witnessed a significant shift in the human accommodation of death.37 The Protestant denial of purgatory, in particular, impacted how individuals imagined the afterlife and rendered the living’s intercession for the dead ineffectual.38 Instead of focusing on intercessory prayers for the dead, ministers began to exhort mid-­­sixteenth-­­century individuals to look toward their own faith as they contemplated the deaths of loved ones. Such new approaches to death are seen not only in the denial of purgatory and the condemnation of intercessory prayers for the dead but also in the

Introduction 11

approaches to funeral and mourning rituals. The Tudor versions of the Order for the Burial of the Dead, for instance, focused not on mitigating the soul’s torment in purgatory but instead on delivering the individual to his or her eternal home, be it heaven or hell.39 The new focus on the individual’s religious conviction that stemmed from the English Reformation also transformed execution practice. As Katherine Royer points out, the scaffold ritual was no longer viewed simply as retribution that stressed the infamy of the offender but instead as a chance to return the condemned to the Christian community before their death.40 Therefore, execution narratives in the post-­­Reformation period began focusing on the repentance of the individual rather than on the punishment, which typically had dehumanized criminal offenders. This increased attention to the executed individual also meant that the words, actions, physical demeanor, clothing, and disposal of the bodies of these condemned people mattered to early modern audiences as markers of guilt, innocence, and sincere repentance. Thus, after the Protestant Reformation, chroniclers, hagiographers, and pamphleteers often include details about bodily comportment and final speeches left out of earlier execution narratives. Second, while reformed theologians encouraged and government officials often facilitated the criminal’s scaffold speech because it could show proper contrition and signify the condemned’s renewed connection to the earthly and heavenly community, the sixteenth century also witnessed the creation of stricter and more expansive laws that carried the death penalty. Notably, Henry VIII’s decision to break with Rome met with public resistance and rebellion, which in turn resulted in the passage of new and more severe treason statutes.41 Additionally, concerns over maintaining social order in the wake of significant religious and economic changes resulted in the passage of new criminal laws during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.42 A number of these laws directly impacted women, including the infanticide statute of 1624 and the numerous witchcraft acts passed by the Tudors and Stuarts, which many scholars believe unfairly targeted women.43 One final reason for limiting this study to between 1530 and 1660 is the changes to the execution narrative and the cultural understandings of the same that occurred following the Restoration. The English Civil Wars ushered in an era of political and religious instability, which in turn caused individuals to question ideas like divine providence, the sincerity of scaffold confessions, and eventually the violence of the execution ritual itself.44 Beginning in the last half of the seventeenth century, individuals no longer offered a predictable last dying speech that included confession, prayer, and submission to the law. Instead, a significant number

12 Introduction

of men and women during the long eighteenth century died defiantly, drunkenly, and desperately.45 The treatment of female criminals also changed as cultural attitudes shifted. As Frances Dolan points out, the female petty traitor, once a popular subject for pamphlets, ballads, and drama, became absent from printed texts. Instead, domestic tyranny and the threat of Catholicism became more pressing concerns during the last half of the seventeenth century.46 According to Susan Amussen, the fear of unruly and rebellious women, which had concerned Tudor and early Stuart authorities, lessened considerably, and “disorderly women fade from our view.”47 By the eighteenth century, most of the female offenders who came before the judges at the Old Bailey were accused of property-­­related crimes like shoplifting or stealing from their masters, and while some were executed, most received lesser sentences, including branding and transportation to the American colonies.48 Thus, I focus on a particular cultural moment when narratives about female executions appeared more frequently in publications, and audiences carefully analyzed their final words and deeds as markers of truth, defiance, and limited subjectivity. While this study occasionally analyzes the British legal system, cultural beliefs about women’s speeches and bodies, and the executions of their male counterparts, my central focus is representations of women as they made their way to the scaffold, offered final speeches, and died. While the most famous women who suffered execution during this period are familiar to us—Anne Boleyn, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Lady Jane Grey—many female offenders from all levels of society died at the gallows, scaffold, or pyre during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their crimes included a wide range of capital offenses: high treason, petty treason, heresy, infanticide, and witchcraft. Although numerous scholars have explored the topic of public executions in early modern England, gender has seldom been the focus of these works. A few notable exceptions exist, but to this date, no book-­­length study has scrutinized solely how sixteenth-­­and seventeenth-­­ century execution narratives depicted condemned women.49 This work aims to provide a more thorough assessment of the recorded accounts of women’s executions from 1530 until 1660 that includes not just an examination of their speeches but also an exploration of their rhetorical practices and the depictions of their bodies. Although governmental authorities tried to control the interpretation of women’s executions, numerous authors and the women themselves often subverted such attempts. These moments of subversion, though, frequently relied not on open defiance or overt assertions of selfhood but instead took the form of embracing verbal communication and physical postures deemed feminine and godly by early modern society. By behaving modestly,

Introduction 13

comporting themselves as weak and repentant, and expressing deference to patriarchal figures, women (and those writing about their final moments on the scaffold) negotiated their positions as agents. Indeed, those women who operated within acceptable structures that encouraged obedience to male family members and state authorities gained the right to speak more openly at the moment of their deaths. This study begins with an examination of the execution narrative and its generic conventions. The first chapter outlines the development of the early modern execution ritual by looking at not only medieval English executions but also the ars moriendi tradition, or art of dying texts, that shaped the narrative. Exploring the expectations for condemned individuals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals that while speeches usually followed a formulaic pattern, execution victims could and sometimes did deviate from the expected script in subtle ways. Although authors of execution narratives deemed the final speech important in many accounts, the demeanor of the victim, their clothing selections, and the treatment of their physical remains often provided supplementary and individualized meaning to the ritual. Part of the individualized message of executions was based on the gender of the victim. Chapter 2 explores the different methods used to execute early modern women as well as the laws that targeted female offenders and the relative privacy given to elite women executed under the Tudors. Class often determined the location of the ritual for women, as noblewomen beheaded in the sixteenth century died in enclosed spaces, and the audiences at these events were limited to other elite members of society. The gender of the condemned also determined the method of execution; women convicted of petty treason were burned—a penalty not suffered by men convicted of the same crime. Burning, although purported to be a less invasive and more humane method of execution, actually reflected the cultural fear of women’s crimes against their earthly lords and masters—their husbands. Additionally, burning destroyed women’s bodies, which authorities hoped would instill fear in other insubordinate women watching such spectacles. Executions for infanticide were also predominantly fates faced by women. In accounts of such crimes and their punishments, the authors consistently framed the condemned women as unnatural and monstrous and often linked them to promiscuity and bodily deformity. Deferential treatment of women did occur, but often, as this chapter reveals, the merciful handling of specific cases relied on the involvement of elite male members of society. In Chapters 3 and 4, I continue to explore the female body, paying attention to how contemporary accounts portrayed executed women

14 Introduction

physically both before and after their deaths. In contrast to earlier work by Frances Dolan, who contends that early modern representations of female executions evade the physicality of women’s death, I argue that women’s bodies are present and significant in many accounts. Hagiographies, in particular, often focus on women’s physical suffering through both text and woodcuts. These accounts, because of their attention to the female figure, legitimatize women’s bodies as signs of spiritual power and constancy. Like records of female martyrs, pamphlets and broadsides also highlight women’s bodies, both during and after execution, often focusing on the suffering that women endured not only as proof of their ability to spiritually transcend the punishment of their bodies but also as moments that could be interpreted as evidence of a woman’s guilt, repentance, or innocence. Although the display of the executed female corpse occurred less frequently than did the display of the male corpse, a significant minority of women’s bodies were dissected or displayed after death, thereby becoming visually driven rhetorical artifacts the public might read as warnings against the dangers of female-­­specific sin. Finally, a number of accounts note the beauty or ugliness of executed women; some depicted the capital punishment of women as erotic experiences, while others read deformities or unattractiveness as markers of guilt and spiritual deviance. While the first four chapters describe the ritual of execution, explore how gender determined methods of execution, and analyze the depictions of the female body on the scaffold, in chapters 5 and 6, I turn to the speeches of these condemned women. Obviously, not all speeches were recorded, and many of the extant records offer highly stylized versions of confessions and prayers that ventriloquize the female voice; however, these accounts hold value as representations of cultural beliefs and practices. Both chapters outline strategies employed by the authors reporting on these events and by the women at the scaffold. In execution narratives, women frequently address their female audience members, offering their compatriots cautionary messages about female behavior. Sometimes, though, these executed women’s speeches subvert generic conventions by critiquing the treatment of women by husbands, lovers, and parents. Some executed women even refused to admit guilt or used differentiation to justify their crimes. Examples of these strategies, drawn from chronicles, pamphlets, and broadsides, reveal women’s efforts to maintain control over their executions and the resulting narratives. In the final chapter, I continue my discussion of women’s execution speeches by exploring the rhetoric of modesty and women’s use of self-­­ deprecation at their deaths. While hagiographers interpreted the perceived innate weakness of women at the scaffold as evidence of a

Introduction 15

spiritual strength prompting reliance on the Divine, accounts of defiant women equated unrepentant and deviant behavior with an essential weakness of character. Women themselves seem to have frequently employed expressions of modesty, used self-­­deprecation, and framed themselves as humble at the scaffold. These strategies allowed women to speak from a position of authority and to fashion themselves as models of exemplary scaffold behavior. In fact, I argue that while the authorities allowed—and even encouraged—women to speak, execution victims needed to adhere to conventions when providing scaffold speeches. Therefore, while subtle defiance and social critiques occur in many speeches, women typically positioned themselves as modest and repentant in order for audiences to accept their words and deem their deaths good. Perhaps most importantly, these execution narratives offer tantalizing insights regarding contemporary conceptions of the female body. In particular, the body of the woman dying at the pyre or on the scaffold was a site of contested meaning, negotiated by the victim herself as well as those witnessing and reporting on the ritual. Social ideas about women’s inferiority, interior secrets, and affective responses influenced the representations of them as execution victims. These textual and visual images suggest that women’s guilt, innocence, repentance, and adherence to or rejection of accepted norms of female behavior were written on their bodies as they readied themselves for death. Indeed, in a world that linked corporeal experiences and expressions to individual mental and spiritual states, the woman’s body became evidence of interior virtue or vice. Important changes in beliefs about women’s bodies occurred in the last half of the sixteenth century, and exploring these cultural shifts allows for greater understanding of how their contemporaries understood women’s bodies, which can usefully be applied to female execution victims. According to Mary Elizabeth Fissell, while medieval women’s reproductive bodies were viewed as possessing “miraculous qualities,” due to their identification with the Virgin Mary’s role as mother to Jesus, the early modern woman’s body, and the womb in particular, came to be defined as a site of contagion that could infect not only the physical but also the mental health of women. Women experiencing pregnancy and childbirth, rather than being celebrated as replicating the good work carried out by the Virgin Mary as was common in the medieval era, instead became associated with Eve, who was cursed to suffer during childbirth for her transgressions. Similarly, medical and religious literature following the Protestant Reformations suggested that the womb could “go bad,” causing women to give in to violent urges and adopt unmotherly habits. In particular Fissell explores the cases of mothers who became insane and murdered their own

16 Introduction

children, and witches who abandoned their own offspring in favor of animal familiars.50 Anxieties about the interior female body and its influence on women’s behavior, she notes, pervaded early modern cheap print and led to increased efforts to instill female obedience and chastity.51 Indeed, throughout execution narratives focused on women, the descriptions of physical responses and body parts are scrutinized for markers of deviant or properly repentant behavior. Thus, execution narratives frequently note the monstrous bodies of defiant female victims and sometimes describe these women as animalistic and deformed. Looking at the bodies and speeches of women on English scaffolds allows for a greater understanding of how early modern gender was constructed both by women and by those writing about them. When reproducing the speeches and actions of executed women, authors closely examined the bodies and words of the condemned in order to authenticate the ritual and argue for either the acceptance or rejection of these women’s positions as agents worthy of consideration and subjecthood. Some of these women are portrayed adhering to the divinely sanctioned order through their passive acceptance of death and their deferential physical posturing. Textual records show that often the same societal prescriptions that regulated women’s behavior at their executions allowed them to verbally and physically refashion themselves as agents. In fact, performing obedience and modesty at the scaffold offered women opportunities to influence witnesses and readers, just as performing defiance and active rebellion met with resistance from the audience. Textual accounts of executions, however, rely not just on the words and actions of the condemned as interpretative tools; assessments of executed women’s physical beauty, deformities, and unattractiveness also occur frequently in execution narratives. These discourses about the body reveal that early modern society saw a connection between sinfulness and monstrosity, and between godliness and beauty, particularly in relation to women. Additionally, while the perceived weaknesses of women often met with criticism from those reporting on their deaths, many women, echoing the behavior of female martyrs, embraced the notion of female weakness and used it to their advantage. Anne Saunders, executed in 1573 as an accessory to her husband’s murder, prayed at the foot of the gallows that Jesus would assist her, “a weake woman in a strong battell,” in her final moments.52 By referring to herself as a “weak woman,” Saunders alluded to the generally accepted idea of the female gender as the lesser sex as determined by women’s perceived physical limits and mysterious reproductive bodies. But the battles these women fought on the scaffold—the desire to be heard, to be

Introduction 17

represented as spiritually redeemed, and to be remembered positively— play out in these narratives. Writers consistently praised women who successfully performed modesty and repentance both physically and bodily, while denigrating those who refused to enact penitence and subservience. In short, these accounts reveal the subtle ways that women and those writing about them could through words and behavior represent acceptable as well as objectionable female subjectivity at the scaffold.

1 The English Execution Ritual in Early Modern England

T

o understand the early modern English execution ritual more fully, it is important to explore the history of these spectacles beginning in the medieval era and to show the continued reading of the suffering body as text throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholarship over the last fifty years has focused primarily on the last dying speeches offered by the condemned as well as the struggle for narrative control of the ritual, often engaging in more limited analyses of the bodies of execution victims. Historians and literary critics frequently consider narratives about early modern English executions as dominated by the final speech of the condemned, while reports of medieval executions are overshadowed by the physical body of the victim. Words spoken from scaffold tell us a great deal about how individuals approached death and punishment; however, the rhetorical moves employed by the condemned—not only those spoken, but also those physically enacted—must be brought into the conversation. While many scholars note the possibility that execution victims took part in shaping the meaning of the ritual through their words and clothing choices, the way that victims comported their bodies, their facial expressions, and the textual depictions of their suffering bodies attest to the power of the body to signify more than just its status as an object of punishment. Indeed, the body of the condemned remains important in early modern accounts because it, like the reported speeches, showed that victims could use more than just words to create and alter meaning within the confines of the ritual. The most widely circulated approach to executions views these rituals as a function of state power over the body of the condemned but fails to fully take into account the ways that bodily movement and reports of physical posturing could subvert the central message of the event. Michel Foucault’s theories as outlined in Discipline and Punishment (1975), establish executions as solemn occasions wherein the state inscribes its power on the body of the criminal and enforces confession and repentance. The political display of the tortured body and death of the condemned, according to Foucault, affirmed the power of the sovereign through “a policy of terror,” meant to reassert the monarch’s power over the physical bodies of his subjects.1 Likewise, the last dying speeches of the condemned and the subsequent textual accounts of the ritual worked to authenticate

20 Chapter 1

the sentence of the law.2 Furthermore, for the ritual to instill meaning, a crowd of witnesses needed to be present to understand the terror of the procedure and verify its truth, thus becoming agents of the monarch.3 Not all scholars, though, view the body on the scaffold as simply an object of state power.4 In their study of executions for religious treason, Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue that when individuals were executed for religious crimes during the early modern era, the scaffold often became a space of unstable meaning. Focusing on Catholic martyrs during the reign of Elizabeth I, Lake and Questier note: “When the Elizabethan state confronted the threat of Catholicism it sought to distinguish between religion and politics, treason and faith, but the nature of that very distinction, compounded by the conventions and demands of the last dying speech, left events on the scaffold open to a number of competing interpretations. The result was an inherently unstable event, a species of dialogue, a partly scripted, partly extemporized series of exchanges between the Catholic victim, the secular and clerical representatives of Protestant authority . . . and the crowd.”5 Thus, the scaffold became a site of competing narratives where different actors tried to define and disseminate ideological meaning, primarily through the final speech. Lake and Questier posit that the executions of Catholic martyrs in particular provided the condemned with an opportunity to defy the earthly monarch and subvert the religious rhetoric employed against them. For Catholic martyrs, outward manifestations of defiance and denials of physical pain usually featured prominently in their execution accounts, or at least those penned by religious sympathizers. Lake and Questier note that many Catholics resisted their Protestant confessors at the scaffold by praying in Latin rather than English or by offering more overtly defiant speeches before their executions.6 The scaffold therefore offered not only the crowd but also the condemned individual and the pamphleteers a chance to disseminate meaning through skillful verbal and bodily rhetoric. While the possibility of defiance and deviation from the accepted script existed and sometimes occurred, most of the time, as P. J. Klemp notes, the execution ritual itself rarely became “a contested site,” as the majority of victims provided a formulaic speech, the crowd gathered to witness, and the government ensured that the sentence was carried out. Instead, the interpretations of these events became the site of conflict, which is shown through the differing narrative accounts of executions, the broadsides and pamphlets composed in response to the events, the treatment of the bodies of the executed, and sometimes the performance of plays that staged the executions of the condemned.7 Indeed, most recent scholarship on the execution ritual tends to investigate the diverse and

The English Execution Ritual in Early Modern England 21

wide array of individuals involved in creating meaning from the execution ritual. One of the key players to create meaning, of course, was the condemned individual, even though the textual accounts of executions and deaths are often unreliable, biased, and sometimes deliberately misrepresentative of the condemned’s final words and actions. Yet, as Katherine Royer notes, the early modern period experienced a shift in the execution narrative, which permitted the condemned to be positively remembered and reinserted into the Christian community. And this shift, she believes, allowed execution victims to challenge the state and “construct alternative identities,” including “contrite sinner, regretful traitor, heroic martyr or joyful saint” and, later in the long eighteenth century, “defiant rebel or unrepentant reprobate.”8 Such self-­­fashioning, while constrained by the execution ritual, is clearly expressed in the written accounts of the events through not only the behavior and clothing of the condemned but also their rhetorical choices and use of their physical bodies.9 Royer’s study suggests that the body of the condemned functioned not just as a passive recipient of spectacular justice. Instead she correctly argues that scholars need to “look beyond the body on the scaffold as simply the object of [the] state’s power to do violence and see it as a text upon which was written a message specific to the circumstances.”10 For Royer, though, only the living body of the condemned mattered for the early moderns. While noting that “the bodies of the condemned, both dead and alive, had been read in the late medieval narratives as the text of the crime,” Royer argues that execution narratives in the sixteenth century and beyond “required a living, breathing body.”11 Those awaiting execution, she contends, used their bodies to communicate a lack of fear, spiritual salvation, and control of the ritual, but once the axe had fallen or the neck had snapped, bodies lost their power to tell a story. Instead, Royer posits that the events that transpired on the scaffold become more important than the crimes committed, the corporeal punishment endured, or the posthumous disposal or use of the criminal’s body. Yet, while this assessment may be true regarding the executions of some male victims, I contend that even after death the bodies of executed women remained objects of considerable speculation for witnesses and readers. The corpses of female execution victims in not only historical records but also in literary sources continued to function as signs. The cadavers of female witches were often searched for marks that signified pacts with Satan, while the severed head of Lady Jane Grey in Webster and Dekker’s historical drama inspires her husband to face his own execution with bravery. Additionally, the penalty for women found guilty of murdering their husbands involved not only their deaths

22 Chapter 1

but the destruction of their physical bodies. Burning, in particular, marked the murderous female body as abhorrent, its value shifting from a sign of potential motherhood and desirability to a pile of ashes. Authorities and audiences expected both men and women in England during the early modern period to adhere to specific physical and verbal rituals when undergoing public execution. Like all government-­­controlled public events, executions demanded set actions and speeches, the terminology of which is important to establish before exploring women’s executions as unique subsets of the whole. Many contemporary writers compared the execution ritual to the public theater, equating the crowd with dramatic spectators and portraying the condemned as the central actor in a tragedy who provided a final oration to a rapt audience. These formulaic expectations, which had their basis in both earlier execution rituals and the ars moriendi tradition, or the medieval “art of dying,” are worth outlining here before moving on to consider the role gender played in the proceedings and subsequent narratives. EXECUTIONS IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

The execution rituals of medieval European peoples began with the separation of the condemned from society, which included imprisonment and the imposed wearing of demeaning clothing on the way to the place of execution. Thus, while the convict heading to the gallows would sometimes wear clothing that symbolized his or her nobility, often the “symbols of magnificence [were] reversed,” causing shame and possible ridicule.12 The condemned were also sometimes forced to wear the apparel of their social inferiors or don humiliating hats or crowns.13 In some instances, the victims were wrapped in the hide of a freshly slaughtered ox to immobilize and further demean them.14 Furthermore, to signify the individual’s removal from society, he or she would also be dragged or led to the scaffold, rather than being allowed to control the process by riding on horseback. Occasionally “tormentors dressed as devils” attended traitors on their way to executions, and in some instances trumpets and horns were played, announcing the upcoming execution.15 Thus, the body of the condemned and the treatment of the same functioned as an important sign. Witnesses read these physical spectacles as material evidence of guilt, shame, and, often, markers of the specific crimes for which individuals were condemned. Public executions in medieval England—especially of aristocratic male traitors—usually involved the shameful removal of rank through both outward symbolism and bodily destruction.16 Although the

The English Execution Ritual in Early Modern England 23

condemned traitors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries typically confessed their sins prior to execution, their words on the scaffold are often absent from medieval chronicles. In fact, most accounts of executions during the late Middle Ages, according to Royer, “dehumanized the condemned, reducing him to a body that served simply as a symbol of his crime.”17 For individuals facing execution during this era, deportment often seemed to matter more than words. Sympathetic accounts of late medieval executions—those rituals judged as proper deaths—stressed the remorseful demeanor of the condemned rather than their final words. However, as other scholars note, executions did include formulaic rituals that “could be read as a rite de passage, from the state of life and the status of a noble political adversary to death,” and that this shift was symbolized through the body and behavior of the condemned.18 While the religious preparation for death that many early modern English accounts allude to is often missing from medieval narratives, it seems that some nobles were afforded a chance to make their peace with God prior to their executions or to consider their deaths as spiritually, if not socially, redemptive.19 It should be noted, additionally, that according to a number of scholars, the medieval view of punishment included elements later deemed important to early moderns. Rather than considering punishment simply a deterrent to crime or a show of government force, medieval Western Christians often also associated the bodily suffering of the condemned with the purging of sin, the ability of the victim to share in the suffering of Christ, and the symbolic reconciliation of the criminal to society.20 Moreover, as Mitchell Merback notes in his study of medieval and early modern punishment, executions allowed the audience to preview the agonies they might suffer in either purgatory or hell and thus consider the state of their eternal souls.21 Yet, while the physical pain of the executed and the sight of blood may have provided religious meanings to the viewers of the ritual and, later, the readers of medieval chronicles, the lack of the individual voice of the condemned cannot tell us much about their repentance, hope for a good death, or final thoughts as they awaited death. Indeed, medieval chroniclers typically expressed little interest in the final words or physical posturing of the condemned awaiting execution. These narratives focus instead on the punishment of physical bodies, often describing the method of execution and the public display of the condemned’s body parts. In The Chronicle of Lanercost, for instance, numerous executions are described, including that of the legendary Scottish knight, William Wallace, who, in 1305, was “drawn and hanged, beheaded, disemboweled, and dismembered,” his entrails burned, his head placed on London Bridge,

24 Chapter 1

and his arms and feet in English and Scottish towns.22 This method of execution and the placement of Wallace’s severed body parts carried symbolic meaning. As Sarah Tarlow and Emma Battell Lowman point out, beheading signified Wallace’s “outlaw status,” disemboweling his blasphemy, dismemberment his sedition, and the public display of his limbs and head attested to the criminal corpse’s ability to deter others from treasonous activities.23 The medieval execution’s reliance on symbols allowed the audience to understand the ritual, but accounts focused more on the outward aspects of the individual and the crimes he or she committed, rather than on the condemned’s contrition. As Royer argues, significant changes occurred in the sixteenth century, and execution narratives began to focus on the psychological state of the individual awaiting death.24 In response to the attention placed on the man or woman experiencing punishment, the ritual became more elaborate, and the final words spoken at the scaffold took on greater meaning. The execution ritual and the printed accounts of these events became, in short, a type of performative genre, with specific roles for the government, the audience (both those viewing the proceedings and those reading about the events), the writers who composed accounts of executions, and, of course, the condemned.25 Many of the elements that made up the genre stemmed from the medieval understandings of executions, but the accounts of sixteenth-­­and seventeenth-­­century hangings, beheadings, and burnings include new elements, of which many scholars view the last dying speech as most important. Olga Kubińska argues that the later English execution narratives tended to focus on the scaffold speech and the individual executed rather than messages about state power. Observing that the title pages of popular pamphlets often contained direct references to the condemned and his or her confession and execution, Kubińska notes that “their focal point shifted to the dying words of the convict and, consequently, they finally refashioned the very essence of discourse unfolding the context of executions.”26 Yet, while the words of the victims frequently became the centerpiece of early modern execution narratives, the body of the condemned continued to tell a story both before and after death. EARLY MODERN ENGLISH EXECUTIONS

The execution ritual began as soon as the condemned entered prison. Like the medieval approach to execution, imprisonment physically separated the victim from society. During the early modern period, the prison also became a place where the individual contemplated sin and death,

The English Execution Ritual in Early Modern England 25

and hopefully decided to repent of their sins. The condemned were not expected to come to repentance alone, though. Instead, prison chaplains or Visitors, some employed by the government and some volunteers, actively sought to assist the condemned through regular visits and calls to repentance and spiritual renewal. Henry Goodcole, a London chaplain, visited Ludgate and Newgate prisons during the years 1620–41, not only to hear the testimonies of the condemned but also to secure their confessions and repentance and later to pray with them at the foot of the scaffold. Goodcole subsequently used his experiences with execution victims as the basis for a number of pamphlets that highlighted his attempts to bring the condemned to repentance as well as his surprisingly circumspect narratives of their stories.27 Although not all of the condemned accepted the assistance of Goodcole or other ministers, the presence of the minister in the prison and at the scaffold became commonplace during this period. While the accounts of medieval executions often mentioned the shameful clothing the condemned were forced to wear, early modern execution narratives about aristocrats regularly emphasized the sumptuous clothing choices of these individuals. Extant accounts mention the types of fabric worn as well as the colors selected. These descriptions of garments, while seemingly trivial to modern readers, meant a great deal to contemporary audiences. As Maria Hayward notes in a recent study of the clothing choices of the condemned, how these individuals expressed their innocence or guilt, their relationship to the monarch, and their altered social position “can be seen in the types of garments and accessories that they wore,” as well as “how they used colour, fabric type and fur.”28 Similarly, Royer stresses that the inclusion of clothing in execution narratives beginning in the sixteenth century marked an important shift in the ritual, because descriptions of victims’ dress allowed for both the proliferation of a noble posthumous reputation and an opportunity to craft an identity on the scaffold for themselves, their audiences, and posterity.29 The colors chosen present further evidence of the pageantlike aspect of the scaffold. In a world filled with intricate and symbolic markers on clothing, books, livery, and artwork, the hues of their costumes and the types of fabrics used held specific meanings for the Tudor and Stuart elite.30 In a study of early modern portraiture, Robert Tittler points out that the colors used in heraldic painting were “few, largely pure and heavily symbolic: white standing for cleanliness, purity, and joy; black, inter alia, for prudence and humility; and red a symbol of blood . . . and of bravery.”31 Not surprisingly, the three main colors selected by nobles facing execution were black, red, and white. In addition to denoting humility, black signified (as it does for us today) death and mourning and seems to be the color

26 Chapter 1

most frequently chosen by the condemned.32 The prevalence of black in these accounts suggests an attempt at religious modesty but also marks the condemned as possibly mourning their deaths and asking the audience to participate in this grieving process.33 While clothing provided some of the condemned with a chance to make a statement regarding their class status and reflect on their upcoming demise, the speech given prior to execution has often been considered the most important element in accounts of early modern executions, and one that was available to all (not just the nobles).34 A number of scholars have usefully outlined the conventions of the last dying speech, among them P. J. Klemp, who notes that by the mid-­­seventeenth century these statements usually included the following: a greeting to the gathered crowd; a statement of English identity; an assertion of loyalty to the reigning monarch; an affirmation of faith (usually involving a declaration of adherence to the Church of England); an admission of guilt (whether that be guilt for the crime for which he or she was condemned or a more general statement of everyman’s sinfulness); a declaration of the judgment’s fairness; a request for forgiveness; a call for the audience to pray for her or his soul; and the recitation of a final prayer.35 Nearly all of these elements are typically present in early modern scaffold speeches, but, as we shall see, the expectations for women making these speeches differed in significant ways. On the scaffold individuals were expected to “die well,” which meant properly penitent, assured of their salvation, and loyal to the monarch. In addition, audiences expected to see the condemned individual exhibit bravery and a lack of anxiety. By performing well, the condemned individual not only upheld his or her dignity but maintained the family honor and sometimes, in the cases of aristocrats, the continuation of his or her heirs’ positions and property ownership.36 The most important aspect of the execution and the crux of the experience, according to most scholars, rested with the final speech. The scaffold confession provided the condemned “a model of expected behavior to help him [or her] through [the] ordeal.”37 These speeches generally followed a set pattern during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which varied little in extant accounts. First, the individual would address the crowd directly, welcoming the audience and reminding them of the reason for the occasion. Often, the executed used nearly identical wording. Anne Boleyn, for instance, began her 1536 last dying speech with the greeting “Good Christian people, I am come hither to die,” while Thomas Cromwell, who was executed in 1540, said, “I am come hither to die and not to purge myself.”38 According to pamphlets and chronicles, not only upper-­­class individuals but also

The English Execution Ritual in Early Modern England 27

lower-­­class people offered similar phrases at their executions. Anne Saunders, executed for conspiring to murder her husband in 1573, greeted witnesses by declaring, “Good people, I am come hither to die the deathe, whereunto I am adjudged, as worthely & as deservedly as ever died any,” thus echoing the formulaic opening used by aristocrats in the past.39 After the obligatory greeting, the condemned typically expressed guilt and sinfulness. Often, they did not actually admit guilt for the crimes for which they had been convicted. Nearly everyone, however, expressed a general sinful state. As Richard Wunderli and Gerald Broce point out, “Most felons denied the specific crime with which they were charged but confessed to Everyman’s sins for which all men deserve to die.”40 Lady Jane Grey, for instance, who attested her innocence, still gave credence to her general sinful nature: “Notwithstanding, I have offended Almighty God, for that I have followed over-­­much the lust of mine own flesh, and the pleasure of this wretched world, neither have I lived according to the knowledge that God hath given me, for which cause God hath appointed unto me this kind of death, and that most worthily, according to my deserts.”41 Of note here is that Grey, whether she believed her sentence justified, stated that for her sins she deserved to die. Such language permeates accounts of early modern executions. Even the lower and middle classes used similar language. John Bodey, a Catholic academic who was executed in 1583 for denying Elizabeth’s position as supreme head of the Church of England, refused to admit any wrongdoing in regard to his religious faith but did acknowledge that he had offended the queen by “using unlawfull games, excesse of apparel, and other offences to her lawes.”42 However, while their contemporaries seemed to believe their protestations of sinfulness and general guilt, to modern people such confessions “sound transparently false.”43 In fact, a number of scholars have attempted to determine why the condemned insisted on their guilt and often expressed their allegiance to the law that sentenced them to death. According to Lacey Baldwin Smith, the condemned individual’s compliance with the “scripted” speech stemmed from the use of physical coercion, contemporary values about societal good, and internalized obedience to the state and the Divine.44 As Mervyn James notes, no response other than submission was possible at the scaffold “if events were structured in terms of a law which required the response of obedience, and whose instrument was the crown, the king being ‘but a servant to execute the law of God.’”45 Such assessments, however, view the condemned as merely passive participants in the ritual. Instead, many individuals used their final moments as an opportunity for self-­fashioning. One way that some victims

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constructed an identity at the scaffold involved recounting events of their lives—both positive and negative. Although not all individuals spoke about their personal histories, some described military exploits, celebrated their religious influence, and articulated their professional accomplishments. Edward Seymour, beheaded for treason in 1552, spoke at length to the crowd about his personal impact on the spread of the Protestant faith in England, “whiche so long as I was in autority, I have always diligetly set forth unto you.” In fact, Seymour argued that through his influence “the state of Christian religion, seameth to drawe most nere unto the fourme and order of the primative churche.”46 Seymour was not the only individual to offer a reminder of his work on behalf of his religious convictions. A number of condemned Protestant nobles used the scaffold as a platform for encouraging the proliferation of their faith, particularly the availability of the Bible in the vernacular. While using their dying confessions to attest to their faith suggests the personal importance some individuals placed on their own spirituality, it also attests to their need to remind the crowd of their achievements in a world where religion and politics often became conflated. Some of the condemned, though, admitted to their crimes and presented themselves as public examples of the wages of sin and warned the watching audience to beware of temptations that could lead to murder, treason, or heresy. According to an anonymous account, Humphrey Stafford, at his execution for sodomy in 1607, used his scaffold confession to call on the audience to avoid lesser sins like drinking and swearing lest they lead to sins more “loathsome and unnatural”: “hee out of true and perfect contrition, acknowledged againe that hee had been a greevous offender many and diverse waies and lifting up his voice to the people, prayed that his death might be a warning to all others, to beware how they gave up themselves to wine, swearing, and companie keeping with such as he tearmed good fellowes, which from his youth hee had greatly delighted in, but especially he wished that all men would have a care never to delight in making of men drunk, which, as it should seeme, was the sin his soule then chiefly stood guiltie of.”47 Similar accounts of contrite sinners turning to the Divine on the scaffold are frequent and reflect not only the desire for reinsertion of the condemned into the Christian community but also the English ars moriendi tradition.48 The formulaic ending of the execution ritual, as many scholars have noted, echoed the medieval ars moriendi tradition.49 The ars moriendi, or the “art of dying well,” developed in Germany during the fifteenth century and originally “was popularized by the printing press in the form of books containing woodcuts, individual images that each person contemplated in

The English Execution Ritual in Early Modern England 29

his own home.”50 Early versions of these handbooks, created for the illiterate as well as the literate, consisted of a series of woodcuts, each representing the temptations a dying person would face in their final moments. These religious handbooks offered readers “a well-­defined set of attitudes and gestures which dying Christians were expected to manifest at this, the most solemn and important moment of their lives,” and admonished them to adhere to their faith and make amends to God and their fellow humans, which is echoed by the execution ritual.51 The ars moriendi taught that death was inevitable but also offered comfort to Christians by reminding them of Christ’s sacrifice and reassuring them of their salvation and place in heaven if they prepared themselves with penitence and sincere faith. In practical terms, the ars moriendi tracts and subsequent tradition provided a narrative framework for individuals to prepare themselves for the moment of death not only spiritually but also physically and socially. Indeed, many of these manuals included a theatrical type of staging, similar to the condemned’s position on the execution scaffold, and sought to manage the fears of the dying and those surrounding him or her. Notable English ars moriendi texts such as William Perkins’s Salve for a Sicke Man (1595) and Christopher Sutton’s Disce mori (1600) stressed the communal aspects of a good death. Thus, the individuals who observed the last words and actions of the condemned served not only as witnesses of the law’s power over the bodies of the victims but also as spiritual helpers. Indeed, most of these execution accounts include the condemned’s request for prayers to assist them as they met their ends.52 In addition to the use of spiritual language from the ars moriendi tradition, the condemned also employed body language with specific religious meanings. Many accounts of executions note that the victims of beheadings stretched their arms out as a signal to the executioner they were ready for the stroke of the axe.53 Samuel Edgerton, whose study of mannerist paintings found Christian imagery within visualized beheadings, interprets the outstretched arms of traitors on the block as a symbol of Christ on the cross, and the kneeling position taken by these victims as synonymous with prayer.54 Likewise, a number of sixteenth-­century Protestant martyrs embraced or kissed the stakes used as instruments of their deaths, and one individual burned for heresy during Henry VIII’s reign made a hat of straw to wear for his execution in imitation of Christ’s crown of thorns.55 While the position of the body and the embrace of the instruments of punishment are frequently mentioned in early modern accounts of executions, many narratives also note the countenances of the condemned,

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which witnesses scanned for signs of true repentance and assurance of salvation. The demeanor of the victims, especially their perceived bravery, their ability to smile at witnesses, and the ruddiness of their complexions, signified that they had made their peace with God and therefore no longer feared death.56 At his execution in Edinburgh in 1608, George Sprot, hanged for his part in a plot to kidnap the king, showed physical and verbal evidence of his bravery and contrition. According to William Hart, the lord justice of Scotland, Sprot’s behavior on the scaffold was proof of God’s providence and Sprot’s sincere repentance: “And here it may not be forgotten, that in the uttering of these things his tongue served him verie well, with words readie and significant, his memorie was perfect, his countenance reasonably erect and full of alacritie, without all feare of death, his voice was loud and audible on every part: which was the more strange, because at the times of his examination, as also that very fore-­noone, at the houre of his arraignment, his speech was low and weake; but now so strong, as if God of purpose had given him power to deliver his words in such a maner, that all the people might heare and understand.”57 For Hart, then, Sprot’s ability to speak so all could hear, his “reasonably erect” countenance, and enthusiastic delivery designated him as a repentant sinner and tool of the Divine. Perhaps even more astonishing, Hart relates that Sprot, after telling the audience he would give them a sign verifying the truth of his confession, was able to clap his hands three times after he was pushed off the ladder by the executioner.58 While many execution accounts end with the death of the victims, sometimes narratives include details about the length of time bodies burned, the number of axe strokes needed to decapitate the condemned, the post-­ death dismemberment of traitors, the method of burial, or even the use of the victims’ bodies by barber-­surgeons. Severed heads were often placed on bridges, while dismembered body parts were also displayed in prominent urban locations. These postmortem uses of the body parts of the condemned extended their punishments and served as reminders to the populace of the penalties for treason, murder, and heresy.59 According to most scholars, these spectacles of heads and body parts worked to deter criminal behavior and functioned as symbols of the state’s power.60 Indeed, one contemporary account seems to verify such interpretations. Describing the 1586 executions and posthumous treatment of the corpses of the Babington conspirators, Raphael Holinshed asserts that after the condemned were killed, “their heads and quarters were conveyed away in baskets, to be fixed upon poles and set over the gates of London, that all the world might behold the just reward of traitors.”61 Displayed heads and body parts, though, could be and sometimes

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were interpreted as signs of true martyrdom. Robert Parsons, in his posthumously published A Discussion of the Answer of M. William Barlow regarding the oath of allegiance, reflects on the display of the remains of Henry Garnet, who was executed for his role in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605: “As for the rotting of his head, and flesh upon London-­bridge, there is no reason, that he should have a priviledge above other Servants of God, of whom the Prophet sayd in lamenting-­wise to God himselfe: They have cast the dead bodies of thy Servants for birdes of the ayre to feed upon: and the flesh of thy saintes to be devoured of beasts. If that be sanctity which was wont to be in ancient Divinity consisting in true Catholik beliefe, and vertuous, pious and innocent life; Father Garnet is knowne to have lyved a Saynts life indeed.”62 In this passage, Parsons interprets the treatment of Garnet’s body as evidence of his adherence to the Catholic faith. Parsons was not alone in positively reinterpreting the severed body parts and heads of the condemned. As Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey note in the introduction to their study of medieval and early modern narratives about decapitation, “Latin martyrologies and biblical subjects laid the foundation for vernacular hagiographic traditions that frequently included decapitation as either divine punishment or the method of achieving holy martyrdom.”63 The status of execution victims following their deaths, then, could be read multiple ways. Indeed, the extant narratives, pamphlets, poems, chronicles, and broadsides often provide conflicting information about these rituals, which led to the impossibility of detecting a single meaning or cohesive story.64 Political and religious allegiances impacted the rhetorical strategies employed by the authors of these accounts, as did the writers’ sympathy for the victims, the class status of the condemned, and even the ability of the observers to hear, remember, and write about the events.65 Yet, in these extant accounts and even in the literary works engaging with public executions, writers consistently sought to frame meaning through their attention to two different aspects of the ritual: the rhetoric employed by the condemned and descriptions of the body undergoing mortal punishment. In particular, as I will show, authors focused on the female body undergoing execution as a legible text containing spiritual messages. By deciphering and interrogating her face and body, witnesses and recorders sought to render visible the guilt, innocence, repentance, or monstrousness of the woman facing execution. While the writers who recorded and published the speeches of the condemned played an important role in the dissemination of the execution narrative, spectators at public executions also participated in the ritual and its interpretation.66 Although Leigh Yetter notes that details of crowd reactions to early modern executions are sparse, we can catch glimpses

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of the audience.67 Exact numbers of attendance are difficult to estimate, but witnesses often noted that the crowd was sizable: at the 1615 hanging of Catholic priest John Ogilvie, for instance, the condemned seemed amazed when “the throng of people was great,” and when Mary Smith was hanged for witchcraft in 1616, the pamphlet writer observed “the audience of multitudes of people gathered together (as is usuall at such times) to be beholders of her death.”68 Audience reactions to early modern executions also varied considerably. At the 1596 execution of Roderigo Lopez, Elizabeth I’s former physician who was found guilty of trying to poison her, spectators were particularly cruel to the condemned man. When Lopez swore that “he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ,” his claim—due to his Jewish ancestry—prompted “no small Laughter in the Standers by.”69 Spectators also sometimes disrupted the ritual by talking during the victim’s final speech or acting in a disorderly fashion.70 Some accounts, though, stress the sympathetic reactions of audience members. A broadside depicting the execution of husband-­murderer Alice Davis notes that as the condemned woman was drawn to her execution on a hurdle, “weeping eyes I past,” suggesting that executions didn’t inspire just feelings of righteous anger and hatred but also sympathetic emotions from the crowd.71 In conclusion, accounts of executions in the early modern period echoed medieval practices and ideologies, but authors as well as the condemned developed individualized approaches to the ritual. Not only speeches but also demeanor, clothing, and the methods of execution offered messages to the crowds gathered to watch and to the readers who later encountered these events in print. These spectacles of deathly punishment did not just show the power of monarchs over the bodies of their subjects; instead, executions provoked a variety of responses and involved numerous participants, all of whom had a stake in the ritual. A man’s performance on the scaffold was often viewed as a test of his manhood. As Anthony Fletcher notes, men in this era were expected to learn and enact “a social role, founded upon self-­mastery and rational behaviour.”72 Thus, when providing their final speeches and suffering public execution, men sought to display manly courage by speaking audibly, appearing cheerful, and refraining from tears. Men who did cry on the scaffold were typically castigated as “weak, base or hypocritical,” while those who held back their pain and offered a brave face were praised.73 Walter Ralegh’s last dying speech and bravery on the scaffold, for instance, met with admiration from many of those who penned narratives about his execution. Indeed, in the numerous accounts of Ralegh’s execution behavior, witnesses and chroniclers consistently commended the victim’s

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extraordinary composure, which, for them, indicated his manliness. According to one author, Ralegh’s “voyce and courage never failed him,” while another noted that Ralegh behaved “without any shew of feare or affectation.”74 Likewise, the anonymous writer of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Sceptick or Speculations (1651) reported that Ralegh “had no sooner mounted the scaffold, but with a chearfull Countenance, and undaunted Look, he saluted the Companie.”75 Hagiographers from both sides of the religious divide also employed similar language, describing male martyrs as courageous, stoic, and manly when undergoing martyrdom.76 Additionally, early modern society allowed men greater latitude when speaking from the scaffold. Although an exemplary case, Ralegh’s gallows confession included “implicit criticism of the monarch and a justification of the right to freedom of speech.”77 The final speeches of a number of male pirates in this era also reveal a similar tendency. As Claire Jowitt argues in her study of pirate executions, many of these men subtly defied the authorities through not only speeches that questioned English justice but also by donning elite clothing despite their lower-­class status.78 In short, audiences judged men’s execution behavior not only on their displays of repentance and godliness but also on their show of manliness, which included a lack of fear, an upright carriage, a loud voice, and masculine eloquence. Like their male counterparts, the women who underwent capital punishment during this period were not all passive recipients of governmental justice; instead, many used their final moments to fashion themselves physically and rhetorically as deserving of remembrance. Their behavior on the scaffold, however, often differed from that typically observed in male victims, as rather than presenting themselves as fearless and bold, many women sought to frame themselves as modest and virtuous. Often, reports stressed the weakness of female victims as a means to engender sympathy and critique contemporary social and legal practices. Martin, in his exploration of the narratives surrounding female murderers in early modern England, suggests that authors increasingly began to portray women as victims of the unfair treatment of husbands, lovers, and parents. He outlines the ways that popular printed accounts often provided details about extenuating circumstances that he believes eventually led to greater legal equity for women. Exploring a wider range of narrative accounts, including dramatic works, poetry, hagiography, and chronicles, we find a similar pattern, which can extend our understanding of women’s positions in early modern England. Within these accounts, women and those writing about their experiences facing and suffering execution often sought to negotiate the understanding of the ritual. While authors did frequently provide details in these accounts that allowed for a more

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nuanced consideration of female crimes and punishments, the women themselves often adapted their behaviors to ensure a more positive gloss of their situations. By enacting characteristics, attitudes, and physical postures deemed proof of virtuous femininity, many women facing execution sought to carve out a limited subjectivity that allowed them to critique social gender norms, inspire religious devotion, and even ensure a positive posthumous reputation.

2 Gendering the Execution

I

n order to analyze the representations of executed women’s bodies and speeches, it is important to understand the gender-­specific ways English authorities legislated and carried out women’s executions. Although fewer women than men were executed in the early modern period, fears surrounding female rebellion against male authorities and concerns about women’s rejection of their positions as obedient wives and attentive mothers were reflected both in the application of the law and through execution methods. Women convicted of killing their husbands, for instance, suffered considerably harsher punishments than men who murdered their wives. Burned on pyres and rarely strangled prior to their horrific deaths, women guilty of mariticide became spectacular examples of the authorities’ attempts to uphold patriarchal control. Likewise, laws enacted during this time to combat the problem of infanticide targeted unmarried women, which not only punished mothers suspected of killing their offspring but also functioned as a method of social control. By executing and shaming women deemed promiscuous and unnatural, the governmental authorities hoped to set boundaries on women’s sexual expression and enforce greater obedience among women observing such spectacles of punishment.1 These gendered differences in legislative and punishment practices not only reveal that women were conceived of as physically other than their male counterparts but also show the association of specific crimes with women. In short, the executions of women, which relied on the physical destruction and shaming of the female body, acted to enforce strict boundaries between proper and improper female behavior. In cases of petty treason and infanticide, for instance, women were punished, not just for murder, but for transgressing their proper gendered roles as either obedient wives or chaste unwed women. Thus, the laws that punished female criminals sought to police women’s positions in society, and the public nature of such executions served to provide a spectacular message to female witnesses at these rituals. Yet, as many scholars have noted, public executions and the news pamphlets and other documents that reported on these events also called into question women’s subject position and the justice of the law. Scholarship over the last three decades has expanded our understanding of women’s crimes and executions during this era, particularly in regard to their positions and agency as subjects. A number of scholars,

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though, continue to debate whether early modern women were treated more sympathetically by the authorities than their male counterparts due to the assessment of women as “weaker vessels” and passive rather than active criminals. Frances Dolan, in Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (1994), argues that the early modern period experienced a “crisis of order,” or fear of women disrupting the patriarchal and hierarchal systems that defined relationships in Tudor and Stuart England. Her study, which explores not only legal documents but also popular pamphlets and literary engagements with female crimes and punishments, equates the extreme penalties meted out to women as a direct result of these fears. For Dolan, criminal women’s agency was “construed as wholly negative,” and the exoneration of women for crimes like infanticide occurred only when the legal system denied them individual agency.2 Illustrative of her assessment of female criminal subjectivity, Dolan finds that depictions of women convicted of murdering their husbands typically “present violence as one means by which women could be constituted and recognized as subjects in the early modern period.”3 Presenting women as violent agents, though, Dolan suggests, eliminated sympathetic responses, because such works showed wives and daughters as usurping male authority and performing nonfeminine roles.4 One of the only ways that the murderous wife in popular literature induced sympathy, according to Dolan, was when she was depicted as a passive victim of an abusive husband.5 Thus, female agency was nearly always linked to deviant behavior by women. While agreeing with Dolan’s central claim that many female criminals were represented as subjects only when they disrupted the social order, Sandra Clark, in Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (2003), argues that some narratives provide women with agency by focusing on their confessions and repentance.6 Of particular interest to Clark are the accounts of penitent women who cooperate with the authorities by offering moralizing sermons prior to their executions. Clark interprets the last dying speeches of these women as their attempts—or the attempts of those writing about them—to reveal how less powerful and often-­abused women tried to assert control over their fraught circumstances. Randall Martin takes this argument further, arguing that crime pamphlets, while sometimes framing criminal women as deviant disruptors of the social hierarchy, also sought to provide sympathetic and logical causes for women to murder their spouses, children, or masters. Indeed, Martin believes that popular literature like broadsides actually helped shape a growing discourse regarding the equity and agency of women under the law by providing readers with more-­nuanced accounts of female

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crime and positioning women as agents working against unequal and unfair treatment.7 While each of these perspectives adds considerably to our understanding of early modern women’s crimes and executions, this study broadens the conversation in three significant ways. First, while commonly accepted ideas about gender during this period often propagated views of women who committed crimes like murder and infanticide as monstrous and dangerously deviant, the intervention of powerful men in these cases could shift the narrative and allow either for greater sympathy for the female victims or in some cases, a lesser sentence for women accused of serious crimes. Secondly, building on the scholarship of Martin and Clark, I point out that the reception of women’s speeches and the allowance of their claims to greater legal and social equity depended on their enactment of accepted female behaviors. The performances of modesty and repentance, rather than simply replicating contemporary ideologies of patriarchal control, actually opened up a space for women and those writing about them to subtly critique the treatment of women in early modern England and allowed women to perform as agents. Third, while condemned women’s positive positioning as subjects both before and after their deaths relied on their performances of proper feminine virtues like modesty and repentance, some authors deliberately coded deviant women as bestial, grotesque, and ugly in order to construct negative exemplars of female behavior at the scaffold. These representations of women who performed contrary to accepted social prescriptions also worked to enforce and monitor women’s roles by highlighting the dangers of overtly rebellious conduct. To understand the unequal treatment of female offenders more fully, though, it is important to look at the different laws impacting women and the gendered application of these laws. English laws targeted the behavior and bodies of female offenders, and penalties for crimes were most severe when women crossed established gender boundaries. Legislation discriminated against women who usurped male authority, engaged in sexual activity outside of marriage, and failed to perform proper maternal roles. Often, while extenuating circumstances led to many of these crimes, popular narratives and legal documents equated such women with monsters or animals and framed them as deviant and grotesque. However, in certain circumstances, sympathy for these female criminals was evoked, which could afford women more equitable treatment, establish their reputations as penitent and godly figures, or protect them from the public gaze. In many cases positive forms of female subjecthood in extant records relied on two factors: the intervention of male authority figures who reframed

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women as deserving of sympathy and the women’s performance of what early moderns deemed virtuous and modest feminine behavior, a theme I will discuss at length in subsequent chapters. PETTY TREASON

Most women executed in Tudor and Stuart England were found guilty of homicide, heresy, or petty treason. The latter offense, in particular, generated considerable public interest, and the cases, trials, and capital punishments of women executed for petty treason were recorded and often embellished in pamphlets, ballads, and plays. Originally defined by the Treason Act of 1351, petty or petit treason was “an inferior form of treason which consisted of the slaying of a person to whom the killer ‘oweth faith and obedience.’”8 In an examination of laws pertaining to women published in 1632, the lawyer Thomas Edgar explained that petty treason occurred “if any servant kill his Master, any woman kill her husband, or any man secular or religious person kill his Prelate to whom he owes obedience.”9 Thus, the crime of petty treason was viewed as a rebellion against the social order and pertained to both domestic and church hierarchies. While the law, however, included three different varieties of petty treason, in practice married women were most frequently charged with and suffered for this crime. The punishment of female petty traitors not only reflected the unequal legal position of women in marriage and in early modern society but also, as Dolan points out, “collapsed the distinction between the two kinds of treason”—petty and high.10 Additionally, the punishment for petty treason differed for men and women. For males, the punishment was less severe than that of high treason. Rather than being hanged, drawn, and quartered, as most non-­noble men convicted of treason were, men found guilty of petty treason were simply hanged. For women, though, the punishment for both high and petty treason remained the same: burning at the stake.11 The law therefore punished women in a more violent manner than men convicted of petty treason.12 Yet burning was also the penalty for a number of other crimes in this period, including heresy and sodomy, suggesting that burning was reserved for crimes deemed particularly heinous and unnatural by early modern people.13 In addition to causing greater pain, burning also allowed for the complete removal from society of not only the evil of the woman being executed but also the evil of her possible offspring. Indeed, in a 1652 pamphlet entitled A Prodigious & Tragicall History of the Arraignment, Tryall, Confession and Condemnation of Six Witches at Maidstone in Kent, H. F. notes that although the witches

Gendering the Execution 39

on this occasion were hanged: “Some there were that wished rather they might be burnt to Ashes; alledging, that it was a received opinion amongst many, that the body of a Witch being burnt, her bloud is prevented thereby from becomming hereditary to her Progeny in the same evill, which by hanging is not.”14 While H. F. remains personally vague as to the veracity of this belief, his account establishes that the failure to fully destroy the body of a witch could lead to the propagation of more witches and suggests that burning allowed for the complete destruction of the condemned.15 As Marisha Caswell points out, execution by burning functioned as more than simply a symbolic reminder of hellfire or a purification ritual that rid the community of a deviant individual. Instead, “there was a need to destroy the body of the offender and in doing so to purify society from the harm caused by the offender’s actions.”16 Women who killed their husbands, according to contemporary understandings of the divine hierarchy, were analogous to individuals who sought to kill the monarch and should pay for their extreme rebellion by having their bodies utterly destroyed. The goal in staging the burnings of women was to deter other wives from choosing the penultimate form of rebellion against their earthly lords. When Mistress Beast was tried for the murder of her husband in 1583, the anonymous pamphlet writer noted that “shee was adjudged (for an example to all lighte and lascivious women) that shee should bee burned.”17 The fear of burning to death, which included the complete destruction of the female body, and the loss of Christian burial rites, authorities hoped, would deter other wives from killing their husbands. INFANTICIDE

Like petty treason, infanticide was typically viewed as a female crime. While in the medieval era church courts usually assigned penance to women found guilty of infanticide, by the early modern period the killing of newborn infants became a criminal offense punishable by hanging.18 Dolan suggests that new laws passed during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I “that attempted to control the rates of illegitimacy and to hold parents responsible for supporting bastards played an important role” in the eventual passage of the 1624 Acte to prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children.19 This act stated that “whereas many lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoid their shame and to escape punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the Death of their Children; and after, if the Child be found dead, the said Women do alledge that the said Childe was born dead, whereas it falleth out sometimes (although hardly is it to be proved,) that the said Child or

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Children were Murthered by the said Women their lewd Mothers, or by their assent or procurement.”20 In its wording, therefore, the act linked infanticide to unmarried and “lewd” women; furthermore, it specified that if any woman gave birth to an illegitimate child and concealed its death, she would be presumed guilty of its murder unless she could produce a witness to testify that the child was stillborn.21 The act therefore shifted the burden of proof to the condemned. As Judith Hudson notes, the 1624 act basically made it “a capital offence to conceal the death of an illegitimate newborn, regardless of whether the child had suffered any malicious action.”22 In most cases the women condemned for the murder of their infants were single, and their children were bastards.23 While various theories regarding the reasons behind these crimes abound, modern scholars believe that most mothers committed infanticide “out of utter desperation, whether economic or emotional,” as the birth of an illegitimate child could cause the loss of work, public shame, and reduced circumstances.24 As Garthine Walker has pointed out, though, the 1624 act actually “had a low conviction rate and convicted women were far more likely to be reprieved and pardoned than they were for any other category of homicide.”25 Indeed, many of these women—both those innocent and those guilty of infanticide—inspired pity, due primarily to the accused’s abandonment by men who had seduced and lied to them. In such cases narratives often stressed the woman’s innocence and lack of agency, thus displacing blame onto men. Yet, despite extenuating conditions and the seemingly low rate of conviction, the majority of popular accounts of women who killed their newborn children offer sensational and extremely negative portrayals of these women. Even Henry Goodcole, who often expressed sympathy for women who murdered their husbands and included detailed information about the spousal abuse that led to such crimes, represented women accused of newborn child murder in a markedly dismissive manner. In Natures Cruell Step-­Dames; or, Matchless Monsters of the Female Sex (1637), Goodcole focuses on the crime and confession of Anne Willis, an unwed woman condemned for infanticide. Providing few details of the case, Goodcole instead simply notes that Willis confessed to killing her bastard child after its body was found in a vault. He then launches a religious tirade against “cruel Monsters of that tender Sex.” Willis’s crime, he contends, is unnatural, and her failure to care for her infant places her lower than beasts who “preserve & foster” their young. Goodcole ends his description of Willis by commanding that she and all other unnatural mothers should be forgotten: “O let therefore the memorial of them perish.”26 Sentiments similar to those expressed by Goodcole are provided in

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the 1634 ballad No Naturall Mother, but a Monster, which ventriloquizes the lament of a woman condemned to hang for infanticide. The unnamed mother, who relates her seduction while in service, explains that she feared losing her employment and therefore hid her pregnancy and smothered her newborn child in the straw. Within the ballad the woman constantly references the unnaturalness of her crime, stressing her actions were “quite against natures law,” and contrasting her lack of care for her child to that of “savage creatures” like the tiger, who is “wonderous tender and loving to her young.”27 Likewise, in the account of Martha Scambler, convicted of infanticide in 1614, the anonymous pamphleteer describes the condemned as “another Caterpiller of nature, a creature more savage then a shee woolfe, more unnaturall then either bird or beast.” Indeed, the author points out that “every creature hath a tender feeling of love to their young, except some few murtherous-­minded strumpets” that he does not even deem women, “for a woman esteemes the fruit of her owne womb,” while “the harlot (delighting in shame and sinne) makes no conscience to be the butcher of her owne seed.”28 Thus, the crime of infanticide is repeatedly described as a monstrous act committed by women who are both promiscuous and devoid of natural motherly feeling.29 These negative and often biased portrayals of women convicted of and executed for infanticide are significant because they often focus solely on the female criminals and fail to take into account the role of the men who impregnated these women and the often desperate situations in which unwed mothers found themselves. Like the burnings of women convicted of petty treason, the executions of women condemned for infanticide were meant to instill fear and obedience in the female population. Punishing the offending woman’s body, though, was not enough. To deter women from smaller sins that could eventually lead to murder meant that condemned women needed to be publicly shamed not only through their spectacular deaths but also through the medium of print. While most publications concerning infanticide depicted the condemned woman as promiscuous and unnatural, there were a few notable exceptions that reveal that public sentiment regarding women condemned for this crime could shift and even sometimes result in an official pardon. Two cases of women who miraculously survived their executions after they were found guilty of infanticide reveal the inconsistent treatment of condemned women. The variations in the narratives concerning these events suggest that while the public often responded sympathetically to such cases, those in positions of authority usually determined the outcome. Thus, when powerful men involved themselves in reassessing

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and reinterpreting infanticide, their opinions mattered more than those of the women involved, particularly if the women were of lower social status. The cases of Anne Greene and Elizabeth Russell illustrate this point. In 1650 Anne Greene, a twenty-­ t wo-­ year-­ old serving girl to Sir Thomas Reed, gave birth to an illegitimate child, described in a later pamphlet as “a span long, and dead born.”30 Although likely that the child was stillborn, and the father, according to one account was “Mr. Jeffery Read Grand-­child to the said Sir Thomas,” members of the household immediately suspected Greene of murdering the infant.31 Swiftly taken into custody and then sent to Oxford Gaol, Greene “passed about three weeks more in continuall affrights and terrours, in a place that was as comfortlesse as her condition,” before being found guilty of infanticide.32 The local authorities promptly hanged Greene, but she revived while awaiting dissection. The anatomists, after “perceiving some life in her, as well for humanity as their Profession sake,” worked to revive Greene and bring her back to health using hot cordials, a clyster, and bloodletting. Meanwhile, the governor and the justices of the peace, described in one pamphlet as “worthy Gentlemen,” determined that her recovery was an act of God and a sign of her innocence.33 The doctors and authorities then petitioned for her pardon, stating that not only was the infant “abortive or stillborn” but also that Greene herself didn’t know of her pregnancy.34 Viewed as an occurrence of God’s providence, Greene’s return from the dead was hailed as proof of her innocence and celebrated by woodcuts, as well as numerous pamphlets and poems written in both English and Latin by a number of eminent scholars, including one by Christopher Wren.35 Eight years later a female servant named Elizabeth Russell met a much different end following her post-­hanging revival. Robert Plot, in his 1677 The Natural History of Oxford-­shire, explains that Russell, found guilty of killing her illegitimate child, was condemned for infanticide in 1658. Executed at Green-­Ditch in Oxford, Russell “hung so long, that one of the by-­standers scrupled not to say, that if she were not dead, he would be hanged for her: hereupon being cut down (the gallows being very high) she fell with such violence on the ground, that it would have been enough to have been the death of many another person, only to have had such a fall.”36 Miraculously, though, Russell failed to die. After being placed in a coffin and carried to a nearby inn to be anatomized, the physicians noticed that she was breathing. Although the surgeons took pains to keep Russell alive by “putting her to bed with another young wench by her,” and even though Russell’s recovery was deemed a success, she was executed a second time and died. Plot believes that Russell did not receive a pardon because she had “no friends to appear for her,” while

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Figure 1. This woodcut depicts the stages of Anne Greene’s miraculous recovery from her hanging, including her execution, the coffin readied for her anatomy, her recuperation in bed, and her prayers at the foot of the gallows. Note the inclusion of a speech bubble declaring, “Behold God’s providence.” Frontispiece from A declaration from Oxford, of Anne Green a young woman that was lately, and unjustly hanged in the Castle-yard [. . .] (London: J. Clowes, 1651), RB 123781, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Anthony Wood blamed one of the bailiffs for the decision to execute her again.37 The young woman’s second execution, though, met with public disapproval, as “the women of Oxford responded to the bailiffs’ actions with abuse and by cutting down the tree from which Russell had been hanged.”38 Thus, while Greene’s recovery was explained as God’s revelation of her innocence, Russell’s return to life was not granted the same interpretation. The different reactions of the authorities to these women point to the unpredictable application of mercy for female offenders, which in these two cases seems based on the public interest in the woman’s fate. Greene became the subject of numerous publications and inspired the composition of many poems; Russell lived to die another day.39 Yet, more importantly, the gender and class of those sympathetic to the accused mattered. Greene had the support of the eminent physicians William Petty and Thomas Willis, both Oxford scholars, while Russell seems to have inspired only the backing of local women. Although these are only

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two cases, it is likely that the leniency and pity shown to women by local authority figures depended heavily upon patriarchal support.40 DEFERENCE TO THE FEMALE SEX?

In cases of petty treason and infanticide, women experienced significant disadvantages both legally and physically. Additionally, after 1575 men could claim benefit of clergy to lessen their sentences for serious crimes, while women remained ineligible for this claim. Benefit of clergy, based on clerical immunity from trials in secular courts, originally allowed men to recite or read the “neck verse”—the first part of Psalm 51—to prove that they were part of the clergy. Later, however, legal authorities allowed all men to claim benefit of clergy and receive a branding or loss of property instead of death. Women were not allowed this benefit until 1624 and then could claim it only for theft crimes under ten shillings. The injustice of the gendered application of benefit of clergy is addressed in Robert Yarington’s 1601 play, Two Lamentable Tragedies and reveals that even sympathetic and nuanced understandings of female crime did not necessarily lead to more equitable treatment. One of the two central plots of the work finds its basis in a real crime that occurred in 1594 when Thomas Merry, a tavernkeeper, murdered his neighbor and the neighbor’s servant boy, and with the help of others, including his sister, hid the crime.41 The sister in Yarington’s play, Rachell, repeatedly expresses squeamishness and guilt after learning of her brother’s crime. When asked to help Merry dismember the victim’s corpse, she brings the knife but tells her brother, “I cannot stay to see, / This barbarous deed of inhumanitie.”42 Despite her revulsion Rachell agrees to protect her brother and not only keeps his secret but also washes up the blood and burns the blood-­stained clothes Merry wore when killing and dismembering his victims. These tasks, undertaken out of a sense of familial obligation, are described by the allegorical character Avarice as Rachell’s expected and loving duty as a sister: “And Rachell doth not wish to overlive, / The sad remembrance of her brothers sinne, / Leave faithfull love, to teach them how to dye, / That they may share their kinsfolkes miserie.”43 Rachell’s decision to put her brother’s welfare above that of the law reveals, according to Lena Cowen Orlin, how some women “transgress despite their demonstrated attempts to honor their obligations.”44 Rachell is not the only character to learn of her brother’s murderous deeds and illegally protect the murderer. Harry Williams, Merry’s servant, also discovers the murder and is bribed by his master to keep silent. Neither of Merry’s subordinates remains free from blame for long; in the

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end, all three individuals are arrested for the murder, but the treatment of Merry’s two “accomplices” further highlights the fraught legal position of women in early modern England. While both Williams and Rachell are convicted for concealing the crime, the outcome differs based on their genders. The figure of Truth sums up their fates: “Williams and Rachell likewise are convict / For their concealement, Williams craves his booke, / And so receaves a brond of infamie. / But wretched Rachels sexe denies that grace, / And therefore dooth receive a doome of death, / To dye with him, whose sinnes she did conceale.”45 Here, Truth pointedly tells the audience that Rachell’s fate is determined not by her decision to hide her brother’s crimes but by her “sexe.” Williams, who as a man is able to recite the “neck verse,” thus suffers only branding, while Rachell is condemned to die. Despite the lack of “benefit of clergy” allowed male criminals, women could receive preferential treatment in some instances. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford note that while civil, ecclesiastical, and criminal law classified women as unequal to men “in moral as well as intellectual capacity,” the administration of punishment did contain “some elements of chivalry towards women as dependants.”46 Such “elements of chivalry” included allowing women to delay their executions due to pregnancy, convicting women of lesser offenses if the punishment was death, and undervaluing goods stolen by women.47 In his study of women accused and convicted of murder in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century England, Randall Martin also found that while the stereotypical portrayals of unruly and wicked women—those who poisoned their husbands or killed their children, in particular—were popular in news pamphlets and broadside ballads, such texts often problematized a straightforward assessment of these women. Martin notes that many accounts portrayed female criminals sympathetically by including details of abusive treatment by husbands, experiences of poverty, and ambiguous evidence presented in specific cases.48 Yet, while these texts did, over time, shape the behavior of authorities toward women accused of crimes that demanded the death penalty and resulted in more equitable legal treatment, it is less clear if they impacted the manner of women’s executions. Indeed, accounts of executions halted due to pregnancy, motherhood, and extenuating circumstances are few. Inconsistencies in the concessions granted to women facing execution also varied considerably, meaning that while some women received more lenient treatment, just as many seemed to have suffered death. Many women in early modern England “pleaded their bellies,” or claimed that they were pregnant, in an attempt to protect their unborn

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children, avoid execution entirely, or stall their eventual deaths.49 According to Ferdinando Pulton’s 1609 treatise on existing criminal law, if found guilty of a capital crime, a woman “may alleadge, that shee is with childe: and then the Marshall or Sherife shall be commanded to returne an enquest of twelve women before the Justices, who being then sworne to examine and trie the trueth, shall take that woman into a chamber, and search and trie whether she be quicke with childe, or not: and if she be found to be quicke with childe, then execution of her shall be staied untill she shall be delivered: But if shee be not quicke with child, she shalbe hanged presently, for it will not availe her to be yong with childe: And yet whether shee be with child, or not, Judgement shall not be delayed, but shalbe presently given against her, that she shalbe hanged: but only the execution of that judgement shal be stayed.”50 Therefore, according to legal precedent, a woman who sought to receive a stay of execution by claiming her belly was examined by a group of matrons to determine whether her claim of pregnancy was true. Even if authenticated by examination, for the stay to be allowed, the matrons must find the woman “quicke with child,” meaning that they needed to feel the fetus moving.51 Of those women who pleaded pregnancy, though, few were actually pardoned during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.52 Instead, many of these women either were found not sufficiently far along in their pregnancies or successfully proved their advanced pregnancies only to be executed following their deliveries. Found guilty of infanticide in 1580, Joan Brooker pleaded her belly, but the women who examined her determined that she lied. Agnes Geary, who was charged with murdering her own child in 1592, also used the same ploy, but a jury of matrons determined that Geary’s claim was false.53 Husband-­murderer Alice Davis, the subject of two popular ballads in 1628, also attempted to plead her belly after she was found guilty, but as with Brooker and Geary, the matrons determined she was not pregnant, and she was executed at Smithfield.54 A number of women during the second half of the sixteenth century pleaded pregnancy and were found to be carrying a child but were executed following their deliveries. In her study of these cases, Carole Levin notes that successful pregnancy pleas often delayed execution by one to two years.55 Anne Saunders, for example, executed for her role in her husband’s murder in 1573, also had her trial and execution delayed due to pregnancy.56 Some records imply that a few women who pleaded their bellies received pardons, sometimes years later. Petronella Brightred, found guilty of poisoning her husband in 1583, pleaded her belly and was pardoned in 1587.57 Likewise, Alice Cowland, found guilty of felony theft in 1550, was pardoned after the judge learned of her pregnancy.58 Other

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records, however, indicate the deferment of female executions due to pregnancy but fail to mention whether these women eventually met their ends at the scaffold or pyre. According to the unnamed author of Three Bloodie Murders, Elizabeth James, an innkeeper’s wife accused of murdering her maidservant in 1613, “was arraign’d and sentenced to her deserved death: but because shee is with child, her execution is put off, till after her delivery,” yet it remains unclear whether James was executed after the birth of her child.59 Accounts of women who received pardons following their use of the belly plea, though, are rare. Most recent explorations of this topic suggest that few women used this plea, and of those who did, a relatively small percentage were pardoned. Most of the time, according to Sarah Butler, pleading the belly only delayed women’s eventual executions.60 Clearly, then, gender played a significant role in the treatment of individuals facing execution. It is striking that the two different possible routes toward pardon—claiming benefit of clergy and pleading the belly—involve assumptions about each gender. The assumption about men is that they can read, while the assumption about women is that they are caretakers of their infants and must protect their fetuses from death. Yet the role of the criminal woman as a protector and caretaker to the infant applies only when she is verifiably pregnant. Once the pregnancy ends or the woman’s possible child is deemed “unquickened,” the possibility of a pardon becomes less likely. Thus, for men, the probability of pardon, usually given without a test of literacy, was ensured, while for women, a reprieve might last only as long as the remainder of her pregnancy, if at all.61 EXECUTIONS OF ELITE WOMEN

While the gender of the condemned individual determined the types of pardons available as well as their treatment on the scaffold, the class of the victims also determined the staging of the ritual. Elite women like Anne Boleyn and Mary, Queen of Scots died not in public spaces but in relatively private locations, which allowed for greater control of the ritual and its dissemination. Furthermore, attendance at these demonstrations of governmental power over the bodies of women who transgressed the boundaries of gender by allegedly committing adultery or plotting the death of the monarch were determined by the status and sometimes nationality of witnesses. Such semiprivate executions served the interests of the state, as they protected upper-­class women from the gaze of lower-­class men and downplayed the role of the monarch in the executions of women. While the executions of lower-­class women convicted of petty treason, witchcraft, infanticide, and heresy were open to the public, those of

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upper-­class women were closed spectacles that only elite members of society had access to. The relative privacy of noblewomen’s executions, however, does not mean that the control of deviant female behavior and the importance of the female body within the ritual mattered less. Instead, although the government restricted witnesses at elite spectacles of punishment, these executions still manifested elements identified in the punishment of other gendered crimes. In particular, the executions of queen consorts, female royalty, and noblewomen not only controlled and punished the bodies of the victims but also established and maintained class boundaries. By limiting the number of spectators at the executions of upper-­class women, governmental authorities ensured that such rituals maintained their solemnity and not only safeguarded the privacy of the women dying but also shielded their husbands and male relatives by closing off their suffering bodies from the common gaze. The execution of Anne Boleyn on May 19, 1536, was the first of its kind in England. As Nadia Bishai notes, “no English queen had been tried and found guilty of treason before,” and Boleyn’s subsequent execution was both unexpected and novel.62 One important aspect of this novelty was Henry VIII’s decision to limit the crowd at her beheading. While women executed earlier in the Tudor period, like Elizabeth Barton and Joan Boughton, met their ends in public places like Smithfield or Tyburn, Boleyn, as queen consort, was executed on Tower Green, located within the Tower of London. Sources, however, disagree regarding who requested the site for Boleyn’s execution. According to The Spanish Chronicle, which was written by a Spanish merchant living in London and has been found inaccurate by many historians, Boleyn herself requested the venue, begging “that she might be executed within the Tower, and that no foreigner should see her.”63 A summary of her trial, though, notes that the specific location of her execution was selected by Henry himself.64 Whoever decided that Boleyn’s beheading would take place within the Tower, the execution set a precedent for later beheadings of elite women. Over the next decades, four more executions of noblewomen occurred on Tower Green: Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (1541), Catherine Howard (1542), Jane Boleyn (1542), and Lady Jane Grey (1554). The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, performed at Forthinghay Castle, was likewise a private affair observed only by a limited number of spectators.65 Those in attendance at Boleyn’s execution in 1536 included select members of society. A list of those present at her beheading is included in Wriothesley’s Chronicle, which evidences the importance of attendance at the executions of high-­ranking individuals and, in particular, their

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interest in this unique event and the monarch’s expectation that elite citizens bear witness to such a demonstration of state power. Wriothesley records that “the Lord Chauncelloure of England, the Duke of Richmond, Duke of Suffolke, with most of the Kings Councell, as erles, lords, and nobles of this realme,” as well as “the Mayor of London, with the Alldermen and Sheriffs, and certayne of the best craftes of London” watched Boleyn’s execution.66 Thus, while her beheading was meant to be a private event, the records indicate that the ritual garnered interest among and the attendance of London’s most notable citizens.67 Like Boleyn, Catherine Howard, the fifth queen of Henry VIII, also met her end at the scaffold on Tower Green. Aware of the importance of the event for London’s elite, Howard spent the night before her beheading in preparation. According to Martin Hume’s translation of The Spanish Chronicle, Howard “asked that the block should be brought to her room, that she might learn how to dispose her head upon it” and then “calmly and smilingly rehearsed her part in the tragedy.”68 Howard’s practice may have helped her navigate her execution the next morning, which was attended by “all the Councilors except Norfolk and Suffolk,” and “even her first cousin, the poet Surrey.”69 Thus, while the executions of female traitors were closed to the general public, they garnered a great deal of interest from the elite members of society and, as evidenced by Howard’s rehearsal of the event, still functioned as performative rituals. The relative privacy of these executions allowed noble female traitors protection from the gaze of the common people, but it also downplayed the role of the monarch in the deaths of their family members and close associates. Henry VIII’s victims, of course, included two of his wives, his cousin, and his second wife’s former sister-­in-­law, while Queen Mary authorized the execution of her cousin Lady Jane Grey, and Elizabeth I likewise sanctioned the death of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. The fear of public backlash as well as the attention to the gender of these condemned women most likely called for a more private space in which to carry out these executions. Elizabeth I, for instance, dissociated herself from the trial and execution of her cousin, Mary. As Paola Baseotto notes, although Elizabeth “was usually present at the opening sessions of Parliament, she did not open the fifth Parliament on 29 October 1586” when the demand for Mary’s death would be made; instead, the English queen remained at Richmond, strategically separating herself from the proceedings.70 Elizabeth also selected the venue for her cousin’s execution, which Lisa Hopkins notes “was the most secluded yet, for it actually took place in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle” instead of Tower Green.71 Finally, Elizabeth and her government attempted to justify Mary’s beheading

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through the publication of pamphlets that depicted Mary “as a wicked, envious and bold woman with no hope of conversion and just one goal in mind: to kill the English sovereign.”72 While the decision, though, to offer elite women comparatively private executions allowed for greater governmental control of the event and may have staved off criticism of the monarch, it also reflected a concession to both the class and gender of the victims.73 Tower Green functioned as a space for the elite. After all, upper rooms in the Tower housed not only noble prisoners but also queen consorts prior to their coronations. Just as the upper echelons gathered to watch the crowning of the monarch or court masques, they gathered to observe the solemn ritual of an elite execution. In addition, though, to connecting these private spaces to the upper-­ class audience, nearly all of the private executions that occurred in Tudor England featured the beheadings of women.74 The relative secrecy of these rituals reflects a concession to the perceived civility of noblewomen and the need to shelter them, even in the moment of death, from the gaze of lower-­class men. Such a view is reflected in the Jacobean play Swetnam the Woman-­Hater (c. 1618), in which Princess Leonida is sentenced to death for disobeying the king and choosing a suitor contrary to his wishes. Prior to the execution, Atlanta the Amazon (actually Leonida’s brother Lorenzo in disguise) begs the king to protect the honor of Leonida, stating: “Since she must die; I beg she may not basely / Be hurried forth amongst uncivill men; / But that your Queene, and I, and some few others, / With any one of your attendant Lords, / May see her execution.”75 While the comedic play never presents the beheading of Leonida, as she is eventually saved from death, Atlanta’s statement reflects the societal desire to conduct the executions of noblewomen in semiprivacy due to the fear that “uncivill men” would watch the executions of elite women. Atlanta here suggests that the executions of upper-­class women should be limited to a select few of noble status out of deference to their class and gender.76 Limiting the crowd gathered to watch elite women lose their heads invites comparisons to the abolition of public hangings that took place in the late nineteenth century. V. A. C. Gatrell, in his exploration of the move from public to private executions, argues that this change in venue “may redeploy, sanitize, and camouflage disciplinary violence without necessarily diminishing it.”77 Gatrell interprets the end of public spectacles of execution not as a humanizing process that upheld the dignity of the individual and revealed increased sympathy for the condemned, but primarily as an effort to exclude the crowd from the event. Plebian crowds, he believed, increasingly mocked, rather than upheld, governmental justice. A similar approach, I believe, is at work in the executions of early modern

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queens and noblewomen. Crowds of lower-­class individuals, in particular men, represented a threat to the administration of the punishment of elite women because, in part, the upper echelons needed to protect their public image. Part of the public image of a noblewoman involved her proper enclosure, which meant that access to the female body needed to be limited. Staging the executions of queens and aristocratic women in the space of a castle’s great hall or within the Tower allowed the Tudor government to maintain greater control of the representation of the elite female form by setting up spatial boundaries. As Laura Gowing notes in her study of the beliefs surrounding women’s bodies in the early modern era, “women’s legal and economic definition through men was made manifest in the body,” which meant that the female body needed to be constrained by male or governmental authority through outward signs.78 As queen consorts, execution victims like Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were bounded not only by their duties to their husband but also by the official purpose of their bodies as maternal instruments that could potentially continue the line of succession. By definition their bodies made manifest the power of the monarch through clothing, jewelry, demeanor, and the social boundaries between them and the lower classes. Likewise, the bodies of Lady Jane Grey and Mary, Queen of Scots attested to their elite status and royal bloodlines. Beheading these women in private not only signaled their protection from the gaze of the common people but also reinstated restrictions on their bodies, which signified the power of the government by limiting the individuals allowed to watch the spectacle of their deaths, and enclosing the event in a relatively private space. Additionally, the control of the rituals continued after these women’s deaths, as most narratives about the executions of elite women are found in official correspondence or chronicles, both of which were typically authorized by the state and disseminated to other elites in England and Europe. Throughout this chapter, I have been suggesting that the ways that women were executed and the treatment of their bodies after death reflected significant gender differences. Women faced an uphill battle for recognition as positive agents. Legally disadvantaged and consistently classified as other, women needed to perform conventional roles in order to receive sympathetic treatment and ensure affirmative representation. Upper-­class women faced execution in relatively private spaces, and attendance at these events was typically limited to nobles, thereby protecting the condemned’s privacy, allaying criticism of the monarch, and enclosing the noblewoman’s body, away from the gaze of commoners. Certain capital crimes and methods of execution were also legally and in practice

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determined by the gender of the condemned. Unlike men convicted of petty treason, for instance, women suffered death by burning, which destroyed their bodies and functioned as a spectacular sign that upheld patriarchal control and responded to fears of wives’ rebellion against their husbands. The punishment of crimes like infanticide also reflected fears of women’s promiscuity and focused on the female body as a locus of power and deviance. Ultimately, the rituals surrounding women’s executions worked to uphold social boundaries and instill religious conformity through fear tactics and attention to the female body as a site of spectacular punishment. However, as we shall see, women and the men who wrote about their deaths could, and often did, work within the confines of the ritual to position these women as controlling and refashioning their final moments. Furthermore, by offering execution narratives that positioned women as capable of serving as exemplary individuals who could offer audiences spiritual admonitions and gendered social warnings, these authors helped to reframe early modern understandings of women and their status as subjects.

3 Martyrdom and the Female Body

I

n early modern England, the executed woman’s body functioned as a text. Scrutinized for markers of proper female repentance, modesty, and even beauty, the woman’s body on the scaffold told a story. In execution narratives, observable demonstrations of bravery such as smiling, speaking with clear voices, and walking upright marked women as prepared for death and, if not necessarily innocent, then sincerely repentant. In some instances, particularly in accounts of martyrdom, writers framed women’s physical sufferings and penitent demeanor as sacramental acts with the power to create new converts or move witnesses to repentance. In contrast, the bodies of women deemed unremorseful, treasonous, or dangerous were often depicted as grotesque and monstrous, which their audiences interpreted as signs of their sinful natures. While many scholars—both literary critics and historians—have examined the execution ritual, and while most agree that the accounts of executions offer competing narratives, few have analyzed how gender impacted the ritual and its retelling, especially in relation to the female body. One notable exception is Frances Dolan, who, while pointing out that scaffold confessions allowed women a unique opportunity to speak publicly, also contends that they were allowed to do so only “on the condition that they are represented as transcending bodily suffering and death.”1 For example, Dolan states that Foxe’s report of Anne Askew’s martyrdom leaves out her gruesome physical death and instead focuses on the martyr’s disembodied speeches as a way to suggest her Christian virtue.2 Executions of women, Dolan suggests, carried sadistic and erotic connotations, which threatened the victims’ chastity and virtue. To get around this issue, accounts of executions omitted the spectacle of violence against the female body, in effect unsexing women, which in turn allowed women to provide the public execution speeches demanded by society.3 A number of recent critics, however, have cast doubt on Dolan’s central argument regarding the textual erasure of the suffering female body. Margaret Owens, for example, points out that Dolan’s extension of her argument to the treatment of women in early modern drama is flawed because many “women’s deaths are in fact graphically depicted in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.”4 Randall Martin also finds Dolan’s theory questionable because of the frequent representations of women’s bodily suffering in contemporary news accounts.5 Although the execution ritual differed for women, and it is true that

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often women were killed by different methods than men—burning for instances of petty treason, for example—execution narratives often highlighted the bodies and physical suffering of women. Contrary to Dolan’s claims regarding early modern writers’ purposeful evasion of the suffering female body, a number of the sensational woodcuts in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments portray the physical deaths of women, and the text itself often focuses on the suffering of the female martyrs.6 Likewise, woodcuts from pamphlets and broadsheets frequently include images of women hanging, being burned at the stake, or kneeling to receive the stroke of the axe, suggesting that the suffering female body functioned as a pertinent part of the ritual. Furthermore, there are accounts detailing the use of female corpses after execution, including the placement of Elizabeth Barton’s severed head in a prominent place in London following her 1534 execution, and the display of the skeleton of Elizabeth Evans in the Barber-­Surgeons’ Hall after her 1635 hanging.7 Contemporary authors also frequently discuss the attractiveness of condemned women at the scaffold, showing that female victims were not unsexed but instead definitely viewed as feminine and sexual, even at the moments leading up to death.8 The condemned woman’s body is present in these accounts, just as the female voice, although often ventriloquized by male authors, remains present in a wide variety of execution narratives. This inclusion of women’s bodies allowed witnesses to construct the victims as godly and repentant or as monstrous and therefore guilty not only of the crime for which they were condemned but also of a failure to show contrition. Ultimately, early modern understandings of the executed female body were based not only on contemporary views of female weaknesses but also on the developing martyrdom tradition, which linked bodies and behaviors to inner spiritual states. Indeed, the increase of state-­sponsored martyrdoms, when accompanied by the growth of print culture, helped establish a set of cultural expectations regarding the executions of women that shaped accounts of those women condemned and executed for civil offenses as well as those executed for religious nonconformity. Martyrdom, then, as both a category and a process influenced not only specifically religious understandings of women but also broader cultural narratives regarding gender and the treatment of the female body on the scaffold. CONTEMPOR ARY UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE FEMALE BODY

The positive reception of female martyrs relied on depictions of these women as strong and constant despite their physical weaknesses. According

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to Steven Mullaney, while such women do speak in defense of their religious convictions and sometimes exhibit defiant behaviors, their actions were not perceived as transgressions of societal gender codes, because their strength was the work of the Divine.9 Yet, as Susannah Brietz Monta notes, Foxe, in his textual accounts of female martyrs, sometimes experiences difficulties explaining their transgressions of gender norms, including disobedience to male authorities and public speaking.10 Part of the way Foxe and other early modern authors got around the problem of female deviance was to foreground the bodies of these women as objects with a message. Although female martyrs deviated from prescribed performances of gender, hagiographers consistently represented their bodies— the final textual and visual images encountered by readers—as powerful tools that linked femininity to godliness. The visual rhetoric of the female martyr’s body relied on contemporary understandings of women’s physical makeup and the possibility of framing the event as sacred performance because of the martyr’s bodily pain. In early modern England, theologians, medical authorities, and legal theorists typically viewed the bodies of women as changeable, unstable, and inferior to those of men. Humoral theory, which structured beliefs about the workings of the human body, privileged the male body. This theory, which was developed by Galen and other early Greek physicians, proposed that the health of human bodies and the emotions of individuals were determined by the balance of the four humoral fluids—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.11 These medical theories provided support for male superiority because men were believed to be hotter and drier than women and thus were more able to function consistently and rationally. Women, by contrast, were viewed as cold and wet, which meant they were more passive, inconsistent, and weak.12 As Gail Kern Paster notes, “the coldness and sponginess of female flesh, relative to the flesh of men, become traits of great ethical consequence by explaining the sex’s limited capacity for productive agency, individuality, and higher reasoning.”13 In particular, the female body was believed to suffer from weakness due to the womb, which could infect women both physically and mentally with disease. As Amy Kenny notes, “the womb and its functions were habitually blamed for an assortment of ailments, suggesting the inherent weakness of the female body could not control her own internal systems.”14 In response to these ideas, the womb became a site of anxiety and was coded by some as a malevolent and mysterious force within the female body. Belief in the humoral makeup of women’s bodies therefore led to a variety of theories about women’s lack of self-­control, inability to govern themselves, and refusal to accept the divinely ordered system of

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the universe, which theologians and scholars believed placed men above women.15 Many contemporary male authors viewed women as prone to unfaithfulness and possessing a willful desire to rule over their husbands. The essayist Leonard Wright, for instance, describes women in his 1589 Display of Dutie as: “light of credite: lustie of stomacke: unpatient full of words: apt to lye, flatter, and weepe: whose smiles are rather of custome then of curtesie: and their teares more of dissimulation then of griefe: all in extreames without meane, eyther loving dearely, or hating deadly: desirous rather to rule, then to be ruled: despising naturally that is offred them: and halfe at death to be denyed of that they demande.”16 Because of these prevailing views on the nature of women, many pamphlet writers and ministers encouraged women to submit to and obey their male family members, particularly their husbands. The Homily on Marriage, read from the pulpits of English churches beginning in 1562, reminded women of their inferiority and duty toward their husbands: “For the Woman is a weak Creature, not indued with like strength and constancy of Mind, therefore they be the sooner disquieted; and they be the more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of Mind more than Men be, and lighter they be, and more vain in their Fantasies and Opinions.”17 A significant minority of writers, though, including both men and women, questioned these prevailing views about women’s natural inferiority, instead suggesting ways that women could reframe their minds as constant and their bodies as acceptable and virtuous. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, a German scholar whose work was regularly translated into English during the early modern period, argued for the value of women as intellectuals and stressed their spiritual equality to men, noting that women, “being subewed as it were by force of armes, are constrained to give place to men, and to obeye theyr subdewers, not by no naturall, no divyne necessitie or reason, but by custome, education, fortune, and a certayne tyrannicall occasion.”18 For von Nettesheim, then, perceptions of women were based not only on innate physical and intellectual weakness, but complicated by unfair cultural practices. Likewise, Thomas Elyot, in his 1540 work The Defense of Good Women, praises women as capable of all the virtues ascribed to men, advocates for their education, and offers historical examples of godly women. While Elyot does encourage the subordination of women to their husbands, he views such behavior as stemming not from inequality, but from divinely sanctioned difference.19 In addition to defending the spiritual and intellectual abilities of women, some authors also upheld the value of women’s physical bodies. Agrippa von Nettesheim, in sharp contrast to writers who viewed women’s

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bodies as shameful, praised women’s physical forms, stating that “in shap figure proportion and disposition above al other she is farre the fairest creature,” and noting that women are naturally more modest than men, “for the heare of her head hangeth downe soo lowe, that yt wyll cover and hyde all the pryvy partes of her body. Farther, it is not nedefull for a woman, to handle these partes of her body, in the workes of Nature, whiche man customably useth to doo.”20 For von Nettesheim, then, God created women’s bodies not as grotesque but as physically superior to those of men in terms of aesthetics, humility, and privacy. Some female writers also encouraged women to accept their physical bodies. Writing in 1671, the midwife Jane Sharp reminded her readers that “we women have no more cause to be angry, or be ashamed of what Nature hath given us than men have, we cannot be without ours no more than they can want theirs.”21 Such works point to the ability of women—and those writing about them—to position their physical forms and body parts as worthy of praise due to their natural modesty and usefulness. The views of authors like Sharp, von Nettesheim, and Elyot, with their focus on the acceptability of the female body, suggest more widespread understandings of women’s bodies as signifiers of godliness. Hagiographers like John Foxe would rely on these ideologies in their work by representing female martyrs as actively testifying to their faith through their dying bodies. Along with cultural anxieties regarding the female reproductive body’s unreliability and the womb’s negative impact on women’s behavior, as well as attempts to read the female body as intrinsically modest and beautiful, Mary Floyd-­Wilson points out that scientific and medical literature, as well as dramatic texts, “located occult knowledge and forces within the bodies of women.”22 These occult forces, Floyd-­Wilson explains, were understood by the early moderns as “mysterious sympathies and antipathies in nature, in a preternatural realm removed from God’s aid or the devil’s interference.”23 The womb specifically exhibited powerful invisible forces. Not only could it cause disease and disorder through a woman’s body, it also responded to scents, reacted to fear, and demonstrated magnetic properties by attracting men and male seed.24 According to Floyd-­Wilson, the occult powers of women’s bodies provided them with “privileged access to nature’s secrets” and allowed for greater female agency, which was reflected by a number of early modern dramatic works.25 Amy Kenny’s recent work on humoral wombs also contends that Shakespeare’s plays, rather than portraying women’s interior bodies and wombs as contaminated, “encourage a discourse which exonerates the womb.”26 The power of the womb, as we shall see, also concerned Foxe, who connected motherhood and martyrdom and, in at least one account,

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suggests that female martyrs gave birth to spiritual children through their sacrifices. A variety of differing conceptions of the female body and the impact of that body on women’s characters and abilities coexisted in early modern England and informed the depictions of female execution victims. On the one hand, many writers interpreted women’s bodies (and minds) as inferior to men’s due to the Galenic theories of the humors and the biblical injunctions calling on husbands to rule over their wives. On the other hand, some authors viewed women as equal to men in spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic ways. Finally, the bodies of women, in particular their wombs, remained mysterious and powerful unknowns that instilled anxiety in men but may have provided women with limited agency. The prevailing viewpoint, however, interpreted women as “leaky vessels,” unable to control the flow of bodily fluids, and thus less able to practice self-­control and in need of male guidance and regulation.27 Many Renaissance plays speak to this issue, including Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio compares his taming of Kate to the training of a falcon. The way that he subjugates his new wife is by depriving her body of its needs and desires. By denying her sleep and food, Petruchio manages Kate’s bodily functions, which leads eventually to her acceptance— whether feigned or real—of his mastery over her mind and body.28 Kate’s physical suffering, therefore, becomes a way for the male figure to impose control on her mental and bodily excess. Understanding the ways that early modern culture conceived of and tried to manage women’s humors and behavior brings us then to the question of punishing the female body. During this time, the family unit (which included not only husbands, wives, and children but also servants) was often compared to the state, and its smooth functioning, according to theologians and legal experts, required female submission to male authority. Deemed a “little commonwealth” by numerous writers, the family needed to operate in an orderly and hierarchical fashion, with the head of the family unit firmly in charge of the spiritual and economic health of his household.29 And one of the main ways that men and the male-­dominated society controlled women was through physical punishment. In fact, violence often served as the legitimate instrument of those in power, whether princes, local nobles, or fathers. The maintenance of social hierarchy, as Garthine Walker points out, included “reasonable correction” of children, wives, and servants.30 Women who threatened the social order, like witches, scolds, adulterous wives, prostitutes, or religious nonconformers, were subject to bodily correction. Such corrections, for women, took many forms, including duckings, in which the woman was placed on a

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seesaw and repeatedly submerged in a body of water until she agreed to submit to her husband or father; beatings by male family members; public whippings; and, for more serious forms of rebellion against the religious, moral, and social orders, death. The female body therefore served as a site of correction, not only for male family members but also for the state.31 THE MARTYRED FEMALE BODY

The multiple printed editions of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, the renowned late sixteenth-­century Protestant martyrology, provide some of the most vivid and violent descriptions of female executions, one form of legislative control over women who refused to submit to the state’s governing of their religious beliefs.32 As many scholars have noted, Foxe’s martyrological histories were widely circulated and influenced religious thought not only in England but also in the British colonies.33 His work includes not only textual accounts of the women’s deaths but also woodcuts that further memorialize their sufferings.34 In fact, it was frequently through their bodies that female martyrs fashioned their subjectivity and served as models of virtue for eye-­w itnesses and readers. Perhaps most importantly, in the accounts of their executions, these women exemplified the constancy women could exhibit when dying, a constancy that writers often linked to the female body. In outlining his purpose in gathering together stories of martyrdom, John Foxe argues that the stories of martyrs should serve as models of behavior for his readers, advising this audience to “imitate theyr death[s] . . . with like constancy” and extolling the abilities of the martyrs to “retayne an invincible constancie agaynst the threates of tyrantes and violence of tormentours.”35 In accounts of religious martyrdom, representations of women’s tortures and deaths often served as examples of personal wholeness in the face of seemingly insufferable pain. Indeed, Foxe, drawing upon a longer martyrdom tradition, often praises the bodily composure of the female Protestant martyrs he discusses, noting their steadfastness and bravery when encountering death. In his account of the 1556 burnings of Agnes Potten and Joan Trunchfield, for instance, Foxe notes, “In whose sufferyng, their constancie worthely was to be wondered at, who beyng so simple women, so manfully stoode to the confession and testimony of Gods word and veritie.”36 Women’s capacity for dying with integrity was further enforced by the sensational woodcuts in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. The deaths of the Marian martyrs Katherine Hut, Joane Hornes, and Elizabeth Thacknell, for instance, are depicted in the 1583 edition of Foxe’s text (see fig. 2). In the woodcut, these three women stare out toward the audience from the

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Figure 2. “The Martyrdome of Three Women.” From John Foxe, Actes and Monuments [. . .] (London: John Daye, 1583), RB 59843, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1911.

flames, softly smiling and praying while walls of smoke billow out behind them. Their posture—upright with hands clasped in front, despite the chains binding them to the stake—suggests their stoicism and reliance on otherworldly strength. The woodcut serves as a monument to the women—a visual representation of both their suffering and their spiritual bravery. Likewise, the image of the martyr Cicelie Ormes shows her hands clasped in prayer, her body erect, and her gaze outward while the fire burns around her (see fig. 3). While the depiction of Ormes, similar to

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Figure 3. “The Burnyng of Cicelie Ormes at Norwich.” From John Foxe, Actes and Monuments [. . .] (London: John Daye, 1583), RB 59843, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 2033.

those of the three women martyred together, highlights her endurance, the representation also more overtly emphasizes her body. Ormes’s reproductive body is clearly revealed by the prominence of her breasts, suggesting that the martyr both overcomes and uses her physical form to fashion her martyrdom.37 By including visual representations of these female martyrs in his work, Foxe effectively extends the monumental aspects of their martyrdoms, allowing for greater public engagement with these women as representatives of good deaths.38

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In her recent study of martyrdom, Susannah Brietz Monta notes that although early modern writers typically gendered martyrdom as a masculine form of heroism, some more recent scholars have noted a shift from “a heroics of action” to a more feminine “heroics of endurance.”39 A significant aspect of this change involved attention to the female body as the site of torture, which elicited pathos from readers, highlighted womanly passive resistance, and inspired audiences to adhere to their faith.40 And while not all executions of women in Foxe’s works appear in detail, a few textual depictions provide a picture of their sufferings. In his description of the burning of Cicelie Ormes, for instance, Foxe not only offers his readers an account of her scaffold speech but also notes the physical destruction of her body: “After the tormentors had kindled the fire to her, she said: My soule doth magnifie the Lord, and my spirite rejoyceth in God my Saviour, and in so saying, she set her handes together right against her brest, casting her eyes and head upward, & so stoode, heaving up her hands by litle and litle, till the very sinowes of her armes brast asunder, and then they fell: but she yelded her life unto the Lord as quietly as she had bene in a slumber, or as one feeling no paine.”41 Here Foxe notes the gruesome bursting of Ormes’s burning arms, thus showcasing her physical body and its suffering. Yet, to prove the power of God and the faith of Ormes, Foxe notes that despite this ghastly death and the destruction of her body, Ormes’s death becomes a peaceful sleep. Thus, rather than avoiding the suffering female body, Foxe here emphasizes it to reveal the rewards of female martyrdom. It is the execution of Perotine Massey, though, that stands out for its cruelty, and what Foxe describes as the “horrible straungenesse of the facte.”42 In 1556 Massey, a young woman living with her mother and sister in St. Peter’s Port of Guernsey, was arrested along with her female family members for the theft of a pewter dish and a silver cup. When neighbors of the women attested to their honesty, the original charge of theft was dropped. However, these neighbors added that while the three women were “honest women,” they held heretical religious viewpoints and did not obey “the commaundementes of holy church.”43 With this new information, the justices returned the women to prison for their refusal to attend mass and examined them at length. Although Massey, her mother, and her sister promised to obey the law and begin attending Catholic services, they were all sentenced to death. The visceral horror of their subsequent executions became legendary. According to Foxe: The tyme then beyng come, when these three good servauntes and holy Saintes of GOD, the Innocent mother with her twoo daughters shoulde

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suffer, in the place where they should consummate their Martyrdome, were three stakes set up. At the midle post was the mother, the eldest daughter on the right hand, the yongest on the other. They were firste strangled, but the Rope brake before they were dead, and so the poor women fell in the fire. Perotine, who was then great with child, did fall on her side, where happened a ruefull sight, not onely to the eyes of all that there stode, but also to the eares of all true hearted Christians, that shall read this history: for as the belly of the woman brast a sonder by the vehemencie of the flame the Infant being a faire man child, fell into the fire, and eftsones beyng taken out of the fire by one W. House, was layd upon the grasse. Then was the child had to the Provost, and from him to the Bailife, who gave censure, that it should be carried backe again and cast into the fire. And so the infant Baptized in his owne bloud, to fill up the number of Gods innocent Saincts, was both borne, and died a Martyr, leaving behind to the worlde, which it never sawe, a spectacle wherein the whole worlde maie see the Herodian crueltie of this gracelesse generation of Catholicke tormentours.44

Foxe’s account of this execution draws attention not only to the scandal of executing a heavily pregnant woman but to the spectacle of a female body giving birth during immolation. Indeed, it is the body of Perotine Massey and the child that burns with her that become the center of the narrative—the scene Foxe uses to show the inhumanity of the Catholic religion. Additionally, the woodcut that accompanied the 1576 text emphasizes the naked body of Massey, whose clothes have presumably burned off, and whose womb gapes open to expel the body of her child (fig. 4).45 What was Foxe’s purpose here? Obviously the martyrologist chose not to evade the suffering female body but to showcase Massey’s status as sacrificial victim. Yet more than the rhetoric of martyrdom informs Foxe’s inclusion of this story and image. In a sense the woodcut anatomizes Massey, showing not only the mystery of the nude female body but also that within—the womb and the intestines. Indeed, the woodcut of Massey opens her to inspection by those gathered to witness her execution as well as by those who would later read and learn from her example. Usually, such visual renderings of the female anatomy, in addition to eroticizing the female corpse, equated women with sinfulness and showcased their rebellious natures as descendants of Eve and thus perpetrators of original sin.46 Foxe, however, at least in his textual accounts of the proceedings, insists on the sexual purity of Massey (as well as her married state) and instead of opening her up to remind audiences of her sinfulness, vilifies the Catholic authorities who sentenced her to death and caused the martyrdom of her

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Figure 4. “A lamentable spectacle of iii. Women, with a sely infant brastyng out of the Mothers Wombe.” From John Foxe, Actes and Monuments [. . .] (London: John Daye, 1583), RB 59843, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1944.

child. The shamefulness of Massey’s body here is subverted, its nakedness and anatomization acting not as an attack on the female form but as a catalyst that allows Foxe to instill passions in English Protestants. The miracle of birth amidst the flames of the pyre testifies to the role of the female body as the generator of spiritual as much as physical fruit. Although Massey’s child dies, the delivery observed by witnesses and retold in Foxe’s narrative functions as a reproduction of Protestant faith, which allegorizes Massey’s body as a site of suffering and redemption.47 Yet Foxe’s interpretation of the image of Massey giving birth amid the fire also works to highlight men’s attempts to control the female body. Massey’s reproductive body disrupts the ritual of execution even as Foxe attempts to inscribe his own values on her deathly delivery. Amy Kenny, in her analysis of Shakespeare’s treatment of women’s corpses and wombs, suggests that many male characters in early modern drama “instead of merely objectifying the corpse” actually try “to preserve the female body as a sanitized object, containing its innate grotesqueness by eroticizing its

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features.”48 Foxe, of course, sidesteps the erotic components of Massey’s opened body by offering a spiritual reading of the moment when her child bursts from her womb, but he also sterilizes the moment. Unlike the female corpses on the Shakespearean stage that remain intact and often refuse to bleed, Massey’s body bursts open, burns, and presumably sheds blood. Yet these visceral signs of suffering, overflowing of fluids, and the expulsion of an infant are spiritual signs for Foxe. What could have prompted carnivalesque responses to Massey’s extraordinary death and delivery becomes, in Foxe’s inscription, a holy and sanctified event.49 Protestant martyrologists were not alone in focusing on the bodies of female victims and attempting to interpret what might be explained as erotic or grotesque as holy. Of note are the accounts of the execution of the Catholic martyr Margaret Clitherow, who was pressed to death (peine forte et dure) in 1586.50 Clitherow, a butcher’s wife who resided in York, first came to the authorities’ attention by harboring and maintaining Catholic priests. Although married to a practicing member of the Church of England, Clitherow had converted to Catholicism as an adult and refused to enter a plea during her two trials or name anyone who may have worshipped the old religion in her home. Later, Clitherow refused to confirm or deny that she was pregnant when faced with execution. Despite the possibility that she was with child, the judges decided to impose the death penalty, and Clitherow was crushed to death on March 25, 1586. Her hagiographer, John Mush, one of the priests she allegedly harbored, relates that despite Clitherow’s request “that she might die in her smock, and that for the honour of womanhood they would not see her naked,” the male executioners stripped Clitherow of her clothes and bound her hands to posts.51 The method of her execution, which Mush explains in gruesome detail, emphasizes Clitherow’s broken body: “She was in dying one quarter of an hour. A sharp stone, as much as a man’s fist, put under her back; upon her was laid to the quantity of seven or eight hundredweight at the least, which, breaking her ribs, caused them to burst forth of the skin.”52 This account of the destruction of Clitherow’s body, while sensational in its description of her physical suffering, also allows for a reading of Clitherow as an example of passive (and thus typically feminine) resistance. 53 Because Clitherow refuses to speak the names of the priests she may have harbored, or to confirm her pregnancy, her death becomes a bodily act based on silence and physical submission to her faith. (See fig. 5.)54 Indeed, according to Mush’s account, Clitherow herself thought of her upcoming execution as a bodily duty, stating: “I confess death is fearful, and the flesh is frail; yet I mind God’s assistance to spend my blood in this faith, as willingly as ever I put my paps to my children’s mouths.”55 For

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Figure 5. “The Martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow.” From Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: Adrianum Huberti, 1587), K3, public domain.

Megan Matchinske, Clitherow’s statement connects her martyrdom “with her already performed responsibility as nursing mother to her children.”56 Yet, more than this, Clitherow frames her female body as subject to the divine will, whether that be as a source of nourishment for and comfort to her children or as a bleeding martyr for her God. Her bodily fluids here— her milk and blood—are gifts that she, as a woman, could provide. Of note as well is the early modern reliance on Galenic humoralism, which read milk as a type of white blood that developed due to maternal feelings.57 By juxtaposing her milk and blood, Clitherow reminds her audience of the powerful properties of the female body, which had the ability to perform a sacrifice that echoed but went beyond the mother’s physical care of her children. While these accounts of female martyrs highlight their physical sufferings and bodily deaths and claim at points to provide statements directly from these women, the narrators of these narratives are primarily male, which potentially problematizes the representations of female bodies. Foxe and Mush work to legitimatize women’s bodies as signs of

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spiritual virtues, often stressing constancy and bravery, traits typically displayed by men in Renaissance literature. By memorializing the courage of these women, though, the authors break down gender divides and subvert traditional understandings of the female capacity for rational thought, reliability, and bodily integrity. In the accounts of Massey, Clitherow, and the other female martyrs, it is not their words that provide spiritual meaning to these events, although some women’s verbal sparrings with priests are legendary.58 Instead, their physical bodies become the focus—pressed to death beneath weights, bursting open to produce a child, or burning to ashes at the stake. And their bodies tell a story of constancy, of their ability to reproduce not just children but faith; in these accounts the female body signifies something divine rather than animal. Interestingly, when looking at responses to female martyrs from the other side of the religious divide—that is, Catholics responding to Protestant martyrs, and Protestant theologians assessing Catholic martyrdom— the body once again becomes the central focus. After Margaret Clitherow’s death, for example, her own stepfather, Henry May, the Mayor of York, maligned her, claiming that “she died desperately, and that she had been an unhonest woman of her body, and . . . that the priests used to lay her on their knees and give her discipline, and that they used her body when they would.”59 Likewise, after Foxe’s initial inclusion of Perotine Massey in his Acts and Monuments, the Catholic priest Thomas Harding attacked Foxe’s version of events and veneration of Massey, claiming that not only was she guilty of heresy, she was also an unchaste woman, because “of the childes Father, there is no woorde spoken.”60 Such attacks on female martyrs point to the importance of women’s bodies as powerful tools that could either uphold the status of the woman as properly chaste and therefore virtuous or question her ability to remain faithful to God if she couldn’t control her sexual urges. Hagiographers—and the women they praise—consistently frame these female victims as able to represent bodily their constancy and submission to the Divine. Significantly, then, the body of the female martyr becomes key in interpreting the legitimacy of each individual woman’s martyrdom. The suffering these women undergo and how they respond to their pain are consistently framed as proof of their faith. Due to the understanding of women as less constant and more prone to physical weakness, hagiographers, rather than evading the tortures these women endured, focused on the gory details of their deaths to showcase their strength and steadfastness. Some accounts, like the textual and visual representations of Perotine Massey in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, connected women’s bodily destruction to the reproduction of faith. Martyrologists therefore

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legitimized the female body, and even female body parts, as signs, not of weakness but of strength. While at first glance, few similarities exist between accounts of female martyrs’ deaths and cheap print texts about the executions of female murderers, authors of street literature often employed the language of martyrology when describing the final moments of women condemned for violent crimes.61 As these verbal and physical elements are present in popular martyrologies as well as narratives about the executions of criminals, a good case can be made for the influence of Foxe and other hagiographers on the ways early modern criminals approached public execution. Martyrologies also often highlight the agency of martyrs, which is echoed in narratives about female criminals by describing their repentance, public expressions of reliance on the Divine, and willingness to die. Although discussing the executions of women convicted of infanticide in colonial America, Mary Kathleen Eyring posits that criminal narratives in the colonies used “the conventions of martyr literature to recast execution as a prelude to salvation.”62 According to Eyring, authors of colonial accounts emphasized the repentance of female offenders and framed their final speeches at the scaffold as an “occasion to publically articulate their courage, faith, and resignation to God’s will.”63 These demonstrations of willingness to die echo Protestant martyrologies and were common among female criminals, including the English husband-­murderer Alice Clarke, who, according to Goodcole, was after her public confession “by it the better prepared unto death, with comfort, and willingnesse to suffer the same.”64 Like martyrs, then, women such as Clarke were reframed as victims giving their consent and looking toward God for eternal, rather than earthly, deliverance. Execution narratives about criminal women connect to the accounts of martyred women not only by echoing the rhetoric used in hagiographies but also because of the textual focus on the body of the female victim. In Protestant martyrologies, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in particular, the bodies and physical sufferings of female martyrs are highlighted through both textual descriptions and accompanying woodcuts. As Efterpi Mitsi argues, these narratives “indicate that pain must be endured, not evaded,” which distinguished them from earlier Catholic accounts that depicted martyrs transcending their sufferings through God’s miraculous power.65 The Protestant tradition, Mitsi contends, connects the pain martyrs experience to their abilities to remain constant in their faith and become spectacular witnesses to the truth. Their bodily suffering, in short, becomes “a necessary vehicle for their testimony,” and a powerful rhetorical tool.66 Suffering female bodies are common in martyrologies, perhaps most

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prominent among them the vivid descriptions of Anne Askew’s torture at the rack in John Bale’s account, which Susannah Brietz Monta notes is “repeatedly asking the reader to envision her suffering, broken body.”67 By encouraging readers to engage with the female body in pain, martyrologists hoped to provide readers with examples of female constancy and to stress women’s ability to submit to pain as a testament to their beliefs. Usually, within these martyrdom narratives, the perceived innate weaknesses of women at the scaffold functioned paradoxically as a strength, which prompted reliance on the Divine. For Foxe, the female martyr served as a testament to other women, and her physical weakness either could be reframed as something she overcame with God’s help or could function as the very basis of her ability to outwardly witness to her faith through torture and death.68 Thus, in the 1570 edition of Foxe’s work, the early Christian martyr Julitta advised the women gathered to watch her public burning to remember that despite “the fragility of feminine nature,” God could still use their inward strength as well as their physical bodies: “Stycke not, O sisters, to labour and travell after true pietie and godlynes. Cease to accuse the fragilitye of feminine nature. What? Are not we created of the same matter, that men are? Yea, after Gods image and similitude are we made, as lyvely as they. Not fleshe onelye God used in the creation of the woman, in signe and token of her infirmity and weakenes, but bone of bones is she, in token that she must be strong in the true and living God.”69 In Foxe’s account Julitta urges women not to subscribe to theories that equated female bodies with spiritual weakness. Instead she and Foxe’s female Marian martyrs consistently use their weak bodies to testify to their beliefs. Foxe’s textual descriptions of the deaths and final speeches of female martyrs not only shaped the subsequent deaths of those executed for religious heresy but also influenced the execution behavior of female criminals. While Foxe’s famed martyrologies found their basis in earlier medieval traditions, his accounts invited readers to witness the trials and martyrdoms of women as spectacular events that showcased the inner strength of women undergoing extreme suffering.70 Unlike the virgin martyrs of medieval hagiographies, who typically transcended bodily suffering, Foxe’s female martyrs feel pain and die in agony. Due to their abilities to attest to their faith through suffering and their embrace of their gendered positions, these women served as models of godly dying. Indeed, the rhetoric, physical posturing, and rituals surrounding nonreligious executions frequently borrowed from martyrdom accounts.71 Many women executed for murder parroted St. Stephen’s dying words, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” echoing not only the early martyr but also the

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words of Foxe’s martyrs. Husband-­murderer Alice Davis, for instance, reportedly stated, “O Lord receive my Soule,” while Anne Wallen, according to a ballad about her execution, expired after saying, “Receive my soule sweet Jesus now I die.”72 Martyrdom accounts, though, inspired more than just the biblical language used by executed criminals; instead martyrdom, as Andreas Höfele points out, was understood as a performance that martyrs could turn “into a prophetic emblem, a meaningful image to be looked at and understood by” the audience.73 Foxe’s martyrs therefore attempted to change the meaning of the ritual by redefining the stake as a religious symbol, rather than a tool of execution, and embracing death as the route to eternal life. Many criminal women facing execution—or at least those writing their stories—understood the theatrical aspects of the ritual and looked to martyrologies for clues on how to reframe the execution, as something that did not just strip the woman of her life but allowed her to gain some limited control over the narrative. Thus, while the overarching meaning of most female executions concerned divine providence and God’s judgment, other competing messages worked alongside traditional moral lessons to reframe criminal women as repentant and assertive subjects. While the suffering of female criminals at the scaffold cannot always be interpreted as proof of their newfound devotion to the Divine, a number of ballads do focus on the physical pain these women experienced. Often, descriptions of bodily anguish in these accounts are juxtaposed with their hope in God’s mercy. A ballad detailing the fate of Alice Davis, who murdered her husband in 1628, shows that the thoughts of her upcoming immolation and her physical restraint cause Davis to think on the Divine: “And being chayned to the Stake, / both Reedes and Faggots then Close to my Body there was set, / with Pitch, Tarre, and Rozen, / Then to the heavenly Lord I prayd, / That he would be my strength and ayde.”74 Here the anonymous writer visualizes Davis, a reformed murderer, as a type of martyr. The spectacle of her suffering body does not just signify her punishment; it also functions as a reminder of the female martyrs in Foxe’s popular work. Because she repents and turns to God, Davis, while serving as a negative exemplar, also participates in a well-­known cultural tradition that positions her repentance and death as divinely sanctioned.75 At least in this case, Davis’s bodily agony is what allows her final prayer and presumably eternal salvation. In conclusion, women’s bodies are not conspicuously absent from early modern execution narratives. While the body is seldom the focus of chroniclers, hagiographers, and pamphlet writers, the bodies of women suffering and dying are mentioned in a significant number of accounts and

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sometimes function as the centerpieces of these texts. In the martyrdom literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the bodies of female martyrs (both Catholic and Protestant) demand the attention of readers. At times their agonies are gruesomely detailed, and their ability to withstand and experience pain is framed as a sign of faithfulness to their beliefs. The textual inclusion of bodily suffering these women undergo, rather than simply attesting to historical truth, signifies their commitment to their God, which allows their perceived feminine weakness to be reframed as holy strength. Additionally, by drawing attention to the heroism of women undergoing execution, authors framed these women as subjects with the ability and right to attest to their faith. Hagiographers’ attention to the suffering and dying female body not only influenced accounts of women executed for civil crimes but also shaped women’s understanding of the body’s role in the ritual. Consequently, the physical attributes of women came under scrutiny in execution narratives written by pamphleteers, playwrights, and poets, which are explored in the next chapter.

4 The Female Body on the Scaffold

W

hile most martyrdom accounts tend to focus on the bodies of the dying, narratives of public executions for husband murder, treason, and infanticide typically emphasize the crimes of the condemned, their confessions, and the moral commentary of the author.1 Aspects of these accounts, though, are similar to martyrdom narratives, particularly when the authors highlight the suffering female body and the use of women’s corpses after death. Additionally, a number of pamphlets and broadsides include woodcuts detailing these women’s executions.2 Such sources reveal that the bodies of those women who committed particularly heinous crimes, instilled fear in the authorities, or refused to repent, were often marked for posthumous punishment and display or represented in narrative accounts as ugly and deformed. Similarly, women deemed innocent and properly repentant were frequently depicted as beautiful and as exhibiting bodily postures and facial expressions that verified their virtuous interior conditions. Many of these woodcuts and textual depictions echo patterns of the martyrdom tradition by focusing on the suffering female body and its value as an object of contemplation meant to instill spiritual values in readers. The body of the executed woman—both before and after death—was viewed as evidence of innocence, guilt, or repentance. Bodily signs, such as the woman’s complexion, her countenance, or marks found on her corpse, fascinated those writing about female executions, and descriptions of these physical details were used as evidence to back up interpretations concerning the spiritual states of these women. Indeed, the proliferation of texts about the body and how to interpret bodily signs reveals that early modern English culture was deeply concerned with reading the individual’s spiritual and emotional makeup from physical clues.3 Although such outward signs, especially when used in polemical narratives meant to discredit or venerate individuals, could be interpreted different ways, most of the narratives concerning executed women rely on well-­known and accepted evidence to signify truths about these women’s characters and repentance as they face execution.4 Witnesses at women’s executions scrutinized the victim’s body language to determine their inner mental and spiritual states.5 Those composing execution narratives likewise frequently highlighted the gestures, complexions, and postures of the condemned to give credence to their assessments of these women. What witnesses, governmental authorities,

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and the ministers assisting these women hoped to see were assurances of authentic repentance, or, in some cases, innocence of the crimes for which they died. As Paul Stegner notes, a sincere confession following the Protestant Reformations required both “an inward spiritual performance accessible only to the individual and God” and “an outward social performance intended to reassure” the community.6 The signs typically referenced by authors providing positive accounts of women’s behavior on the scaffold include ruddy complexions, eyes gazing either downward in submission or upward to heaven, tears flowing in sorrow for past sins, a smiling countenance, and a kneeling posture. Henry Goodcole’s 1635 description of the various bodily movements and physical reactions of husband-­murderer Alice Clarke (The Adultresses Funerall Day in Flaming, Scorching, and Consuming Fire) illustrates the way that one author interpreted the physical signs of repentance. Although Goodcole’s pamphlet does end with a positive assessment of Clarke’s behavior on the scaffold, the narrative starts by describing Clarke’s recalcitrant attitude. Goodcole relates that on the morning of her execution, Clarke exhibited “a stout angry disposition,” and was “suddainly inraged” when the people who came to see her die asked Clarke about her husband’s death. Yet, after considerable “perswasions” from Goodcole and his fellow ministers, which included denying Clarke holy communion, she responded: “Whereupon, it pleased God, so to mollifie her heart, that teares from her eyes, and truth from her tongue proceeded, as may appeare by this her ensuing Confession at the very Stake, where she was executed . . . relating the same with as loud and audible a voice, as possible she could, that many others besides, there present, were also witnesses of such her ensuing Confession.”7 Here, Goodcole interprets physical signs as proof of Clarke’s true repentance and change of heart. Accordingly, the interior shift in Clarke’s attitude, the softening of her heart, produces a bodily response. Because her anger is assuaged and she accepts God’s grace, Clarke generates tears and speaks truthfully; she demonstrates an affective shift, shown in Goodcole’s account as evidence of inner repentance.8 Goodcole also makes sure to note Clarke’s facial expressions and complexion when imparting her last dying speech. Goodcole relates that in her confession, Clarke “replyed with harty thankefulnesse unto God, that shee had better resolutions unto death, then formerly she had, and by her countenance, which was very ruddy confirmed her inward new begotten chearfulnesse.”9 The combination of all of these bodily markers, for Goodcole, symbolizes Clarke’s inward contrition and works in tandem with her words, strengthening the perceived authenticity of her repentance and hopefully moving the audience to receive and emulate her move from sinner to saint.10

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The body of the woman on the scaffold, then, was evaluated by the crowd gathered to watch the event and later by readers who encountered her story in print. Signs of penitence, of bravery, of sorrow, and of cheerfulness needed to be evident to provide proof that either the woman was innocent or she had escaped damnation through her love of God and sincere repentance. While it is possible that certain behaviors coded as godly—kneeling or crying, for example—could be feigned, most of the authors of these narratives did not question the gestures and physical responses of these condemned women. Instead, the writers tend to give credence to these signs of repentance as true marks of penitence and proof of a virtuous acceptance of death. THE GROTESQUE FEMALE BODY ON THE SCAFFOLD

Just as the bodies of martyred women functioned as signs of faith, strength, and submission to the Divine, the bodies of witches, unrepentant female criminals, and those women deemed politically subversive could be read as signs of evil. Depictions of the female body as grotesque, misshapen, animalistic, and stinking are relatively common in execution narratives about witches and women deemed significant social threats due to their crimes or inability to repent with proper modesty and submission. The revelation of Duessa’s true nature, in Edmund Spenser’s 1590 The Faerie Queene, functions as a disclosure of her grotesque body that works in similar fashion to the discovery of the evil written on the bodies of several condemned women. Once undressed, Duessa appears to the Redcrosse Knight and Arthur as an object of bodily horror: Her craftie head was altogether bald, And as in hate of honorable eld, Was overrgrowne with scurfe and filthy scald; Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld, And her sowre breath abhominably smeld; Her dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind, Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld; Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind, So scabby was, that would have loathd all womankind. Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind, My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write; But at her rompe she growing had behind A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight;

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And eke her feete most monstrous were in sight; For one of them was like an Eagles claw, With griping talaunts armd to greedy fight, The other like a Beares uneven paw: More ugly shape yet never living creature saw.11

Here, Duessa’s body not only looks but also feels and smells like that of an old woman and a patchwork beast. As the Redcrosse Knight and Arthur examine Duessa, they are assaulted with filth, rot, dung, and sour odors, which inspire exclamations of wonder and shock. These sights and smells, as Una explains to the men, reveal Duessa’s “face of falsehood” and make “all her filthy feature open showne.”12 Truth therefore is read through the body and requires witnesses to pay attention to women’s physical forms and judge their virtue and godliness or lack thereof. The close connection between the grotesque female body and the discovery of evil is seen clearly in a number of contemporary execution narratives. The account of the examination and hanging of Mother Arnold, as reported by T. I. in his 1595 tract A World of wonders. A masse of murthers. A covie of cosonages, for example, establishes the condemned’s evil through bodily signs. The author uses Arnold’s development of a goiter or neck tumor and the horrible smells of her dying breath to positively identify her as a witch: “Beeing often examined, when she was to answere suddainly there rose in her throate a swelling as bigge as a mans fist, black as pitch, and then she seemed to have the hitchcough, as though she would speake but could not, and in this case the examiners would strike her on the brest but she required them not to doe so: And when she was executed such a stincking vapour issued foorth of her mouth that the behoulders were scantlye able to endure it. All which is moste wounderfull.”13 In this account the swelling in Arnold’s throat, her inability to speak, her hiccups, and the stinking breath that she expelled at her death are labeled “most wounderfull,” because they attest to her guilt. While many scholars have noted the prevalence of reports of “witch’s marks” or “witch’s teats” on the bodies of women suspected of witchcraft, for early modern audiences the reactions of the body while undergoing execution also allowed for verification of the condemned’s affiliation with Satan.14 As Jonathan Gil Harris points out, many early modern plays used foul smells to represent the demonic, a practice that was based on earlier Catholic entertainments and maintained its powerful associations into the seventeenth century.15 In contrast, Christian tradition often depicted martyrs and saints as possessing an aroma of sanctity, which was described variously as perfume, flowers, apples, or bread, or was likened to precious spices like cloves and

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ginger.16 The audiences watching and reading about Mother Arnold’s execution, by focusing on her body, show their understanding of the physical as a signifier of the interior. The smell of her dying breath, which witnesses “were scantlye able to endure,” indicates not only that Arnold is a witch but that the authorities have correctly identified her as such and protected the populace against her evil.17 The body of the witch was of particular interest to authorities both before and after execution. Courts typically appointed women to search the bodies of accused witches for marks that would establish proof of their allegiance to the devil. According to a 1612 pamphlet detailing the trial and execution of the five witches in Northampton, one sure sign of witchcraft was a bodily “marke where the Spirits sucke, and the trying of the insensiblenesse thereof.” This witch’s teat, the pamphleteer noted, was discovered on one of the accused witches, a woman named Helen Jenkenson, and served to validate her sentence.18 Likewise, in Henry Goodcole’s account of the case of Elizabeth Sawyer, a justice of the peace told the court that her neighbors claimed Sawyer “had a private and strange marke on her body.” Immediately, three women were summoned “to search the body of Elizabeth Sawyer.” Their evidence, based on an inspection of Sawyer’s body, proved Sawyer’s guilt: “And they all three said, that they a little above the Fundiment of Elizabeth Sawyer the prisoner, there indited before the Bench for a Witch, found a thing like a Teate the bignesse of the little finger, and the length of halfe a finger, which was branched at the top like a teate, and seemed as though one had suckt it, and that the bottome thereof was blew, and the top of it was redde. This view of theirs, and answere that she had such a thing about her, which boldly shee denied, gave some insight to the Jury, of her: who upon their consciences returned the said Elizabeth Sawyer, to be guilty.”19 Thus, the body of the witch functioned as a canvas on which were written the demonic affiliations of the individual. Not only did such examinations occur on living women accused of witchcraft, but witnesses also inspected the bodies of executed witches to determine guilt and interpreted bodily abnormalities, stench, and growths as signs of demonic possession. Grotesque bodies, therefore, became visible signs of criminal culpability and decreased the chances for a sympathetic reaction from those recounting these events, witnessing the rituals, or reading the account later. Following the execution by hanging of Mother Alice Samuell in 1593, an examination of her corpse similarly provided proof of her witchcraft. The Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie of the Three Witches of Warboys relates that rather than simply disposing of Samuell’s body and those of two other witches, the jailer and his wife “stripped off their clothes, and

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being naked, he found upon the bodie of the olde woman Alice Samuell, a little lumpe of flesh, in manner sticking out, as if it had beene a teate, to the length of halfe an inch.” Following this discovery, the couple decided to exhibit this body part “to divers that stoode by.” Although they made sure “not to disclose, because it was adjoining to so secrete a place, which was not decent to be seene,” the author relates that at least forty individuals gazed upon the witch’s teat and the jailer’s wife even tested it to see if milk could be produced.20 The treatment of Samuell’s corpse—both by the jailer and his wife and by the anonymous pamphleteer—reveals a continuing fascination with the body of the alleged witch, which according to Kirilka Stavreva can be described as “sadoerotic fascination.”21 Yet their gruesome fascination with Samuell’s executed corpse also suggests their belief in the body’s ability to signify its guilt or innocence.22 In addition to the secret “lumpe of flesh” discovered on Samuell’s body, her advanced age also reflected contemporary beliefs that linked old women to witchcraft. As Malcolm Gaskill has shown, the stereotypical witch was depicted as an elderly woman, described by both popular news pamphlets and demonologists like Reginald Scot and Samuel Harsnet as toothless, bleary-­eyed, and wrinkled.23 Indeed, in a 1650 collection of verses by Robert Heath, we find the unflattering poem entitled, “Upon the Sight of an Old but Very Deformed Woman,” which equates the signs of female aging with witchcraft: I Saw a woman: Bless me! did I say A woman or a Witch? or what you may Or can more horrid think, a Furie; she Was more deform’d then Deaths Anatomie Nor the black ink, nor this more ragged quil Can dawb her forth, she look’t so monstrous il. A Camel-­back with a crookt baker-­knee, Bow’d like a token for the earth was she: Her eies two inches buried in her head Like leaden bullets seem’d, they lookt so dead: Her nose did like a Promontorie, threat With its appendant drop the chin to meet. Her eie brows hairie, and her rougher brow Furrow’d with wrinckles did like trenches show; Her parched hair did hang like wither’d hay, About her ears, it was so drie and grey: Her lean chops rough and hollow as the earth When chopt for rain in a drie summers dearth:

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The mark was out of her coney-­mumping mouth, Where if a tongue yet was there ne’r a tooth; Which when she op’t, ’twas but to fart a cough, Where who stood by would wish him farther off: Her lips like th’ Monkies hairy hard and thin And in her bosome hung her forked chin. Thus monstrous uglie and deform’d was she; From such a wainscoat face, Deliver me!24 .

Heath’s focus on the body of the old woman functions as an anti-­blazon. No longer an object of sexual interest, the elderly woman’s body instead is rendered as grotesque. Heath anatomizes the woman, moving from her crooked body to her face and then to her breasts, scrutinizing the aging female form and finding it lacking. Everything about this woman he equates to a drying up, a hollowing out. She is “parched” and “wither’d,” her “bosome hung,” and her mouth lacks teeth; her form suggests emptiness and prompts the poet to cry out “Deliver me!” Although perhaps meant as a satirical portrayal of an old woman, Heath’s poem, with its focus on the negative aspects of the aging female body, may, however, reflect “a patriarchal society’s real fear of the power and authority actually held by aging women, particularly spinsters and widows.”25 What is most striking, though, is the connection between the signs of female aging— the growth of hair, the sagging breasts, and the crooked back—and the possibility of witchcraft. Heath, perhaps fearful of the old woman’s abilities, must comically equate her body with dark and unnatural forces.26 The pervasiveness of beliefs about witches’ bodily powers and abnormalities included superstitions about how the unholy employed bodily fluids and breath to harm their enemies. Thomas Bromhall reports that one unnamed witch killed the men hired to carry out her execution with the power of her breath: “At another place when a Witch was bound and brought to the Gallows top, she spet in the face of the Hangman, and he presently fell down dead; in like manner she did by a second. But the third going about a little more warily, was yet so invenom’d by her breath, that all his face swelled till he was stark blind with it, and a little after, he died of it.”27 Although probably a fictionalized account, Bromhall’s report reflects ongoing fears of witches, who their contemporaries believed not only cursed and maimed people and animals while living but had the power to slaughter their executioners at the scaffold. Indeed, the spit and breath of the witch were particular causes for concern. As a bodily fluid, saliva, as Brett D. Hirsch notes, contained potentially defiling and healing

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properties. Medieval and early modern folklore, for instance, credited saliva with a range of powers, including curing diseases, sealing contracts, creating life, and killing enemies.28 Likewise, the breath of the witch was commonly believed to cause afflictions. Henry Boguet’s 1602 Discours des sorciers (An Examen of Witches) included an entire chapter devoted to answering the question “whether witches kill by their blowings and their breaths.”29 After providing numerous examples of French female witches who breathed upon and subsequently injured or killed their victims, Boguet, although noting that sometimes potions were involved, concluded that “in most cases witches have no drugs or herbs in their mouths, but that Satan alone causes the death or sickness in the secret manner which we have before described.”30 In fact, for many early moderns, witches’ affiliation with Satan altered the corporeal body and allowed these women to gain new physical abilities, which included transforming into animals, possessing hair that couldn’t be cut, and gaining magical powers to afflict the bodies of others.31 Authors of popular news pamphlets and demonologies also regularly depicted female witches as possessing bestial traits. Not only did such descriptions mention animal familiars that lived intimately with witches, sucking blood and milk from their bodies and carrying out the witches’ bidding, but these accounts also told of witches who behaved like animals and copulated with demons in animal form.32 By equating these women with beasts, male writers suggested that witches became hybrid creatures—not fully human, not fully animal. Indeed, according to Anna Rosner, demonologists “envision the bodies of witches as fragmented, changeable, and malformed.”33 The female witch in the early modern imagination pushed not only the boundaries of proper female behavior, which included maternal care, obedience to authorities, and sincere repentance, but also the borders between the human, animal, and demonic bodies. Thus, women convicted of witchcraft are frequently depicted as grotesque creatures with extra and deformed body parts. The widespread popular beliefs in devil’s marks and physical ugliness as signs of witchcraft, though, seemed to impact accounts of not only witches. As we shall see, the bodies of women executed for crimes other than witchcraft were often described as similarly monstrous, which allowed audiences to read female guilt through close attention to women’s bodies.34 Reading many of these narratives closely reveals, however, that some authors chose to invent or highlight physical abnormalities to discredit female victims whose religious or political affiliations were opposed to the writer’s own views. While Mary, Queen of Scots was not condemned as a witch, Robert Wynkfield’s account of her execution focuses on the queen’s body and

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offers a portrait of a woman marked as evil by the grotesque nature of her corpse. Yet within the text the mediated Mary herself complicates Wynkfield’s attempts to discredit her. In the narrative Mary appears self-­assured and overtly aware of her feminine body when ascending the scaffold. The queen even jokes with those gathered to watch her decapitation: “Shee never altred hir countenance, but smiling sayde shee never had such groomes before to make hir unreadye, nor ever did putt of hir cloathes before such a company.”35 By drawing attention to her physical form and the removal of her outer garments, Mary embraces her body and reminds the viewers that they are executing a woman once praised for her beauty. In contrast Wynkfield offers a negative picture of her suffering body and corpse as if to negate Mary’s attempt to highlight her female body. Rather than omitting the moment of her death, Wynkfield seems to relish the violence: “While one of the Executioners held hir streightly with one of his hands, the other gave two stroakes with an Axe before he did cut of hir head, and yet lefte a little grissle behind.”36 Not content with depicting just the moment of death, Wynkfield describes the aftermath, noting that “then hir dressinge of Lawne fell from hir head, which appeared as graye as if shee had byn thre score and ten years olde . . . hir face much altred, hir lips stirred upp and downe almost a quarter of an hower after hir head was cut off.”37 Thus, in death, Mary appears as an old woman with greying hair and eerily moving lips. In contrast to Mary’s feminization and celebration of her body, Wynkfield’s assessment of her execution and corpse undermines the queen’s attempts to fashion herself as desirable. Indeed, the author’s narrative of Mary’s execution constructs her decapitated body as hideous, which Naomi Baker notes was a common poetic strategy for dealing with outspoken women.38 In Wynkfield’s account, although Mary speaks as a subject while emphasizing her female body, the male author refuses to let his audience read her as attractive or powerful. Instead, Wynkfield focuses his readers’ attention on her decapitated head, framing it as an object of disgust. Mary, Queen of Scots was not the only elite executed woman depicted as unattractive at the time of her demise or in posthumous accounts of her body. The differing textual descriptions of Anne Boleyn’s beheading and subsequent representations of her body also reflect the ways that witnesses, polemicists, and chroniclers interpreted and depicted her death, showing clearly the differing aims of authors who focused on women’s physical traits as part of the execution narrative and subsequent assessment of their characters. Lancelot de Carles, a French almoner residing in London and attached to his country’s embassy, penned a long poem approximately two weeks after Boleyn’s execution extolling the beauty of

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the queen consort at the time of her death. According to de Carles, Boleyn “went to the place of execution with an untroubled countenance,” and he notes that “her face and complexion never were so beautiful.”39 The purpose of de Carles’s poem, however, despite its focus on Boleyn’s attractiveness, is not to fully vindicate the queen but instead to offer readers a conventional de casibus tragedy, detailing the queen’s fall from a position of power to an ignoble, yet pitiable end.40 In the first part of the poem, de Carles presents readers with an unfavorable depiction of the queen, judging her guilty of adultery. The final portions of the piece, though, portray Boleyn as a sympathetic character. According to G. W. Bernard, de Carles highlights the final moments of the queen’s life as worthy of both compassion and commemoration, due to her resignation to her death and perceived sincere repentance.41 Thus, de Carles offers readers a laudatory final image of a woman he deemed once lascivious and foolish but in the end found sympathetic, stressing not only Boleyn’s beauty but also her ability to “gracefully” provide the final speech and express herself with increasing vocal strength.42 By including physical markers of her repentance, de Carles implies that the queen ends her life properly contrite and focused on her spiritual state. In contrast to de Carles’s sympathetic account of an attractive and properly contrite Boleyn, an anonymous account of her execution from the Archives at Brussels offers readers a more critical depiction of the queen, focusing on her body language: “The wicked Queen herself suffered last on the scaffold within the Tower  .  .  . she was led up by the lieutenant, feeble and half-­stupified, and she looked back from time to time at four of her ladies by whom she was attended.”43 Written by an individual sympathetic to Henry’s first queen, Catherine of Aragon, and presumably biased against Boleyn as an instigator of the early English reform movement, this depiction interprets the queen’s demeanor as evidence of her wickedness and implies her lack of repentance. In this account the queen’s confrontation with death is marked by physical signs counter to what philosophers and theologians deemed a positive approach to mortality; rather than embracing her upcoming death and performing her final role with confidence, Boleyn in this account exhibits weakness, shock, and anxiety, which suggests that she was unprepared for death. Reports of the queen’s bodily monstrosity by Catholic propagandists in the century following her execution caused even more damage to the posthumous reputation of the queen. According to the exiled Catholic priest Nicholas Sander, writing nearly half a century after her death, Boleyn was marked by suspicious physical abnormalities. Sander described her as possessing “a projecting tooth under the upper lip,” six fingers on her

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right hand, and “a large wen under her chin.” Such deformities, for many of Boleyn’s contemporaries, symbolized her evil interior and verified her guilt.44 Indeed, these physical abnormalities not only signified that Boleyn was guilty of adultery but also physically marked her as a witch. As Scott Eaton notes, “the witch’s body was visually linked to deformity, and spiritually to sin” in “both popular and learned publications” during this time.45 Sander, by describing Boleyn as monstrous, implies that interior corruption had deformed her body.46 As these differing accounts of Boleyn demonstrate, the bodies of executed women, especially politically significant women, often became the focal point of competing narratives. Writers deliberately depicted victims as beautiful or ugly in order to promote their own religious and political agendas, often drawing on contemporary understandings of the body to discredit or venerate these women. Although constructions of female ugliness on the scaffold are unusual in accounts of elite executions, descriptions of lower-­class women condemned to death more frequently comment on their unattractiveness as a sign of their guilt and failure to exhibit sincere repentance. Of note is the description of Annis Bankyn, burned at the stake for murdering her mistress in 1590. According to the anonymous author of the pamphlet detailing her crime and execution, Bankyn was “ill favoured, unhandsome, and foolish, her looks were crabbed, her behaviour unseemly, and in qualities sluttish.”47 The pamphleteer’s account of her execution, which is surprisingly detailed, also focuses on her unattractive demeanor and her extremely shameful treatment as she walked to the place of execution and was burned: the prisoner was brought forth sodenly, and convaied into the field . . . and upon a faire greene place in the waie as they came, digged a hole, and therein pitched the stake, and fastned the prisoner therunto, who came thether in this sort: shee being stripped out of her clothes in the prison before she came forth, had nothing upon her but a wide frocke downe to her foote, made of course canvas, gathered about the wristes, with an olde neckinger about her necke, and a faire kercher uppon her head, about her necke there was a long yron chaine fastned, whereby she was lead, and came wallowing like a Beare to the stake, according to her ordinarie use of going when she was in service. And beeing fastned to the stake with two yron chaines, reeds were set round about her, and faggots of very dry stickes planted by them, in which shee was wholy incompassed, and nothing to be seen of her round about, but only her face, on one side the reedes looking forth. And so with as much speed as might be, after the ministers had persuaded her to call uppon God,

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and . . . Having saide the Lordes praier, & asked God & al the world forgivenes, the reeds were set on fire first underneath hir with a Linke, & then round about her, wherof the reedes and dry faggots tooke speedie hold, and so soone as she felt the force & fiercenes of the fire to touch hir, she cried out twice saying, alasse, alasse, and having called uppon God, even in short space the smoke and vapor of the fire choked hir, that she was soone dead, and so continued in the fire until she was consumed to ashes.48

In this account, Bankyn becomes a type of animal—lumbering like a bear, stripped of her usual clothing, chained like a beast, and crying out in pain as she is consumed. The shamefulness of her treatment is here compounded by the continual references to the haste of her execution. Bankyn is brought out “sodenly,” the authorities dig a pit while she walks to the spot, and the ministers deliver their message “with as much speed as might be.” The attention to her physical body, deemed unattractive throughout the narrative, suggests that her poisonous proclivities can be read through her ursine gait and her “crabbed” looks, just as the unflattering depiction of Mary, Queen of Scots reflects a need to imagine her as not only treasonous but also grotesque. Likewise, in Humphry Mill’s 1640 collection of poems, A Nights Search: Discovering the Nature and Condition of All Sorts of Night-­Walkers, the final consideration of the execution of an unnamed prostitute, thief, and receiver is rendered as marvelously grotesque. Although meant to be a moralistic discussion of London’s criminals, Mill’s poems provide scandalous accounts of pimps, thieves, prostitutes, and their clients, often including salacious details about sex. The anonymous prostitute that Mill depicts offers a fairly typical confession, expounding on her crimes, warning the gathered crowd, and lamenting that she “must go fry / with Jesaebel, in flames eternally.”49 Although throughout the poem Mill includes derogatory language to label the woman, describing her as “a Hackney jade,” the concluding epitaph, in particular, is pointedly misogynistic: “Here lies a monster of the Female kind; / So serpent-­like! her venom’s mixt with shame: / Yet like a mole she turnd; fur she was blind: / Or like a dragon, but she was too tame. / Some part from woman, more from beasts had shee. / She was most fowle, and dy’d upon a tree.”50 In this final remembrance, the prostitute, like a stereotypical witch, is compared to a number of animals, all of which were linked to misogynistic ideas about women and their bodies. By alluding to the serpent and its venom, Mill suggests that the prostitute, although repentant, possessed the ability to poison others. The serpent imagery also suggests perverse sexuality

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because of its identification with Eve, who was spiritually seduced by the snake in the Garden of Eden.51 Mill’s allusion to the blind mole suggests furthermore that the executed woman lacked wisdom and may also highlight her earthly nature and affinity for hell.52 The poem ends with a reminder of the woman’s dual nature, which is informed by medieval literary treatments of hybrid women. These depictions of woman-­animal hybrids, according to Frederika Bain, “figure human women’s negative traits: duplicity, mutability, and the unequal yoking of rationality or control to the lack thereof.”53 Women, then, who failed to display proper chastity and modesty, are doubly othered. Not only are they lacking the male strength of mind and ability for rational thought, they also are imagined as animalistic—a dangerous hybrid between woman and beast that threatens to infect the community. The inclusion of assessments of the physical attributes of women shows that abnormalities, whether invented or observed, provided audiences with an interpretive framework for judging the merits of executed women’s deaths. The discovery of grotesque body parts, particularly in execution narratives, pointed toward a providential understanding of the female body. The regulation of criminal women, even after their deaths, demanded attention to their physical forms. Thus, authors frequently attempted to persuade their readers that women guilty of heinous sins like treason or witchcraft, as well as women deemed unrepentant, were monstrous, bestial, or grotesque. BEAUTY ON THE SCAFFOLD

Just as unattractiveness and physical abnormalities denoted women’s criminal natures and demonic proclivities, the exceptional beauty of female victims signified innocence and inspired virtuous behavior. Indeed, the assessment of executed women’s beauty or ugliness often denoted public perceptions of character and value, with exceptionally attractive women deemed worthy of celebration and imitation and ugly women aligned with interior evil.54 Physical beauty was often interpreted as an outward manifestation of a divine truth and a godly interior.55 Yet literary responses to female beauty were often viewed as a male domain. Thus, men responded to the woman’s beauty, commodifying her, and turning her body parts into objects for inspiration and control.56 Indeed, early modern writers often used the blazon to praise female beauty, thus metaphorically dissecting the woman’s attributes and praising her body parts, which has been noted by both Hillary Nunn and Jonathan Sawday.57 Yet does such an assessment adequately account for male writers’ decisions to highlight the beauty of

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executed women? And do these narratives negate the female experiences of execution by focusing on the physical attributes of these women? Margaret Cheyne Bulmer, burned in 1537 at Smithfield for her involvement in the Pilgrimage of Grace, inspired unique mention from Charles Wriothesley in his account: “And the same daye Margaret Cheyney, ‘other wife to Bolmer called,’ was drawen after them from the Tower of London into Smythfyld, and there brente, accordinge to hir judgment, God pardon her sowle, beinge the Frydaye in Whytson weeke; she was a very fayre creature and a bewtyfull.”58 Of note here is the chronicler’s decision to comment on Cheyne’s physical beauty, which obscures her corpse and horrific execution by reimagining and aestheticizing her once-­living body. Wriothesley was not alone in his decision to comment on the beauty of executed women. One account of Anne Boleyn’s 1536 judicial beheading notes that the queen consort had “never appeared more beautiful, than at that time.”59 Such accounts attest to the male observers’ continued interest in the physical bodies of women on the scaffold but also suggest an elegiac lament for the loss of female beauty.60 Yet the objectification of the executed female body is rarely simple. Instead, as Elisabeth Bronfen argues in her study of the connections between femininity and death, preserving the female corpse through art shows male desire for possession of the woman’s body as well as male need to metaphorically stop the decay of the female form.61 By commenting on the beauty of the dead or dying woman, male authors position themselves as contestants in a battle with death for the female body. Indeed, many literary works of the period depict death as an erotic bridegroom or rapist who sought to wed or copulate with a deceased woman. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet illustrates this trend. When Romeo encounters the body of his beloved in the tomb, he imagines Death has claimed her, and he equates her continuing loveliness with Death’s possession of her body: “Why art thou yet so fair? shall I believe / That unsubstantial death is amorous, / And that the lean abhorred monster keeps / Thee here in dark to be his paramour?”62 In order to arrest Death’s assault on his wife, Romeo ultimately decides to die at her side, choosing not only to maintain his imaginative projection of his beautiful wife as a lifelike corpse but also to claim her body as his own. Although the male authors who highlight the loveliness of female execution victims do not literally claim the bodies of these women, a similar scheme, I argue, is at work. By drawing attention to the beauty of an executed woman, these writers suggest that they are able through the mediums of poetry, drama, and prose, to control the physical remembrances of the female victims and to possess them, at least as objects of contemplation.63

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One account, though, moves beyond an appreciation for female beauty and instead evidences a salacious fascination with the body of an executed woman. Edward May, a seventeenth-­century poet, composed an elegy for a female execution victim that eerily catalogs the condemned’s body parts as she is burned at the stake. In his poem “On a woman burned in Smithfield the 20 of April 1632,” May focuses on the victim’s cheeks, lips, eyes, and flesh, depicting her death as an erotic experience: When all in white pure as her qu’et thought She to her journies end was easly brought How sweetly then she on her death-­bed lay, How cheerefully her eye did dart its raye, What crimson blushes in her cheekes were spread And how the snow strove gently with the red; [. . .] How quickly up the nimble flame did skip And like glad lovers, fed upon her lip; Kist her faire eyes and with such fervor strove, That they destroyd what they so much did love: Impartiall death thy skill is strange and great Thou wound’st with frost, but here thou kil’st with heate, And she like gold thou hast in fire tride, And her bright soule thou now hast purifide; For ’twas unfit the greedie wormes should tare Such daintie flesh, or such a banquet share, That was ordained by the destinies, For a burnt offering and a sacrifice.64

For May, the body of the unnamed woman functions as an object of desire, even as she is burned on the pyre. He praises her conventional beauty, imagines that the flames are her lovers caressing her lips and eyes, and rejoices that her “daintie flesh” would never rot and become food for worms. May seemingly would agree with Edgar Allan Poe’s statement that the “death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”65 Yet May’s elegy attests to more than his fascination with a dying woman’s beauty. The imagery of the poem allows May to metaphorically become the fire that consumes the body of the dying woman. Through his description May imagines the condemned woman not as a suffering body but instead as a spectacularly visualized and immobilized victim of seduction and rape. He mentally probes her body parts, imagines touching her skin as the flames do, and interprets her death as a moment of sexual consummation that she welcomes due to her cheerful

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gaze and flushed cheeks. In short, May, by cataloging the beautiful body parts of the condemned woman, turns her into an object of consumption that he can vicariously use.66 For some spectators, then, the execution of a woman, particularly a young and beautiful woman, may have conjured up erotic fantasies. The female victim hanging from the gallows or burning at the stake was typically bound and immobilized. Her powerlessness in that moment before death might suggest her passivity and rejuvenate male feelings of superiority and control. Additionally, as Gatrell notes, “the bucking female body as it hanged could elicit obscene fantasies.”67 After death, as well, the executed female corpse could conceivably offer male spectators a blank text on which to pen their desires.68 Similar accounts of the beauty of executed women are also present in a number of Renaissance dramas, but with significantly different connotations.69 In John Webster and Thomas Dekker’s The Famous Historie of Sir Thomas Wyat, which covers the historical events of Lady Jane Grey’s assumption of the throne, the Wyatt Rebellion, and the eventual punishment of Grey and her supporters, the authors depict the severed head of Grey as conventionally beautiful, which is interpreted by her husband as a sign of her innocence and bravery. Following her execution, Grey’s head is displayed to her spouse, Guildford Dudley, as he awaits his turn on the scaffold. Guildford expresses surprise at the condition of her lifeless head: “Doe malefactors, looke / Thus when they die, a ruddie lippe, / A cleere reflecting eye, / Cheekes purer than the Maiden orient pearle, / That sprinckles bashfulness through the clowdes. / Her innocence, has given her this looke: / The like for me to show so well, being dead, / How willingly, would Guildford loose his head.”70 Guildford, like Edward May, in his depiction of the female murderess burned at Smithfield, emblazons Grey in the conventional language of Renaissance poetry. Her lips, like those of countless women praised by sonneteers, are “ruddie,” while Grey’s cheeks maintain the whiteness common in literary depictions of beautiful women.71 These marks of traditional beauty, which appear on the decapitated head of Grey, signify, for Guildford, her innocence and allow him to “willingly” follow her to the scaffold.72 This literary treatment of the female body in Webster and Dekker’s historical drama does two things of note. First, Dekker and Webster position the severed head of Grey as an important component of the execution narrative. In a sense, Grey’s head, with its otherworldly ability to maintain its beauty, functions both as a marker of womanly virtue and as an encouragement to her husband, allowing him to go to his execution with hope in the recognition of their innocence and the virtue of their cause. Although a number of other characters lose their lives on the scaffold in

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this play, Grey’s head is the only body part shown to the audience after death, illustrating that within the world of this play, her executed body matters and signifies more than those of her male counterparts. Secondly, in their description of a historical execution, the authors shift the narrative, which allows Lady Jane Grey, rather than her husband, to serve as the mentally stronger one by undergoing death first and serving as an example to her husband of how to properly face execution.73 Historical sources state that Guildford died first and Jane second, but Dekker and Webster reverse this order. Additionally, contemporaries claim that Jane expresses fear and sorrow when encountering Guildford’s headless body on her way to the scaffold; in The Famous Historie, however, Guildford is the one who reacts in stereotypically femininized ways to the events.74 Although Guildford tells Grey that as a man he can “better brook [the] shocke of threatening death,” he is the one who “falles in a trance” when his wife is led to the scaffold.75 Only the sight of her severed head allows Guildford to regain his manly courage. Thus, Dekker and Webster position Grey as an exemplar of female steadfastness, which is shown not only through her words and actions but also through the sign of her decapitated head.76 What is notable throughout these accounts is the range of responses to the execution of a beautiful woman. On the one hand, some witnesses seemed particularly disturbed by the destruction of fair women, tending to romanticize their deaths and even view their severed heads or corpses as signs of holy martyrdom or innocence. On the other hand, some accounts eroticize the executions of women, fetishizing their horrific deaths as vicarious sexual experiences for the men watching. All of these narratives, though, structure the execution of a beautiful woman as an aesthetic moment that men hoped to interpret and control. In short, these accounts highlight connections between death and desire and reveal how male authors and witnesses reframed the corpse or dying body of the female victim as an object of art. THE SIGN OF THE FEMALE CORPSE

While women’s posturing and physical responses on the scaffold were interpreted as signs of contrition or innocence, their bodies after death, as we have seen, could also tell a story. Class status may have protected elite women from the gaze of lower-­class men during their executions, and narratives about their deaths may have provided these women with posthumous redemption, but the treatment of their bodies following execution belies these noblewomen’s attempts to maintain control over their remains. Most of the aristocratic women beheaded on Tower Green

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were buried unceremoniously at the nearby Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, denied the rituals typically afforded to elite women. Anne Boleyn’s corpse, for instance, was placed in an arrow chest, as no coffin was provided.77 Mary, Queen of Scots’s corpse, while buried respectfully, was stripped of its Catholic symbolism following her execution. As John D. Staines explains, following the event “the directors of the execution then set about erasing Mary’s body from sacred history” by thoroughly washing the dog discovered near her corpse, cleansing all items stained by Mary’s blood, burning “all things” physically marred by the event, and providing the executioners with money rather than the clothes or belongings of the deceased. Staines interprets the destruction and cleansings of these items as an attempt by Elizabeth’s agents to prevent the development of “a martyr’s cult of the Queen of Scots.”78 These decisions can be read as attempts to erase the noble female body and to remove it from contemplation as sacrificial sign. Thus, beyond death, the body of a criminal woman—whether queen or commoner—was subject to mutilation, disrespect, and erasure, and often denied the typical rites associated with Christian burial. The bodies of elite women who died naturally were also subject to mistreatment. Elizabeth I, who fashioned her royal image and perceptions of her female body through iconography that symbolized “royal power and prerogative in” her “virginal self-­sufficiency,” lost control of that body after death.79 According to Elizabeth’s maid of honor, Elizabeth Southwell, following the queen’s death, members of the Privy Council left to proclaim James king, “leaving her bodie with charge not to be opened such being her desire, but Cecill having given a secret warrant to the surgions they opened her.”80 Although in life Elizabeth embodied kingship and the body politic, in death she became merely a female body, subject to the patriarchal desires of anatomists. In her analysis of the opening of Elizabeth’s body after her death, Kate Cregan suggests that the anxieties surrounding the body of the queen, who embodied both kingly power and a female form, were finally laid to rest.81 No longer the monarchial body, Elizabeth’s corpse was exposed to the view of the male barber-­surgeons of London. Kaara L. Peterson even suggests that the opening of Elizabeth’s body aimed to discover the truth of the queen’s claims to lifelong virginity.82 The violation of the deceased queen’s body suggests that while elite women sought to control men’s access to their bodies and their privacy while alive, the female corpse remained susceptible to defilement after death.83 Of course, male bodies made up the vast majority of those provided to the Company of Barber-­Surgeons for anatomical dissection. Beginning in 1540 the company was allowed to claim the corpses of four executed individuals each year, which were then dissected and lectured over for a

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number of days.84 While these public dissections were scientific events that aimed to learn the inner workings of the human body, they were also viewed as degrading to the dead. Michael Neill notes that “the drama of dissection extended the humiliation of the malefactor beyond execution, with an exemplary cruelty that not even prolonged exposure upon a gibbet could match.”85 Yet, if the anatomization of the male corpse potentially violated it, the opening of the female body was doubly degrading. As Jonathan Sawday argues, the anatomy theaters offered “a demonstration of Eve’s sin, a reinforcement of those structures of patriarchal control which, so the argument ran, were necessary to avoid a repetition of that first act of rebellion in the garden of Paradise.”86 Therefore, the dissection of the female cadaver became another way for men to control and use women’s bodies that went beyond scientific study to justify the perceived inferiority and aberrance of women. Heavens speedie hue and crie, written by Henry Goodcole in 1635, describes the public use of one executed woman’s body as an anatomical display and a didactic tool.87 Elizabeth Evans and Thomas Shearwood (referred to by the aliases “Canberry Bess” and “Country Tom”) carried out a unique criminal plot in the year preceding their executions, which involved not only theft but serial murder. Extant narratives relate that Evans, pretending to be a prostitute, would seduce wealthy men and bring them to the fields surrounding London. There her accomplice Shearwood would club these unsuspecting men to death with an iron truncheon, and the twosome would steal the victim’s goods and clothing. Finally apprehended by the authorities, the couple received more-­severe punishments than did other felons, due perhaps to the shocking nature of the murders and the pair’s decision to target gentlemen. In his account of the crimes, confessions, and executions of Evans and Shearwood, Goodcole relates that following her hanging, Evans “was conveied to Barber Surgions Hal for a Skeleton having her bones reserved in a perfect forme of her body which is to beseene, and now remaines in the aforesaid Hall.”88 Although rare in this time period, the anatomization and display of a female corpse points to contemporary understandings of the female criminal. By engaging in theft, prostitution, and murder, Evans gave up the right to demand the proper burial and care for her corpse.89 As Richard Sugg notes, the anatomized female body “was often perceived as sexually shameful and as somehow pornographic.”90 Indeed, one sixteenth-­century woman, Mary Percy, Countess of Northumberland, fearing that her body would be handled by male surgeons after death, wrote in her will: “I have not loved to be very bold afore women, much more would I be loath to come into the hands of any living man, be he physician or surgeon.”91 Unlike the

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countess, however, Elizabeth Evans had no say in how her body would be treated after death. In fact, in the second version of Heavens speedie hue and crie, Goodcole reminds his readers of Evans’s fate: “the Coy-­duck, or divellish allurer to sinne and confusion, was dissected, and her dryed Carkase or Sceleton of Bones and Gristles is refery’d, in proportion to be seene in Barber Surgeons Hall.”92 Evans’s body, now anatomized and stripped of its flesh, serves not only as an example of the female skeleton but also as a symbol of her sinful life and fearful punishment.93 Remarkably, Evans’s skeleton (as well as that of her lover and fellow criminal, Thomas Shearwood) was displayed in the Barber-­Surgeons’ Hall until 1784.94 Perhaps due to the exhibition of her corpse, as well as the shocking nature of her crimes, Elizabeth Evans became a popular figure in early modern publications. Edmund Gayton, in his 1635 commentary on the English translation of Don Quixote, for example, lists the various types of criminals or “canary birds” in early modern England, making sure to include “Canberry Besses” as a particular kind of female felon.95 Thomas Taylor also included “Countrey Tom” and “Cambury Besse” in his collection of tales of infamous sinners as examples of the dangers of lust.96 In addition to the anatomization and display of Evans’s corpse, authorities planned to use the body of another executed woman in 1650. Anne Greene, found guilty of infanticide, was hanged in Oxford, assumed dead, “cut down, put into a Coffin, and brought to a House to be dissected before some Physitians.”97 According to W. Burdet’s pamphlet A Wonder of Wonders, the body of Greene was “carried to Mr. Clarkes house, an Apothecary, where the Physitions met to try their skill.”98 Miraculously, Greene, whom all believed dead, began breathing again, which the physicians and later the magistrates interpreted as a sign of her innocence. Curiously, though, while Greene does not suffer the indignity of dissection, her body does, as Susan Staub notes, become an object of study for those gathered to watch her anatomization.99 Rather than cutting up the corpse of the executed woman, the physicians, Robert Watkins notes in his pamphlet Newes from the Dead, worked to revive Greene by wrenching open her mouth; pouring cordial water down her throat; rubbing her body; opening a vein and bleeding her; anointing her neck and temples “with confortative oyles and spirits”; and ordering “an heating odoriferous Clyster to be cast up in her body, to give heat and warmth to her bowels.”100 Thus, while Watkins lamented that the medical authorities “missed the opportunity of improving their knowledge in the dissection of a Dead body,” the opportunity to study her living body and inspect its secrets allowed them to further their knowledge of female anatomy.101 In each of these accounts, the female body functions as a sign. In

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the case of Evans, her skeletal remains, displayed for posterity, serve to remind the people who visit the Barber-­Surgeons’ Hall of the wages of sin. Evans becomes an example of female vice, decried by Goodcole as a deceitful criminal who used her sexual body to seduce men and allowed her partner to rob and kill their victims. The surrender of her body to the state entailed not just her physical death but a sacrifice of her remains for the common good. In short, Evans serves as a demonstration in two ways. First, her body becomes a text whereby the surgeons can read the secrets of her hidden interior and learn more about female anatomy. Second, her corpse, which, Goodcole reminds his readers, “is reserv’d in proportion to be seene in Barber Surgeons Hall,” can be read by the public, who are perhaps as interested in the punishment of Evans as in the novelty of a female corpse. Greene’s body, conversely, signifies innocence and the providence of God. Her physical regeneration and the doctors’ scrutiny of her interior and their subsequent decision that she had miscarried testify to the ability of the female body to reveal a wrongful conviction. Although the heads of female traitors, like that of the historical Lady Jane Grey, were typically buried with the victims’ bodies, one woman suffered the fate of many male traitors when her severed head was displayed publicly. During the reign of Henry VIII, Elizabeth Barton, popularly known as the Holy Maid of Kent and lauded as a visionary and prophet by some and as a charlatan by others, was hanged and subsequently beheaded. She had prophesied that the king would lose his throne and life if he did not take back his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and return to the Catholic faith. Due to her dangerous political prophecies, Barton was sentenced to death in 1534. According to Wriothesley’s Chronicle, her body, like those of the men she suffered with, met with the usual posthumous treatment given to traitors: “The Holie Maide of Kent, beinge a nun of Canterburie, two munckes of Canterburie of Christes Churche, one of them called Doctor Bockinge, two gray freeres observantes, and a priest, were drawne from the Tower of London to Tiburn, and there hanged, and after cutt downe and their heades smitten of, and two of their heades were sett on London Bridge, and the other fower at diverse gates of the cittie.”102 This treatment of a woman’s head, while an anomaly, points to the possibility of using female body parts as signs of government power and examples of what might occur when men, and even women, threatened the monarch. The public display of Elizabeth Barton’s remains stems from the danger she posed to the social order. Because she prophesied against the monarch during the height of the Henrician Reformation and because her performances garnered public notoriety, the government ultimately

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discredited and executed Barton. The decision to place her severed head in a public spot occurred because her crime and her political influence directly threatened the crown.103 In death Barton served as a spectacular example of what happened to female traitors who dared to jeopardize the sanctity of the monarch and state religion. Barton based her revelations and miracle work on the well-­established medieval tradition of Catholic holy women, which initially inspired public acceptance of her prophecies. This allowed Barton to challenge Henry’s decision to divorce his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn but also provided support for the religious system Henry was attempting to break away from. Thus, her execution and the display of her decapitated head show how dangerous the government deemed Barton and her supporters.104 Richard Grafton’s Chronicle offers another account of the display of an executed female’s remains. According to the published story, Alice Wolfe, whom Grafton refers to as “The Harlot Wolfes Wyfe,” and her husband murdered two Italian merchants in 1534.105 The murder, which was motivated by greed, occurred while the couple and their victims were floating down the Thames. Apparently, Alice lured the men onto the river along with an oarsman accomplice while her husband hid himself “with a leather that boate men use to cover their Cushins wyth.” At just the right moment, John Wolfe jumped out and stabbed the merchants and together with his wife robbed them and threw their bodies overboard.106 Although Wolfe and her husband sought sanctuary at Westminster, Thomas Cromwell, under an act of attainder, which removed their right to sanctuary, was able to arrest them and condemn them to death. Alice Wolfe attempted to escape from the Tower of London wearing men’s clothing but was caught when a member of the city watch recognized her.107 Shannon McSheffrey notes that “John and Alice Wolfe were publicly executed in spectacular fashion by being hanged from a tree over the Thames, drowned by the incoming tide.”108 According to Grafton, Mistress Wolfe’s body remained at the site of execution for some time: “where she hanged stil & was not cut downe, untill such time as it was knowne that beastly and filthy wretches had most shamefully abused her being dead.”109 In this case the sensationalism of the murder as well as the international implications of the death of foreign merchants probably led to the extraordinary execution and display of Wolfe’s body. While an anomaly, this treatment of the female corpse again points to the possibility of women’s bodies functioning as public warning signs of the dangers of sin.110 Additionally, the abuse of Wolfe’s corpse reveals yet again that the female body remains prominent in narratives about women’s executions and that sexualized punishment of the female body can extend beyond the life of the malefactor.

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More sensational treatments of the executed female corpse can be found in prose fiction from the era. The Adventures of Ladie Egeria (c. 1580) by W.C. and a closely paraphrased version of the same text published twenty years later (The Famous Historie of Albions Queene by R.G.) include the execution/murder of a woman by her son, the desecration of her corpse, and the gibbeting of her body.111 In the second version of the story, King Vallentinus, the bastard son of the deposed King Edward and his former mistress, Casiope, decides to execute his mother and her current lover, the Baron, for their adultery and alleged treason. To further his plan, Vallentinus constructs a tower with a gibbet at the top and arrests his mother, Casiope, and her lover. Despite her protestations of repentance, “blushing countenance, as beautiful as the new bloomed Rose,” and her reminder to her son, “I am the Mother, thy selfe fashioned of my wombe and body,” Casiope fails to move her son to pity. Instead, Vallentinus immediately orders her execution, which the text describes in gory detail: “by a present commandement, he caused her bodie to be cast upon a Table, and hir hands and legs to be houlden by the strength of men: the which being done, he with a sharpe knife cut his Mothers throate: and with the same butcherly instrument desevered her lisly necke from hir shoulders, which had wont to be adorned with a glittering chaine of pure gold. After this, he caused the place which first conceaved him to be ript up, and sild full of corny salt: where after hir belly being thus closed up, he gave commandement to have her dead carcasse transported to the top of the Tower, & there hung upon a Gibbet.”112 The violence in this text highlights discourses about the maternal body and the womb as a site of power and punishment. Casiope attempts to induce pity by reminding her son of their physical bond and pointing out that her body once nurtured him. Vallentinus, though, degrades and destroys his mother’s womb, punishing her corpse by destroying the body part that once connected him to her. In the end, Casiope’s body, gibbeted atop the Tower, functions as a reminder of her alleged crimes. By gibbeting his mother, Vallentinus also robs Casiope of her own narrative and imposes on her corpse a new story of shame. Although Casiope wanted her body to tell a story of maternal power and care, her son reframes her narrative. Informing the gathered crowd that his mother was “the She-­devouring Beare of England,” Vallentinus provides them with a different version of history—one that is created not only through his words but through the spectacle of her gibbeted corpse. While fictional, this story points to the possibilities of refashioning the body of the female execution victim through both words and visual spectacle. Indeed, in numerous accounts of women’s hangings, burnings, and beheadings, the authors verbally construct the female body, just as

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Vallentinus displays his mother’s corpse and redefines her identity. While many of these narratives frame women as beautiful and virtuous, a significant number employ signifiers that mark condemned women as wicked and unrepentant. The physical ugliness and deformities pointed out by writers serve as symbols of interior sin and unrepentance. By highlighting such traits (or possibly inventing these malformations and unpleasant attributes), authors sought to fashion some women as ungodly and deserving of punishment. For early modern people, then, the body of the woman—both before and after death—was fraught with meaning. As these narratives demonstrate, women sought to perform virtuous physical behaviors at their executions in order to protect their posthumous reputations. Such behaviors included actions encoded as penitent and godly: weeping, kneeling, and speaking bravely. Those writing about their dying and dead bodies, however, often sought to control interpretations of their bodies. To discredit women, authors pointed out physical flaws, depicted those they deemed deviant as grotesque, and even sometimes sought to objectify their corpses as objects of lust or as items fit only for medical study or didactic warnings. The woman’s body conveyed secrets that the process of dying revealed. Thus, executed women and their corpses became signs, revealing interior spiritual conditions. Monstrous female bodies signified unrepentant and deviant natures; outer beauty denoted inner regeneration and innocence. Sometimes, though, as revealed by the poem of Edward May, the body of the dying or dead female felon became an object of erotic desire. Made passive through punishment and death, the executed female body could be inscribed with meanings beyond the woman’s control. In cases of particularly deviant or threatening women, for instance, their corpses functioned as signs following their executions. The bodies of witches were analyzed for demonic marks, the corpses of prostitutes were deemed animalistic, and the remains of disgraced queens were often buried without ceremony. Additionally, the details of Elizabeth Evans’s dissection and skeletal display, as well as the spiking of Elizabeth Barton’s head, reveal that in some instances the female body served as a reminder of crimes long after the execution of these women’s bodies. In short, women’s bodies were not absent from execution narratives; instead, women brought attention to their physical forms and bodily suffering in order to showcase their courage and ability to die well, while writers, most of whom were men, created meaning out of the dying bodies and corpses of female victims by interpreting physical attributes and anomalies as signs of proper or improper femininity.

5 Women’s Last Dying Speeches Critiquing Social Norms

W

hile the bodies of these executed women speak to us from beyond the grave, the words they uttered at the scaffold also interested their contemporaries. As Henry Goodcole noted in 1618, “dying men’s words are ever remarkable, & their last deeds memorable for succeeding posterities, by them to be instructed, what vertues or vices they followed and imbraced, and by them to learne to imitate that which was good, and to eschew evill.”1 While Goodcole specified “dying men,” the final speeches given by condemned women are also noteworthy, because they provided women with opportunities to transform themselves from cautionary examples to celebrated spiritual guides or social commentators. Although women usually followed the ritualistic patterns employed by male victims, they often used different rhetorical strategies to fashion themselves as subjects and to subvert the execution ritual. Some of these strategies involved appealing directly to the female witnesses gathered to watch their executions; calling for camaraderie from female supporters; employing apologetic differentiation, or attempting to recontextualize the crime as the result of a societal problem encountered by early modern women; directly mentioning family members, in particular husbands and children; employing various strategies of denial; and, finally, positioning themselves as stereotypically weak women to defuse criticism of their public orations. These rhetorical strategies point to the complex nature of the public executions of women and the documents composed in relation to these events. Although Michel Foucault argues that the government allowed the publication and circulation of gallows speeches “because they were expected to have the effect of an ideological control,” the chronicles, hagiographies, pamphlets, and broadsides that reported on women’s executions often advanced the writers’ own agendas or those of the dying women, rather than simply reiterating official positions.2 Indeed, as Randall Martin notes, early modern accounts of women’s last dying speeches include both women’s cooperation with the governmental expectations of penitence and submission to the law and their “active defiance.”3 Many narratives, then, rather than simply reiterating the position of women as criminals or deviants, reframed them as subjects with the ability to provide social commentary or religious instruction or to serve as negative exemplars of feminine behavior.

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The female voice often remained absent from early modern discourse, save when the woman assumed a traditionally male position of power, such as ruling over a nation or managing household monies. Yet, as Catherine Belsey notes, for the women who met their ends on the public scaffold, “the supreme opportunity to speak was the moment of execution.”4 These moments, then, need to be analyzed in terms of both their adherence to and their difference from those of their male counterparts. While most of the accounts of these women’s dying words come to us through male authors, significant transformations of the genre are present even in their mediated voices. Not only did women follow the ritualized scripts that called for repentance, invocation of the Divine, or denial of at least some aspect of the accusation, they also addressed audiences differently, sought communal reformation, and positioned themselves as stereotypically feminine to repair the damage to their reputations and those of their family members. Perhaps most striking in the accounts of female execution speeches, though, are the complex and subtle social critiques women themselves offered, which suggest that women desired more equitable treatment from male family members and authorities.5 Proving that women’s scaffold speeches allowed them to develop a specifically female subjectivity remains difficult, due in part to the lack of unmediated female voices in execution narratives. Court documents and letters of petition, however, do provide more reliable accounts of women’s concerns in this time period and show how women often positioned themselves as obedient and inferior to voice their opinions and influence their audiences. Laura Gowing, in her study of women’s participation in the London ecclesiastical courts, notes that the transcriptions of their testimonies “with all their unexplained absences and gaps, still present a more coherent, fluent story than the other textual records” women left behind.6 The court documents Gowing explores reveal that women often defended themselves against accusations of bigamy, adultery, and sexual deviance by placing themselves in positions subservient to their husbands and masters. In answer to questions about their finances, for instance, women typically noted they were “a mere wife” and had little understanding of their husband’s property.7 Additionally, many women “reminded the court of the limitations and weaknesses ascribed to femininity” and claimed they were unable to speak about certain sexual matters due to female modesty.8 Such self-­deprecating representation, though, according to Gowing, provided women with effective tactics that allowed them to defend themselves against slander and uphold their honor. Indeed, courts seemed particularly concerned with matters of honor and closely questioned female witnesses and defendants to determine “what manner of woman” they were.

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Women therefore needed to offer the courts evidence of their chastity, obedience, and subjection for their words to matter. Women could, and did, counter denials of their accusations of abuse, rape, and seduction by alluding to their powerlessness when dealing with husbands, fathers, and masters. Positioning themselves as weak and modest, however, was often a rhetorical move that allowed women to establish their control over the narratives heard by the courts.9 As we shall see, women’s scaffold speeches, while less reliable than court records, reveal a similar form of rhetoric that allowed women to navigate their positions in early modern society. In addition to court documents, letters of petition written by women during this period reveal that women used similar rhetorical strategies to delineate their agency. In outlining the “scripted” female voice in such correspondence, James Daybell found the following distinct elements: “tropes of female weakness and fragility for strategic effect; emphasis of the plight of widows; the duty of wives, mothers and kinswomen to intervene on behalf of family and friends.”10 In these letters many women strategically claimed lack of knowledge or alluded to inherent female weaknesses. In her 1570 letter to William Cecil, for instance, Lady Julyane Holcroft described herself as “a lone woman” lacking “experience in matters that wemen use not to dealle wyth.”11 Yet, while Daybell highlights women’s pervasive application of deferential language and claims of inferiority, he also notes that women’s use of this language could be strategically employed. Mary Throckmorton, in detailing her approach to composing a petition, told her father: “I have answered his letter like a woman very submissively if that will serve for I perceive that they do not indure to be tolde of theyr faults.”12 Here, Throckmorton attests to her calculated application of the stereotypical language used to communicate women’s weakness and obedience, which would make her letter more likely to obtain a favorable result.13 This same technique, although often retold from a male perspective, was employed by many women at their executions. APOLOGIA: RHETORICAL CONVENTIONS OF SCAFFOLD SPEECHES

Before exploring women’s recorded speeches, though, it is important to understand the generic rhetorical conventions of scaffold addresses, in order to identify the techniques employed by condemned women. In analyzing the last dying speeches of the medieval and early modern period, scholars note the use of apologetic discourse, or a specific form of public address that responds to an accusation of wrongdoing. The scaffold speech, as a type of apologetic discourse, differs significantly from all

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other rhetorical strategies, because the condemned’s words cannot alter their situations. Indeed, when providing a final statement, individuals know that no matter what they say or how eloquently they express themselves, they will shortly die. Although the condemned could no longer defend themselves against the rule of law, they still employed conventional strategies to defend their posthumous reputations, family members, religious beliefs, and even the monarch. Additionally, the scaffold speech offered them a final opportunity to publicly respond to their alleged crimes, repair relationships with their communities, and provide words that continued to echo beyond their lives. The four common responses or tactics identified by scholars of apologia include denial, bolstering, differentiation, and transcendence.14 All of these elements are present in at least some narrative accounts of early modern executions, and individuals encountering death on the scaffold typically employed one if not more of these strategies. According to B. L. Ware and Wil Linkugel, rhetorical denial “consists of the simple disavowal by the speaker of any participation in, relationship to, or positive sentiment towards whatever it is that repels the audience.”15 Such a definition, though, is complicated by the various forms of denial individuals used at the scaffold. Some of the condemned blatantly denied the crimes they were charged with. Others denied an intent to commit the act, such as Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, who, according to one account of his last dying speech, claimed that “in the intentions and purposes of my heart I am innocent of what I die for.”16 Finally, some of the condemned indirectly denied the charges against them by refusing to mention the indictments at all and framing themselves as dying due to the will of God or their general sinfulness. According to the account of a probable eyewitness, Anne Boleyn, for example, deftly avoided any admittance of guilt in her scaffold speech, stating: “Good friends, I am not come here to excuse or to justify myself, forasmuch as I know full well that aught that I could say in my defence doth not appertain to you, and that I could draw no hope of life from the same. But I come here only to die, and thus to yield myself humbly to the will of the King, my lord. And if in my life I did ever offend the King’s Grace, surely with my death I do now atone for the same.”17 In her scaffold confession, Boleyn refuses to discuss the charges against her but does subject herself to the rule of law and “the will of the King.” By doing so she explicitly leaves the matter of her innocence or guilt up to the audience, while noting that any proclamation of innocence would not prolong her life. In addition to denial, Ware and Linkugel note that bolstering, or enhancing the individual’s image by appealing to “abstract values” or

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connecting the person to “valued objects,” is a common strategy in apologetic discourse.18 This particular tactic appears infrequently in the extant accounts of scaffold speeches, and usually only in those of upper-­class men during the early modern period, who occasionally referenced public offices held or work completed on behalf of the monarch or church.19 More common in these execution narratives are strategies of differentiation, which seek “to create necessary distinctions that redefine the questionable act and/or some element” of the accusations against those being punished.20 By using differentiation, the condemned sought to reframe their actions and challenge the audience’s understanding of the charges against them. Thus, some individuals justified their behavior, or at the least provided context regarding the reason for their deaths.21 As we shall see, though, while men’s differentiation strategies usually relied on recontextualizing political or military actions, women’s tactics often reframed their lives as wives and mothers. As the authors of pamphlets and broadsides often pointed out, and women themselves sometimes noted in their final speeches, women’s control over their marriages and the birth of children was often limited. Indeed, accounts of homicide and infanticide often revealed the seduction and abandonment of young women by their masters, the inability of women to select their marriage partners, and the abusive treatment of women by their husbands. Such accounts provide audiences with a more complex picture of many of the women executed for petty treason and murder during this era and bring to light issues of gender inequality and limited agency for women living under the control of male family members and masters. While differentiation appears in many accounts, the most common strategy employed by the condemned was transcendence, which was often religious in scope. According to Sharon D. Downey, the condemned in the medieval and early modern eras “tended to resist the temptation of contesting their cases and instead transcended their dilemma by emphasizing the glories of afterlife.”22 Transcendence, according to a recent study of contemporary execution rhetoric, bypasses the crime by introducing “a higher value in order to shift the context in which the audience” understands the scaffold speech.23 While differentiation strategies focus on the direct context of the charges against an individual, transcendence widens the audience’s understanding of the event, usually by pointing to a belief in God’s mercy, but sometimes through other strategies. Some of the transcendent tactics used by those facing execution include: defiance, or shifting blame onto society; conversion, or defining themselves as redeemed by the Divine and therefore no longer condemned by earthly judgment; “better place” strategies, focusing on the moment of execution as a journey to

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Heaven; and the rhetoric of martyrdom, or asserting their innocence and fashioning themselves as sacrificial victims.24 The use of transcendent rhetoric permeates most medieval and early modern execution narratives, both for those who viewed themselves as religious martyrs and those condemned for treason and murder. Indeed, despite claims of guilt or innocence on the part of the executed individual, most “almost invariably acknowledged their real or imaginary offenses in terms of glittering generalities” and usually “proclaimed their worthiness to die.”25 Yet the condemned who chose to die for their religious beliefs, as Thomas R. Burkholder notes, “assumed far more control over their rhetorical situation than did accused traitors.”26 According to their hagiographers, religious martyrs often reframed their executions as opportunities to offer themselves to God as “burnt offerings” and sometimes referred to the clothes they donned for their deaths as wedding garments.27 The strategies that the condemned used on the scaffold often highlight their attempts to present themselves not only as redeemed by God but also as valuable members of Christian society. For most male victims, the scaffold speech functioned as a way for them to fashion their posthumous identity by using well-­understood strategies. For the women who perished on the pyres and scaffolds of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­ century England, though, the generic conventions were less clear-­cut and often failed to address their unique positions in society and the nature of their accusations. Thus, women often used markedly different rhetorical strategies when speaking from the scaffold. To reestablish themselves as valued members of English society, women fashioned themselves as part of a community of other women, often addressing themselves directly to female audience members. Doing so allowed them to offer advice and warnings to their fellow women; additionally, in their scaffold speeches, women frequently located their rebellion against male authority figures in the context of their repression in early modern society, citing examples of spousal abuse, seduction by unscrupulous men, and an inability to choose their husbands. This strategy of differentiation allowed women to position themselves both as repentant sinners and as sympathetic victims. ADDRESSING FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBERS

One important strategy used by several women was their address to female audience members. As noted previously, many of the scaffold speeches began with a stereotypical greeting of the witnesses who had gathered to watch the event. Usually these addresses included all of those watching, both men and women. In several female execution narratives, though, the

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victims include a statement addressed particularly to the women in the audience. This specific strategy was most common in broadside ballads, in which condemned women position themselves or were positioned by the authors as negative examples for their female readers and listeners.28 Thomas Deloney’s “Lamentation of Master Pages Wife of Plimmouth,” which ventriloquizes the final words of Eulalia Glanville Page, who was burned at the stake in 1591 for her role in the murder of her husband, includes a number of direct addresses to other married women: “Take heed you wives, let not your hands rebell / . . . All wives farewell, example take by me: / Let not the Devill to murder you entice: / Seeke to escape each soule and filthy vice.”29 Another husband murderer, Prudence Lee, also reportedly used her final speech to articulate her new role as a negative example to other women. According to the 1652 pamphlet The witch of Wapping, at the stake Lee expressed her hope that “she might be a warning to all women, that they attempt to do nothing rashly, especially against their husbands.”30 The anonymous author of the pamphlet, though, after describing Lee’s demise, provided context for her crime and expressed sympathy with her circumstances. By reporting that “her husband was a very wicked liver” who “kept company with strange women,” the author positions Lee as a victim. The murder of her husband, furthermore, is described as occurring during an argument that ensued when Lee “found him in company with another woman.” Although Lee’s guilt remains clear, the more nuanced details of her story emerge, perhaps in part because Lee allowed herself to function as a negative exemplar for other women.31 Likewise, in the ballad “The Wofull Lamentacon of Mrs. Anne Saunders,” the words ascribed to the condemned woman include the following: “Behold, all honest wyves, / And fynest London dames, / Beare to your husbandes trusty hartes, / Procure not to your shames; / Tacke patterne playne by mee, / Well vewe my race and end; / And while yow stand, see to your stepes, / And lett the faultye amend.”32 These ballads, which purport to have been written by the executed women prior to their deaths, contain advice specifically for female audience members. By including this language, the ballad writers stress a relationship between female subjects and female readers and witnesses, implying that all women are capable of both virtuous behavior and rebellion against their husbands.33 Indeed, in this era philosophers and theologians typically connected female sins to women’s innate characteristics. Nicholas Byfield, for instance, in a seventeenth-­ century sermon discussing the virtues and deficits of women, explained to his parishioners: “Women are weake and fraile, called here the weaker vessell; and I take it, this weaknesse is attributed to them, not in respect

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of sinne so much, as in naturall defects . . . not personall faults, but such weaknesses, as are found in all women, or the most. But yet I would not bee understood, to free women altogether from sinne in these frailties, because since the fall the naturall defects are tainted, and there is in them a speciall kinde of defectivenesse, or infirmity which cleaves to their Sexe, which is not so usually in men, or not accompanying the nature of men.”34 Byfield attests to a popular reading of scripture whereby women, due to the initial sins of Eve, were “tainted” by moral weakness and more prone to sinfulness. These characteristics, many believed, were passed down to most, if not all, women, and caused them to succumb more readily to vices. Yet, as Byfield later notes, God granted strength to the weak, and with his assistance women could “overcomne their frailties,” and “excell in knowledge, and piety, and mercy, and trust in God.”35 The repentant woman on the scaffold, for her audience, represented the weak and sinful everywoman while simultaneously showcasing the power of God to refashion her as virtuous. For female witnesses, then, the message was clear: you are innately prone to vice but can, with God’s help, overcome your natural tendencies. In ballads concerning women condemned for infanticide, a similar strategy of reminding women of their innate evil and the possibility of repentance is employed; in these accounts, though, the condemned remind their female audience members of the dangers of fornication and unnatural attitudes and actions toward their newborn children. In Martin Parker’s 1634 ballad No Naturall Mother, but a Monster, the condemned woman states “take heed faire Maidens,” explaining that she found herself pregnant and unwed because her “carriage was too wild” and “the father on’t was fled.” Yet, although the unnamed woman in this ballad warns of the dangers of fornication, her main concern is cautioning unwed and pregnant women not to compound their promiscuity with the sin of murder: “Sweet Maidens all take heed, / heedfully, heedfully, / Adde not unto the deed of fornication, / Murder which of all things, / The soule and conscience stings.”36 While these textual examples position all women as capable of sins against their husbands and children, the use of similar sentiments about human wickedness informs a number of ballads from the period, suggesting that rebellion against God, in general, was something that early modern people needed to watch out for. Ballads about men who committed robberies and murders also include warnings to audience members cautioning readers to beware of drunkenness, love of money, and failing to honor the Sabbath.37 Similar to the narratives about women condemned for violent crimes, these accounts of male perpetrators suggest a “domino

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theory” of wrongdoing, which meant that people typically held that minor vices only led to more serious sins.38 Thus, those speaking at the scaffold warned their audiences about the dangers of lesser iniquities by pointing to themselves as examples of the way that minor vices, if unchecked, could lead to life-­altering sins. The ventriloquized male voices, though, never address themselves to the female audience members directly. Instead, these lamentations are either spoken to all witnesses or to young men specifically. The ballad writers’ decision, therefore, to include women as particular audience members, reveals that women were not only consumers of crime literature but also direct recipients of a message meant for them and related particularly to the problem of female vices. Additionally, the titles of many of these popular accounts—for example, “A Warning for Wives” and “A Warning for All Desperate Women”—position themselves as cautionary messages for women.39 And these messages, while including common warnings against failing to attend church, being seduced by the devil, and forsaking God’s words, often contain female-­specific sins. In “The Unnaturall Wife,” which is told from the perspective of husband-­murderer Alice Davis, the condemned woman recounts not only the murder but also her socially unacceptable treatment of her husband.40 In this ballad Davis sets herself up as an example to other women, cautioning, “Let all curst Wives by me take heed, / how they doe, doe the like, / Cause not thy Husband for to bleed, / nor lift thy hand to strike; / Lest like to me, you burne in fire.” While the ballad’s central focus is on the murder, Davis traces the origin of her crime, noting that prior to her desperate act, she was a scold: “though oft I him ubbraide; / And often times would chide and braule, / And many ill names would him call.”41 This behavior, Davis suggests, eventually led to her decision to stab her husband, which she classifies as a desperate moment motivated by his request for a shilling. At the end of the ballad, Davis again cautions wives “that are of hasty kinde” to “mend their lives,” lest they too find themselves burned at the stake for killing their husbands.42 Davis’s story therefore, becomes within this ballad, a moralizing tale that recounts a woman’s passage from scold to murderer. Such narratives “brought into sharp focus the gendered nature of domestic authority” and presumably worked to scare women into socially acceptable roles as submissive and obedient wives.43 As Susan Amussen notes, in early modern England “the focus of greatest popular concern . . . was not the abusive husband, but the violent disorderly wife.”44 What, however, is most interesting here is the use of the female voice to condemn female vocal power as an action that could lead to great evil. Presumably, Davis began as a “scold,” which was a derogatory term for “any woman who verbally

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resisted or flouted authority publicly and stubbornly enough to challenge the underlying dictum of male rule.”45 In the ballad, though, Davis is given a public voice, and while she may (through her presumably male ballad writer) advocate for male rule, she herself is the one providing the verbal lesson to her female listeners. While women on the scaffold often assumed positions as moral authorities on the dangers of female vices like scolding and failing to control their sexual desires, their status as agents remained fraught. Although the women in these accounts spoke as subjects, their words often promoted their own and their fellow women’s subjugation to male family members. The execution narrative in these cases functioned as a ritual of inversion, for by allowing women to exercise the typical male privilege of public speaking, the authorities overturned convention, only to use such speeches to right the hierarchical structure of society. The words of formerly disorderly, rebellious, and murderous women therefore were meant to function as evidence of a return from female chaos to male order. Yet many of these women’s last dying speeches complicate this traditional reading. At first glance such speeches imply that male authors frequently and consistently used the ventriloquized voices of condemned women to uphold male dominance and negate female concerns; however, some women, while verbally supporting traditional gender relations and behaviors, also offered subtle critiques and sometimes condemnations of men’s treatment of their wives, lovers, and daughters. The consequences of their mistreatment by men, these women and their writers suggest, impacted women’s abilities to control their passions and led to extreme violence. Thus, women’s speeches, while usually adhering to didactic and confessional modes, were more complex than previously supposed. In fact, within the confines of the execution narrative, some women found space to attest to their own subjectivity. SOCIAL CRITIQUE ON THE SCAFFOLD

While the mediated voice of Alice Davis in “The Unnatural Wife” works to uphold male authority within the household and warn women against verbal rebellion, other accounts of women’s scaffold speeches problematize the role of women in early modern England. A significant number of execution narratives, rather than warning women of the dangers of disobeying male authority figures, point to the need for social reform in the treatment of women. It should be noted, though, that while the public might accept that female victimization by men led to women murdering

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their husbands, “popular representations of the female murderess were moral tales that did not question her final fate on the scaffold.”46 Indeed, a number of recent studies suggest that women’s gallows confessions should be primarily read as didactic texts that controlled and contained the female voice.47 Yet, as Rosalind Smith has argued in relation to women’s gallows confessions, the female complaint occasionally manifested itself in broadside ballads and crime pamphlets.48 I argue that these complaints are prevalent in all genres of execution narratives and offered women a chance for limited agency when they adhered to the ritual conventions both verbally and bodily. Indeed, for writers to include subtly subversive sentiments from female speakers and for audiences to positively assess these rhetorical moves required condemned women to position themselves as modest, submissive, and repentant. Three issues, in particular, stand out in gallows confessions that include these social critiques and female complaints: spousal abuse, the seduction of women by unscrupulous men, and the need for women to select sober and law-­abiding spouses.49 The inclusion of these complaints suggests that women (or the authors describing their final speeches) used their scaffold confessions as opportunities not to simply promote female submission to male authorities but to warn women of the dangers of unscrupulous men.50 In short, the social critiques women provided in their last dying speeches subtly suggested ways for their fellow women to gain greater control over their domestic and sexual lives. While the mediated female voice of Anne Wallens Lamentation For the Murthering of her husband John Wallen (1616) does participate in the typical warnings, urging her fellow wives to “take heed” and treat their husbands with kindness and to “let not your tongus oresway true reasons bounds,” the speaker also places blame on the husband for his violence against her. Although Wallen expresses repentance for her crime and notes that her husband “nere did wrong to any in his life,” the ballad complicates such a simplistic reading of the scolding wife driven to a murderous rage. Instead, the narrator relates: My husband having beene about the towne, And comming home, he on his bed lay down: To rest himselfe, which when I did espie, I fell to rayling most outragiously. I cald him Rogue, and slave, and all to naught, Repeating the worst language might be thought Thou drunken knave I said, and arrant sot, Thy minde is set on nothing but the pot.

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Sweet heart he said I pray thee hold thy tongue, And if thou dost not, I shall doe thee wrong, At which, straight way I grew in worser rage, That he by no meanes could my tongue asswage. He then arose and strooke me on the eare, I did at him begin to curse and sweare: Then presently one of his tooles I got, And on his body gave a wicked stroake.51

This account, while obviously not a true rendition of Wallen’s final words, levels several complaints against the husband. Not only does John Wallen appear drunk, but he also strikes his wife, which causes her to respond in kind. The possibility that Anne Wallen’s actions could be read as self-­ defense are borne out in the historical record. Sir John Chamberlain, commenting on Wallen’s sentencing and execution, noted that “she had summum jus, for her husband having brawld, and beaten her, she took up a chesill or such other instrument and flung it at him, which cut him into the bellie, wherof he died.”52 Thus, while the ballad presents a properly repentant wife who warns others of her inability to control her tongue and rage, it also points to the real danger of spousal abuse not only by wives against their husbands but also husbands against their wives.53 Likewise, Thomas Lodge, in his 1596 Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse, offers a complex account of an unnamed woman who, after suffering extensive abuse, murdered her children and husband. While Lodge never excuses the woman’s decision to kill her husband and blames the murder partially on Satan’s prodding, he provides details that highlight the woman’s desperate plight and notes that her punishment should serve as a warning not only to angry wives but also to negligent husbands. According to Lodge, the husband was a “gamester and drunkard, drowned in prodigality & sensuality  .  .  . who sold all his possessions to Archias, that hee might follow dishonest drinking.”54 The husband’s decisions had dire consequences for his wife and two children, who were left alone and without food. When the wife confronted her husband, begging his aid, he beat her and “left her dead, and past recovery,” which prompted her fatal choices.55 On her return home, confronted with the cries of her starving children, the woman “pressed by these miseries, and brought to this dispaire, shee tooke a knife in her hand, and cut her childrens throats.”56 Later, when her drunk husband returned home, unaware of the death of his children, she murdered him in his sleep, stating, “Thou shalt die thou negligent man, since thy ill government hath bene the ruine of me and my children.”57 Lodge reports that at her execution the woman, like many

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others convicted of petty treason, “left examples to wives to beware of too much fury” but also notes that she added to her speech “admonitions to husbands to be more circumspect.”58 Although Lodge’s story of the unnamed child-­and husband-­murderer follows a pattern similar to many stories of female criminals, as it provides details of the crime, the apprehension of the culprit, her execution, and a moral reading of the events, obvious sympathy for the wife pervades the account. Throughout the narrative, the words used to depict the woman highlight her desperation and force readers to confront not only the sin of murder but also the mitigating circumstances that led this woman to take such desperate actions. Lodge describes her as a “desolate wretch” and “poore wife” and highlights in colorful language the extent of her suffering and that of her children, who communicate with “bitter sighes,” are “grievously oppressed with hunger,” and “languish in continuall famine.” The murder of her children, Lodge suggests, is motivated by the woman’s despair and motherly concern rather than a monstrous inhumanity. It is only the husband’s murder that was “urged on by Satan.” Yet even then the account is framed not by statements about the wife’s murderous intents or devilish motives. Instead the story begins with Lodge’s assessment of the husband’s failure as the head of his household and ends with a claim that “this cursed invention of the Lydians hath bene the occasion of the murder of foure persons.”59 In the end, then, Lodge places the wife among the victims. Indeed, the husband’s love of dice and gambling (as dice were traditionally viewed as “the invention of the Lydians”) presumably led to neglect of his family, and consequently his wife’s murderous rage and subsequent execution. Lodge’s account, then, can be read as a warning to husbands as well as to wives. Part of the message communicated here is that husbands need to manage their household accounts and treat their dependents with kindness. That abuse may have prompted some women to murder their husbands is also confirmed by Henry Goodcole’s account of Alice Clarke’s conviction and execution. According to Goodcole, Clarke, who was burned at Smithfield in 1635 for poisoning her husband, was “almost compeled” to commit murder due to the cruelty of her husband, Fortune Clarke, who “used not onely to beat her with the next cudgel that came accidentally unto his hand, but often tying her to his bed-­post to strip her and whippe her, &c.”60 While Goodcole here fails to provide readers with a full account of Clarke’s experience of abuse, he suggests not only physical but sexual assault and does not shy away from placing blame on the husband, even though the wife is the one ultimately punished. Through his sympathetic treatment of Clarke, Goodcole invites his readers to consider not

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just the usual platitudes concerning ungovernable women but also the societal problems of physical and sexual abuse against women. Additionally, Goodcole’s decision to include a detailed account of Clarke’s scaffold speech further details common difficulties facing lower-­class women. Clarke, who was pressured to provide a full confession at the stake after being denied the last rites, finally complied and “with as loud and audible a voice, as possible” related her crimes in detail. Clarke confessed that her lover paid for the mercury that killed Fortune Clarke and that he instructed her to “give it unto her Husband.” She did, however, deny that she actually caused her husband’s death, as Fortune discovered the vial of poison in her sleeve and swallowed it while drunk. Clarke also, though, provided an explanation of her situation that pointed to the difficulties of lower-­class servant women during this time. Clarke related: “Her Master got her with childe a yeare since, which was her overthrow, and mediated for the Marriage, betweene her and her Husband, whom shee could not love, nor no way affect. By her Masters perswasion, who sent her up to London to be Married, and payed the costs thereof, and further promised her maintenance during her life, if she did condescend unto his desiers, which were most unlawfull, dishonest, and unchaste, before and after her Marriage, with Fortune Clarke her Husband.”61 Although Clarke states that she was later sexually involved with men other than her husband, and even though Goodcole condemns her adultery, the inclusion of this information provides a modified justification of Clarke’s actions. By mentioning her master’s seduction of her as well as his assumption that she continue to serve his sexual needs despite her marriage, Clarke places partial blame on a powerful male figure. In addition to condemning her unnamed master for her descent into adultery and murder, Clarke also reveals the unequal position of women in early modern England. Her movement from servant to mistress to sexual pawn and finally to willing adulteress shows Clarke’s “selfe-­w ill,” which Goodcole may view as transgressive, but which accurately represents the coping strategies of many lower-­class women who willingly acquiesced to male lusts in order to survive. The murder of her husband therefore reads not as simply Clarke’s fault but also as the fault of the various men who used her sexually, and the one in particular who encouraged her to poison Fortune Clarke. Clarke’s message from the scaffold, then, not only warns her fellow women and offers words of repentance but also advances a direct attack on the treatment of female servants and comments on the sexual double standard. By scapegoating her former master, Clarke suggests that the slippery slope of female sin may begin not with women’s licentious proclivities but with the unchecked lusts of their male employers. Clarke’s last

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words therefore point out flaws in the prevailing sexual double standard. This double standard, as Bernard Capp notes, held “that female sexuality was regarded (by men) as a male possession, so that sexual immorality in women was regarded as a heinous fault while men’s lapses might be regarded as relatively trivial.”62 Such a belief system often meant that when masters took advantage of their female servants, the woman was more likely to be punished than the man. Indeed, female servants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries faced severe consequences if they became pregnant, including losing their positions and livelihoods, as well as the possibility of public punishment.63 Unmarried mothers were also pressured to provide the name of the child’s father, who, it was hoped, would either wed the woman or at least provide financial support for the child. Often, however, men denied paternity, and in the case of pregnant maidservants, the masters who impregnated them typically controlled the situation by offering money or advising the women to name another man as father. Capp details several cases involving maidservants who found themselves pregnant by their masters, noting that some employers pressured their servants to select other “fathers,” failed to provide funding for the delivery and upkeep of the child, or even suggested that the women commit infanticide. While some of these women were able to successfully push for financial support from their employers and fathers of their children, many others found themselves destitute.64 Clarke’s account of her own life suggests that her unnamed master, while offering financial support for her unborn child, pressured her into a loveless marriage and persuaded her to continue serving his sexual desires. Clarke’s social commentary from the scaffold is not the only one given by condemned women facing execution. Elizabeth Evans, or “Canberry Bess,” also used differentiation tactics and social critique in her 1635 gallows speech. In his account Goodcole noted that Evans laid blame “against all Theeves, which caused her destruction. And furthermore in signe of such her detestation, of such unholy courses, proceeded from her mouth a most serious request unto all then present assembled, advising all poore simple women to marry an honest man, though but a Ragge-­gatherer, rather then a lewd man or a Theefe, rendring the reason of such her earnest admonition, because an honestman may make an evil woman turne from her evill waies, but it was hard for an evill man, to make a wicked woman good, with divers other admonitions to the wonder of the standers by, considering what a life shee had lived in.”65 Evans therefore used her final words not to confess her sins but to place blame on the thieves she knew and on her fellow murderer and lover, Thomas Shearwood. Her rhetorical tactic here is one of differentiation and indirect denial. In her

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speech Evans avoids a clear statement of guilt and instead suggests that she was led astray by Shearwood. Furthermore, Goodcole provides a discussion of Evans’s past, detailing the woman’s seduction by an unscrupulous man, loss of friends due to her “folly,” and reluctant entry into the criminal world. According to Goodcole, Evans was “of a very good parentage descended, who carefully for her good education, and future preferment, sent her up unto London, to some friends, who setled her in a good service. . . . But unfortunately it happened, that shee grew acquainted with a young man in London, who tempted her unto folly, and by that ungodly act her suddain ruine insued.”66 Here, Goodcole describes Evans as a well-­ brought-­up woman who was corrupted by the presumably sexual attention of Shearwood. While Goodcole notes the crowd found Evans’s statements unconvincing, “considering what a life shee had lived in,” through her statement Evans attempted to fashion herself as a victim of injustice. The accusations against her—murder, theft, and prostitution—become symptoms of a society that valued wealth above virtue. If only, Evans suggested, she had chosen to marry an “honestman,” her life would have ended differently. Additionally, in her address to “poore simple women,” rather than reminding them to obey their husbands, Evans warned them of the dangers of marrying the wrong type of man, which shifts the focus of her speech from the crimes she committed to the needs of her fellow women. In his 1604 account of Elizabeth Caldwell’s crime, arraignment, and execution (A True Discourse), Gilbert Dugdale notes that Caldwell used a similar rhetorical tactic and provided extensive reasons for the cause of her attempt on her husband’s life. The first section of Dugdale’s pamphlet focuses on Elizabeth’s life, including her ill-­fated marriage to Thomas Caldwell, who spent little time with his young wife and squandered her dowry; her affair with Jeffrey Bownd; the lovers’ subsequent plan to kill Thomas Caldwell with poisoned oaten-­cakes; Thomas Caldwell’s miraculous survival after eating the poisoned food; the death of a neighbor’s child as well as of two dogs and a cat who ingested the fatal cakes; and Elizabeth Caldwell’s subsequent penitence and godly behavior in prison. Dugdale’s narrative frames Caldwell as a victim of her husband’s neglect and an unwilling participant in the poisoning attempt, as well as an exemplary and virtuous prisoner who tries “to convert all the rest of the prisoners” and offers wise admonitions to the hundreds of people who visit her in prison.67 While his account is sympathetic and throws doubt on Caldwell’s full guilt, it is the letter that Dugdale includes in the pamphlet that allows Caldwell to reframe herself as the victim of her husband’s abuse, thereby

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shifting the guilt back on him and positioning herself as a martyr on his behalf.68 In this letter, supposedly penned by Caldwell prior to her execution, the condemned woman addresses her husband directly and refers to her upcoming execution as an opportunity to save his soul: “And if the losse of my blood, or life, or to endure any torments that the world can inflict upon me, might procure your true conversion, I should esteeme it purchased at an easie rate.”69 Additionally, Caldwell directly mentions sins committed by her husband, including drunkenness and failing to honor the Sabbath. She also hints at his probable adultery and specifically blames his ill treatment of her as a mitigating factor in her decision to poison him: “Remember in what a case you have lived, howe poore you have many times left me, how long you have beene absent from mee, all which advantage the devill tooke to subvert mee. And to further his purpose, he set his hellish instruments a work, even the practise of wicked people, who continuallie wrought upon my weaknes, my povertie, and your absence, untill they made me yeeld to conspire with them the destruction of your bodie, by a violent & suddaine death.”70 By castigating her husband, Caldwell, according to Randall Martin, reverses “the traditional link between female sexual infidelity and murder,” instead equating her husband’s sexual uncleanness as “the root cause of the homicide.”71 Her letter therefore allows Caldwell to point out the unequal treatment of women in early modern England and to posture both as a victim of her husband’s cruelty and as a martyr for his salvation. As these accounts show, some women used the scaffold speech to critique the social order. These women noted the unequal social relations between men and women and pointed out that not only the female murderers but also their husbands and lovers shared responsibility for the breakdown of relationships. Yet, for audiences to accept these critiques, the representation of the female speaker needed to adhere to the majority of accepted execution rituals. Providing a speech that deflated some aspects of the ritual required women to fulfill generic expectations, including upholding the dominant position of male authorities, positioning themselves as penitent, and offering themselves as cautionary examples. Thus, opportunities for limited subjectivity existed but were severely limited by the generic expectations of the authorities and witnesses. Indeed, as shown through the examples of Caldwell, Evans, and Clarke, the attitude and perceived contriteness of the condemned female impacted the transmission of the scaffold confession and the acceptance of these women’s complaints by the presumably male authors who wrote these complaints into their accounts. Therefore, while both Clarke and Caldwell positioned themselves as penitent and submissive to the authorities, Evans’s seeming

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lack of true repentance caused the author of her story to treat her social critique with suspicion. In addition to addressing women directly and providing social critiques that focused on the inequality of early modern women’s lives, some condemned women used their final moments to unite with other women. Women expressed their camaraderie with their fellow women both by sharing a drink on the foot of the scaffold and by selecting female attendants to walk with them to the scaffold and care for their bodies after death. Joyce Lewes, for instance, who was martyred in 1557, shared a drink with her Protestant friends following her scaffold confession. Foxe notes that “a greate number, specially the women of the towne did drinke with her: which afterward were put to open penaunce in the Church by the cruell Papistes, for drinkyng with her.”72 In her last moments, then, Lewes bonded with the evangelical women of Linchfield, a moment that Meghan Nieman classifies as a possible “re-­enactment of the Last Supper with an all-­female cast.”73 Many women also were attended by female servants or friends on their way to the scaffold. Such an arrangement seems common regardless of the condemned’s social position or crime. Two maids, for instance, assisted Mary, Queen of Scots at her 1587 execution, helping her remove her outer garments and receiving kisses and blessings from the queen before she was beheaded.74 Similarly, four women attended Anne Boleyn, walking with her to the scaffold, covering her eyes before she knelt for the fatal blow, and removing her body following the decapitation. According to the poem composed by Lancelot de Carles, a member of the French embassy to London, these women took great care of the queen’s body and appeared genuinely distressed by her execution: “One of her ladies in tears came forward to do the last office and cover her face with a linen cloth. . . . The head and body were taken up by the ladies, whom you would have though bereft of their souls, such was their weakness; but fearing to let their mistress be touched by unworthy hands, forced themselves to do so. Half dead themselves, they carried the body, wrapped in a white covering, to the place of burial within the Tower.”75 Boleyn’s women here conduct the domestic duties usually carried out by women for their deceased family members and neighbors.76 Such work usually included washing the corpse, wrapping the body in linen or wool, and often watching the corpse, or keeping the newly dead body company. While Boleyn’s maids are unable to attend to all these traditional rituals, it is noteworthy that the women protect the queen’s body in death, covering her decapitated head, ensuring that she is buried, and mourning her loss together.77 Although waiting women usually attended elite women at the scaffold,

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accounts of the executions of lower-­class women also mention the involvement of women at the scaffold. An anonymous author who documented the 1608 burning of husband-­murderer Margaret Ferneseede, for example, records that the condemned woman “was by the keeper delivered to the Shreve, one each hand a woman leading her, and the Preacher going before her.”78 The presence of these women at the foot of the scaffold allowed the executed woman not only the possible comfort of her female companions but also the reverent treatment of her remains after death. Such sentiments are echoed in early modern drama when, for example, the Duchess of Malfi in Webster’s drama of the same name begs her murderers, “Dispose my breath how please you, but my body / Bestow upon my women.”79 The inclusion of female attendants at the deaths of executed women attests to the continued importance of female relationships and the gendered rituals of death, even for those women deemed deserving of capital punishment. Women frequently remained at the bedsides of their dying female friends and were often charged with the care of their bodies after death.80 Indeed, in a study of deathbed rituals in early modern Canterbury, Elizabeth A. Hallam found that while men were more likely to be participants in will-­making, women spent more time caring for the dying (particularly their fellow women), interpreting the signs of approaching death, and deciphering and relaying the intentions of the dying person. Additionally, women typically initiated the dying individual’s preparation for a good Christian death by helping them to acknowledge relationships with family and friends, confess their sins, and request and grant forgiveness from others. Finally, female deathbed attendants often provided narratives and assessments about the dying person’s mental and spiritual state.81 The inclusion of female attendants at women’s executions, then, suggests that women served as encouragers, caretakers, and gendered witnesses to the ritual. Even though the voices of these female attendants remain absent from most accounts of women’s executions, their participation in these rituals positions them as agents in the theater of death. PARTING GIFTS AND WORDS TO FAMILY MEMBERS

In addition to addresses to their fellow women, critiques of the unfair treatment of women, and the involvement of attendant women in their deaths, many condemned women mentioned and directly addressed their family members. Most men facing the spectacle of public execution, particularly members of the nobility, tended to position themselves as servants of the monarch and to call for obedience to the divinely ordained

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ruler. In Thomas Cromwell’s 1540 last dying speech, for instance, he expressed his support for Henry VIII, calling on the audience “to pray for the kinges grace, that he may long lyve with you in health and prosperitie.”82 Even lower-­class men often called for obedience to the sovereign, as did Thomas Appletree in his 1579 scaffold speech, in which he prayed that God would “preserve every part and member of the same, especially thy servaunt ELIZABETH our most gracious soveraine Queenes graunt hir al such giftes as be needefull for so high a calling, to the advauncemente of thy glorie, and benefit of this comon wealth, to the establishing of a perfect goverrnement of thy church.”83 Yet, while a number of condemned noblewomen, especially the wives of Henry VIII, reminded audience members of their allegiance to the monarch, some women’s speeches mentioned authority figures and duties closer to home. Although many women expressed concerns for family members in their scaffold speeches, quite a few men in the seventeenth century also mentioned their wives, children, or parents as they addressed the witnesses from the scaffold.84 As Joy Wiltenburg notes, laments for family members by both men and women “underline the humanity and social connectedness of felons, . . . heighten the deterrent aim of execution ballads by showing the suffering of loved ones,” and “suggest a care for others and a resignation that might bode well for the state of the penitent’s soul.”85 Thus, the mention of kin served to humanize the condemned and position them as objects of sympathy rather than simply social outcasts. This strategy worked for both men and women and more frequently appears in the accounts of individuals executed for treason or heresy, rather than for those punished for crimes like murder. In the cases of high-­ranking men whose sufferings and deaths met with sympathy from the crowds, mention of kin seems more common and may have added to the audience’s willingness to view their scaffold behavior favorably and lament their executions. At the start of the seventeenth century, Walter Ralegh wrote letters to his wife and son while in prison, and John Trewman, an Irishman executed for treason in 1641, requested that the judge “take care of my Wife and Children” in his scaffold speech.86 Men typically, though, did not mention family members in their final speeches as frequently as women did. Women in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often mentioned their husbands, children, or extended family in their scaffold speeches or in the letters they penned the nights before their deaths. Accounts of both elite and common women attest to their continued interest in family connections. Lady Jane Grey, for example, remembered her family members when facing capital punishment. Immediately before her execution, Grey wrote a letter to her sister,

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Katherine Grey, in the back of her Greek New Testament. In this letter, which was included in several contemporary collections of her conversations and writings, Jane constantly reiterates her affection for her sister, calling her “my only best and best loved Sister,” and “my dearest Sister.” Jane’s purpose in this letter is not only to express her sisterly love but also to encourage Katherine’s faith and urge her to rely on the New Testament as a guide to life.87 Margaret Clitherow, the Catholic martyr pressed to death in 1586, also considered her family members in her final hours. According to her biographer, John Mush: “Her hat before she died she sent to her husband, in sign of her loving duty to him as to her head. Her hose and shoes to her eldest daughter, Anne, about twelve years old, signifying that she should serve God and follow her steps of virtue.”88 Clitherow’s parting gifts uphold her relationship with her husband and highlight her subjection to him by showing her embrace of traditional gender roles; her final gift to young Anne Clitherow also reveals the importance she placed on instilling religious values in her daughter.89 Through her decision to leave her shoes and her life as a godly example to her daughter, Clitherow echoes the popular mother’s legacy texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These manuscripts, written by mothers as deathbed gifts, aimed to positively influence their children’s religious beliefs and behavior. To establish their ability and right to compose these texts, mothers often highlighted their maternal authority and emotional connection to their progeny and sometimes also stressed the need for their daughter’s education.90 And in doing so, these women, like those offering subtle critiques from the scaffold, attempted to provide their daughters with opportunities for limited agency through religious study and humanistic learning. While women like Clitherow and Grey left behind parting gifts to family members to encourage them in their faith or promote female learning, other narratives show more-­traditional approaches to kin and greater support for women’s subjugation to male authorities. In a number of accounts, women lamented the loss of their children, highlighted the shame they brought to their families, offered prayers for their family members, and requested forgiveness from their kin. Foxe relates that the martyr Bradbrege’s wife or widow expressed concern for her two children and “sayd to the Bishop, that if he would needes burne her, yet she trusted, that he would take and keepe Pacience & Charitie, meaning her ii. children.”91 Although the bishop denied her request, the woman’s focus on her children highlights a reoccurring worry for not only those women who died for their spiritual beliefs but also convicted felons. In T. Platte’s 1616 broadside ballad Anne Wallens Lamentation, the condemned requests

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pardon, stating, “Mother in lawe, forgive me I you pray, / For I have made your onely childe away, / Even all you had.”92 Other women used this opportunity to remind their family members of their religious duty and offered prayers for the conversion of their spouses or children. Elizabeth Caldwell, for example, according to Dugdale’s account, prayed “very earnestly for her husbands conversion, and that her two children might have the feare of God before their eyes.”93 Perhaps the most detailed surviving accounts of an executed woman’s concern for her family are the numerous publications detailing the murder of George Saunders and the representations of his wife, Anne, from her participation in the murder to her execution in 1573. According to these accounts, George Saunders and his servant were traveling to Woolwich when they were attacked and mortally wounded by Anne’s lover, George Browne. Although Browne claimed that Anne had no knowledge of the plan to kill Saunders, suspicion quickly fell on both Anne Saunders and her neighbor, Anne Drewrie, who had told Browne about Saunders’s planned visit to Woolwich. The pregnant Anne Saunders and her neighbor were consequently tried as accessories to the murder and found guilty. After a series of delays owing to Anne’s pregnancy and the efforts of some influential individuals to save her from death at the stake, both women, depicted as fully penitent at the last moment, were executed at Smithfield.94 The sensationalism of the case, due in part to Anne’s role in her husband’s death, ignited popular interest and led to the publication of not only a pamphlet by Arthur Golding (Briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders) but also a ballad titled “The Wofull Lamentacon of Mrs. Anne Saunders,” a lost account by Edward White called “A Cruell Murder Donne in Kent,” inclusion in an Anthony Munday report of contemporary murders, and a 1592 play entitled A Warning for Faire Women.95 In every one of these extant accounts, Anne’s request for forgiveness from family members and lament over the future of her children are prominent. According to Golding’s lengthy pamphlet detailing the Saunders case, Anne Saunders, realizing that her execution was imminent, sent for her husband’s family members and asked their forgiveness “with abundance of sorrowful teares.”96 Anne allegedly also lamented how her crime had impacted her own family “but especially her children, whom she had not only bereft both of father and mother, but also left them a coarsie and shame.”97 Perhaps prompted by the minister of St. Paul’s who heard her confession, Anne also gave her children “a booke of maister Bradfordes meditations,” and asked the ministers “to write some admonition as they thought good, Whiche doone, she subscribed them with these wordes: Youre Sorowfull mother Anne Saunders.”98 In her scaffold speech, Anne also

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alluded again to her family, stating: “I aske mercye of God, I aske mercie of all men and women of the world, who by my deede & example I have offended: and especiallye I bewaile my husbande, & aske mecie of my children who I have beraved of so good a father, I aske mercy of his kindred and frendes whome I have hurt, & of all my frends & kindred, of whom I am abashed and ashamed: and beyng of my selfe unworthy of pittie, yet I besech them all, & you all, & all the whole worlde even for gods sake, and for our saviour Christs sake to forgive me.”99 Anne Saunders’s confession therefore personalizes her sin and request for forgiveness. Rather than asking for general mercy, she specifically comments on the “kindred and frendes” impacted by George Saunders’s death and laments the fatherless state of her children. Early modern audiences readily recognized the dramatic potential of such cases. A Warning for Faire Women, a play most likely written by Thomas Heywood, highlights Anne Saunders’s words and behavior toward her family members but provides the central character with greater agency and at points delivers a more sympathetic reading of her character.100 The drama ends with Anne’s remorseful lamentation and preparation to walk to the scaffold, which follows Golding’s text but allows for additional pathos by incorporating a final visit from her children. This domestic tragedy also reframes Golding’s account of Anne’s confession as a blessing for her children, rather than a speech to a crowd of witnesses. By doing so the playwright heightens the audience’s sympathy for Anne, who tearfully reminds her children, “My trespass hath bereft you of a father, / A loving father, a kind careful father, / And by that self same action, that foul deed / Your mother likewise is to go from you.”101 The playwright also includes Anne’s last parting gift to her children but allows Anne herself to explain the spiritual meaning of Bradford’s meditations, rather than suggest that her ministers write down advice of their choosing, as they did in Golding’s pamphlet. This gift, Anne explains, is not “gold or silver” but instead Bradford’s works, which “shall be richer than with gold, / Safer than in fair building: happier / Than all the pleasures of this world can make you.”102 Thus, in her final moments, Anne undertakes the spiritual education of her children, just as Lady Jane Grey imparted religious wisdom to her sister before her execution. While these ballads, pamphlets, and plays ventriloquize the condemned’s requests for forgiveness and lament for the pain they caused their family members, in a few of these popular sources, the mediated female voice combines such sentiments with accusations against family members. In the late sixteenth century, the elderly Thomas Page of Plymouth was murdered by his young wife, Eulalia Glanville or Glanfeeld;

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the story of the crime and Eulalia Page’s execution was recounted in a number of ballads and pamphlets, as well as in a lost play by Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker entitled Page of Plymouth.103 According to the extant accounts, Eulalia Page wanted to wed George Strangwich or Strangwidge, “a proper young man” to whom her father entrusted his business; her parents, however, against her wishes married her off to a widower named Thomas Page.104 Unhappy in her marriage and still in touch with Strangwidge, Eulalia Page conspired with her lover to murder her elderly husband. According to the pamphlet Sundrye Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, Eulalia Page “did within y space of one yeere and lesse, attempt sundry times to poison her husband,” but Master Page was continually saved from death by God’s protection and was “compelled to vomit blood and much corruption.”105 Tired of waiting, the lovers eventually hired two killers to strangle Master Page in his bed. After the murder, authorities discovered the plot and arrested not only the hired killers but also Eulalia Page and George Strangwidge. All were sentenced to death. While the news pamphlet written in response to these events provides gory details concerning the murder, the ballads offer a more sympathetic portrait of Eulalia Page and romanticize the figures of Page and Strangwidge as doomed lovers separated by uncaring parents. In Thomas Deloney’s ballad “The Lamentation of Master Pages wife of Plimmouth,” although Eulalia Page attempts to assuage her parents’ grief at her execution, she also blames them for marrying her off to the elderly Master Page against her wishes.106 Calling her parents “greedy-­minded,” and blaming them for her “great discontents,” Page frames their decision to force her to wed as the start of her “downfall and decay” and ends her lamentation with a plea to “give all Parents wisedome to foresee, / The match is marrd where minds doe not agree.”107 Throughout the ballad Page repeatedly notes her youth, lack of choice, and “great discontent” in the marriage, lamenting that her “legs did loathe to lodge within” her elderly husband’s bed.108 Although the words may not be Page’s, the ballad criticizes the practice of parents choosing their daughters’ marriage partners, especially when their motives were monetary rather than based on the happiness of their children. Page’s young age, though, may also account for Deloney’s sympathetic treatment of her execution and the suffering she endured as a reluctant wife to a much older man. In part, allowances for young and beautiful women within execution narratives were based on the medieval hagio­ graphic tradition, which frequently venerated young and pretty Christian heroines. According to Karen Anne Winstead, the legends of early virgin martyrs “rehearse similar incidents of faith, family conflict, sexual

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persecution, and torture.”109 Eulalia Page, of course, is not a virgin; however, her story does replicate some aspects of the virgin martyr legend as the accounts of her crime and execution include her parents’ unwise treatment of her, Page’s squeamish reaction to her sexual relationship with her much older husband, and the pointed notation of her youth. A ballad that ventriloquizes the final words of George Strangwidge further enhances the readers’ understanding of Page as echoing the earlier medieval tradition of virgin martyrs. In this ballad, which Deloney places after his rendering of Page’s gallows confession, Strangwidge describes his beloved as extraordinarily lovely: “Ulalia faire, more bright than Summers Sunne, / Whose beauty had my heart for ever won.”110 Thus, while Eulalia Page is executed for murder, not for religious beliefs, many of the elements used to depict the executions of virgin martyrs remain present in her story and allow for a more sympathetic reading of her life and tragic end. Henry Goodcole’s treatment of Alice Clarke likewise often focuses on her youth. In his murder pamphlet The Adultresses Funerall Day in Flaming, Scorching, and Consuming Fire (1635), Goodcole not only describes the abuse Clarke suffered at the hands of her husband but also notes the couple’s difference in ages: “shee being young and tender, he old and peevish.”111 In the pamphlet’s opening, Goodcole reminds his readers of past female criminals, noting that “Mistress Page of Plimouth, who for poysoning her Husband, suffered with her sweet-­heart Master George Strangwich, who had beene before time betrothed unto her: her husband being old, she yong, by which may be apprehended the misery of inforced marriage.”112 By drawing attention to Page, Goodcole subtly suggests that readers take into account Clarke’s youth and the similarities between her situation and that of Page. Both of these women, then, may be accounted greater sympathy because they were young women unhappily married to much older men. Such concerns were often expressed in popular ballads during the seventeenth century, in part due to the move toward companionate marriage. For example, in The Young-­Womans Complaint (c. 1655–65), the female speaker cautions “all you young damsels” of the dangers of marrying old men. Noting that she was only fifteen when wed to a man of seventy-­t wo, the young woman details how her elderly husband threatens her with physical abuse, accuses her of infidelity, and calls her “a thousand base names.” In the end, the speaker argues that she cannot enjoy herself with her husband and her only recourse is to “make him a Cuckold / as soon as she can.” Lest others maids follow her unwise life choices, the female speaker ends with a warning: “Be sure to be wise in / your choice of Marriage: / For Ile assure you, / do what you can, / You never can love such, / an Old doting man.”113 Such sentiments are echoed in

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a number of pamphlets and ballads about husband-­murderers, revealing not only the anxieties men had of rebellious and overly lusty wives but also the fears wives—particularly young wives—had of their husbands. By including details of these female criminals’ youth and ill-­advised marriages, Deloney and Goodcole allow readers to understand the intolerable conditions experienced by many women and the circumstances that led to their crimes. From these accounts, though, it is clear that family relationships formed the center of individual women’s lives in early modern England and that their deaths brought shame on their families. Although Goodcole and Deloney subtly critique the treatment of young wives, they never reject the justness of these women’s sentences or omit the moralizing messages common in news pamphlets. Yet the inclusion of domestic details, both positive and negative, provides not only pamphlets but other types of execution narratives with a greater understanding of the unequal treatment of early modern women and highlights the attempts of the authors and women to reestablish family connections and community virtue. By mentioning their kin or providing gifts to their family members, women hoped to restore the honor of their families, pass on a spiritual legacy, or, in some cases, point out flaws in familial relationships. Women’s main goals in these statements, though, seem to be repairing relations with their kin. Such concerns echo the numerous contemporary manuals on how to prepare for death, which often stressed the need for attending to family matters, including passing on spiritual guidance and getting the household in order.114 Women’s decisions to include similar language in their scaffold speeches, while perhaps due to prompting by chaplains, show that a significant aspect of their repentance and reinsertion in their communities involved attending to their traditional and domestic duties as wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters. DENIAL AND DIFFERENTIATION

Although most condemned women admitted guilt at the scaffold, a number either indirectly or directly denied the charges against them. As already noted, Anne Boleyn refused to speak about the charges against her, thereby indirectly denying the justness of her sentence. Lady Jane Grey, unlike Boleyn, chose to address the charges against her but engaged in differentiation to provide reasoning for her assumption of the crown. According to an anonymous account published in 1554, Jane addressed the crowd gathered to watch her die with the following words: “Good people, I am come hether to die, and by a lawe I am condemned to the same.

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The facte, in dede, against the quenes highnesse was unlawfull, and the consenting thereunto by me: but touching the procurement and desire therof by me or on my halfe, I doo wash my hands thereof in innocencie, before God, and the face of you, good Christian people, this day.”115 Grey here qualifies her guilt, stating that while she did accept the crown, she never desired queenship. Thus, Jane frames her action as something that went against her conscience, and despite her violation of Henry VIII’s will, which legalized the rule of Mary, Jane declares her interior innocence. Jane ends her speech, though, with a traditional statement of guilt and a concession that her death was divinely sanctioned: “I confesse, when I dyd know the word of God I neglected the same, loved my selfe and the world, and therefore this plague or punishment is happily and worthely happened unto me for my sins.”116 Here, then, Jane participates in the generic convention that required a confession of sinfulness; by offering a qualified statement of her sinfulness, though, Jane modifies the execution ritual and calls into doubt the justness of her sentence. A similar approach was taken by a vastly different woman facing execution, suggesting that the formulaic requirements of execution rituals—as well as the possibilities of introducing a general, rather than specific, confession—were understood by common as well as elite women. Margaret Ferneseede, who was burned at the stake in 1608 for the alleged stabbing of her husband, refused to plead guilty to the crime at the trial. Additionally, despite the best efforts of three gentleman housed in the prison, who used “persuasion and wholsome counsells of their owne, with comfortable promises of our mercifull Saviour Jesus Christ to them that unfainedly beleeve in him . . . as also with threatning her with the terrible Judgements of Hell,” Ferneseede refused to fully comply. She was, according to a pamphlet published by Henry Gosson, “at last drawne to make a confession of her former life past, and to repent her of the same,” but even at the place of execution and under the ministrations of a priest, “she still obstinately denied” the murder.117 In Ferneseede’s extensive pre-­execution confession, which included scandalous revelations of prostitution, maintaining a brothel, and receiving stolen goods, she acknowledged deserving death but continued to deny any part in her husband’s death. The thoroughness of her confession, her refusal to comply even at the pyre, and the insufficient circumstantial evidence provided at her trial suggest that she may well have been innocent of her husband’s murder and unfairly targeted by the authorities. In fact, as Randall Martin notes, Ferneseede’s inability to show proper feminine grief at the discovery of her husband’s body, combined with her past illicit activities, led to her condemnation and execution.118

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Elizabeth Abbot, hanged the same year as Ferneseede for the murder of a widowed London seamstress, also refused to comply with the authorities and confess her guilt. In the anonymous pamphlet The Apprehension, arraignment, and execution of E. Abbot, the evidence against Abbot, like that against Ferneseede, is circumstantial, and the assumption of guilt likely stemmed from Abbot’s housebreaking activities. When the authorities discovered bones and a lock of hair in a fireplace belonging to Mistress Killingworth, suspicion immediately fell on Abbot, who had reportedly run errands for the elderly woman and had recently been arrested attempting to break into a house with her husband. At her arrest and later at her conviction for the murder of Mistress Killingworth, Abbot consistently denied her guilt. Indeed, the evidence against Abbot relied primarily on the statements of neighbors and their interactions with the often-­drunk Killingworth, who had complained of not trusting a young woman who ran errands for her. Despite Abbot’s denial of guilt and incomplete proof that the bones found in the chimney belonged to Killingworth, Abbot was found guilty. The authorities, hoping to bring Abbot to full confession, which would not only justify their guilty verdict but also bring the condemned to a state of repentance and acceptance of her death, used all means available. According to the pamphlet published shortly after her execution, “they sent into the prison unto her a reverend & grave doctor of divinitie, who with such strong instances, beat against the dores of her harte, that had they not beene made of harder than marble they had had power to have broke them open.”119 Unable to force her confession in prison, the Lord Mayor “caused her to be loosed out of the Cart & conveied her into Cree-­Church” and sent for witnesses to once again present their evidence against her. Abbot again refused to admit any guilt and so “was presently brought from the church againe, and there suffered Execution.”120 All of these denials on the scaffold point to the limited ability of women to reframe the execution narrative or to subvert the ritual. While the authorities desired the condemned to uphold the law, prepare for their mortal ends, and express remorse, some women refused to play the game. Indeed, while denial was perhaps the most overt method of maintaining control of the execution narrative, many women and those reporting on their executions used other strategies when speaking from the scaffold or providing the public with textual accounts of the event. Some women chose to address female witnesses, often to warn them of the dangers of failing to submit themselves to their husbands but sometimes to caution them to avoid ill-­advised marriages or to point out the injustice of gendered social norms. Other women used differentiation to provide context

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for their sentences and reasons for their crimes, including spousal abuse, parental control of their choice of husband, and lack of inward intention. Parting gifts to family members and direct addresses to loved ones also revealed women’s attempts to personalize their final hours and speeches. Perhaps, though, the most unique aspects of female scaffold speeches are their claims of weakness, which paradoxically allowed them to justify their final words and defend the legitimacy of their confessions and religious beliefs. As we shall see, to be deemed worthy of exemplary and godly deaths, women needed to position themselves as penitent and submissive. While this chapter has explored strategies of resistance to the execution ritual, such challenging behaviors were acceptable only if the condemned woman adhered to her proper feminine role. Although in a number of these accounts, women and writers noted the complexities of female confessions and the extenuating circumstances of their convictions, women’s ability to successfully and convincingly speak to these matters depended upon their observance of gendered norms and subjective positions. The authorities encouraged women to speak from the scaffold; the positive recording and reception of that speech, though, required women’s compliance with societal expectations and traditional modes of feminine rhetoric.

6 The Modesty Topos and Women’s Executions

F

emale writers during the English Renaissance often attempted to counteract criticism of their writing by referring to themselves as “weak women” and by using expressions of modesty. Elizabeth Tebeaux and Mary M. Lay, in their study of the rhetorical strategies employed by female writers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, observe that women often: expressed awareness and even acceptance of the prejudice against female writers; used self-­deprecation; employed writing that reflected virtues commonly associated with women’s traditional roles, including humility and chastity; and attempted to affirm the value of the female perspective.1 While often mediated by male writers and printers, it is significant that many of these same strategies are evident in women’s last dying speeches. Laudatory accounts of women’s executions, through their use of what I term a modesty topos, positioned female rhetors as subjects with the right to comment on societal problems, offer guidance to witnesses, and refashion themselves as godly women. The proliferation of these speeches, in turn, allowed for greater awareness of women’s subjecthood and challenged assumptions about women’s social roles. The importance of women’s speech acts in early modern England has generated considerable scholarship by feminist critics. Many scholars, pointing to contemporary conduct books and studies of rhetoric, argue that society expected women to talk as little as possible.2 Indeed, in his 1553 The Arte of Rhetorique, Thomas Wilson advocates for female silence: “What becometh a woman best, & first of al? Silence. What seconde? Silence. What third? Silence. What fourth? Silence. Yea if a man should aske me til dowmes day, I would stil crie, silence, silence, without the whiche no woman hath any good gifte, but having the same, no doubt she must have many other notable giftes, as the whiche of necessitie do ever folow suche a vertue.”3 Authority figures, including local governments, spouses, and fathers, also employed punishments and embarrassing social rituals to deter and punish overly talkative and verbally combative women, in particular scolds. These sanctions involved the use of bridles, or head cages that depressed the tongue, shaming rituals like skimmingtons, or public processions that ridiculed and humiliated nagging women, and spousal beatings.4 In addition, as noted previously, garrulous women were often linked to unchaste behavior, as those women unable to control one part of their bodies—their tongues—were viewed as similarly unable to control their sexual desires.5 Thus, public speaking by women

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was not typically encouraged by the patriarchal society of Tudor and Stuart England, and women were often stereotyped as excessively loquacious, even quarrelsome, and in need of silencing. Yet, as a number of recent scholars have pointed out, women did frequently speak publicly and often negotiated their places in society. As Kathleen Kalpin Smith argues, “women were not passive receivers of the limits placed upon them” and instead often challenged restrictions by criticizing such socially sanctioned control by publishing texts, contributing to oral traditions that upheld the value of women’s stories, and entering public discourses through the creation and dissemination of jests and ballads.6 Likewise, Patricia Pender, in a recent study of early modern women’s use of modesty tropes, notes that although many scholars have read women’s expressions disavowing authorship or apologizing for public discourse as evidence that women “internalized the commands to silence so prevalent in [their] culture,” the use of this rhetoric is often more nuanced than previously supposed.7 According to Pender, the use of self-­effacement so common in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century women’s writing does not signal their exclusion from public discourse but instead serves to mark them as aware of literary conventions also employed by male authors.8 I argue, then, that women’s use of self-­deprecating language at the scaffold, while reflecting the societal injunctions against women’s public expressions, also signals their rhetorical skills and ability to negotiate their positions in public discourse. One important place where women could and indeed were expected to provide a public speech was on the foot of the gallows or upon the execution stage. Catherine Belsey, although discussing the capital punishments of female witches rather than all executed early modern women, points out that “the requirement for confessions from the scaffold, so that the people could see how church and state combined to protect them from the enemies of God and society, paradoxically also offered women a place from which to speak in public with a hitherto unimagined authority.”9 Additionally, as Kathleen Kalpin Smith convincingly argues, the condemned woman was “compelled by her minister and by the crowd” to provide a scaffold confession that instructed the audience how to live godly and penitent lives, upheld the justice of the sentence, helped witnesses prepare for their own eventual deaths, and warned listeners of the dangers of sin.10 Although such speeches were encouraged by society and sanctioned by the government and official church, women continued to position themselves as inferior to men and to highlight their weaknesses when giving scaffold confessions, in part because doing so allowed them to fashion themselves for posterity. Not only the women themselves but

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also hagiographers, chroniclers, and the authors of pamphlets and ballads typically framed executed women as weak, “seely,” or timid, either to defuse criticism of the women’s speeches or to move their audiences to sympathy and compassion. While accounts of women’s speeches reveal the modesty topos at work, often the words used to describe their demeanors and manners worked to further the association of these individuals with correct female behavior. In her study of the litigations between female apprentices and their masters and mistresses, Laura Gowing convincingly argues that these women were expected to perform proper modesty to safeguard their positions in society. Indeed, the term “modesty,” Gowing notes, comprised “everything else a woman was meant to show: virtue, submission, obedience, thrift and dependence.”11 Female domestic servants and apprentices needed to not only speak but also act modestly, which included avoiding “any wanton gesture,” being neat, clean, and humble in clothing choices, and averting their gaze when speaking to men or social betters.12 Women who failed to perform these gendered expectations were often brought to court by their employers, who complained of their female servants’ inability to display modesty in words, manners, and dress. Women, though, who displayed the proper hallmarks of femininity, were deemed more reliable, and their words were accepted more readily.13 As a number of scholars have recently shown, early modern women often gained credibility and agency when they followed social rules regarding proper feminine behavior. In her analysis of women’s intentions, Kathryn Schwarz found that “women pose a threat when they willingly conform to social conventions.”14 In fact, according to Schwarz, foundational components of patriarchy like female chastity and motherhood were contingent on women’s compliance and were often willingly supported by them. A similar willfulness, I suggest, is at work in women’s scaffold speeches, because by reiterating social norms in the moments before their deaths, women proved their value to the social system and thus encouraged witnesses to listen to their subtle critiques and calls for renewed female virtue. I argue here that women’s ability not only to speak from the scaffold but also to inspire writers and audiences to accept their final speeches relied upon their performance of modesty and feminine virtue. Although men at the scaffold needed to position themselves as subject to the monarch and God, women needed to evidence submission to male authorities as well as governmental and spiritual lords. As these accounts show, by presenting themselves as meek, repentant, subject to male governance, and aware of their weaknesses, women paradoxically became subjects capable of providing guidance to their audiences. The speeches of women

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deemed properly penitent and obedient at the scaffold therefore received approval from writers and presumably audiences because they upheld women’s traditional roles in society and performed gender in a culturally acceptable fashion. Additionally, these women, due to their adherence to the ritual and their assumption of proper feminine qualities, were reframed in the narratives, not as reprobates but as godly women whose final words mattered and whose reputations were restored. WRITERS’ STR ATEGIES

Although many male authors framed their narratives of women’s executions as factual renderings of their behavior and words, such accounts were always mediated and do not necessarily reflect an “authentic” female voice.15 Indeed, many ballads, while probably written by men, purport to be the work of women; the ballad “The lamentation of Master Pages wife of Plimmouth,” for example, maintains that it was “written with her owne hand a little before her death,” despite the unreliability of such an assertion.16 Yet, as Kathryn Schwarz argues, “the absence of ‘actual’ women does not limit the reach of representation.”17 While women did not publish such accounts under their own names, many were actively involved in the process of recounting knowledge, speaking with the men who wrote their stories, and writing last dying speeches or final letters to family members. Even when women on the scaffold were not actively involved in the writing and publication of their execution narratives, the representations of them reflected the cultural realities of their lives and deaths.18 Authors depicted condemned women not just as stereotypical followers of the execution ritual but also as individuals with varied responses. Some condemned women, as outlined in the previous chapter, denied any guilt, some offered biting social critiques, and some adhered strictly to conventional expectations. The differences between these execution narratives suggest the variety of female experiences of capital punishment and the diverse ways that note takers, witnesses, and readers might respond to such events. The authors who provided accounts of female executions, of course, had their own agendas, which varied according to their religious and political affiliations, their purposes in composing these documents, their attempts at truthfulness, and their sympathy or lack thereof for the victims. Across the different genres, and despite differing goals, many of these writers represented women before the scaffold as feeble and weak— an accepted stereotype. Yet how this weakness worked rhetorically for these authors varied considerably. Some chose to highlight female weakness to

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elicit sympathy and to frame the execution itself as a pathetic moment. Henry Goodcole, for example, when describing the 1635 execution of Elizabeth Evans, pauses in his narrative to remind his readers of her femininity: “A Woman she was that died, for whose weake and timerous Sexe sake, something must bee allowed tollerable.”19 Others pointed out female weakness only to show how the strength of the woman’s belief in God or her interior bravery allowed her to die well, despite her natural timidity.20 Sometimes stereotypical displays of feminine weakness signified godly repentance. In Arthur Golding’s account of the executions of Anne Saunders and Anne Drewrie, for instance, the women’s physical feebleness is linked to their true remorse: “both of them confessed themselves guiltie of the facte, for which they were condemned, and with verye greate repentaunce and weakenesse, receyved the rewarde of their trespasse.”21 In The Acts and Monuments, Foxe’s female martyrs are often described as “seely,” weak, or poor. These terms, which implied innocence and helplessness, however, belie the often assertive and nonconforming behavior that Foxe attributes to these women.22 Cicelie Ormes, for example, is described as “a very simple woman,” who had previously recanted her faith prior to her arrest for heresy in 1557. Yet, despite Ormes’s lack of formal education, and the assessment of the chauncellor who interrogated her and deemed her an “ignorant, unlearned, and foolish woman,” Foxe provides a lengthy description of her execution speech and behavior. According to Foxe, Ormes spoke bravely at the stake, outlining her Anglican beliefs and requesting prayers from “as many of you as beleve as I beleve.” Following this speech, Ormes “came to the stake and laid her hand on it, and sayd: welcome the crosse of Christ. Which being done, she loking on her hand, & seing it blacked with the stake, she wiped it upon her smocke, for she was burnt at the same stake that Simon Miller & Elizab. Cooper was burned at. Then after she had touched it with her hand, she came and kissed it, and sayd welcome the sweete crosse of Christ, and so gave her selfe to be bound thereto. After the tormentors had kindled the fire to her, she said: My soule doth magnifie the Lord, and my spirite rejoyceth in God my Saviour.”23 Here, Ormes becomes more than “a very simple woman.” In her final moments, Ormes reframes her experience. Similar to a number of other martyrs who emphasize their spiritual triumph by kissing the stake, clapping their hands, or singing psalms, she embraces the stake not as an instrument of death but as a symbol of her holy martyrdom.24 Additionally, by noting that Ormes holds the same stake used to execute two other martyrs, Foxe implies Ormes’s entry into a holy community, one that he celebrates on earth and one that Ormes believes she will enter upon her death. Finally, Ormes recites the Magnificat, the

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Virgin Mary’s song of thanksgiving, which positions the female martyr as echoing Mary’s sacrifice, which was ultimately a surrender of her body for the Lord’s use and follows patterns of acceptable female virtue. Thus, Foxe highlights the weakness of women like Cicelie Ormes to show that God uses the disadvantaged and powerless as examples to the world. That male authors typically depicted both female criminals and female martyrs as weak and modest reveals how most individuals in early modern England understood feminine virtue. Women dying on scaffolds and pyres had a responsibility to their communities; it was their duty to warn and reform those watching and reading about the event. By portraying these women as modeling proper performances of feminine weakness and modesty, writers sought to either defend the status of these women or highlight their move from sinner to saint.25 The modesty performed by these women and reported by witnesses functions as evidence of their exemplary deaths and allowed for positive assessments of their final moments. Yet, just as many authors presented unrepentant or deviant women as bestial or grotesque, similar strategies were used to describe the behavior of unremorseful women, who were framed as immodest, defiant, and lacking in feminine virtues. DEFIANCE AND DENIAL

While authors usually depicted repentant women and female martyrs as physically weak but spiritually strong, women who refused to provide full confessions or who behaved in overtly defiant ways were often described as unnatural women who lacked the feminine qualities expected by their societies. The anonymous author of The Apprehension, arraignment, and execution of E. Abbot, for example, details the extraordinary attempts made by the authorities to elicit a confession from the condemned woman. Even on the way to the scaffold, Elizabeth Abbot continued to deny any knowledge of the murder of Mistress Killingworth; in response, the sheriffs halted the procession, unbound Abbot, and brought her into the parish church. There the minister and court witnesses urged her to confess to the crime. Abbot again refused and was promptly hanged. The author of the narrative interpreted Abbot’s failure to confess as a mark of her hard (and presumably unfeminine) heart, as well as her rejection of God: “By which it is evident, the devil whom she served, had fully hardened her heart, she that would die unpurging her soule of one sinne, it is plaine she was guiltie of the other.”26 The hardening of the heart, in particular, denoted a negative physical response to the spiritual prompting of the Holy Spirit. Although the anonymous author and the minister who

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attempted to persuade Abbot to repent could not see within the woman, they based their understanding of her lack of spiritual renewal on her obstinate refusal to perform a speech act. Jane Hattersley, convicted of infanticide and executed in 1609, also exhibited insubordinate behaviors at the scaffold, which met with criticism in the pamphlet regarding her crimes and execution. According to extant records, Hattersley, who was sexually involved with her married master, Adam Adamson, had given birth to and killed a number of the pair’s illegitimate children to hide their affair. Finally discovered in labor and later overheard discussing the killing and burial of a baby with her lover, Hattersley was arrested, as was Adamson. Thomas Brewer, in The bloudy mother (1610), noted that because Hattersley believed she would receive a last-­minute pardon at the foot of the gallows, she “was as stout and fearelesse, as if she had bin but (like a stage player) to act the part in least.”27 Her bravado and hope, however, did not save her. Although Hattersley paid the hangman to cut her down and stalled as long as possible, “her beleefe was vaine, and her vaine hopes were deceived, for as she deserved she there died.”28 Brewer’s lack of sympathy for Hattersley, who over the course of ten years concealed the pregnancies, births, and murders of at least three children she bore her master, is evidenced through his focus on not only Hattersley’s lustful nature but also her naïveté. According to Brewer, Adamson convinced Hattersley he would obtain her pardon if she denied his involvement in their children’s murders. Hattersley complied, due to what Brewer pronounced as “her most wicked and impious credulity,” and later died a “simple wench.”29 Two pamphlets and a ballad detailing the crimes and execution of Anne Bodenham, an eighty-­year-­old cunning woman condemned as a witch and sentenced to hang in 1653, provide further evidence of how an unrepentant woman was depicted during the period.30 In Edmond Bower’s pamphlet, Doctor Lamb revived, or, Witchcraft condemn’d in Anne Bodenham, the convicted woman, famed because she claimed to have studied under Dr. John Lamb, a well-­known cunning man accused of black magic, failed to express the proper penitent attitude; after receiving a death sentence, she “never valued it, or was much troubled that she was to die.”31 Bower recounts that despite his attempts to prepare her for death, Bodenham remained obstinate. When told that she would be executed and was advised to confess, Bodenham answered, “If I must die this morning, I care not.” Instead she noted she “was resolved to be hanged, and her earnest desire was that she might be buryed under the gallows.”32 Additionally, Bower records that Bodenham “was very desirous for

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drink, and had not Mr. Undersheriffs prudence been such as to restrain her from it, she would have died drunk: She said, she would not have any Psalm sung, or any prayers for her at the Gallows.”33 Her complete disregard of the execution ritual continued as she made her way to the gallows: By every house she went by, she went with a smal piece of silver in her hand, calling for Beer, and was very passionate when denyed; one of the men that guarded her on the way, told her that Mr. Sheriff would not let her be buryed under the gallows, upon which she railed at the man extremely that told her so, and said, she would be buryed there. When she came to the place of execution, she went immediately to goe up the Ladder, but she was pulled back again and restrained: I then pressed her to confesse what she promised me she would, now before she dyed, but she refused to say any thing. Being asked whether she desired the prayers of any of the people, she answered, she had as many prayers already as she intended, and desired to have, but cursed those that detained her from her death, and was importunate to goe up the Ladder, but was restrained for a while, to see whether she would confesse any thing, but would not: they then let her goe up the Ladder, and when the rope was about her neck, she went to turn her self off, but the Executioner stayed her, and desired her to forgive him: She replyed, Forgive thee? A pox on thee, turn me off; which were the last words she spake: She was never heard all the while she was at the place of Execution to pray one word, or desire any others to pray for her, but the contrary.34

Bodenham’s behavior here completely overturns the ritual. Rather than a serious procession to the place of execution, Bodenham constantly attempts to buy beer and becomes angry when she is denied her desires. She also protests when the guard upholds the Sheriff’s injunction disallowing her burial beneath the gallows, attempts to control the execution herself, snubs the executioner when he requests her forgiveness, and refuses to pray. Noting the importance of the condemned’s final words, James Bower, in his more sensational account of Bodenham’s life and execution (Doctor Lambs darling: or, strange and terrible news from Salisbury), links her last utterances to her rejection of God: “The Executioner staid her, and desired her to forgive him: she replyed, Forgive thee! A pox on thee, turn me off; which were the last words she said. Thus, dear hearts, you see, those that forsake God in their lives, shall be forsaken of him in their deaths.”35 A contemporary broadside ballad offered a similar assessment of Bodenham,

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condemning her not only for rejecting God but also for her refusal to participate in the required execution ritual: The old Witch executed was, This moneth the 19. Day, She ever had a face of Bras As all the people say, Insteed of pensivenesse and prayer She did nought but curse and sware . . . God nothing had to doe with her She said most desperately She swore and curst and kept a stur And desperately did dye.36

Bodenham’s refusal to conform to expectations is interpreted as desperate and degenerate by these writers, and presumably the audience. As with Hattersley and Abbot, her rejection of spiritual aid and failure to confess her crime signified her hard heart and inability to allow the Divine access to her conscience. Additionally, Bodenham’s countenance in Bower’s account testifies to her lack of repentance. Her “face of Bras,” a term drawn from scriptures, signifies shameless bravery and iniquity, which a contemporary source notes is a common description for the “temper of the wicked, and graceless heart.”37 Accounts, then, of Bodenham’s execution focus on her unrepentant actions and physical demeanor as signs of her rebellion against God. Due to her defiance on the scaffold, those writing about Bodenham view her as a cautionary tale that reveals the wages of not only sin but also a lack of compliance with spiritual norms of behavior. The depictions of most subversive women’s executions reveals more than just the writers’ negative assessments of their conduct; instead, when compared to the accounts of women who subtly critiqued societal expectations of proper female behavior, it becomes clear that women could subvert or question the execution ritual and the legality of their sentences, but only when they performed with proper penitence and submission. Although these depictions of defiant and hard-­hearted women are less common than the positive or sympathetic uses of female weakness employed by the majority of authors who reported women’s executions, they show that an overtly defiant woman’s final words could be dismissed as unfeminine and ungodly. The ability of women to resist or question the execution ritual in a way audiences and writers could accept and promote, conversely, depended on women’s adeptness in conforming outwardly to expected conventions. Generic slippages, including understated criticisms

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of male authorities and failures to fully express guilt, became acceptable when women successfully demonstrated their modesty and contrition when facing death. MODESTY TROPES

While the various accounts of Anne Bodenham’s execution exemplify how authors constructed women as ungodly and deviant, many execution narratives positioned female victims as positive role models. Within these accounts, the narrators reveal that women themselves used self-­ deprecation and expressions of modesty in their final speeches as part of their performance of feminine virtue. In Gilbert Dugdale’s A True Discourse of the Practises of Elizabeth Caldwell, the condemned woman successfully uses the modesty trope as a justification for her ability to provide lengthy speeches and letters. Caldwell’s last dying speech, her teachings from prison, and her final letter to her husband, have inspired a great deal of critical discussion in recent years. Tebeaux and Lay note that Dug­ dale’s account of Caldwell’s life and execution is one of the first published works to specifically address spousal abuse from a female perspective.38 Frances Dolan also focuses on the account, arguing that Caldwell “overcomes such a considerable disadvantage as a murder conviction to assert herself as a moral guide for others” due to both “her imminent death and her willing submission to it.”39 Additionally, Lynn Robson notes that Caldwell’s articulations are allowed because they conform “to generic narrative conventions” by virtue of their Calvinist doctrinal stances and because Caldwell herself is exceptional, due to her education and genteel family background.40 Kathleen Kalpin Smith adds to this discussion by examining how Caldwell is given agency to fashion these communications “because her speech is in effect compelled by the masses who come to hear her in court, in prison, and on the scaffold.”41 Yet perhaps what is most interesting here is not that Caldwell provides these letters, teachings, and speeches, or that such public discourse was allowed and encouraged by her audience, but that Caldwell strategically uses her position as a weak woman to influence her audience before and after her death. During her scaffold speech, while providing her audience with a detailed exhortation to live godly lives and avoid sin, Caldwell reminds them of her position as a “weake wretched woman.”42 By referencing her status as a subservient female, Caldwell here assumes a properly submissive voice. In fact, this same obedient attitude is present in the opening of her speech, when Caldwell asks that “the Lord would give a blessing unto the speeches that she delivered, yet they might tend to the converting

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of many of the hearers.”43 Thus positioning herself under God’s direction and in line with divine purposes, Caldwell provides her listeners with vivid reminders of her past sins. In doing so she constantly uses self-­ condemning language, noting “her owne filthy flesh,” “her owne conceite” and pride, her neglect of the Sabbath, and her “filthy sinne” of adultery. After listing her sins and expressing her repentance, Caldwell shifts gears and instead begins admonishing the gathered crowd, “wishing them most earnestly to serve the Lord . . . to keepe the Saboth, to goe to the church, and heare the word of God preached.” Although such sentiments are common in a number of scaffold speeches, Caldwell doesn’t stop there; instead, she asserts her right to preach to the crowd: “Then made knowne that she could teach as the Preachers, for they taught as they found it in the word, and she was able to speake from a feeling hart, very confidently affirming, that her sinnes were the greatest reason of the dulnes and hardnes of her hart, and the seperation of Gods mercies from her: and therefore she carefully advised all to beware of sinne, because it was hateful and odious in the sight of God, and all reasonable creatures.”44 Caldwell’s right to speak, as expressed here, is based not just on her submission to God, and definitely not on her knowledge of scripture, but on her “feeling hart.” While Robson argues that Caldwell’s reference to a “feeling hart” highlights her femininity and “confirms the conventional early modern view that female spirituality was based on emotion and was therefore suspect,” such language is common in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century theological works and usually connoted an awareness of human sinfulness, sincere repentance, and submission to the Divine. Indeed, Edward Elton, in an early seventeenth-­century sermon noted, “True prayer pleasing to God, is not lip-­labour, . . . but the labour of the heart, and it is not uttering of the words of praier, though with a lowd voice and with great eloquence that the Lord likes of; indeed it is but mere babling and formall, unlesse it come from a feeling heart.”45 Therefore, Caldwell’s justification of her right to preach is based not on her emotions or her eloquence but instead on her true subjection to God. Rather than grounding her preaching in the male-­dominated realms of knowledge, which are suspect due to their basis in exterior concerns and the speaker’s ability to feign sincerity through fluency and loudness, Caldwell uses her submission to establish her right to speak to the crowd. While Caldwell employed both the rhetoric of modesty and expressions of submission to God to justify her lengthy scaffold speech, Anne Saunders used self-­denigrating language in her final prayer before execution to empower her speech. Saunders, whose tardy repentance stemmed from learning that her stay of execution had ended and the gallows had

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been constructed, had, according to Golding, been “unprovided to die,” but at the end she and her coconspirators “willingly yelded to the death which they had shunned, uttering such certaine tokens of their unfayned repentance by all kinde of modestie & meekenesse, as no greater could be devised.”46 Saunders’s final prayer, which combines the modesty trope with the traditional biblically based language of scaffold confessions, confirms Golding’s claim that Saunders died in submission to religious and secular law. Although the ordinaries of the prison originally deemed Saunders and her fellow prisoners “very rawe and ignorant in all things perteyning to God & to their soule health, yea and even in the very principles of the Christen religion,” under their instruction, Goodcole suggests, Saunders gained extensive theological knowledge. Thus, he records that at her death she prayed: “O Lorde, nowe as thou hast, so still lifte up my soule as it were with an eagles wings unto Heaven, there to beholde thee. Lorde into thy hands I commit my body, that it be not troubled in death, and my soule, that it see not damnation. Come Lorde Jesu, come assiste me with thy holy spirite, a weake woman in a strong battell, come Lord Jesu, come quickly save thy hand maide that putteth hir trust in thee, behold me in Christ, receive me in Christ, in whose name I pray.”47 Saunders’s last words therefore juxtapose her female weakness and status as God’s handmaid with both the “strong battell” she will undergo as she swings from the gallows pole, and the moments following, when she hopes her soul will ascend to heaven. By deeming herself powerless but reliant on the strength of God, Saunders positions herself as properly contrite. Her inclusion of her status as a “weake woman” further highlights her knowledge of feminine modesty and allows for public acceptance of her prayer as a sign of her belated acquisition of female virtues. The numerous accounts of the 1615 execution of Mistress Anne Turner also utilize the rhetoric of weakness and modesty to imply her conversion from a supposedly sexually promiscuous woman who dabbled in witchcraft to a properly repentant and humble widow. Turner, implicated in a widely publicized case—the poisoning of courtier and poet Sir Thomas Overbury—was hanged as an accessory to his murder after a dramatic trial that not only examined the charges of poisoning but also brought up allegations of a wide range of vices.48 According to Francis Bacon’s account of her trial, the prosecution alleged that Turner had learned magic from the necromancer Simon Forman, given birth to illegitimate children, and had served as a go-­between for an adulterous couple.49 Turner’s subsequent hanging generated considerable interest and inspired the publication of trial reports, pamphlets, and broadside ballads. These sources depict a repentant Turner who encounters death in an exemplary manner. In one

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prose account, Turner admits her sins to the gathered crowd, embraces the Protestant faith, requests forgiveness, warns those gathered of the sins of “pride and malice,” asks for prayers for King James, and finally kneels to repeat the Lord’s Prayer.50 Following Turner’s speech and prayer, “the rope was put about her neck, being before upon her shoulders, her hands were bound with a black silk ribbon, as she desired, and a black veil, which she wore upon her head, being pulled over her face by the executioner, the cart was driven away, and she left hanging, in whom there was no motion at all perceived.”51 Turner’s decision to wear black to her execution suggests her newfound modesty and acceptance of guilt. These clothing choices are later echoed in the woodcuts that decorate the broadside ballad Mistris Turners Farewell to all women (1615) and emphasize Turner’s shift from prideful sinner to penitent saint (fig. 6).52 While the ballads Mistris Turners Farewell to all women and Mistres Turners Repentance highlight the condemned woman’s past sins of pride and lust and provide a moralizing example of how God’s grace can save even the most reprobate, “A Prayer made by Mistris Turner, the night before her Suffering Death,” provides an even stronger link to female repentance and appropriate modesty.53 The prose prayer, which was included in

Figure 6. Mistris Turners Farewell to all women (London: John Trundle, 1615), public domain.

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the pamphlet The Bloody Downfall of Adultery, Murder, Ambition, presents Turner as an image of Mary Magdalene, the biblical example of a fallen woman turned devoted follower of Christ.54 Indeed, Turner begins her prayer with the words: “With Mary Magdalene, I kneele (O Jesus) at thy feete, which I wash with the teares of a penitential bleeding heart.”55 In this final prayer, Turner positions herself as the ultimate sinner, stating “my youth was Licentious, my Age wicked, my Latter daies offensive and odious to God and Man.” Yet, even in her abject state, Turner begs for forgiveness, reminding the Divine of her “broken, wounded, and oppressed heart,” and requesting that God “comfort me in my Combat of Death.”56 While Turner’s words here are formulaic, reflecting the moralizing theme of her story as it was employed by contemporary publications, the connection that Turner makes between herself and Mary Magdalene deserves further study. As Patricia Phillippy notes, in the early modern imagination the Magdalene functioned not only as repentant fallen woman but also as “chief mourner . . . to Christian history’s most illustrious corpse.”57 Additionally, Mary Magdalene’s earlier life of sin and attention to her sexual body is signified by her obsession with clothing in Lewis Wager’s 1566 morality play, The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene. Within the drama Mary’s fall into sin is instigated by a number of vices, including Pride, Infidelitie, and Cupiditi, all of whom instruct her how to dress: Pride: Let us returne agayne to our ornamentes, I would have you pleasant alway in your garments Upon your forhead you must weare a bon grace, Which like a penthouse may com farre over your face, And an other from your nose unto your throte, Of velvet at the least, without spot or moate, Your garments must be so worne alway, That your white pappes may be seene if you may. Cupiditi: If yong gentlemen may see your white skin, It will allure them to love, and soone bryng them in.58

Here the Vices convince Mary Magdalene to dress extravagantly and provocatively, to showcase her breasts, and to highlight her white skin. Similar to Mary Magdalene’s focus on her garments and skin, numerous contemporary sources mention Turner’s obsession with clothing and cosmetics, in particular her starched yellow ruff. Alastair Bellany observes that years after Turner’s death, writers continued to note that Turner went to her trial wearing the yellow ruff and cuffs, with some even stating that

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both Turner and the executioner wore ruffs on the day of her death.59 The public seemed to believe that Turner’s love of apparel was linked to her pride and lust, and that these unchecked vices eventually caused Turner to purchase the poison that would kill Overbury. Indeed, in Richard Niccols’s 1616 Sir Thomas Overburies Vision, a poem featuring the ghost of Overbury leading the poet through the Tower of London and encountering the spirits of the victim’s murderers, Turner’s ghost links her crimes to her love of clothes. The ghost relates, “First pride aray’d me in her loose attires, / Fed my fond fancie fat with vaine desires” and adds, “Thus pride, the pandar to luxurious thoughts, / Did guide me by the hand through those close vaults, / That lead to lusts darke chambers.”60 Likewise, in Barnabe Rich’s account of Turner’s execution, he recounts that at her execution “when before the whole multitude that were there present, shee so bitterly protested against the vanitie of those yellow-­starcht bands, that her outcryes (as it was thought) had taken such impression in the hearts of her hearers, that yellow starcht bands would have beene ashamed (for ever after to have shewed themselves about the neckes, either of men that were wise, or of women that were honest).”61 The connection, therefore, between the love of clothes and a life of pride and lust is clear in both accounts of Turner and Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene’s conversion in Wager’s morality play is also reflected by her change in clothing. As with Turner’s decision to wear humble black at her execution, and similar to the woodcut that depicts Turner dressed in modest mourning garments, Mary Magdalene appears “sadly apparelled” following her encounter with Christ and decision to amend her ways.62 Thus, although Turner’s familiarity with the morality play is doubtful, her decision to compare herself to Mary Magdalene in her final prayer speaks to an ability to fashion herself as a repentant woman who is willing to humble herself before God and those who watched her hang at Tyburn. Although originally castigated at her trial as “a whore, a bawd, a sorcerer, a witch, a papist, a felon, and a murderer,” Turner, at her death, was deemed appropriately penitent and prepared to meet her maker.63 These accounts show therefore that by choosing humility and repentance, women worked to reinsert themselves in their communities. To accept and understand their wrongdoing and perform lowliness functioned not as a passive acquiescence to governmental and male authority but instead as a form of female agency. So, while women like Turner and Caldwell presented themselves as penitent and modest women and reminded their audiences of their past sins, they also employed this rhetoric to endorse their positions as speakers. The acknowledgments of their female weaknesses, their former inability to control their feminine bodies,

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and their newfound reliance on God allowed them to construct themselves as authorities on female repentance and as subjects. HUMILITY AND STOUTNESS

Positioning themselves as modest at the scaffold provided women with the authority—and perhaps incentive—to meet their deaths with courage. Such humility, rather than denoting a cowering fear of death or an erasure of the individual will, instead functioned as deliberate compliance to the ritual. And such compliance could be viewed as empowering. Indeed, framing themselves as submissive to God and the male-­dominated society provided women with greater opportunities for self-­expression and allowed them paradoxically to behave boldly when encountering death. In her study of women’s relationship to death in post-­Reformation England, Patricia Phillippy notes that exemplary accounts of women’s deaths, similar to the rhetoric employed by a notable number of execution narratives, were “marked by the paradoxical qualities of humility and stoutness.”64 In his assessment of Anne Drewrie, executed with Saunders for her part in the murder of George Saunders, Golding praises her self-­effacement at the gallows but also hints at her courage in facing death: “And mistresse Drewrie no lesse carefull of hir owne state, besides hir humble repentance in the prison, and hir earnest desiring of the people to pray for hir selfe, and the others with hir as they came toward execution, did upon the Carte not onely confesse hir giltinesse of the facte, as mistresse Saunders had don, but also with great lowlinesse and reverence first kneeling downe towards the Earle of Bedforde and other noble men that were on horssbacke on the East side of the stage, tooke it upon hir death that whereas it had bin reported of hir that she had poysoned hir late husbande Master Drewrie, and dealt with witchcraft and sorcerie.”65 Of note here is Golding’s conviction that Drewrie’s confession is sincere. Her humbleness, her earnestness, and her “great lowlinesse,” denote a weak female state and show audiences the acceptable way for women to rise above their gendered positions. As M. R. writes to her daughter in The Mothers Counsell Or, Live within Compasse (1630): “Humilitie to heaven is step and staire, / Both for devotion, sacrifice, and prayer. / The bending knee in safetie still doth goe, / when others stumble, as too stiffe to bow.”66 By embracing a submissive stance through words and actions, Drewrie attests to not only her humility but also her stoutness, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries meant “valiant, brave; undaunted and vigorous in conflict or resistance.”67 The juxtaposition of meekness and bravery also characterizes many

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of the execution narratives of female martyrs. Although John Foxe typically describes male martyrs as “stout,” he also ascribes this characteristic to numerous female martyrs whose interrogations and executions he recounts. “A certaine poore woman, and a seely creature,” simply referred to by Foxe as “Priestes wife,” exemplifies this combination of humility and stoutness. While the unnamed woman “was of suche simplicitie and without learnyng,” Foxe relates that God worked “mightily in such a weake vessel: so men of stronger and stouter nature, have also to take example how to stand in like case.”68 According to The Acts and Monuments, this woman, despite immense pressure from Catholic priests, refused to recant and chose martyrdom rather than returning to her husband and children. Burned at the stake at Exeter in 1558, this “simple” woman, Foxe states, “with much pacience tooke her cruell death,” and was deemed by the hagiographer “as constant a woman in the faith of Christ, as ever was upon the earth.”69 Likewise, Thomas Mason, in his account of Christian martyrs, praises the bravery of female martyrs like Mistress Potten and Mistress Trunchfield, both burned in 1556, whose “constancy in burning was wonderful.”70 One question martyrologists and scholars continue to grapple with is the root of women’s constancy. As Susannah Brietz Monta explains, the primary question was “whether the female martyr’s constancy and strength stem from female nature itself, or derive primarily from women’s divinely-­inspired assumption of the martyr role.”71 Monta posits that Foxe uses both positions throughout his work based on context, variously putting forth claims of women’s natural endurance and of God’s work to strengthen their resolves. The main way to understand such constancy is through an analysis of women’s enactment of martyrdom, which is based on bodily performance as well as verbal expressions of modesty and reliance on the Divine. Indeed, for Foxe, the inner courage and conviction of the martyr “emerges as the body is torn asunder.”72 A ballad about the martyrdom of Anne Askew, which Katharine Craik points out was printed in 1624 but was widely available by 1596, also juxtaposes the physical weakness of the condemned woman with her bravery.73 In A Ballad of Anne Askew, Intituled: I am a Woman poore and blind, the lament, which is written from Askew’s viewpoint, begins by positioning the famed Protestant intellectual and martyr as a typical uneducated woman: “I Am a Woman poore and blinde / and little knowledge remaines in me, / Long have I sought and faine would I finde, / what hearbs in my garden were best to be.”74 Askew goes on to describe her body as a seed sown by God, desiring to learn to properly follow Christian teaching but naively led astray by Stephen Gardiner, the Catholic minister

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who interrogated her. At the end of the poem, however, Askew converts to the Protestant faith and, facing death, asks to overturn her position as a passive and powerless woman: “Strength me good Lord in thy truth to stand, / for the bloudy Butchers have me at their wil / With ther slaughter knives ready drawn in ther hand / my simple carkas to devour and kill.”75 In these lines, Askew fashions herself as strong in God, ready to face torture and death. Likewise, in “The Balade which Anne Askewe made and sange when she was in Newgate,” which is included in John Bale’s 1547 The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe and may have actually been written by Askew prior to her death, the martyr clearly alludes to her stoutness. Comparing herself in the opening lines to “the armed knight,” and declaring that with her weapon of faith she “wyll prevayle at length / Though all the devyls saye naye,” Askew fashions herself as a combatant in a righteous war.76 The entire ballad, in fact, contains numerous references to a spiritual battle in which Askew positions herself as God’s warrior. Yet, while Askew here envisions herself in a typically masculine role, she still reminds her readers of her gendered position and her lack of writing experience, noting: “Not oft use I to wryght / In prose nor yet in ryme.”77 Thus, even one of the most well-­known female martyrs, noted for her elocution and learning, uses the language of modesty while representing herself as a woman of courage and independent thought. As this chapter shows, authors of execution narratives about women as well as the women offering final speeches on the scaffold employed a range of rhetorical strategies to defend women’s right to speak. Framing themselves as weak and modest allowed condemned women not only to conform to gender stereotypes but to assert their power over the spoken word. For many female religious martyrs, the Christian idea of God making the weak strong provided them with a special status. As the “weaker vessel,” women more fully demonstrated the power of the Divine to work with and through them even as they awaited execution. Weakness also could elicit sympathy from spectators and allow women to subtly point to the injustices of early modern society. Virtue and humility likewise found their basis in biblical accounts of women like Mary Magdalene, whose shift from prostitute to saint was demonstrated by her embrace of the rhetoric of modesty; women used such rhetoric at the scaffold to frame themselves as repentant and reformed. Indeed, it was often the lack of self-­deprecating language and modesty that characterized accounts of executed women dying badly. The use of the modesty topos, because it positioned women as repentant and submissive to authority and thus worthy of consideration, allowed

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condemned women greater control over their scaffold speeches. By choosing to behave in stereotypically female fashion and by adhering to the formulaic conventions of the genre, women could subtly subvert the ritual and frame themselves as subjects with the right to teach and preach to their audiences and readers. Outright defiance and a refusal to participate in the basic aspects of the execution ritual, on the other hand, ensured that women’s messages would remain unheeded and their deaths be deemed bad. For those women willing and able to utilize the accepted structures of the gallows confession, though, the opportunity for constructing a memorable and positive end remained possible.

Epilogue

D

uring the last half of the seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century, Great Britain witnessed substantial changes in the treatment of women sentenced to death. Methods of execution, the types of crimes resulting in death sentences, accounts of the ritual, and the behavior of women on the scaffold or gallows reflected new societal preoccupations and understandings of female criminals. These changes occurred slowly but reveal a growing sympathy toward female victims of male seduction and abuse, greater attention to property crimes committed by women, marked cultural concerns about prostitution, and prejudices against the female urban poor. These large-­scale social shifts resulted in execution narratives that tended to highlight the horror of female capital punishments and either offer more formulaic confessions or embellish accounts of the women’s executions. The reporting of these events also shifted. Although pamphlets and broadsides still publicized the last dying speeches and crimes of women until the nineteenth century, in late seventeenth-­century London The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, written by the chaplains of Newgate Prison, began to regularly offer official accounts of the confessions, lives, final speeches, and executions of the condemned hanged at Tyburn. These sources, while useful records of the preoccupations of society and the fates of those convicted at the Old Bailey, were, as Andrea McKenzie points out, “formulaic documents, scripted both by convention and the demands of their audience.”1 In short, these records, while offering details of criminal lives, often represent the condemned tendering a prescribed penitential script before the gallows that rarely allowed for the individual voices of the executed to be heard. Outside of London, newspapers and periodicals—the most prevalent forms of popular print culture in the eighteenth century—primarily served as the sources for women’s execution behavior. Although newspapers typically devoted fairly large segments to accounts of crime and punishment, such narratives were usually brief and focused attention more on sensational crimes than on the behavior of the condemned.2 In addition to widespread changes in the reporting of women’s executions during the long eighteenth century, methods of punishing female criminals were transformed. While burning women remained the legal

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punishment for petty treason until the late eighteenth century, the practice became less harrowing during the final decades of the seventeenth century.3 Mary Aubry, condemned to death for murdering her husband in 1687, received a mitigated punishment. According to An account of the manner, behaviour and execution of Mary Aubry, the victim: “was set upon a stool prepared for that purpose; and a Rope being fastened through a Hole of the Post, or Stake, and the Noose of it put over her Neck; the stool being taken away, she hung there for near the space of a quarter of an Hour, in which time, the Bavins and Faggots where Piled about her, and at the Expiration thereof, Fire set to them, which consumed her in about half an hour more to Ashes.”4 Aubry therefore was hanged prior to her postmortem burning. The practice of strangling female traitors prior to burning became common around this time, and few women were burnt alive for petty treason from the late seventeenth century until the abolition of this practice in May of 1790.5 Likewise, during this time period, executioners usually strangled women convicted of high treason before immolation. In 1685 Elizabeth Gaunt, indicted and condemned for high treason after harboring and aiding a wanted outlaw, was “set on fire after she had been a while strangled.”6 A year later Alice Millikin, condemned of high treason for clipping the king’s coin, likewise was stifled prior to her burning.7 The mitigation of punishments for petty treason may reflect a more sympathetic view of female criminals, in particular married women, which is also observed in the frequency of later authors’ inclusion of mitigating circumstances, such as spousal abuse and poverty that led women to commit capital crimes. In The distressed mother: or, sorrowful wife in tears (1690), for example, the anonymous author borrows much of the wording from a sixteenth-­century narrative about an abused wife who killed her children and husband, adding in specific geographic details, names, and sympathetic language to provide a veneer of truth. This pamphlet, which offers a nuanced account of Katherine Fox’s murder of her husband and children, considers not only her sin but the dire circumstances of her life. Relating that Fox’s husband “was reduced to a very low Ebb of Fortune,” was often drunk, “beat his poor Wife, who came to seek Relief from his hands, for her, and her poor children,” and left her for dead, the pamphleteer reveals Mr. Fox’s obvious deficiencies as a husband and father. Katherine Fox, confronted with lack of food for herself and her children, was so “pressed by these Miseries” that she slit her children’s throats. The author relates that Fox planned to kill herself after she murdered her children, but when her husband returned home “laden with Wine, and more fit to take rest than examine these Tragedies,” Fox took the opportunity to kill him as he slept. Rather than condemn Fox for her actions, the author

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continually describes Fox as someone deserving of sympathy—a “desolate wretch” and “poor Wife.”8 Although this particular pamphlet closely recycles Thomas Lodge’s 1596 account of an unnamed husband-­murderer, notable differences show the growing awareness of women’s positions in society. The distressed mother: or, sorrowful wife in tears positions the wife as even more sympathetic than her predecessor, due to the title’s focus on her desperate circumstances and the description of her home as a “sad sorrowful House.” The later account also concentrates more fully on the wife’s distress than on offering lengthy assessments of the husband’s sins of gambling and drinking, thus making her the central figure in the story. Furthermore, the anonymous author strengthens Fox’s final statements by noting that she provided “wholesome Admonitions to the numerous Spectators” who observed her journey to prison.9 Social critiques first set forth by women and the authors of their execution narratives during the sixteenth century found stronger expression during the long eighteenth century and presumably led to fewer convictions of women for domestic crimes. The case of Elizabeth Fisher, tried for the murder of her husband in 1714, serves to demonstrate the greater leniency given to women who suffered abuse at the hands of their husbands. According to the Old Bailey records, Fisher wounded her husband with a knife, and he died a few weeks later. Witnesses spoke in her defense, noting that Will Fisher “had given his Wife very great Provocation” and “had misus’d and beat his Wife to a great Degree.” Likewise, Elizabeth Fisher testified that “he had beat her with a Horse-­whip as long as the small End would last.” Due in part to the proof of spousal abuse and to the report of two surgeons who found it unlikely Will Fisher died of the wound, Elizabeth Fisher was acquitted.10 While during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries women were primarily convicted of and died for crimes like infanticide and murdering their husbands, during the long eighteenth century far more women were tried for property offenses such as coining, clipping, housebreaking, burglary, and shoplifting.11 Indeed, the crime rate among women was unusually high during the first half of the eighteenth century, which the authorities often linked not to poverty but instead to prostitution and the unmarried status of many women.12 While some single women may have resorted to prostitution to support themselves, many engaged in other activities, including cross-­dressing as men to gain employment in higher-­paying jobs, and working with other women in female crime rings.13 Women in large urban areas, London in particular, often lived independently, which intensified fear of women committing

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crimes. J. M. Beattie notes that “the attitudes towards women that were expressed by the grand juries of London and the ordinary of Newgate in this period . . . could only have encouraged a view that women, particularly single women, needed to be brought under control, and if only indirectly, encouraged the prosecution of women caught stealing.”14 And for women convicted of stealing goods valued at one shilling or more (defined as grand larceny), the penalty was death. Later records of the executions of female thieves in London, unlike the sometimes lengthy and often more personalized pamphlets in the early modern period, offer fewer details about women’s executions and last dying speeches. The Ordinaries of Newgate, though, tended to spend considerable time and ink describing the condemned woman’s occupation, marital status, religious knowledge, and literacy levels; the Ordinaries also detailed their attempts to bring each woman to repentance. The account of Mary Knight, executed in 1716 for pickpocketing, reveals the typical treatment of women condemned to death for felony theft. Knight, according to the account of her trial in the Old Bailey Proceedings, met a slightly inebriated man named William Cane on the streets of London. Cane, who was “not acquainted with the Town,” asked Knight for directions to his lodgings and she agreed to “light him home” if he bought her a drink. Yet, instead of taking him to his lodging, Knight “conducted [him] to the Ship in Church-­lane” and put him to bed. Knight and another woman named Margaret Hopkins then robbed Cane while he slept of nine guineas and fourteen shillings. Both women were found guilty of pickpocketing, but Hopkins’s sentence was respited for pregnancy, while Knight was sentenced to death.15 While awaiting her execution, Knight was interviewed and admonished to repent by the Ordinary of Newgate, who provided the public with a detailed account of her life prior to the crime. According to the ordinary, Knight, who was thirty-­one years old at the time of her death, was born at Yarmouth in Norfolk but moved to London to serve as an apprentice fish-­woman in the early 1700s. She had married “a Seaman, who prov’d a bad Husband, [and] was thereby brought to great Poverty.” Seemingly unable to work following her husband’s failure to provide for her, Knight turned to “an ill Course of Life to keep herself from Starving” and became a nightwalker, or prostitute. Although she had been previously committed to Bridewell, the London reform house, Knight admitted that she was “not reform’d” and had instead “return’d to her former vicious Life.” The Ordinary, although describing Knight as “very ignorant and Stupid,” noted that he was able to convince her to repent and pray for her soul’s salvation.16 Despite the Ordinary’s detailed description of Knight’s sinful life and

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repentance, the account of her execution remains cursory, formulaic, and collective. On January 27, 1716, Knight was executed with four other individuals, all of them men. They suffered together at Tyburn, and none of their individual speeches were recorded. Instead, the Ordinary related: At the Place of Execution (to which they were carry’d from Newgate, viz. Allcock in the Coach with me, and the rest in 2 Carts, this Day) I attended them for the last time, exhorting them more and more to clear their Consciences, stir up themselves in holy Affections to GOD, and pray, that as Sin had abounded, so Grace might much more abound in them. To this end, I pray’d for them, made them rehearse the Apostles Creed, and sung some Penitential Psalms with them, who desir’d the Spectators to pray for their departing Souls, and take Warning by their Shame and untimely Death, that they might avoid their coming to such an End. After this I pray’d again with them; and having recommended them to the Mercy of God in Christ, I withdrew from them, leaving them to their private Devotions, for which they had some Time allotted ’em: And then the Cart drew away, and they were turn’d off, calling on God to be merciful to them, and receive their Souls.17

Thus, Knight’s final moments are subsumed within the larger ritual. Whatever words she may have uttered at the foot of the gallows are lost in time. Unlike the brief treatment of Knight’s London execution, the 1736 public hanging of Elizabeth Thompson in Great Yarmouth prompted a number of detailed newspaper accounts. While the (presumably) male authors focused on Thompson due to the sensational nature of her execution, this provincial woman’s final words and behavior reveal a growing discomfort with public execution and highlight the often unfair assumptions about prostitutes’ criminal natures. According to the contemporary journal The Political State of Great Britain, after the body of a Dutchman was discovered in Yarmouth, suspicion fell on the women working in a local “House of very ill Repute.” The authorities searched the house, which was “kept by one Elizabeth Parker and her Daughter, Elizabeth Thompson,” discovered blood on the floor and bedding in one of the rooms, and promptly committed all of the women living in the home to prison. Although these women denied any knowledge of the murder, eventually eight of them were tried for the crime at the Yarmouth assizes, and Thompson alone was convicted of the murder due to another suspect’s evidence. The anonymous author recounted, “Notwithstanding this Conviction Thompson insisted upon her Innocence” and continued to do

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so even at the foot of the gallows, stating that “she was led like a Lamb to the Slaughter, and hoped God would forgive her innocent Soul.”18 At least two different accounts provided extensive details about Thompson’s execution. One source notes that “she was dressed in her Shroud” and attended by four clergymen.19 These ministers tried to walk Thompson through the typical final speech, but she was defiant. Not only did she refuse to confess but also, when asked to forgive her enemies, Thompson answered that “she forgave some.” She also stated that “she hoped her ignominious Death would be no Reproach upon her Mother, for that she was as good and honest a Woman as any one who was at her Execution,” which the anonymous author noted was impudent as “every one who knew her Mother was convinced that what she said was false.” As a further sign of defiance, Thompson refused to sing a psalm with the gathered crowd.20 Although one contemporary author noted that Thompson “left no such Thing as a dying Speech or Confession” and concluded that “she died a most hardened wretch,” another account specified that Thompson actually said quite a lot at her execution but refused to comply with convention: “At last the Clergyman left her, and the Executioner put the Rope about her neck, but happening to put the Knot a little too much before, she called out to him, Am I to be butcher’d to Death? And as he put the Knot right, she then prayed a little by herself, which was the only Time she seemed to be serious, from the first of her Confinement, and immediately after she called out, Let me jump, let me jump, upon which the Cart drove away: Just as the Cart drove from under her, she called out stop, but before she could well utter the Word the Cart was gone, and she stepped into Eternity.”21 While Thompson’s final words cannot easily fit into the accepted customs of the last dying speech, these narratives reveal a challenge to tradition. Not only is Thompson’s gallows performance defiant; she challenges the official view of herself, her mother, and the justice of the law. As a marginalized individual—a woman and a prostitute—Thompson finds ways to resist and subvert the message of her punishment. Her decision likewise to pray “by herself” suggests that while she prepared herself for death through an accepted ritual, Thompson refused the assistance of the ministers, thereby determining her own behavior rather than having it dictated to her from male authorities. Framing herself as an innocent victim butchered by the state may have actually allowed reconsideration of Thompson’s crime. Nearly a hundred years later, John Henry Druery, in his study of Great Yarmouth, wrote that Thompson, while executed for the murder of the Dutchman, was innocent of the crime. Instead, Druery stated: “The actual murderer

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could not be discovered, and as this woman was proved to be in possession of the secret, which she obstinately refused to reveal, she was executed as an accessory. The real murderer confessed the crime on his death-­bed.”22 Thus, after her death, the Yarmouth community remembered Thompson not as a prostitute who murdered a Dutchman but as a woman who gave her life to protect a man. While these few accounts are only a sampling of execution narratives after the Restoration, I suggest that women’s final speeches and behavior at the gallows, as well as the accounts of these rituals, shifted in response to a number of large-­scale societal changes, including a gradual movement away from public executions and a perception of female crime as a result of lower-­class women’s poverty and sexual promiscuity. In large urban areas, particularly London, the speeches of condemned women became less spontaneous, and instead women’s executions were often subsumed within a larger and less individualized execution narrative. Writers typically focused on the lives of these female criminals before their executions rather than on the moment of their deaths, thus negating the power of their final words and actions. Sensational stories of women’s executions, like those of Elizabeth Thompson, detailed extemporaneous actions at the scaffold as well as flaws in the criminal justice system. Although early modern women had provided social critiques at the scaffold, most of these criticisms were leveled at husbands and parents, rather than at the state, and usually the condemned women admitted their own guilt while pointing out the errors of their family members. Thompson’s final words dare to criticize a system rather than her kin; her refusal to participate in the ritual’s conventions likewise suggests her struggle to control the execution and its meaning. Women’s execution narratives in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also often provided more-­detailed reasons for female crime. As shown in the cases of Elizabeth Thompson, Katherine Fox, and Mary Knight, writers often linked murder and theft to prostitution or poverty. Instead of explaining wrongdoing as the work of the devil or a woman’s failure to obey her spouse, mitigating factors became more common in reports of crime and execution. Such explanations worked both to provoke sympathy for executed women and to condemn struggling poor women as more prone to commit property crimes and to engage in illicit sexual activity. Thus, unlike the accounts of early modern women’s executions, which focused on the crimes, confessions, and executions of the condemned, later records provide more-­detailed and individualized histories in order to understand the circumstances of condemned women’s lives and struggles.

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These changes, I contend, began during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when women and those writing about their executions employed the modesty topos and highlighted the suffering female body. Because many women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their positions in society, which eventually led to a greater focus on the nuances of women’s experiences. Thus, the execution narratives explored in this study suggest that the concern with reading the body of the condemned woman and analyzing her words for markers of contrition and proper humility became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women’s roles not just as criminals but as subjects.

Notes Introduction 1. John Reynolds, The Triumphs of Gods Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of (Willfull and Premeditated) Murther [. . .] (London: W. Lee, 1635), 274–75. In this work, quotations from printed sources remain in the original spelling and punctuation, although I have substituted F with s and modernized i, j, u, and v. 2. Reynolds, Triumphs of Gods Revenge, 275. 3. The term “last dying speech” refers to the final words spoken by the condemned on the scaffold or before the gallows. Early modern writers frequently used these words in the titles of pamphlets and broadsides to describe these speeches, and many scholars of history and literature have continued to employ such wording. 4. Frances Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680,” Modern Philology 92, no. 2 (November 1994): 157. 5. Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say,’ “ 167. 6. Although Clark argues that the scaffold provided numerous women with opportunities for subject formation, she points out that “in many instances the focus of an account is almost entirely on the providential wisdom of God” in revealing crimes and bringing perpetrators to repentance. In fact, Clark contends that many narratives of women’s executions sidestep the issue of female agency altogether, either because of an emphasis on providence or due to the generic expectations of last dying speeches and crime pamphlets. Yet Clark points out that women’s gallows confessions in crime pamphlets do not always conclude with a typical admission of guilt and execution; instead, “the endings in practice are often much less tidy and consolatory.” See Sandra Clark, Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 54, 153. 7. Randall Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2008), 111–12. 8. Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 112. 9. Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 11. 10. For an in-­depth discussion of women’s use of the rhetoric of modesty as a deliberate type of self-­fashioning, see Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 11. See, for example, Mary Elizabeth Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-­ Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); and Gail Kern Paster,

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Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 12. Frances Dolan, “Tracking the Petty Traitor across Genres,” in Ballads and Broadsides in England, 1500–1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, 149–71 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). 13. Dolan, “Tracking the Petty Traitor,” 156. 14. Numerous scholars have noted the similarities between early modern tragedies and public executions. See P. J. Klemp, The Theatre of Death: Rituals of Justice from the English Civil War to the Restoration (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2016), 43–46; Fiona Martin, “ ‘O Die a Rare Example’: Beheading the Body on the Jacobean Stage,” in “Embodying Shakespeare,” ed. David McInnis and Brett D. Hirsch, Early Modern Literary Studies, special issue, 19 (2009) 8.1–24 https:// extra.shu.ac.uk/emls; Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 111– 17; and Molly Smith, “The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in The Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 217–32. Klemp notes that the last dying speech of Arthur Knight, who was executed in 1653 for murdering a former army commander, “offers the most explicit statement of the contemporary understanding of scaffold as stage.” Knight began his speech with the following: “I Am come hither to Act, or rather suffer my part, no strange part, though a sad one, I heartily wish I could performe it perfectly, and to the life, as becometh my innocence; that the shamefullnesse of the Stage might not cause me to make an unhandsome Exit.” See Klemp, Theatre of Death, 44, and The speech of Mr Arthur Knight of Grays-­Inne [. . .] (London: Thomas Heath, 1653), A2. 15. David K. Anderson, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England: Tragedy, Religion, and Violence on Stage (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 9. 16. See, for instance, Sarah A. Kelen, “ ‘It Is Dangerous (Gentle Reader)’: Censorship, Holinshed’s Chronicle, and the Politics of Control,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 705–20. 17. I. Ross Bartlett, “John Foxe as Hagiographer: The Question Revisited,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 789. 18. Sharon Achinstein, “John Foxe and the Jews,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2001): 87. 19. John Mush, “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow,” in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, ed. John Morris, 3: 333–440 (London: Burns and Oates, 1877). 20. The narrative, while composed shortly after Clitherow’s execution, was not published until the nineteenth century, although a number of manuscript copies exist that were most likely circulated among the English Catholic community during the early modern period. See Megan Matchinske, “Framing Recusant Identity in Counter-­Reformation England,” in Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53. 21. Matchinske, “Framing Recusant Identity,” 70.

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22. Peter Lake, “Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-­Century England,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, 257–83 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 262. 23. Clark, Women and Crime, 151. 24. Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 25–26. 25. David Stymeist, “Criminal Biography in Early Modern News Pamphlets,” in Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams, 137–61 (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 152. 26. Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 10. 27. David Stymeist, “Female Criminality in Henry Goodcole’s Murder Pamphlets,” Genre 36, nos. 1–2 (2003): 29–46. 28. Sometimes sensational stories were reprinted as “new news” in pamphlets. Often the reprints, as Simon F. Davies notes, were “near-­verbatim” but with changes to dates, names, and places. The 1690 pamphlet entitled The distressed mother is a close copy, for instance, of a narrative found in Thomas Lodge’s 1596 Wits Miserie. Davies theorizes that sensational pieces were often reprinted, showing that their entertainment value may have been more important to printers than the veracity of their stories. See Simon F. Davies, “The Adventure of the Headless Bear and Other Reprinted News in Early Modern England,” Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture 8 (2015): 3–19; The distressed mother: or, sorrowful wife in tears: being a full and true account of a most horrid, barbarous and bloody Murther [. . .] (London: J. Beuvet, 1690); and Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse: Discovering the Devils Incarnat of this Age (London: Adam Islip, 1596), 42–43. 29. Kirilka Stavreva, “Scaffolds unto Prints: Executing the Insubordinate Wife in the Ballad Trade of Early Modern England,” Journal of Popular Culture 31, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 178. For more on broadside ballads’ negative depictions of criminal women and reinforcement of gender stereotypes, see Sarah F. Williams, Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in the Seventeenth-­Century English Broadside Ballads (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015). 30. Una McIlvenna, “The Power of Music: The Significance of Contrafactum in Execution Ballads,” Past and Present 229 (November 2015): 61–62. Emilie K. M. Murphy also notes that English Catholic martyrs during the early modern period used music at their executions, which, she argues, allowed them to politicize the sites of execution and demonstrate devotion to their faith. See Murphy, “Musical Self-­Fashioning and the ‘Theatre of Death’ in Late Elizabethan and Jacobean England,” Renaissance Studies 30, no. 3 (2016): 410–29. 31. Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 25. Williams’s chapter entitled, “The Hanging Tune: Feminising and Stigmatizing Broadside Trade Melodies,” is particularly relevant, as she argues that the tunes typically used to tell the stories of executed women helped to create and perpetuate stereotypes of female crime. See Williams, Damnable Practises, 49–88.

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32. See, for instance, Henry Parrot’s tirade against the authors of ballads: “No massacre or murder comes to him amisse, but brings sufficient matter for invention. Wherein he shewes himselfe so nimble, that if any witch bee by chance condemned, hee’l have a ballad out in print before such time as she goes to Tyburne: wherein all her confession and the manner of her death shall be described by way of Prophesie, witnesse the famous witch of Edmonton, condemned at New-­ gate about foure yeares past. No Printer deales with him that loves his credit, but must be thereunto induc’d for want of worke, and then the Presse begins to sweat when monstrous newes comes Trundling in the way.” See Parrot, Cures for the Itch Characters. Epigrams. Epitaphs (London: Thomas Jones, 1626), A2–A3. For further information on cheap print culture in general during this time, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 33. McIlvenna, “Power of Music,” 63. 34. Bruce Smith, “Female Impersonation in Early Modern Ballads,” in Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-­Male Stage, ed. Pamela Brown and Peter A. Parolin, 284–301 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 284, 297. 35. Smith, “Female Impersonation,” 297. 36. Marsh, “Best-­Selling Ballads and the Female Voices of Thomas Deloney,” Huntington Library Quarterly 82, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 152. Not all authors of popular ballads expressed such concern for the positions of women, though. Stuart A. Kane outlines the generic conventions of broadside ballads about husband murderers, arguing that most ballads that ventriloquized these women’s voices followed a formula that included “lamenting the general spread of sin,” identifying the husband as an innocent victim, describing the brutality of the crimes, and finally outlining the arrest, trial, and execution. See Stuart A. Kane, “Wives with Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Commodity,” Criticism 38, no. 2 (1996): 226–27. 37. See, for instance, the following: Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and Robert N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 38. Although David Cressy judiciously points out that while reformed practices such as the denial of purgatory and loss of commemorative rituals following death did not immediately alter the customs of all English religious communities, “one of the most profound effects of the Protestant elimination of purgatory was to shrink the community of souls and to sever the relationship between the dead and the living.” See David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death Ritual, Religion, and the Life-­Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 396. 39. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 396–97. 40. Katherine Royer, The English Execution Narrative, 1200–1700 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 63. 41. The Treason Act of 1534, for instance, defined three new types of treason:

Notes to Introduction 157

imagining or desiring the death or bodily harm of the monarch in writing; calling the monarch a heretic or tyrant; and levying war against the monarch by detaining castles, ships, or munitions. For more on the increase in treason laws, see John Hostettler, A History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales (Hook, Hampshire: Waterside Press, 2009); John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), and J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1999). 42. Hostettler notes that only six capital statutes were enacted from the reign of Edward III until the death of Henry VII, but “during the next century and a half a further 30 were passed.” Under Elizabeth I, for instance, the statute of 1558 made it treason to print or write anything stating the queen was not the legitimate ruler. See Hostettler, History of Criminal Justice, 90, 80. 43. See Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 171–80; Stephanie Irene Spoto, “Jacobean Witchcraft and Feminine Power,” Pacific Coast Philology 45 (2010): 53–70. J. A. Sharpe points out, though, that while women were more likely to be indicted for witchcraft, the authorities identified a significant number of men as cunning folk. See Sharpe, “Women, Witchcraft, and the Legal Process,” in Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker, 106–24 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 44. See, for instance, V. A. C. Gatrell’s important study The Hanging Tree, which posits that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, public squeamishness and the threat of disruptive scaffold crowds led to the eventual abolition of the death penalty after executions had become private events. See Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 45. Andrea McKenzie, who bases her study of late seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­ century executions on the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, finds that while many individuals still followed earlier expectations of scaffold etiquette, a significant number inverted the ritual by mimicking their social betters, dressing up in outlandish costumes, and drinking their way to the gallows. See McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007). 46. Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 154–55. 47. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 180–81. 48. McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs, 82; J. M. Beattie, “The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-­Century England,” Journal of Society History 8, no. 4 (1975): 80. 49. For exceptions, see Clark, Women and Crime; Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say’”; Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity; Camille Nash, Death Comes to the Maiden: Sex and Execution, 1431–1933 (London: Routledge, 1991); Rosalind Smith, “A ‘Goodly Sample’: Exemplarity, Female Complaint and Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” in Early Modern Women and the Poem, ed. Susan Wiseman, 181–200 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2013); and Susan C. Staub, Nature’s Cruel Stepdames : Murderous Women in the Street Literature of Seventeenth Century England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004).

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50. See Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, in particular, chapters 1–2. 51. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, 100–101. 52. Arthur Golding, A briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders [. . .] (London: Henry Bunneman, 1573), n.p.

Chapter 1 1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 49. 2. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 66. For J. A. Sharpe, the “ideological control” of English subjects by the early modern state involved the dissemination of textual accounts of executions that offered evidence of the obedience individuals could and should internalize. See Sharpe, “ ‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-­Century England,” Past and Present 107 (May 1985): 166–67. 3. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 59. Foucault notes that the presence of the crowd could on occasion subvert the dominant state narrative, for “there is always, even in the most extreme vengeance of the sovereign a pretext for revenge.” In fact, he argues that sometimes the scaffold ritual became endowed with a carnivalesque spirit that inverted the authority of the king, a theme later more fully developed by Thomas Laqueur. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 61. For Laqueur, rather than upholding the power of the state, public executions provided audiences with rare opportunities to express their own agency by resisting the message of institutional authority through festive celebration. Laqueur supports his theory by linking the popularity of bear-­and bullbaiting to the execution of criminals and by revealing that often images related to execution—Christ’s crucifixion and depictions of executed individuals as harlequins, for example—were “explicitly carnivalesque.” Finally, Laqueur—in direct opposition to Foucault—argues that the festive spirit that permeated public executions was actually a moment when the general populace successfully overturned state power, and the didactic message the state hoped to impart to the audience usually became lost in the festivals surrounding the events. See Laqueur, “Crowds, Carnival, and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Stone, ed. Lee Beier, David Cannadine, and James Rosenheim, 305–55 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4. Lorna Hutson, for instance, offers a historical perspective on the ways that the punishment of criminals in England depended not only on the state but also on the community. This communal system of justice, Hutson argues, informed the plots of early modern revenge tragedy. See Hutson, “Rethinking the ‘Spectacle of the Scaffold’: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy,” Representations 89, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 30–58. 5. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 153 (November 1996): 106. 6. Lake and Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric,” 81–82.

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7. P. J. Klemp, The Theatre of Death: Rituals of Justice from the English Civil War to the Restoration (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2016), 6–10. Dramatic representations of historical British executions include John Webster and Thomas Dekker’s c. 1602 The Famous Historie of Sir Thomas Wyat, which dramatizes the executions of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley, and the anonymous Thomas Lord Cromwell (c. 1599–1602). Sensational murders committed by lower-­and middle-­class individuals, as well as their executions, were also the subject of several domestic tragedies. See, for instance, Arden of Faversham (1592), which dramatizes the murder of Thomas Arden and the execution of his wife and her coconspirators and A Warning for Faire Women (1599), which reenacts the murder of George Saunders and the execution of his wife, Anne Saunders. 8. Katherine Royer, The English Execution Narrative, 1200–1700 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 73. 9. Narratives focused on the executions of women, in particular, concentrated on their bodily experiences and physical demeanor, which will be explored more fully in subsequent chapters. 10. Royer, English Execution Narrative, 47. 11. Royer, English Execution Narrative, 58. 12. Henrietta Benveniste, “Dead Body, Public Body: Notes on Death by Execution in the Middle Ages,” Law and Critique 4, no. 1 (1993): 26–27. 13. See, for instance, the execution accounts detailed by Danielle Westerhof, including those of Thomas de Turberville, who was “dressed in ‘poor clothes’”; Simon Fraser of Olivercastle, who wore “a crown of periwinkle, a plant associated with infamy and death”; and Hugh Despenser the Younger, who was forced to wear hides decorated with a reversed coat of arms. See Westerhof, “Deconstructing Identities on the Scaffold: the Execution of Hugh Despenser the Younger, 1326,” Journal of Medieval History 33, no. 1 (2007): 91–92. 14. Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 138. 15. John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 188; Westerhof, “Deconstructing Identities on the Scaffold,” 104. 16. In her study of the 1326 execution of Hugh Despenser the Younger, Westerhof notes that English noblemen in the late Middle Ages were usually led to their executions dressed in “poor clothes” and often forced to wear crowns of nettles or thorns. In addition, following their executions, the physical bodies of these criminals were frequently quartered and publicly displayed. Often, the executioner also emasculated male victims and publicly burned their genitalia. The punishment, then, served to remove both the noble status of the condemned and his masculinity. See Westerhof, “Deconstructing Identities on the Scaffold,” 91–93, 103. 17. Katherine Royer, “The Body in Parts: Reading the Execution Ritual in Late Medieval England,” Historical Reflections 29, no. 2, (Summer 2003): 331. 18. Benveniste, “Dead Body, Public Body,” 26.

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19. In the anonymous account of Edward II’s reign, Vita Edwardi Secudi, Piers Gaveston, the favorite of King Edward II, is provided with foreknowledge of his death and time to prepare his soul. See Klaus P. Jankofsky, “Public Executions in England in the Late Middle Ages: The Indignity and Dignity of Death,” OMEGA 10, no. 1 (1979): 47–48. 20. Trisha Olson, “The Medieval Blood Sanction and the Divine Beneficence of Pain: 1100–1450,” Journal of Law and Religion 22, no. 1 (2006/2007): 66. Margaret Owens notes that “before the Reformation, most theatrical representations of violence referred, in some way, to the act of violence at the center of Christianity.” See Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 18. See also Sarah Tarlow and Emma Battell Lowman, Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse, Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and Its Afterlife (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 41–44. Such viewpoints differ from those put forward by Katherine Royer, who argues that the medieval execution ritual signified “the severance of the condemned from the community,” and contends that there were marked differences between the Passion of Christ and the executions of criminals, because “the fresh blood of Christ served as a manifestation of the exceptional nature of his crucifixion as well as a symbol of his humanity while the whole point of the late medieval execution was to dehumanize the condemned.” Royer argues that most medieval narratives did not refer to the blood of the victim because medieval people linked shed blood to the innocence of Christ. See Royer, English Execution Narrative, 35, 45. 21. Merback, Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 144. 22. The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272–1346, trans. Herbert Maxwell (Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1913), 176. 23. The methods of execution used in medieval England signified class status, gender, and the type of crime committed. The gibbet, for instance, was typically used for lower-­ class criminals, while aristocrats usually suffered beheading, which allowed them greater freedom of movement, less pain, and the opportunity to die in a way similar to those who perished in battle. Different types of crimes also carried different penalties. Forgers and some poisoners, for example, were boiled in hot water and traitors were typically sentenced to be hanged, drawn, beheaded, and quartered, although sometimes these sentences, especially for the upper class, were amended to a simple beheading. Tarlow and Lowman, Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse, 49. See also Sonja Drimmer, “The Severed Head as Public Sculpture in Late Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50, no. 2 (March 2020): 293–321; and Merback, Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 142. 24. Royer, English Execution Narrative, 57. Nicholas Terpstra mentions similar changes in the Italian execution ritual during the early modern period. In addition to noting the more public and theatrical nature of early modern executions, Terpstra observes that clerical comforting rituals allowed for individualized treatment of the condemned and helped them to conceive of themselves as spiritually

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redeemed rather than as merely criminals. See Nicholas Terpstra, “Body Politics: The Criminal Body between Public and Private,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 1 (January 2015): 7–52. 25. Numerous scholars have described the execution ritual or the final speeches of the condemned as a genre. See Klemp, Theatre of Death; Charles Carlton, “The Rhetoric of Death: Scaffold Confessions in Early Modern England,” Southern Speech Communication 49, no. 1 (1983): 66–79; and Philip Smith, “Executing Executions: Aesthetics, Identity, and the Problematic Narratives of Capital Punishment Ritual,” Theory and Society 25, no. 2 (April 1996): 235–61. 26. See Kubińska, “ ‘What a Gallant Mourning Ribbon Is This, Which I Wear’: The Function of the Title Pages in the Shaping of the Character in Early Modern English Execution Narratives,” in Eyes to Wonder, Tongue to Praise: Volume in Honour of Professor Marta Gibińska, ed. Agnieszka Pokojska and Agnieszka Romanowska, 219–32 (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2012), 229. 27. For more on Henry Goodcole’s role as prison chaplain, see Randall Martin, “Henry Goodcole, Visitor of Newgate: Crime, Conversion, and Patronage,” Seventeenth Century 20, no. 2 (2005): 153–84; and Todd Butler, “Swearing Justice in Henry Goodcole and The Witch of Edmonton,” Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900 50, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 127–45. 28. Maria Hayward, “ ‘We Should Dress Us Fairly for Our End’: The Significance of the Clothing Worn at Elite Executions in England in the Long Sixteenth Century,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 101 (2016): 223. 29. Royer, English Execution Narrative, 62–63, 73. See also Andrea McKenzie’s discussion of the use of clothing and gestures in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­ century British executions. In particular, McKenzie notes the condemned’s refusal to doff their hats as political statements. See McKenzie, “ ‘God’s Hat’ and the Highwayman’s Shoes: A Gestural and Sartorial History of Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­Century English Trial and Execution,” Canadian Journal of History 47, no. 2 (2012): 231–57. 30. The ermine worn by Anne Boleyn at her execution, for instance, emphasized her noble status. Ermine was an expensive import from Russia and the Scandinavian lands. One study notes that this fur was “principally used for ceremonial garments within royal and aristocratic circles.” See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 190. 31. Robert Tittler, “Regional Portraiture and the Heraldic Connection in Tudor and early Stuart England,” British Art Journal 10, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 8. In his 1586 book, Blazon of Gentrie, John Ferne provides detailed discussions of the colors used in blazon. He notes that when applied to heraldic decoration, white signified “hope & innocency,” black “prudence, constancie,” and red “charity and magnanimity.” See Ferne, Blazon of Gentrie: Devided into two parts. The first named The Glorie of Generositie. The second, Lacyes Nobilitie [. . .] (London: Andrew Mansell, 1586), 169–71. 32. Lady Jane Grey, for instance, dressed almost entirely in black when she went

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to her execution in 1554. According to the anonymous Chronicle of Queen Jane, “The lady Jane was in a blacke gowne of cloth, tourned down; the capep lined with fese velvett, and edget about with the same, in a French hoode, all black, with a black byllyment, a black velvet boke hanging before hir, and another boke in hir hande open.” At his 1601 execution, Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, likewise “was appareled in a gown of wrought velvet, a satin suit, and felt hat, all black.” See The Chronicle of Queen Jane and Queen Mary, ed. J. G. Nichols (London: Camden Society Old Series, 1850), 4:32; and Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Elizabeth, 1598–1601, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longmans et al., 1869) [February 25, 1601], 592. See also Hayward, “We Should Dress Us Fairly,” 232. 33. For more on the ways that depictions of the executions of nobles used clothing, color, and symbols, see Marguerite A. Tassi, “Martyrdom and Memory: Elizabeth Curle’s Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots,” in The Emblematic Queen: Extra-­ Literary Representations of Early Modern Queenship, ed. Debra Barrett-­ Graves, 101–32 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 34. While the apparel of lower-­class individuals is rarely described, a few accounts do point out the clothes donned by women executed for mariticide. Prudence Lee, for instance, was “attired in a Red Waste-­coat” for her 1652 execution. See The witch of Wapping, Or An exact and perfect relation, of the life and devilish practises of Joan Peterson [. . .] (London: Th. Spring, 1652), 7. 35. Klemp, Theatre of Death, 57. 36. Typically, the properties and monies of those executed for treason were forfeited to the crown. The monarch often granted other nobles rights to the traitors’ possessions as a show of favoritism. As one scholar notes, “the crown milked [forfeiture for treason] unsystematically for immediate political gain, using it as a token of patronage.” See K. J. Kesselring, “Felony Forfeiture and the Profits of Crime in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (June 2010): 288. During the Tudor period, however, some monarchs overturned attainder and restored the property and titles to the heirs of executed traitors. In 1539 the son of Henry Norris petitioned Henry VIII for the reversal of the attainder against his father, who was executed for alleged sexual transgressions with Anne Boleyn in 1536. The monarch granted the son restitution in blood (or rights to the title of his late father) but not restoration of the property now held by the king. See Stanford E. Lehmberg “Parliamentary Attainder in the Reign of Henry VIII,” Historical Journal 18, no. 4 (December 1975): 700. 37. Carlton, “Rhetoric of Death,” 67. 38. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: J. Johnson, F.C., and J. Rivington et al., 1808), 3:797, 6:951. 39. Arthur Golding, A briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders [. . .] (London: Henry Bunneman, 1573), n.p. 40. Richard Wunderli and Gerald Broce, “The Final Moment before Death in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 272. 41. Nicholas Harris Nicolas, The Literary Remains of Lady Jane Grey: With a Memoir of Her Life (London: Harding, Triphook, and Lepard, 1825), 52.

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42. The Severall Executions & Confessions, of John Slade and John Bodye [. . .] (London: R. Jones, 1583). 43. Carlton, “Rhetoric of Death,” 69. 44. Lacey Baldwin Smith, “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15, no. 4 (October 1954): 483–88. 45. This providentialist view of history also allowed dissidents to speak against the monarch. As Mervyn James explains, dissension actually had an important part in society, for treasonous rebels, rather than simply waging war on the monarch “[held] up before him the mirror of the failing of his governance.” The condemned who met their deaths on the scaffold were part of God’s ordained plan of history, and their fate revealed the divine right of the monarch while simultaneously drawing his attention to instability in the realm. For James, both notions of honor and a belief in providence therefore fostered obedience to the state and adherence to the execution ritual. See Mervyn James, “English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642,” Past and Present Supplement 3 (1978): 56, 58. 46. John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, 1563 edition, Book 4 (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), 937. Available from https://www .johnfoxe.org. 47. The Arraignement, Judgement, Confession, and Execution of Humfrey Stafford Gentleman [. . .] (London: E. A., 1607). 48. See, for instance, the formulaic reports of repentance offered by a number of convicted sodomites in early modern England as detailed by Kenneth Borris in Same-­Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470–1650 (New York: Routledge, 2004). 49. Beach Langston argues convincingly that Essex’s scaffold speech, for example, was a nearly perfect rendition of the customary deathbed confession. See Langston, “Essex and the Art of Dying,” Huntington Library Quarterly 13, no. 2 (February 1950): 109–29. 50. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 107. 51. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 322–23. 52. See, for instance, Anne Saunders’s closing statement: “And I besech you all to pray for me and with me.” Golding, Briefe discourse, n.p. 53. See Wunderli and Broce, “Final Moment before Death,” 272–73. 54. Samuel Y. Edgerton, “Maniera and Mannaia: Decorum and Decapitation in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Meaning of Mannerism, ed. Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols Jr., 67–103 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1972). 55. See Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1570 edition, Book 8, 1437; McKenzie, “ ‘God’s Hat’ and the Highwayman’s Shoes,” 232. 56. Royer, English Execution Narrative, 72–73. 57. William Hart, The examinations, arraignment & conviction of George Sprot,

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notary in Aye-­mouth together with his constant and extraordinarie behaviour at his death [. . .] (London: William Aspley, 1608), 26. 58. For many of the Marian martyrs, anxiety about exhibiting the signs of true martyrdom permeate the narratives of reformist writers like John Foxe. As Seymour Byman points out, the line between suicide and martyrdom was hard to distinguish, and a cheerful countenance might signify the desire to selflessly follow God’s call, or it might indicate the condemned’s selfish desire for a suicide that was lauded as service to God. See Byman, “Ritualistic Acts and Compulsive Behavior: The Pattern of Tudor Martyrdom,” American Historical Review 83, no. 3 (1978): 625–43. 59. See Richard Ward, “Introduction,” in A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse, ed. Richard Ward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 6. 60. See, for instance, Pieter Spierenberg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 77–78. 61. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 6 volumes (London: J. Johnson et al., 1808), 4:917. The Babington Conspiracy, a 1586 plot, aimed to assassinate Elizabeth I and place Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne. The failure of the plot resulted in Mary’s imprisonment and eventual execution as well as the execution of numerous Catholic conspirators. Severed heads could also generate other meanings beyond simply deterring crimes, upholding the power of the monarch, or shaming the family of the condemned. As Sonja Drimmer argues in a recent article, decapitated heads could become art that presented witnesses with political statements counter to the will of the deceased. See Drimmer, “The Severed Head as Public Sculpture in Late Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50, no. 2 (May 2020): 293–321. Christopher Marlowe also recognized the possibility that the body parts of political enemies could function as memorial signs and even further the posthumous fame of those responsible for their deaths. See Jennifer Lodine-­Chaffey, “ ‘Another Bloody Spectacle’: Excessive Violence in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays,” Marlowe Studies: An Annual 6 (2016): 85–101. 62. Robert Parsons, A discussion of the answere of M. William Barlow, D. of Divinity, to the booke intituled: The judgment of a Catholike Englishman living in banishment for his religion [. . .] (Saint-­Omer: English College Press, 1612), 23. 63. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey, “Introduction,” in Heads will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, ed. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (Boston: Brill, 2012), 9. 64. As Klemp points out, in publishing execution speeches printers often relied “on a variety of sources, each with a different agenda and concept of fidelity to the source material.” See Klemp, Theatre of Death, 10–11. 65. Frances Dolan, in particular, notes that “scholars increasingly focus on the ungovernability and ‘generic slippage’ of executions and the unpredictability of the condemned’s behavior, stressing a constantly shifting interplay among the punishers, the punished, and the spectators, rather than the simple imposition

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of power on/against the condemned.” See Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680,” Modern Philology 92, no. 2 (November 1994): 157. Additionally, as Wendy Wall points out, in at least one instance the pamphlet describing an execution was actually written and published prior to the event itself. See Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 161–62. The numerous accounts of Sir Walter Ralegh’s execution, in particular, show the inability to construct an authoritative narrative of his execution, which has been usefully highlighted by both Anna Beer and Andrew Fleck. See Anna Beer, “Textual Politics: The Execution of Sir Walter Ralegh,” Modern Philology 94, no. 1 (August 1996): 19–38; and Andrew Fleck, “ ‘At the Time of His Death’: Manuscript Instability and Walter Ralegh’s Performance on the Scaffold,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 1 (January 2009): 4–28. 66. Sanja Bentz argues that audiences exerted considerable influence on the ritual, as their presence categorized the event as spectacle, and the creation of narrative accounts allowed for an extension of the audience that transcended time and place. See Bentz, “Spectacular Scaffolds: Executions and Their Audiences during the Reign of Henry VIII,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 25, no. 2 (2018): 129–42. 67. Leigh Yetter, ed. Public Execution in England, 1573–1868 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 1:xxxi. 68. John Spottiswood, A True Relation, of the Proceedings against John Ogilvie, a Jesuit, executed at Glasgow [.  .  .] (Edinburgh: Andro Hart, 1615), 33; Alexander Roberts, A treatise of witchcraft Wherein sundry propositions are laid downe, plainely discovering the wickednesse of that damnable art [. . .] (London: N.O., 1616), 60. 69. William Camden, The History of The Most Renowned and victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England [. . .], 3rd edition (London: E. Flesher, 1675) Book 4, 484–85. 70. Klemp, Theatre of Death, 67. 71. The Unnaturall Wife: or, The Lamentable Murther, of one Goodman Davis Locke-­Smith in Tutle-­streete, who was stabbed to death by his wife [. . .] (London: M. T. Widdow, 1628). In a recent study of emotions expressed at public executions, Frederika Bain argues that while most execution narratives “reveal a uniformity of emotion that shows their authors working within established generic expectations,” accounts that included deviant or excessive affect were viewed as more authentic. Furthermore, such emotional demonstrations of authenticity may have allowed victims to shape their posthumous identities. See Bain, “The Affective Scripts of Early Modern Execution and Murder,” in Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, 221–40 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 239–40. 72. Anthony Fletcher, “Manhood, the Male Body, Courtship and the Household in Early Modern England,” History 84, no. 275 (July 1999): 436. See also Alexandra Shepard’s discussion of concepts of manhood in this period. She notes that the manly attributes supported and praised by early modern writers included:

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“strength, valor, courage, magnanimity, and liberality to virtue, reason, prudence, moderation, self-­ mastery, civility, honesty, independence, thrift, sobriety, and self-­sufficiency.” See Shepard, “From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (April 2005): 292. 73. For a discussion of early modern criticism of male tears and praise of men’s self-­control on the scaffold, see Bernard Capp, “ ‘Jesus Wept’ but Did the Englishman? Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 224 (August 2014): 84–85. 74. Beer, “Textual Politics,” 26. 75. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Sceptick or Speculations [. . .] (London: W. Bentley, 1651), 143. 76. Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 211. 77. Beer, “Textual Politics,” 30. 78. Claire Jowitt, “Scaffold Performances: The Politics of Pirate Death,” in Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650, ed. Claire Jowitt, 151–68 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

Chapter 2 1. Like executions for infanticide, the punishment of witchcraft became increasingly linked to women during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As J. A. Sharpe points out, “around 90 per cent of persons indicted for witchcraft at the Home Circuit assizes between the passing of the Elizabethan statute in 1563 and the abolition of laws against witchcraft in 1736 were women.” While men were frequently identified as cunning men, and in some cases executed for witchcraft, women made up the overwhelming majority of witch craze victims in early modern Britain. See Sharpe, “Women, Witchcraft and the Legal Process,” in Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker, 106–24 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 106–7. 2. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 16, 132. 3. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 57. 4. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 36. 5. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 52. 6. Clark, Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 56. 7. See Randall Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2008). It is also important to consider the various discourses at work in early modern England regarding crime. As Garthine Walker notes, “there was in fact a multiplicity of gendered discourses, and thus ‘voices,’ with which early modern people spoke and through which they constituted and positioned themselves, and were positioned by others, as subjects.” According

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to Walker, scholars should consider all historical narrative sources as potentially containing contradictory messages regarding the subjectivity of criminals. See Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 8. 8. Matthew Lockwood, “From Treason to Homicide: Changing Conceptions of the Law of Petty Treason in Early Modern England,” Journal of Legal History 34, no. 1 (2013): 33. 9. Thomas Edgar, The lawes resolutions of womens rights: or, The lawes provision for woemen [. . .] (London: John More, 1632), 208. 10. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 23–24. David Stymeist also notes that a charge of petty treason differed significantly from a charge of homicide because “juries and justices could not employ the categories of self-­defence or manslaughter to mitigate sentencing.” See Stymeist, “Criminal Biography in Early Modern News Pamphlets,” in Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams, 137–61 (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 143. 11. Ruth Campbell points out that “this whole area of punishment smacks of discrimination.” See Campbell, “Sentence of Death by Burning for Women,” Journal of Legal History 5, no. 1 (1984): 53. See also Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 22–23. 12. Women convicted of high treason also faced burning at the stake, which some scholars and later legal theorists suggest was explained as a concession to female sensitivity, because burning was a less painful method of execution than the punishment for men convicted of high treason who were drawn and quartered. Additionally, burning was believed to protect female modesty, because it did not publicly batter the female body. The latter claim, in particular, strikes me as specious, due to the burning off of female clothing to reveal the women’s nakedness and to the possibility of limbs falling off and interior organs bursting from the body cavity during execution. For the history of these laws, see Campbell, “Sentence of Death by Burning,” 44–59; and Sheely A. M. Gavigan, “Petit Treason in Eighteenth Century England: Women’s Inequality before the Law,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 3, no. 2 (1989–90): 335–74. For discussion of the punishment of death by burning and its connection to early modern cultural understandings of Indian sati, see Pompa Banerjee, Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 13. K. J. Kesselring points out that due to early modern ideas about female humors (a topic covered in chapter 3), women’s “very nature made them likelier to commit particular kinds of killings that came to be deemed the most egregious.” See Kesselring, “Bodies of Evidence: Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c. 1500–1680,” Gender and History 27, no. 2 (2015): 255. 14. E. G., A Prodigious & Tragicall History of the Arraignment, Tryall, Confession, and Condemnation of six Witches at Maidstone, in Kent [.  .  .] (London: Richard Harper, 1652), 5. 15. H. F.’s reticence to weigh in on the views regarding burning witches may

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reflect shifting beliefs about the supernatural. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971). 16. Marisha Caswell, “Flames and Ashes: The Significance of Death by Burning in Europe, 1400–1800,” International Journal of Arts and Sciences 9, no. 3 (2016): 198. 17. A briefe discourse of two most cruell and bloudie murthers, committed bothe in Worcestershire, and bothe happening unhappily in the yeare 1583 [. . .] (London: Roger Warde, 1583). 18. For more on the history of the legal punishments for infanticide, see Stephanie Chamberlain, “Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England,” College Literature 32, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 72–91; Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 127–32; Marilyn Francus, “Monstrous Mothers, Monstrous Societies: Infanticide and the Rule of Law in Restoration and Eighteenth-­Century England,” Eighteenth- ­Century Life 21, no. 2 (1997): 133–56; Laura Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-­Century England,” Past and Present 156 (August 1997): 87–115; Anne-­Marie Kilday, A History of Infanticide in Britain, c. 1600 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Garthine Walker, “Child-­ K illing and Emotion in Early Modern England and Wales,” in Death, Emotion, and Childhood in Premodern Europe, ed. Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds, and Ciara Rawnsley, 151–71 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Keith Wrightson, “Infanticide in Early Seventeenth-­Century England,” Local Population Studies 15 (1975): 10–21. 19. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 128. 20. Anno vicesimo primo Jacobi Regis, &c. an act to prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children (London: Samuel Roycroft, 1680), n.p. 21. Marital status often played an important role in the ways that the criminal justice system and the popular press treated cases of child murder and infanticide. As Dianne Berg points out, “an unmarried infanticidal woman was shown little mercy in comparison with matrons guilty of the same crime.” Likewise, the attitude of pamphleteers toward married women who killed their children was often more sympathetic and emphasized the mental stress, melancholy, or religious fanaticism of these women. See Berg, “Monstrous Un-­making: Maternal Infanticide and Female Agency in Early Modern England,” in Medieval and Early Modern Murder: Legal, Literary and Historical Contexts, ed. Larissa Tracy, 417–33 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2018), 431–32. 22. Judith Hudson, “ ‘The Nine-­L iv’d Sex’: Women and Justice in Seventeenth-­ Century Popular Poetry,” in Early Modern Women and the Poem, ed. Susan Wiseman, 201–19 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 215. 23. In his study of sixty infanticide cases from the first half of the seventeenth century, Wrightson found that fifty-­t hree of the children who died were described as illegitimate and that in fifty-­nine of the cases, the child’s mother was accused of her child’s death. See Wrightson, “Infanticide in Early Seventeenth-­Century England,” 12. There are, however, exceptions; at times men were implicated as accomplices to infanticide. The bloudy mother (1610) suggests that Jane Hattersley,

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an unwed servant, may have been assisted in the murder of her infants by her master and lover, Adam Adamson. Indeed, the woodcut decorating the cover of the pamphlet shows Adamson helping Hattersley bury the body of one of their infants. See Thomas Brewer, The bloudy mother, or The most inhumane murthers, committed by Jane Hattersley upon divers infants [. . .] (London: John Busbie, 1610). 24. Chamberlain, “Fantasizing Infanticide,” 75. 25. Walker, “Child-­K illing and Emotion,” 158. 26. Henry Goodcole, Natures Cruell Step-­Dames: or, Matchlesse Monsters of the Female Sex; Elizabeth Barnes, and Anne Willis [. . .] (London: Francis Coules, 1637), n.p. 27. Martin Parker, No Naturall Mother, but a Monster [.  .  .] (London: Francis Coules, 1634). 28. Deeds against nature, and monsters by kinde tryed at the goale deliverie of Newgate [. . .] (London: Edward Wright, 1614), n.p. 29. While infanticide cases are frequently recorded in pamphlets and ballads, unlike the prevalence of dramas featuring murdering wives or the executions of noblewomen, women who kill their infants are rarely portrayed in early modern drama. For notable exceptions, see Betty S. Travitsky, “Child Murder in English Renaissance Life and Drama,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 63–84. 30. W. Burdet, A Wonder of Wonders. Being a faithful narrative and true relation one Anne Green, who was condemned  .  .  . and hanged in Oxford, and was afterwards beg’d for an Anatomy by the Physicians and recovered [. . .] ([London: John Clowes],1651), 1. 31. [Richard Watkins], Newes from the Dead, or a True and Exact Narration of the Miraculous Deliverance of Anne Green [. . .] (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1651), 1. 32. [Watkins], Newes from the Dead, 1. 33. [Watkins], Newes from the Dead, 2–3. 34. [Watkins], Newes from the Dead, 6. 35. For more on this case, see chapter 3. 36. Robert Plot, The Natural History of Oxford-­shire, being an essay toward the natural history of England (Oxford: The Theater, 1677), 199–200. 37. Andrew Clark, Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632– 1695, Described by Himself (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 1:250–51. 38. Scott Mandelbrote, “William Petty and Anne Greene: Medical and Political Reform in Commonwealth Oxford,” in The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500–2000: Essays for Charles Webster, ed. Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote, 125–50 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 137. 39. See also A declaration from Oxford, of Anne Green a young woman that was lately, and unjustly hanged in the Castle-­yard [. . .] (London: J. Clowes, 1651). 40. Simon Devereaux argues that the abolition of the burning of women was instigated primarily by a group of influential eighteenth-­century men, including sheriffs. See Devereaux, “The Abolition of the Burning of Women in England Reconsidered,” Crime, History and Societies 9, no. 2 (2005): 73–98.

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41. Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-­Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 106–7. 42. Robert Yarington, Two Lamentable Tragedies: The one of the Murther of Maister Beech a Chaundler in Thames-­Streete (London: Mathew Lawe, 1601), E2. 43. Yarington, Two Lamentable Tragedies, F3. 44. Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 107. 45. Yarington, Two Lamentable Tragedies, I2. 46. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 36–37. 47. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 46–47. 48. Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity. 49. While John Beattie notes that “a successful plea of pregnancy appears to have been tantamount to a pardon” during the long eighteenth century, such does not seem to be the case during this period. Indeed, Sara Butler, in a recent study of medieval cases of pleading the belly, finds that most condemned women who claimed pregnancy were not pardoned. See Beattie, Crime and Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 431; and Sara M. Butler, “Pleading the Belly: A Sparing Plea? Pregnant Convicts and the Courts in Medieval England,” in Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain, ed. Sara M. Butler and K. J. Kesselring, 131–52 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 50. Ferdinando Pulton, De pace Regis et regni viz. A treatise declaring which be the great and generall offences of the realme [. . .] (London: Companie of Stationers, 1609), 215. 51. Cathy McClive, “The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe,” Society for the Social History of Medicine 15, no. 2 (2002): 212, 216. Conceiving a child was insufficient cause to delay a woman’s execution; instead, authorities believed that human life began at the time of animation. Therefore, protection of the fetus was considered only once movement was felt. For more on pleading the belly, see Gregory J. Durston, Wicked Ladies: Provincial Women, Crime and the Eighteenth-­Century English Justice System (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 68–75. 52. McClive, “Hidden Truths of the Belly,” 216. 53. Subha Mukherji, “Women, Law, and Dramatic Realism in Early Modern England,” English Literary Renaissance 35, no. 2 (2005): 258. 54. Stuart A. Kane, “Wives with Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Commodity,” Criticism 38, no. 2 (1996): 219. 55. Carole Levin, “ ‘Murder Not Then the Fruit within My Womb’: Shakespeare’s Joan, Foxe’s Guernsey Martyr, and Women Pleading Pregnancy in Early Modern English History and Culture,” Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 20 (1999): 82. 56. In his account of Anne Saunders’s case, Arthur Golding reports that “at the time of hir husbands death she looked presently to lye down” and was not arraigned until she was “delivered of childe & churched.” See Arthur Golding, A

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briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders [. . .] (London: Henry Bunneman, 1573), n.p. 57. Carole Levin and John Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 36. 58. Middlesex Sessions’ Rolls, in Middlesex County Records, ed. John Cordy Jeaffreson (London: Woodfall and Kinder, 1886), 1:2. See also Carole Levin, “Murder Not Then the Fruit within My Womb,” 82. 59. Three Bloodie Murders. The first committed by Francis Cartwright upon William Storre, M. Arts Minister and Preacher at Market Rasen in the countie of Lincolne. The second committed by Elizabeth James on the body of her Mayde [. . .] (London: G. Eld, 1613), C2–C3. 60. K. J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 212; and Butler, “Pleading the Belly,” 133–34. 61. Additionally, as Sara Butler points out, male authorities in the medieval and early modern periods presumed “that women pled their bellies falsely as a tactical ploy to escape the gallows.” This prevailing viewpoint, of course, bears similarities to modern cases of suspicion of women’s claims that they have been sexually assaulted. See Butler, “Pleading the Belly,” 132. 62. Nadia Bishai, “ ‘Which Thing Had Not before Been Seen’: The Rituals and Rhetoric of the Execution of Anne Boleyn, England’s First Criminal Queen,” in The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, ed. Liz Oakley-­ Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson, 171–85 (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2009), 172. 63. Chronicle of King Henry VIII. of England, trans. Martin Andrew Sharp Hume (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889), 70. 64. Charles Windsor Herald Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton (Westminster: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1875), 1: 38. 65. In addition to the women listed, two men were beheaded on Tower Green: William Hastings in 1483 and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in 1601. 66. Wriothesley, Chronicle of England, 1: 41. Writing more than a hundred years after Boleyn’s execution, Peter Heylyn reflected on the privacy of the ritual, noting that those permitted to attend the execution came “rather as witnesses than spectators of her final end.” This, Heylyn believes, was due to the advice of the Tower’s constable, William Kingston, who believed Boleyn “would declare her self to be a good woman,” which would call into question Henry’s decision to execute his wife, particularly if the crowd contained a large number of individuals. See Heylyn, Ecclesia Restaurata, or, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England [. . .] (London: H. Twyford, T. Dring, J. Place, W. Palmer, 1660–61), 93. 67. The significant number of accounts of Boleyn’s execution demeanor and last words also attests to the importance of the spectacle and the European audience’s desire to read about this extraordinary event. Nadia Bishai provides a list of more than ten accounts of Boleyn’s execution written over the next hundred years, to

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which can be added letters from Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands; John Foxe’s account in his Acts and Monuments; poems by Thomas Wyatt; and the writings of Lancelot de Carles, a Frenchman attached to this nation’s embassy in London during the execution. See Bishai, “ ‘Which Thing Had Not before Been Seen,’ “ 184–85; and “The Fall of Anne Boleyn,” in Elizabeth Norton, 283–365. 68. Martin Andrew Sharp Hume, The Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1905), 394–95. 69. Hume, Wives of Henry the Eighth, 395. 70. Paola Baseotto, “Mary Stuart’s Execution and Queen Elizabeth’s Divided Self,” in Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, ed. Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi, 66–82 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 79–80. 71. Lisa Hopkins, Writing Renaissance Queens: Texts by and about Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 62. 72. Leticia Álvarez-­Recio, “Contemporary Visions of Mary Stuart’s Execution: Saintliness and Vilification,” in The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, ed. Liz Oakley-­Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson, 209–21 (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2009), 210–11. For a detailed discussion of Elizabeth I’s worry over the French and Scottish reactions to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, see Susan Doran, “Revenge Her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder? The Impact of Mary Stewart’s Execution on Anglo-­Scottish Relations,” History 85, no. 280 (October 2000): 589–612. 73. See Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680,” Modern Philology 92, no. 2 (November 1994): 160; and Lisa Hopkins, “Renaissance Queens and Foucauldian Carcerality,” Renaissance and Reformation, n.s. 20, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 23–24. 74. The exception was the execution of Essex, who requested a private venue, fearing that a public execution would tempt him and that his final words would be open to inaccurate interpretations. See Maria Hayward, “ ‘We Should Dress Us Fairly for Our End’: The Significance of the Clothing Worn at Elite Executions in England in the Long Sixteenth Century,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 101 (2016): 234. 75. Swetnam the Woman-­hater, Arraigned by Women (London: Richard Meighen, 1620), F4. A concern for aristocratic men’s privacy (as demonstrated by Elizabeth’s decision to allow Essex to die on Tower Green) is also attested to in popular drama. In The Revenger’s Tragedy (first published in 1607 and believed to be the work of Thomas Middleton), the Junior Brother receives a private execution after his brother requests, “Pray let him die as private as he may; / Do him that favor, for the gaping people / Will but trouble him at his prayers, and make / Him curse, and swear, and so die black” (3.3.20–23). See Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen, 1297–1369 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 76. Noblewomen in Tudor England, unlike their lower-­class counterparts found guilty of treason, were always beheaded, rather than burned at the stake. Decapitation, in effect, functioned as a commuted sentence, allowing the upper class to

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experience less pain and agony than the slow and agonizing ritual of burning at the stake. See Margaret Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 124. 77. V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770– 1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 590. 78. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-­ Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 52.

Chapter 3 1. Frances E. Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680,” Modern Philology 92, no. 2 (November 1994): 159. 2. Dolan, “Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say,” 162. 3. Dolan, “Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say,” 165. 4. Margaret Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 276. 5. Randall Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2008), 228. 6. See also the woodcuts from Samuel Clarke, A Generall Martyrologie Containing a Collection of All the Greatest Persecutions Which have Befallen the Church of Christ (London, 1651). One sensational image in this work depicts a naked woman hanging between two men, one of whom whips her while the other tears off her breasts with pincers. 7. See Charles Windsor Herald Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton (Westminster: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1875) 1:24; and Henry Goodcole, Heavens speedie hue and cry sent after lust and murder manifested upon the suddaine apprehending of Thomas Shearwood, and Elizabeth Evans [. . .] (London, 1635), n.p. 8. Additionally, as Leigh Yetter notes, in many contemporary accounts, men’s sufferings and the violence of their executions are often omitted as well, leading her to suggest that “the significance of the event, at least in print, lay elsewhere.” See Yetter, ed., Public Execution in England, 1573–1868 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 1:xxxviii. 9. Steven Mullaney, “Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, 235–51 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 243. 10. Susannah Brietz Monta,” Foxe’s Female Martyrs and the Sanctity of Transgression,” Renaissance and Reformation, n.s. 25, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 3–22. 11. For more on the humoral theory, see Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially the introduction; Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and

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the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Amy Kenny, Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 12. Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (New York: Boydell Press, 2007), 19. 13. Paster, Humoring the Body, 78–79. 14. Kenny, Humoral Wombs, 6. 15. For more on this topic, see Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), especially chapter 4, “The Weaker Vessel,” 60–82; Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, eds., Half Humankind: Context and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1–22. 16. Leonard Wright, A Display of Dutie Dect With Sage Sayings, pythie sentences, and proper similie: Pleasant to reade, delightful lot hear, and profitable to practice (London: 1589), 36–37. 17. Certain sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches in the time of Queen Elizabeth of famous memory and now reprinted for the use of private families, in two parts (London: George Wells, 1687), 533. 18. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, A Treatise of the Nobilitie and Excellencye of Woman Kynde translated out of Latine into englysshe, trans. David Clapam (London: Thomae Bertheleti, 1542), [98]. 19. Thomas Elyot, The Defence of Good Women Devised and Made by Sir Thomas Elyot Knyght (London: n.p., 1540). See also Constance Jordan, “Feminism and the Humanists: The Case of Sir Thomas Elyot’s Defence of Good Women,” Renaissance Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 181–201. Women also defended themselves against misogynistic texts. Rachel Speght, for instance, writing in response to Joseph Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615), penned A Mouzell for Melastomus in 1617. This work refuted Swetnam’s claims for women’s inferiority and upheld the spiritual equality of women and the need for women to be treated with respect by their husbands (Speght even suggests that men should help their wives with domestic tasks). See Speght, A Mouzell for Melastomus [. . .] (London: Thomas Archer, 1617). 20. von Nettesheim, Treatise of the Nobilitie and Excellencye of Woman Kynde, 21–22. 21. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered [. . .] (London: Simon Miller, 1671), 33. 22. Mary Floyd-­Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 15. 23. Floyd-­Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 3. 24. Floyd-­Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 19–20, 75–77. 25. Floyd-­Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 24. 26. Amy Kenny, Humoral Wombs, 20.

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27. See Gail Kern Paster, “Leaky Vessels,” in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 24–52. 28. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 29. For early modern understandings of the family generally, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination; and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 30. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 49. 31. Susan Dwyer Amussen, “ ‘Being Stirred to Much Unquietness’: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 2 (1994): 71–73. 32. Susannah Brietz Monta argues that in their accounts of the tortures of Anne Askew, both John Foxe and John Bale emphasize “her physical fragility” and bodily agonies. See Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 212. 33. John King notes that Acts and Monuments was “revered by many Protestants as a ‘holy’ book” and was often “chained alongside the Bible for reading by ordinary people at many public places including cathedrals, churches, schools, libraries, guildhalls, and at least one inn.” Additionally, King points out that “women made up an important constituency among those who read the book.” Megan Hickerson described Foxe’s work as “one of the most widely disseminated and influential texts of the sixteenth century and beyond, surpassed in importance only by the Tyndale Bible as a formative text of English Reformation.” See Hickerson, Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 6; and King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1, 320. 34. James C. W. Truman suggests that martyrology, because of its “reliance on repeated spectacles of the suffering body,” eroticizes the bodies of female martyrs. According to Truman, “these women are able to speak in an authorized voice, sanctioned by their eloquent textual defense of their bodies,” because the tortures they endure are intricately linked to rape and the violation of the female body. See Truman, “John Foxe and the Desires of Reformation Martyrology,” ELH 70, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 40–43. 35. John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, 1563 edition, 1563 edition Preface (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), 16, 15. Available from: https://www.johnfoxe.org. 36. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1576 edition, Book 11, 1813. 37. Elizabeth Evenden notes that this woodcut was reused to depict the 1592

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execution of the murderer Anne Brewen. In his assessment of the illustration, Paul Voss, unaware of its origins in Foxe’s text, describes it as “a slightly eroticized image of the woman consumed by the flames of desire, chained to a post, hands folded in a pious expression of prayer.” See Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 101; and Voss, “Books for Sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29, no. 3 (1998): 793. 38. For the connections between Foxe’s representations of female martyrs and the Duchess of Malfi’s posthumous reputation, see Jennifer Lodine-­Chaffey, “ ‘Beyond Death’: John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Posthumous Influence,” Ben Jonson Journal 26, no. 1 (2019): 113–32. 39. Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, 210–11. Monta references Mary Beth Rose’s study of early modern heroism; Rose claims that this period experienced a shift in its understanding of heroism, as the more masculine version of active heroism was gradually replaced by a feminine heroics of endurance. See Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 40. Foxe often relies on the medieval Catholic tradition of female martyrs, who were usually depicted suffering extreme tortures and deaths for their faith. See Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 41. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1576 edition, Book 12, 1943. 42. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1576 edition, Book 11, 1865. 43. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1576 edition, Book 11, 1863. 44. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1576 edition, Book 11, 1865. 45. The story of Perotine Massey and her female family members’ martyrdom caused significant waves following Foxe’s publication. The Catholic polemicist Thomas Harding later sought to discredit Massey by claiming she was a prostitute. This led Foxe to include a lengthy justification of the Guernsey martyrs in the 1583 edition of The Acts and Monuments. See Steven Mullaney, “Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, 235–51 (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2000). 46. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 224. 47. Massey’s delivery at the stake and the death of her infant were also mentioned by a number of Protestant divines. In a sermon, Thomas Playfere, for instance, lamented that the Catholic authorities “made the mother suffer the most untollerable paines of childbirth and martyrdome both together.” See Playfere, Ten Sermons Preached by that eloquent divine of famous memorie (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1610), 61. 48. Kenny, Humoral Wombs, 160. 49. Foxe also notes that another Protestant martyr met her death while preg-

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nant. Elizabeth Pepper, he reports, was “xi wekes gone with chylde,” which was known to the authorities. Foxe reads the decision to ignore Pepper’s pregnancy as proof of “the blody hartes of this cruel generation.” See Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1563 edition, Book 5, 1819. 50. Peine forte et dure was a punishment reserved for individuals who refused to plead. Although not technically considered torture, this sentence involved placing the nearly naked individual on the bare ground, tying their arms to the sides of the press room, and then laying on the body as much weight as the person could bear until they either chose to plead or died. For more on this sentence, see Andrea McKenzie, “ ‘ This Death Some Strong and Stout Hearted Man Doth Choose’: The Practice of Peine Forte et Dure in Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­Century England,” Law and History Review 23, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 279–81. 51. Her executioners did allow Clitherow to cover her body with linen prior to her execution. 52. John Mush, “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow,” in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, ed. John Morris, 3:33–440 (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), 3:432–33. 53. For more detailed discussions of the martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow, see Claire Cross, “An Elizabethan Martyrologist and His Martyr: John Mush and Margaret Clitherow,” Studies in Church History 30, Martyrs and Martyrologies (1993): 271–81; Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Katherine Longley, “The ‘Trial’ of Margaret Clitherow,” Ampleforth Journal 75 (1970): 335–64; and Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom, and the Politics of Sanctity in Early Modern England (London: Continuum, 2011). 54. Richard Verstegan also recounts Clitherow’s martyrdom in his 1588 Theatrum crudelitatem haereticorum nostri temporis. This account furthermore includes a woodcut depicting Clitherow being crushed to death. 55. Mush, “True Report,” 427. 56. Matchinske, “Framing Recusant Identity,” 67. 57. Madeline Bassnett, Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 86. 58. See Megan L. Hickerson, “Gospelling Sisters ‘Goinge Up and Downe’: John Foxe and Disorderly Women,” Sixteenth Century Journal 35, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1035–51. 59. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Margaret Clitherow, Catholic Nonconformity, Martyrology and the Politics of Religious Change in Elizabethan England,” Past and Present 185, no. 1 (November 2004): 81. 60. Thomas Harding, A Rejoindre to M. Jewels Replie against the Sacrifice of the Masse [. . .] (Louanii: Apud Joannem Foulerum, 1567), 184–85. In subsequent editions of his work, Foxe defended Massey and provided the name and location of her missing husband, thus defending her honor and ability to serve as an example of godly femininity. 61. Andrea McKenzie, although focusing on executions in the late seventeenth

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and eighteenth centuries, contends that “the scaffold performances of common criminals borrowed the shorthand of Protestant hagiographic tradition.” To prove this point, McKenzie highlights the religious rhetoric offenders typically used in their last dying speeches, which included appropriating the words of Christ on the cross (“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”), expressing joy in death, embracing or kissing the instruments of their executions, and even dressing up in wedding clothing. See McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675– 1775 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 206, 163–64. Seymour Byman provides a useful overview of the biblical precedents used by the Marian martyrs, which included not only speaking specific words that echoed Christ or St. Paul but also lifting the arms or hands in prayer. See Byman, “Ritualistic Acts and Compulsive Behavior: The Pattern of Tudor Martyrdom,” American Historical Review 83, no. 3 (1978): 640–41. 62. Mary Kathleen Eyring, “Choosing Death: The Making of Martyrs in Early American Criminal Narratives,” American Literature 91, no. 4 (December 2019): 697. 63. Eyring, “Choosing Death,” 710. 64. Henry Goodcole, The Adultresses Funerall Day in Flaming, Scorching, and Consuming Fire [. . .] (London: N. and I. Okes, 1635), C3. 65. Efterpi Mitsi, “The Spectacle of Pain in Protestant Martyrology,” in Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Elly Ifantidou, Anna Despotopoulou, and Chryssoula Lascaratou, 253–67 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 254. 66. Mitsi, “Spectacle of Pain,” 262–63. 67. Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, 212. 68. For more on Foxe’s treatment of female martyrs and in particular his complex destabilization of gender roles and the use of these women as examples for their female readers, see Meghan Nieman, “Foxe’s Female Martyrs and the Utility of Interiority,” Dalhousie Review 85, no. 2 (2005): 295–305. 69. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1570 Edition, Book 1, 145. 70. For a sustained discussion of the ways that Foxe’s work depended on earlier martyrdom literature, including medieval Catholic hagiographies, see Alice A. Dailey, “Typology and History in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” Prose Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 1–29. 71. As Lynn Robson points out, Elizabeth Caldwell, who was executed for the attempted murder of her husband in 1602, deliberately used the language of martyrdom to suggest her death was a sacrifice that should inspire her husband’s repentance. See Robson, “ ‘Now Farewell to the Lawe, Too Long Have I Been in Thy Subjection’: Early Modern Murder, Calvinism and Female Spiritual Authority,” Literature and Theology 22, no. 3 (December 2008): 301. 72. See A Warning for All Desperate Women by the Example of Alice Davis who for Killing of her Husband Was Burned in Smithfield [. . .] (London: F. Coules, 1628); and T. Platte, Anne Wallens Lamentation, For the Murthering of her husband John Wallens [. . .] (London: Henry Gosson, 1616).

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73. Andreas Höfele, “Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments,” in Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Tobias Döring and Susanne Rupp, 81–93 (New York: Rodopi, 2005), 83. 74. The Unnaturall Wife: or, The Lamentable Murther, of one Goodman Davis Locke-­Smith in Tutle-­streete, who was stabbed to death by his wife [. . .] (London: M. T. Widdow, 1628). 75. Emma Whipday, when discussing the recycling of an image of Cicelie Ormes’s 1557 martyrdom in a crime pamphlet about a female murderer, similarly notes that “the reuse of an image from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to depict the state execution of a murderous wife situates that wife in a visual tradition of power and subversive female agency that is laudable, virtuous, and divinely sanctioned.” See Whipday, Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 74.

Chapter 4 1. Leigh Yetter notes that despite attempts to read the actions of the condemned or the assembled witnesses, “one of the curiosities of early modern execution literature is the general paucity of detail concerning the executions themselves.” See Yetter, Public Execution in England, 1573–1868 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 1:xxxvii. 2. The account of Elizabeth Abbot’s hanging, for instance, provides a typically short statement about the execution of the condemned, who “was presently brought from the church againe, and there suffered Execution,” while the title page includes a woodcut detailing her capital punishment. See The Apprehension, arraignment, and execution of E. Abbot [. . .] (London: Henry Gosson, 1608). 3. For information about popular medical texts and cultural attempts to read the outer body as a sign of the interior mind or spirit, see Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-­Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Martin Henry Porter, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 (Oxford: Oxford Historical Monographs, 2005); and Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4. Brad Gregory argues that martyrologists, because they “wanted to promote their respective causes,” tried to make their interpretations of martyrs’ demeanor and physical gesture “fit the best available information about executions.” See Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 21. 5. For a discussion of the way that writers used the body of the condemned as “an object of proof” of their guilt or innocence or sincere conversion, see Abigail Shinn, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 169–211. 6. Paul D. Stegner, “ ‘Try What Repentance Can’: Hamlet, Confession, and the Extraction of Interiority,” Shakespeare Studies 35 (2007): 111.

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7. Henry Goodcole, The Adultresses Funerall Day in Flaming, Scorching, and Consuming Fire [. . .] (London: N. and I. Okes, 1635), C3. 8. For a discussion of the typical accepted bodily signs of contrition, see Jillian M. Snyder, “Pricked Hearts and Penitent Tears: Embodying Protestant Repentance in Robert Southwell’s Saint Peter’s Complaint (1595),” Studies in Philology 117, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 313–36. 9. Goodcole, Adultresses Funerall Day, C3. 10. Jodi Schorb describes a similar understanding of executions performed in colonial America, arguing that these rituals “were variations on early modern anatomy theaters, laying bare the interior—the heart—of the condemned in order to move spectators to self-­examination and spiritual knowledge.” See Schorb, “Hard-­Hearted Women: Sentiment and the Scaffold,” Legacy 28, no. 2 (2011): 291. 11. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 1.8.47–48. 12. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 1.8.49. 13. T. I., A World of wonders. A masse of murthers. A covie of cosonages [. . .] (London: William Barley, 1595), n.p. 14. For more on the discovery of witches’ marks and supernumerary teats, see Julia M. Garrett, “Witchcraft and Sexual Knowledge in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 31, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 37–38; and Charlotte-­Rose Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2017). For a discussion of the belief that possessed individuals had terrible breath, see Kathleen R. Sands, Demon Possession in Elizabethan England (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 32–33. 15. Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 477. 16. Suzanne Evans, “The Scent of a Martyr,” Numen 49, no. 2 (2002): 193–211. 17. For more on Mother Arnold and the discovery of the witchcraft pamphlet about her, see Marion Gibson, “Mother Arnold: A Lost Witchcraft Pamphlet Rediscovered,” Notes and Queries 243, no. 3 (September 1998): 296–300. 18. The witches of Northampton-­shire Agnes Browne. Joane Vaughan. Arthur Bill. Hellen Jenkenson. Mary Barber. Witches. Who were all executed at Northampton the 22. of July last. 1612 (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1612). 19. Henry Goodcole, The wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a witch late of Edmonton [. . .] (London: William Butler, 1621), n.p. 20. The Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie the Three Witches of Warboys (London: Thomas Man and John Winnington, 1593), 3–4. 21. Kirilka Stavreva, “Fighting Words: Witch-­Speak in Late Elizabethan Docu-­ fiction,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 323. 22. For more on Alice Samuel, see Julia M. Garrett, “Witchcraft and Sexual Knowledge in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 56–58. 23. Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37–40.

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24. Robert Heath, “Upon the Sight of an Old but Very Deformed Woman,” in Clarastella Together with Poems Occasional, Elegies, Epigrams, Satyrs (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1650), 16. 25. Lynn Botelho, “Old Women in Early Modern Europe: Age as an Analytical Category,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allyson Poska, Jane Couchamn, and Katherine McIver, 297–316 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 306. 26. For more on the connection between female age and witchcraft in early modern Europe, see Alison Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany,” Past and Present 173 (November 2001): 50–89. Rowlands argues that while older women were more at risk of being accused of practicing witchcraft, most individual women actually gained a reputation over many years that led to accusations when they were older. 27. Thomas Bromhall, An history of apparitions, oracles, prophecies, and predictions with dreams, visions, and revelations and the cunning delusions of the devil [. . .] (London: John Streater, 1658), 124. 28. Brett D. Hirsch, “The Taming of the Jew: Spit and the Civilizing Process in The Merchant of Venice,” in Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Rory Loughnane, 136–52 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 139. 29. Henry Boguet, Discours des Sorciers [1602] (An Examen of Witches), trans. E. Allen Ashwin, ed. Montague Summers (London: John Rodker, 1929; rprt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 75. 30. Boguet, Discours des Sorciers, 76. 31. Gowing, Common Bodies, 73–75. 32. Emma Wilby, “The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England and Scotland,” Folklore 111, no. 2 (October 2000): 295–97; Anne Rosner, “The Witch Who Is Not One: The Fragmented Body in Early Modern Demonological Tracts,” Exemplaria 21, no. 4 (2009): 365. 33. Rosner, “Witch Who Is Not One,” 366. 34. Susan C. Staub points out that many early modern pamphlets and ballads depicted female murderers as monstrous, revealing the contemporary understanding of female felons “as aberrations, as deformities of nature.” See Staub, Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Murderous Women in the Street Literature of Seventeenth Century England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 13. 35. Robert Wynkfield, “Letter of Robert Wynkfield to Lord Burghley,” in Mary Queen of Scots: Evocation, Spectacle, ed. Roy C. Strong and Julia Trevelyan Oman (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), 54–57, 54. 36. Wynkfield, “Letter,” 57. 37. Wynkfield, “Letter,” 57. The visual rendering of the Scottish queen’s deceased body here parallels Spenser’s description of Duessa after her disrobing, as both women are represented as hiding old and hideous bodies beneath their seemingly beautiful forms. For further discussion of Spenser’s allegorical depictions of Mary, Queen of Scots within The Faerie Queene, see Richard A. McCabe, “The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI,” English

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Literary Renaissance 17, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 224–42; and John D. Staines, The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560–1900: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 134–44. 38. Naomi Baker, Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture (New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), 108. 39. “English Summary of the Poem on Anne Composed by Lancelot de Carles, a Member of the French Embassy in London on 2 June 1536,” in The Anne Boleyn Papers, ed. Elizabeth Norton, 357–58 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2013), 357. 40. For more on the de casibus tradition, see Andrew Duxfield, “De casibus Tragedy: Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great,” in The Genres of Renaissance Tragedy, ed. Daniel Cadman, Andrew Duxfield, and Lisa Hopkins, 11–28 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 41. G. W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 159–60. 42. “English Summary of the Poem on Anne,” 357. 43. “Anonymous Imperialist Account of Anne’s Death from the Archives at Brussels,” in The Anne Boleyn Papers, ed. Elizabeth Norton (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2013), 362. 44. See Nicholas Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism [1585], trans. David Lewis (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), 25. 45. Scott Eaton, “Witchcraft and Deformity in Early Modern English Literature,” Seventeenth Century 35, no. 6 (2020): 819. 46. In her study of Boleyn, Retha M. Warnicke speculates that the queen’s miscarriage of a possibly deformed son in 1536 may have caused Henry VIII to believe his wife was a witch. According to Warnicke, Boleyn’s miscarriage of this misshapen fetus was “the sole reason for the king’s setting in motion the process that led to Anne’s execution.” See Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 191. 47. A true recitall touching the cause of the death of Thomas Bales, a seminarie priest, who was hanged and quartered in Fleet-­street on Ashwenesdaie last past. 1590 Whereunto is adjoyned the true cause of the death of Annis Bankyn [.  .  .] (London: William Wright, 1590), 8. 48. A true recitall, 5–7. 49. Humphry Mill, A Nights Search: Discovering the Nature and Condition of all sorts of Night-­Walkers [. . .] (London: R. Bishop, 1640), 251–53. 50. Mill, Nights Search, 253. 51. Rosner, “Witch Who Is Not One,” 376. 52. Edward Topsel, in his bestiary, notes that some people believed moles “were sacred and dedicated to Hell, because they kept continually within the bosom and bowels of the earth.” See Topsel, The History of Four-­Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: E. Cotes, 1658), 391. 53. Frederika Bain, “The Tail of Melusine: Hybridity, Mutability, and the Accessible Other,” in Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth, ed.

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Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes, 221–40 (Boston: Brill, 2017), 18. Prostitutes and bawds were often described as human-­animal hybrids. For example, Nicholas Breton, in his 1616 study of character, writes, “A Bawde is a kinde of Woman-­Beast, who having lost the honour of her Virginity in her youth, means to goe to hell in her Age.” See Breton, The Good and the Badde, or Descriptions of the Worthies, and Unworthies of this Age [. . .] (London: George Purslowe, 1616), 32. 54. Edith Snook points out that “normative beauty was . . . idealized as the physical sign of truth and virtue.” See Snook, Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 4. 55. For more on the subject of female beauty and how early modern men and women assessed the appearance of women, see Anne Laurence, “Women, Godliness and Personal Appearance in Seventeenth-­Century England,” Women’s History Review 15, no. 1 (2006): 69–81. For a discussion of the Neoplatonic belief that outward beauty signified inner goodness, see Lisa Shapiro, “The Outward and Inward Beauty of Early Modern Women,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 203, no. 3 (2013): 327–46. 56. Snook, Women, Beauty and Power, 1–6. 57. See Nunn, Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 29–30; and Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 193–96. 58. Charles Windsor Herald Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton [Printed for the Camden Society] (Westminster: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1875), 1:64. 59. Emanuel van Meteren, Historie der Neder-­landscher ende haerder Na-­buren Oorlogen ende geschiedenissen (Delft, 1599; repr. The Hague: Hillebrant Jacobsz von Wouw, 1614), n.p., quoted in Nadia Bishai, “ ‘Which Thing Had Not Before Been Seen’: The Rituals and Rhetoric of the Execution of Anne Boleyn, England’s First Criminal Queen,” in The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, ed. Liz Oakley-­Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson, 171–85 (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2009), 176. 60. A number of female martyrs are also described as beautiful in contemporary accounts. John Mush, for instance, noted that God blessed Margaret Clitherow with “a body with a comely face and beauty correspondent.” See John Mush, “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow,” in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, ed. John Morris, 3:333–440 (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), 3:368. 61. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 95–99. 62. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.3.102–5. 63. In his discussion of this scene, Richard Sugg perceptively notes that “for Romeo, and for some early modern male viewers, this conveniently idealized,

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unblemished simulacrum may well have been more attractive than a living woman.” See Sugg, “Shakespeare’s Anatomies of Death,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, 184–201 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 189. 64. Edward May, “On a woman burned in Smithfield the 20 of April 1632. who dyed a Wife, a Widdow, and a true maide, by her owne free confession,” in Epigrams Divine and Morall (London: John Grove, 1633), C2. 65. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 19. 66. The unnamed woman May writes about may be the same individual listed in Richard Smyth’s list of early seventeenth-­century deaths (“a woman burnt in Smithfield for poisoning her husband” on April 20, 1632). See Richard Smyth, The Obituary of Richard Smyth, ed. Henry Ellis (London: Camden Society, 1849), 6–7. 67. V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770– 1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 264. 68. While few accounts of executed women blatantly eroticize their deaths and corpses, the eroticization of female corpses is a common theme in early modern drama and poetry. Instances of the links between female death and desire include Romeo’s praise of Juliet’s beauty even when he believes she is a corpse, Marvell’s focus on the decay of his beloved’s body in “To His Coy Mistress,” and Hamlet’s frantic leap into Ophelia’s grave. 69. In addition to Webster and Dekker’s tragedy, see also Philip Massinger and Thomas Dekker’s The Virgin Martyr, which includes the onstage beheading of Saint Dorothea. In this play, many characters refer to the beauty of the martyr, and one laments that “with her dies / The abstract of all sweetnesse that’s in woman.” See Massinger and Dekker, The Virgin Martyr a Tragedie [. . .] (London: Bernard Alsop, 1622), I7. John Marston’s The Insatiate Countess also depicts the onstage execution of a beautiful woman, although unlike Massinger’s account of the martyrdom of an early Christian, the Countess Isabella is executed for her role in a murder. In her scaffold speech, Isabella pays homage to her hair, which “insnar’d so many wanton youths.” See Marston, The Insatiate Countess: A Tragedie, as it was sundry times acted at the White-­Friers, by the children of the revels (London: Thomas Archer, 1613), I1. 70. Thomas Dekker and John Webster, The Famous Historie of Sir Thomas Wyat With the Coronation of Queen Mary and the Coming of King Philip (London: Thomas Archer, 1612), G3. 71. For a discussion of the conventional use of red and white to describe both female and male beauty, see Linda Woodbridge, “Black and White and Red All Over: The Sonnet Mistress amongst the Ndembu,” Renaissance Quarterly 40, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 247–97, especially 247–53. 72. Edith Snook reads Guildford’s reaction to Grey’s decapitated head as “a necrophilic version of the conventional love object” and contends that Grey’s beauty “affords her no sway.” Yet this moment, I argue, positions Grey, through her dis-

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embodied head, as a signifier of innocence and allows Guildford to consider his upcoming death a type of divine martyrdom. See Snook, “Jane Grey, ‘Manful’ Combat, and the Female Reader in Early Modern England,” Renaissance and Reformation 32, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 66. 73. Charles R. Forker notes that Webster continues to employ dramatic strategies whereby the female protagonists die before their male husbands or lovers. See Forker, Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (Carbondale-­ Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 71. 74. For an account of Lady Jane Grey’s execution, see The life, death and actions of the most chast, learned, and religious lady, the Lady Jane Gray [. . .] (London: G. Eld, 1615). 75. Dekker and Webster, Famous Historie, G2. 76. Margaret E. Owens, who also notes the importance of Lady Jane Grey’s severed head, interprets Guildford’s reaction to his wife’s head differently, noting that “Jane’s head is limited to fortifying her husband’s courage,” and that Guildford’s poetic use of the blazon is “to bolster his own sense of fortitude by discursively mastering, paradoxically through the device of anatomization, an image of bodily fragmentation that mirrors his own imminent fate.” See Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 132. 77. According to Thea Cervone, the lack of planning for Boleyn’s burial underlines “the pettiness and spite believed by many to be imbedded with the royal authority.” See Cervone, “ ‘ Tucked beneath Her Arm’: Culture, Ideology and Fantasy in the Curious Legend of Anne Boleyn,” in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, ed. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey 289–310 (Boston: Brill, 2012), 297–98. 78. John D. Staines, The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560–1900: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 93–94. 79. Louis Montrose, “Elizabeth through the Looking Glass: Picturing the Queen’s Two Bodies,” in The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World, 1500–2000, ed. Regina Schulte, Pernille Arenfeldt, Martin Kohlrausch, and Xenia von Tippelskirch, 61–87 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 65. 80. Elizabeth Southwell, “A True Relation of What Succeeded at the Sickness and Death of Queen Elizabeth,” in Catherine Loomis, “Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (1996): 486. 81. Kate Cregan, “Early Modern Anatomy and the Queen’s Body Natural: The Sovereign Subject,” Body and Society 13, no. 2 (2007): 47–66. 82. Kaara L. Peterson, “Elizabeth I’s Virginity and the Body of Evidence: Jonson’s Notorious Crux,” Renaissance Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2015): 842. 83. While Elizabeth requested that her body remain unopened, it should be noted that many royals in the medieval era and even during the early modern period were eviscerated. Some had body parts like the heart and viscera removed

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and buried separately from the body. See Valeria Finucci, “Thinking through Death: The Politics of the Corpse,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 1 (2015): 1–6. 84. Nunn, Staging Anatomies, 4. 85. Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 118. 86. Jonathan Sawday, Body Emblazoned, 224. 87. For more on the differences between the two versions of Goodcole’s Heavens speedie hue and crie, see Randall Martin, “Taking a Walk on the Wild Side: Henry Goodcole’s Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry Sent After Lust and Murther (1635); and “London Criminal Chorography,” Early Modern Literary Studies 14, no. 3 (January 2009) https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/. Martin notes that Goodcole’s amended edition included attempts “to educate citizens to recognize signs of predatory behavior, especially in women,” and effectively mapped the criminal spaces of London. 88. Henry Goodcole, Heavens speedie hue and cry sent after lust and murder manifested upon the suddaine apprehending of Thomas Shearwood, and Elizabeth Evans [. . .] (London: N. and I. Okes, 1635), n.p. 89. The dissection of the criminal corpse was viewed not only as punitive but also as a violation of the individual and the afterlife of his or her soul. While Peter Linebaugh’s study of English executions focuses on the eighteenth century, the Tyburn riots of that era reveal that the condemned and their families greatly feared post-­execution dissection and wanted the executed individuals’ remains to receive a Christian burial. See Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-­Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (London: Allen Lane, 1975). 90. Sugg, Murder after Death, 112. 91. Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-­Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57. 92. Goodcole, Heavens speedie hue and crie, n.p. 93. Nunn notes that Goodcole “perceives her skeleton as echoing with her crimes” and urges his readers to visit and see the spectacle of her remains. See Nunn, Staging Anatomies, 99. 94. Sawday, Body Emblazoned, 60–71. 95. Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot by Edmund Gayton, Esq. (London: William Hunt, 1654), 119. 96. Thomas Taylor, The Second Part of the Theatre of God Judgments Collected out of the Writings of Sundry Ancient and Moderne Authors (London: Richard Herne, 1642), 95. 97. Britain’s Triumphs, or a Brief History of the Warres and Other State-­Affairs of Great Britain. From the Death of the late King, to the third year of the Government of the Lord Protector (London: Edward Farnham, 1656), 68. 98. W. Burdet, A Wonder of Wonders. Being a faithful narrative and true relation one Anne Green, who was condemned . . . and hanged in Oxford, and was afterwards

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beg’d for an Anatomy by the Physicians and recovered [. . .] ([London: John Clowes], 1651), 4. 99. Susan C. Staub notes that Richard Watkins’s account of the event, Newes from the Dead, “is at once a scientific explanation of an extraordinary event and, concomitantly, a rather voyeuristic examination of female bodily functions.” See Staub, “Surveilling the Secrets of the Female Body: The Contest for Reproductive Authority in the Popular Press of the Seventeenth Century,” in The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, ed. Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge, 51–68 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 52. 100. [Richard Watkins], Newes from the Dead, or a True and Exact Narration of the Miraculous Deliverance of Anne Green [. . .] (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1651), 2–3. 101. [Watkins], Newes from the Dead, Cv. For further scholarship on Anne Greene’s miraculous case, see J. Trevor Hughes, “Miraculous Deliverance of Anne Green: An Oxford Case of Resuscitation in the Seventeenth Century,” British Medical Journal 285 (1982): 1792–93; Marina Leslie, “Representing Anne Green: Historical and Literary Form and the Scenes of the Crime in Oxford, 1651,” in Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigations in Law and Literature, ed. Alison L. LaCroix, Richard H. McAdams, and Martha Craven Nussbaum, 89–110 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Sara D. Luttfring, Bodies, Speech, and Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1–4. 102. Wriothesley, Chronicle of England, 24. Richard Rex notes that this account is collaborated by Richard Hill’s version of the event. See Rex, “The Execution of the Holy Maid of Kent,” Historical Research 64, no. 154 (June 1991): 217–18. 103. For more on Barton’s prophecies, the smear campaign against her, and her execution, see Robinson Murphy, “Elizabeth Barton’s Claim: Feminist Defiance in Wolf Hall,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 36, no. 2 (2015): 153–55. 104. While the display of Barton’s head is a draconian and extreme measure, Ethan H. Shagan notes that the fall of Barton and her supporters is also among “the government’s first experiments with acts of attainder, press censorship, the execution of dissidents and other forms of control that would become increasingly important in the coming decades of religious conflict.” See Shagan, “Print, Orality and Communications in the Maid of Kent Affair,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52, no. 1 (January 2001): 21. 105. Richard Grafton, A chronicle at large and meere history of the affayres of Englande and kings of the same [. . .] (London: Henry Denham, 1569), 1224. 106. Grafton, Chronicle, 1224. 107. Judith M. Bennett and Shannon McSheffrey, “Early, Erotic and Alien: Women Dressed as Men in Late Medieval London,” History Workshop Journal 77, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 2. 108. Shannon McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 176. 109. Grafton, Chronicle, 1224. For more on this case, see also Mark Robson, “Wolfes Wife,” Parallax 2, no. 2 (1996): 95–97; and William R. Stacy, “Richard

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Roose and the Use of Parliamentary Attainder in the Reign of Henry VIII,” Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (March 1986): 7–8. 110. The occasional display of female bodies and body parts occurred in later centuries as well. In the early eighteenth-­century ballad “The last Words and Declaration of Jannet Shank,” the condemned’s right hand was cut off by the hangman prior to her hanging and then set up at Dumfries. As Shank was executed for infanticide, possibly her right hand deserved special treatment for its use in the crime. See “The last Words and Declaration of Jannet Shank, Who was Execute in the Grass mercat of Edinburgh, upon the 7 day of February, 1711 for the Crime of Child-­Murder” (Edinburgh: John Reid, 1711). 111. For more on these two texts, see Walter F. Eggers  Jr., “ ‘Lady Egeria’ and ‘Albion’s Queen,’ “ Huntington Library Quarterly 45, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 244–49; and Cyrus Mulready, “Making History in Q Henry V [with illustrations],” English Literary Renaissance 43, no. 3 (2013): 508–11. 112. R. G., The Famous Historie of Albions Queene [. . .] (London: T. Pavier, 1600), n.p.

Chapter 5 1. Henry Goodcole, A True Declaration of the Happy Conversion, Contrition and Christian Preparation of Francis Robinson [. . .] (London: Edward Al-­dee, 1618), A4. 2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 67–68. 3. Randall Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2008), 111–12. 4. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 190. 5. Rosalind Smith also argues for a more complex reading of execution narratives, particularly those in popular publications. In her study of the contemporary accounts and responses to Anne Saunders’s case, Smith suggests that crime ballads “should be allowed the same range of heuristic possibilities afforded elite texts’ depiction of the past,” and that “their use of the rhetorical tool of exemplarity” should be seen not “as fixed and didactic but as flexible and volatile.” See Smith, “A ‘Goodly Sample’: Exemplarity, Female Complaint and Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” in Early Modern Women and the Poem, ed. Susan Wiseman, 181–200 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 187. 6. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53–54. 7. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 239. 8. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 239–40. 9. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 251–52. 10. James Daybell, “Scripting a Female Voice: Women’s Epistolary Rhetoric in Sixteenth-­Century Letters of Petition,” Women’s Writing 13, no. 1 (2006): 4. 11. PRO SP 12/71/73, July 1570, quoted in Daybell, “Scripting a Female Voice,” 15.

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12. Warwick Record Office, Throckmorton Papers, CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3/11, 25 Dec., n.d., quoted in Daybell, “Scripting a Female Voice,” 15. 13. Linda Pollock, in her discussion of the rearing of noblewomen, notes that “both men and women manipulated the ideology of the frailty of women to achieve particular objectives.” Pollock describes, for instance, the case of Anne Newdegate, who petitioned the courts for the wardship of her sons, believing “that by acknowledging her weakness as a woman, the committee would look more favourably on her request.” See Pollock, “ ‘ Teach Her to Live under Obedience’: The Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England,” Continuity and Change 4, no. 2 (1989): 251. 14. B. L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On the Generic Criticism of Apologia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 273–83. 15. Ware and Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves,” 276. 16. A Protestation Against a Foolish, Ridiculous and Scandalous Speech, Pretended to be Spoken by Thomas Wentworth [. . .] (London, 1641), 3. 17. Excerpta Historica, or Illustrations of English History, ed. Samuel Bentley (London: Samuel Bentley, 1831), 261–64. 18. Ware and Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves,” 277. 19. See, for instance, the last dying speech of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset (1552): “Moreover (deerelie beloved friends) there is yet somewhat that I must put you in mind of, as touching christian religion, which so long as I was in authoritie, I alwaies diligentlie set foorth, and furthered to my power.” Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (London: J. Hunne, 1587), 6:1067. 20. Ware and Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves,” 278. 21. Walter Ralegh, for instance, according to one extant transcript, addressed the charges and “main points of suspicion” against him in his final speech by rejecting charges of atheism, dispelling rumors about his activities in the New World, and discrediting the Frenchman who accused him of treason. T. B. Howells, ed. A Complete Collection of State Trials (London: T. C. Hansard, 1816), 1:1360. For a detailed description of the various versions of Ralegh’s speech, see Andrew Fleck, “ ‘At the Time of His Death’: Manuscript Instability and Walter Ralegh’s Performance on the Scaffold,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 1 (January 2009): 4–28. 22. Sharon D. Downey, “The Evolution of the Rhetorical Genre of Apologia,” Western Journal of Communication 57 (Winter 1993): 50. 23. Mike Milford, “Rhetorical Emancipation: Apologia and Transcendence on Death Row,” Western Journal of Communication 83, no. 3 (2019): 340. 24. For an in-­depth discussion of these strategies, see Milford, “Rhetorical Emancipation,” 326–44. While he analyzes speeches given by modern-­day execution victims in the United States who are not as constrained by the scaffold rituals as their early modern counterparts, Milford’s study is useful for its focus on the rhetorical strategies employed by the condemned. 25. Lacey Baldwin Smith, “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the

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Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954): 476. Catholic martyrs, however, often refused to make the accepted final speech, as many denied the crimes they were accused of and failed to mention the power of the state and the justness of their sentences. See Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-­Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 229–80. 26. Thomas R. Burkholder, “Symbolic Martyrdom: The Ultimate Apology,” Southern Communication Journal 56, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 292. 27. Sarah Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-­Century England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 160. 28. Frances A. Dolan points out that “the ballad tradition confers voice on petty traitors largely so that the women can condemn themselves and advise others not to imitate them.” See Dolan, “Tracking the Petty Traitor across Genres,” in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, 1–22 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 157. 29. Thomas Deloney, “The Lamentation of Master Pages wife of Plimmouth [. . .]” (London: n.p., 1635). 30. The witch of Wapping, Or An exact and perfect relation, of the life and devilish practises of Joan Peterson [. . .] (London: Th. Spring, 1652), 8. 31. Witch of Wapping, 8. 32. “The Wofull Lamentacon of Mrs. Anne Saunders, which she wrote with her own hand [. . .],” in Old English Ballads: 1553–1625, ed. Hyder Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Publishing, 1920), 344. 33. For more on the use of negative examples of the murderous wife in broadside ballads, see Kirilka Stavreva, “Scaffolds unto Prints: Executing the Insubordinate Wife in the Ballad Trade of Early Modern England,” Journal of Popular Culture 31, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 177–88. 34. Nicholas Byfield, Sermons upon the ten first verses of the third chapter of the first Epistle of S. Peter Being the last that were preached by the late faithfull and painfull minister of Gods word, Nicolas Byfield [. . .] (London: H. Lownes, 1626), 128–29. 35. Byfield, Sermons upon the ten first verses, 129. 36. Martin Parker, No Naturall Mother, but a Monster [. . .] (London: F. Coules, 1634). 37. See, for example, the following ballads regarding men’s scaffold lamentations: The Wofull Lamentation of Edward Smith a poore penitent prisoner in the jayle of Bedford [.  .  .] (London: Thomas Symcock, 1625); The Wofull Lamentation of William Purcas, Who for Murtherin his Mother at Thaxted in Essex was Executed at Chelmsford [. . .] (London: Francis Coules, 1624); and Luke Huttons Lamentation which he wrote the day before his death, being condemned to be hanged at Yorke (London: H. Gosson, c. 1640). 38. For more on the “domino theory” and its understanding in early modern England, see Cynthia B. Herrup, “Law and Morality in Seventeenth-­Century England,” Past and Present 106 (February 1985): 109–10.

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39. See Martin Parker, A Warning for Wives, by the Example of one Katherine Francis, alias Stoke [. . .]” (London: F. Gravoe, 1629); and A Warning for All Desperate Women by the Example of Alice Davis who for Killing of her Husband Was Burned in Smithfield [.  .  .] (London: F. Coules, 1628). In addition to the ballad form, see also [Thomas Heywood], A Warning for Faire Women, ed. Gemma Leggott, https:// extra.shu.ac.uk/emls. 40. The Unnaturall Wife: or, The Lamentable Murther, of one Goodman Davis Locke-­Smith in Tutle-­streete, who was stabbed to death by his wife [. . .] (London: M. T. Widdow, 1628). 41. “Unnaturall Wife.” 42. “Unnaturall Wife.” 43. David M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 118. 44. Susan Dwyer Amussen, “ ‘Being Stirred to Much Unquietness’: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 75. 45. Lynda Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 189. 46. Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 108. 47. Katherine A. Craik asserts that the women in popular crime ballads “expect and welcome the judgement of their audience by willingly acknowledging legal culpability and Christian sinfulness, by gracefully accepting punishment . . . by quelling fears that the crime might be repeated . . . and by accepting promise of spiritual comfort.” Such readings position women’s execution speeches as didactic, without fully considering the complex nature of embedded social critiques. Although Craik notes that in “The Wofull Lamentacon of Mrs. Anne Saunders,” the condemned’s use of the mode of complaint “momentarily rais[es] the possibility” of female subjectivity, she argues that the dominant theme of her speech is its moralizing tone. See Craik, “Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ and Early Modern Criminal Confession,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 457, 449. 48. Rosalind Smith, “Goodly Sample,” 198. 49. Patricia Phillippy notes that even in male-­authored accounts of natural female deaths, women often chastised their husbands and admonished them to lead holy lives. Thus, while execution narratives infrequently offer instances of wives pointing out their husband’s or lover’s faults, such a trend may have been relatively common at the early modern woman’s deathbed. See Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-­Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 106–8. 50. Many ballads that specifically address women during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently offer similar social critiques. The 1630 ballad A Hee-­Divell: or, if this Womans Husband use her well, recounts the tale of a maiden who married quickly and lived to regret her choice. The female speaker of this piece complains that her husband spent all of her money, physically abused

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her, wasted all of his time at the ale-­house, failed to provide food for her and her daughter, and pawned her garments. She ends with a warning to “all you Maidens faire, / that have a mind to wed,” advising them to “take heed and be aware.” See Martin Parker, A Hee-­Divell: or, if this Womans Husband use her well [. . .] (London: F. Grove, 1630). 51. T. Platte, Anne Wallens Lamentation, For the Murthering of her husband John Wallens [. . .] (London: Henry Gosson, 1616). 52. John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, July 6, 1616, in The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 2:15. 53. A similar theme of spousal abuse is also present in the 1629 ballad A Warning for Wives. In this account the condemned woman, Katherine Francis, alias Stoke, stabs her husband in the neck with a “pair of sheeres” after a drunken late-­night fight. While the ballad depicts Katherine Francis as “monstrous” and having a “barbarous [heart],” the author notes that the couple’s relationship was contentious: “A man and wife at household jarres / long liv’d, the more’s the pitty, / Like Cat and Dog they still agree’d; / Each small offence did anger breed.” See Martin Parker, A Warning for Wives, By the Example of one Katherine Francis, alias Stoke [. . .]” (London: F. G., 1629). 54. Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse: Discovering the Devils Incarnat of this Age (London: Adam Islip, 1596), 42. Lodge’s mention of Archias references Plutarch’s account of Pelopidas. According to Plutarch, Archias, a Theban oligarch, was assassinated after becoming very drunk and refusing to deal with urgent matters until the next day. 55. Lodge, Wits Miserie, 42. 56. Lodge, Wits Miserie, 43. 57. Lodge, Wits Miserie, 43. 58. Lodge, Wits Miserie, 43. 59. Lodge, Wits Miserie, 42–43. This same account, but with a more sympathetic title and the addition of specific names and dates, is provided almost verbatim in a c. 1690 pamphlet. The veracity of either account remains unclear. See The distressed mother: or, sorrowful wife in tears: being a full and true account of a most horrid, barbarous and bloody Murther [. . .] (London: J. Beuvet, 1690). 60. Henry Goodcole, The Adultresses Funerall Day in Flaming, Scorching, and Consuming Fire [. . .] (London: N. and I. Okes, 1635), B1. 61. Goodcole, The Adultresses Funerall Day, C1–C2. 62. Bernard Capp, “The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 162 (February 1999): 70. 63. See Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England, Family, Sexuality, and Social Relations in Past Times (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 113–14; and Capp, “Double Standard Revisited,” 76–80. 64. Capp, “Double Standard Revisited,” 80–84. See also Tim Meldrum, “London Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence, 1660–1750: Servant-­Employer

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Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household,” in Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840, ed. Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, and Pamela Sharpe, 47–69 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 65. Goodcole, Heavens speedie hue and cry sent after lust and murder manifested upon the suddaine apprehending of Thomas Shearwood, and Elizabeth Evans [.  .  .] (London: N. and I. Okes, 1635), C3. 66. Goodcole, Heavens speedie hue and cry, A5. 67. Gilbert Dugdale, A true discourse of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell [.  .  .] (London: James Roberts, 1604), B2. 68. See also Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 47–51; Frances E. Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680,” Modern Philology 92, no. 2 (November 1994): 170–71; and Elizabeth Tebeaux and Mary M. Lay, “The Emergence of the Feminine Voice, 1526–1640: The Earliest Published Books by English Renaissance Women,” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 15, no. 1 (1995): 62–65. 69. Dugdale, True Discourse, C1. 70. Dugdale, True Discourse, C2. 71. Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 51. 72. John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, 1576 edition, Book 12 (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), 1932. Available from: https://www .johnfoxe.org. 73. Meghan Nieman, “Foxe’s Female Martyrs and the Utility of Interiority,” Dalhousie Review 85, no. 2 (2005): 301. 74. William Camden, The Historie of the Life and Death of Mary Stuart Queene of Scotland (London: Richard Whitaker, 1624), 235–36. 75. “English Summary of the Poem on Anne Composed by Lancelot de Carles, a Member of the French Embassy in London on 2 June 1536,” in The Anne Boleyn Papers, ed. Elizabeth Norton, 357–58 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2013). 76. Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, 20. 77. For more on early modern treatment of the corpse, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-­Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 425–32. 78. The Araignement and Burning of Margaret Ferne-­seede, for the Murther of her late Husband [. . .] (London: Henry Gosson, 1608), B5. 79. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 4.2.225–26. 80. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 58. 81. Elizabeth A. Hallam, “Turning the Hourglass: Gender Relations at the Deathbed in Early Modern Canterbury,” Mortality 1, no. 1 (1996): 61–82. 82. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1576 edition, Book 8, 1186. 83. A briefe discourse of the most haynous and traytorlike fact of Thomas Appeltree for which hee shoulde have suffred death on Tuisday the one and twentith of Julie last:

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wherin is set downe his confession [. . .] (London: Henry Bynneman, 1579). Appeltree received a pardon from Elizabeth I at the very last minute, which was celebrated as an example of the queen’s mercy and love for her people. 84. See, for instance, Wofull Lamentation of Edward Smith. In this ballad Smith specifically addresses his spouse and children: “Farewell my children all, / My tender Babes adue: / Let this your Fathers fall, / be warning good for you. / Deare wife and infants three, / Serve God remember this, That you true subjects be, / though I have done amisse.” 85. Joy Wiltenburg, “Ballads and the Emotional Life of Crime,” in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee, 173–87 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 179. 86. See Anna Beer, “Textual Politics: The Execution of Sir Walter Ralegh,” Modern Philology 94, no. 1 (August 1996): 36; and The Irish Martyr. Or, A true relation of the lamentable sufferings of Mr. John Trewman [. . .] (London: F. C. & T. V., 1641), 6. 87. See An epistle of the Ladye Jane, a righte vertuous woman [.  .  .] (London: [J. Day], 1554); and The life, death and actions of the most chast, learned, and religious lady, the Lady Jane Gray [. . .] (London: G. Eld, for John Wright, 1615). For more on imprisoned women’s writings during this era and the ways that women promoted their religious leadership and positions as subjects, see Rosalind Smith, “Narrow Confines: Marginalia, Devotional Books and the Prison in Early Modern Women’s Writing,” Women’s Writing 26, no. 1 (2019): 35–52. 88. John Mush, “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow,” in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, ed. John Morris, 3:333–440 (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), 3:432. 89. Katharine M. Longley reports that Anne Clitherow did follow her mother’s religious beliefs and “later became an Augustinian Canoness Regular of the Lateran at St. Ursula’s Louvain.” See Longley, “The ‘Trial’ of Margaret Clitherow,” Ampleforth Journal 75 (1970): 353. 90. For more on early modern mothers’ legacies, see Jennifer Heller, The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2001). 91. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1570 Edition, Book 12, 2209. According to Patrick Collinson, the widow Bradbridge, who was burned at Canterbury on June 19, 1557, was “perhaps the wife either of George Bradbridge, who had been burned at Canterbury on 6 September 1555, or of Matthew Bradbridge of Tenterden, burned in January 1557.” A Joan Bradbridge was martyred in Maidstone a day before the widow’s martyrdom in Canterbury. See Collinson, “What Are the Women Doing in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’?” in Women and Religion in the Atlantic Age, 1550–1900, ed. Emily Clark and Mary Laven, 15–32 (London: Routledge, 2013), 20; and Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 60. 92. Platte, Anne Wallens Lamentation. 93. Dugdale, True Discourse, n.p. 94. See Arthur Golding, A briefe discourse of the late murther of master George

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Saunders [.  .  .] (London: Henry Bunneman, 1573), n.p.; “Wofull Lamentacon of Mrs. Anne Saunders,” 340–48; and [Heywood], A Warning for Faire Women. See also Joseph H. Marshburn, “ ‘A Cruell Murder Donne in Kent’ and Its Literary Manifestations,” Studies in Philology 46, no. 2 (April 1949): 131–40. 95. Stuart A. Kane, “Wives with Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Commodity,” Criticism 38, no. 2 (1996): 228. 96. Golding, Briefe discourse, n.p. 97. Golding, Briefe discourse, n.p. 98. Golding, Briefe discourse, n.p. 99. Golding, Briefe discourse, n.p. 100. Frances Dolan reads the play as denoting two different representations of Anne Saunders—one as a sympathetic and disempowered wife, and one as a lustful and violent adulteress. In the end, Dolan argues that “the play concludes with the double image of woman on the scaffold, the focus of cultural ambivalence and contradiction: officially chastened for her transgression yet acknowledged as an agent for the first time.” See Dolan, “Gender, Moral Agency, and Dramatic Form in A Warning for Fair Women,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 29, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 201–18, especially 216. 101. Warning for Faire Women, 5.4.134–37. 102. Warning for Faire Women, 5.4.165, 170–72. 103. See Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 131; and Rosalind Smith, “The Case of Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley and Lord Bothwell: Initiating the Literature of Husband-­Murder in Sixteenth-­Century England,” Notes and Queries 59, no. 4 (2012): 500. 104. Sundrye Strange and Inhumaine Murthers [.  .  .] (London: Thomas Scarlet, 1591), B2. 105. Sundrye Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, B3. 106. Christopher Marsh characterizes Deloney’s ballad as unique, due to its attempt to arouse sympathy from listeners and its refusal to dwell on the gory details of the crime. See Marsh, “Best-­Selling Ballads and the Female Voices of Thomas Deloney,” Huntington Library Quarterly 82, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 148–49. 107. Deloney, “Lamentation of Master Pages Wife.” 108. Deloney, “Lamentation of Master Pages Wife.” 109. Karen Anne Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 9, 1. 110. Deloney, “Lamentation of Master Pages Wife.” 111. Goodcole, Adultresses Funerall Day, B4. 112. Goodcole, Adultresses Funerall Day, B1. 113. The Young-­Womans Complaint: Or, A Caveat to All Maids to have a Care how they be Married to Old Men (London: W. Gilbertson, 1655–65). 114. William Perneby, in his manual on death preparation, advises householders as follows: “He must endevour himselfe what hee may, to set his familie in order before he die  .  .  . that is, make thy testament, that so thou maiest prevent the braules and jarres that otherwise may arise among thine heires; tell

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thy household-­folkes what thou wilt have done when thou art dead, . . . [and] commend thine house to some good, honest, godlie and religious man.” See William Perneby, A direction to death: teaching man the way to die well, that being dead, he may live ever (London: Thomas Man, 1599), 229. 115. Here in this booke ye have a godly epistle made by a faithful Christian: A comunication between Fecknam and the Lady Jane Dudley [. . .] (London: Successor of A. Scoloker, 1554), n.p. 116. Here in this booke, n.p. 117. The Araignement and burning of Margaret Ferne-­seede, n.p. 118. Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 41–45. 119. The Apprehension, arraignment, and execution of E. Abbot [.  .  .] (London: Henry Gosson, 1608), n.p. 120. Apprehension, arraignment, and execution of E. Abbot, n.p.

Chapter 6 1. Elizabeth Tebeaux and Mary M. Lay, “The Emergence of the Feminine Voice, 1526–1640: The Earliest Published Books by English Renaissance Women,” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 15, no. 1 (1995): 53–55. 2. See, for instance, Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982). 3. Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorique for the use of all suche as are studious of eloquence, sette forth in English ([London]: Richard Graftonus, 1553), 400–401. 4. See Lynda E. Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1991): 179–213; and David Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, 116–36 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 5. See Christina Luckyj, “A Moving Rhetoricke”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 43–45. 6. Kathleen Kalpin Smith, “Women’s Speech in the Age of Shakespeare,” Literature Compass 10, no. 3 (2013): 263–64. 7. Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2–3. Jennifer Clement also notes that “for many women a humble position could prove enabling as well as restricting— sometimes enabling, in fact, because it was restricting.” See Clement, Reading Humility in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 82. 8. Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1–15. 9. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 190. 10. Kathleen Kalpin Smith, Gender, Speech, and Audience Reception in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2017), 130, 130–31. 11. Laura Gowing, “ ‘The Manner of Submission’: Gender and Demeanour in Seventeenth- ­Century London,” Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013): 28.

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12. Gowing, “Manner of Submission,” 32–33. For more on early modern women’s clothing choices and how female honor was judged based on women’s dress, see Tim Reinke-­Williams, “Women’s Clothes and Female Honour in Early Modern London,” Continuity and Change 26, no. 1 (2011): 69–88. 13. In her study of early modern conduct manuals and literary treatments of how women could construct and represent virtue, Jessica Murphy argues that by conforming to societal expectations to subject themselves to male authority, women could paradoxically gain influence and provide moral guidance to others. See Murphy, Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). 14. Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 2. 15. Authors often claimed truthfulness when relating the executions and last dying speeches of early modern women. Henry Goodcole, for instance, ends his pamphlet on Alice Clarke’s burning with the following: “Heere is nothing contained in her confession, but that which true, and what she uttered with her owne mouth; which I was a witnesse off.” Likewise, Gilbert Dugdale establishes the veracity of his account of Elizabeth Caldwell’s case by stating: “Therefore being an eare-­w itnes to this false alarum, it made me more diligent in the setting foorth the truth.” See Henry Goodcole, The Adultresses Funerall Day in Flaming, Scorching, and Consuming Fire [. . .] (London: N. and I. Okes, 1635), C2; and Gilbert Dugdale, A true discourse of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell [. . .] (London: James Roberts, 1604), A4. 16. Thomas Deloney, “The Lamentation of Master Pages wife of Plimmouth [. . .]” (London: n.p., 1635). 17. Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will, 15. 18. Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49–52. 19. Henry Goodcole, Heavens speedie hue and cry sent after lust and murder manifested upon the suddaine apprehending of Thomas Shearwood, and Elizabeth Evans [. . .] (London: N. and I. Okes, 1635), n.p. 20. See, for instance, Steven Mullaney’s claim that female martyrs’ “strength is not their own; it is virile, but visited as it is upon them by God, their ‘manlye stomache[s]’ cannot be perceived as a transgression of social or religious or gender codes.” See Mullaney, “Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, 235–51 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 243. 21. Arthur Golding, A briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders [. . .] (London: Henry Bunneman, 1573), n.p. 22. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the early modern period “seely” usually meant: “Innocent, harmless. Often as an expression of compassion for persons or animals suffering undeservedly,” while “poor” could denote both poverty and lack, as well as be “used to express deprecation (for reasons of

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modesty, in polite formulae, etc.) of oneself, one’s actions, or something belonging to or offered by oneself: of little worth or pretension; lowly undeserving.” See “poor, adj. and n.1” and “seely, adj.” OED Online, June 2019, Oxford University Press. For more on the subversive behavior of Foxe’s female martyrs, see Roberta Anderson, “John Foxe’s Seely, Poore Women,” Downside Review 133, no. 467 (2015): 5–40; Megan L. Hickerson, “Gospelling Sisters ‘Goinge Up and Downe’: John Foxe and Disorderly Women,” Sixteenth Century Journal 35, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1035–51; and Carole Levin, “Women in The Book of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 4, no. 2 (March/April 1981): 196–207. 23. John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, 1576 Edition, Book 12 (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), 1942–43. Available from: https:// www.johnfoxe.org. 24. See John R. Knott, “John Foxe and the Joy of Suffering,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 721. 25. Of particular note is Foxe’s framing of Anne Boleyn’s execution, which Allison Machlis Meyer usefully explores as the author’s attempt to defend the beheaded queen’s reputation. Meyer suggests that Foxe offers his readers a version of Anne’s scaffold speech that positions “her as a devoted wife and subject who is physically subject to the laws of the state but spiritually subject only to the laws of God.” Additionally, Meyer notes that Foxe uses “the piety of her last words and her modest demeanor in dying” as proof of her status as a godly queen. See Meyer, “Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9, no. 2 (2015) http://www.borrowers.uga.edu. 26. The Apprehension, arraignment, and execution of E. Abbot [.  .  .] (London: Henry Gosson, 1608), n.p. 27. Thomas Brewer, The bloudy mother, or The most inhumane murthers, committed by Jane Hattersley upon divers infants [. . .] (London: John Busbie, 1610), n.p. 28. Brewer, Bloudy mother, n.p. 29. Adamson, unlike Hattersley, was not executed; he did, though, receive divine punishment for his involvement in these murders. According to the pamphleteer, Adamson “fell into a most miserable, greeveous and lamentable consumption” following his lover’s hanging. Plagued by worms and lice, and tormented by “the infecting stench of carrion,” Adamson suffered for half a year before his death. See Brewer, Bloudy mother, n.p. 30. Anne Bodenham remains a popular subject for scholars of the early modern period. For more on her story and the textual accounts of her witchcraft and death, see the following: Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 32–39; Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft, Politics, and Memory in Seventeenth-­Century England,” Historical Journal 50, no. 2 (2007): 289–308; Smith, Gender, Speech, and Audience, 137–40; and Susan C. Staub, “Bloody Relations: Murderous Wives in the Street Literature of Seventeenth Century England,” in Domestic Arrangements

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in Early Modern England, ed. Kari Boyd McBride, 124–46 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 137. 31. Edmond Bower, Doctor Lamb revived, or, Witchcraft condemn’d in Anne Bodenham a servant of his, who was arraigned and executed the lent assizes last at Salisbury [. . .] (London: T. W., 1653), 32. 32. Bower, Doctor Lamb revived, 34. 33. Bower, Doctor Lamb revived, 34. 34. Bower, Doctor Lamb revived, 36. 35. James Bower, Doctor Lambs darling: or, strange and terrible news from Salisbury; being a true, exact, and perfect relation, of the great and wonderful contract and engagement made between the devil, and Mistris Anne Bodenham [. . .] (London: G. Horton, 1653), 8. 36. The Salisbury assizes. Or, the reward of witchcraft, in Cavalier and Puritan: Ballads and Broadsides Illustrating the Period of the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (New York: New York University Press, 1923), 335. 37. John Sheffeild, A Good Conscience the Strongest Hold: A Treatise of Conscience, Handling the Nature Acts Offices Use of Conscience [.  .  .] (London: Samuel Gellibrand, 1650), 130. 38. Tebeaux and Lay, “Emergence of the Feminine Voice,” 63. 39. Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One Thing More to Say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680,” Modern Philology 92, no. 2 (November 1994): 170. 40. Lynn Robson, “ ‘Now Farewell to the Lawe, Too Long Have I Been in Thy Subjection’: Early Modern Murder, Calvinism and Female Spiritual Authority,” Literature and Theology 22, no. 3 (December 2008): 295–312. 41. Smith, Gender, Speech, and Audience Reception, 141. 42. Dugdale, True Discourse, n.p. 43. Dugdale, True Discourse, n.p. 44. Dugdale, True Discourse, n.p. 45. Edward Elton, The triumph of a true Christian described: or An explication of the eight chapter of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans [. . .] (London: Richard Field, 1623), 587. Likewise, in a late sixteenth-­century exposition of The Song of Solomon, T. W. defines a feeling heart as “such a one, as in an earnest desire that hee hath of eternall glorye, or of holye love, that hee hath to all wel doing, & to cease from sin, wisheth even the glorious appearing of our Lord Jesus, and the ending of the days of these miseries.” See T. W., An exposition uppon the Booke of the Canticles, otherwise called Schelomons Song. Published for the edification of the Church of God (London: Thomas Man, 1585), 248–49. 46. Golding, Briefe discourse, n.p. 47. Golding, Briefe discourse, n.p. 48. Thomas Overbury died in 1613, while imprisoned in the Tower of London. Two years later, King James, learning that Overbury’s death was not due to natural causes, authorized an investigation. Apparently, Overbury’s friend, and one of James’s favorites, Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, had requested Overbury’s help in marrying Frances Howard, then the wife of Robert Devereux, Earl of

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Essex. The proposed union of Carr and Howard required an annulment of Howard’s first marriage, and Overbury, who mistrusted the powerful Howard faction and its influence on James I, refused to help Carr. The Howard family then persuaded James to offer Overbury a position as ambassador to Russia, knowing that Overbury would refuse and instead choose to stay in England with Carr. James, displeased with Overbury’s refusal, sent him to the Tower, where he died under mysterious circumstances. The investigation into Overbury’s death revealed that Carr and Howard had conspired to murder Overbury and employed not only the Tower’s jailor but also an apothecary and Anne Turner, the widow of a noted physician, to help them kill Overbury. For months, Turner and Howard made pies and jellies laced with poison and sent them to Overbury; in the end, a poisoned enema given by the jailor most likely killed the prisoner. Howard’s first marriage was annulled shortly thereafter, and she and Carr quickly wed. While the newlyweds were found guilty of murder (Howard) or conspiracy to murder (Carr) and imprisoned in the Tower, both were pardoned after serving six years. The lower-­ class individuals involved in the crime, however, all met their ends on the gallows. For more on this case, see Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 49. Francis Bacon, A True and Historical Relation of the Poysoning of Sir Thomas Overbury (London: T. M. & A. C., 1651). 50. Andrew Amos, The Great Oyer of Poisoning: The Trial of the Earl of Somerset for the Poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury [.  .  .] (London: Richard Bentley, 1846), 223–24. 51. Amos, Great Oyer of Poisoning, 224. 52. Mistris Turners Farewell to all women (London: John Trundle, 1615). The two woodcuts depict two female figures. The one on the left is Anne Turner on her way to execution, dressed in a high-­collared black gown and modest headdress and carrying a prayerbook. On the right is the figure of Lady Pride, wearing an extravagant feather headdress, her breasts exposed, and holding a mirror that she gazes at. The second woodcut, as Alastair Bellany argues, reveals Turner’s sins of pride and lust. The first woodcut, however, portrays Turner as a transformed woman who no longer looks pridefully at a mirror but instead carries a godly book. See Alastair Bellany, “Mistress Turner’s Deadly Sins: Sartorial Transgression, Court Scandal, and Politics in Early Stuart England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58, no. 2 (1995): 189–94. 53. See Mistris Turners Farewell to all women and Thomas Brewer, Mistres Turners Repentance Who, about the poysoning of that Ho: Knight Sir Thomas Overbury, Was executed the fourteenth day of November, last (London: Henry Gosson and John White, 1615). 54. As Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher note, during the early modern period Mary Magdalene was often “conflated with the penitent sinner who washes and anoints Jesus’s feet.” See Brownlee and Gallagher, “Overview: Reading New Testament Women in Early Modern England, 1500–1700,” in Biblical Women in

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Early Modern Literary Culture, 1550–1700, ed. Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher, 1–22 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 140. 55. The Bloody Downfall of Adultery, Murder, Ambition: At the end of which are added Westons, and Mistris Turners last Teares [. . .] (London: R. H., 1615), n.p. 56. Bloody Downfall of Adultery, Murder, Ambition, n.p. 57. Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-­Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13. 58. Lewis Wager, A new enterlude, never before this tyme imprinted, entreating of the life and repentaunce of Marie Magdalene [. . .] (London: John Charlewood, 1566), n.p. 59. Bellany, “Mistress Turner’s Deadly Sins,” 189–90. 60. Richard Niccols, Sir Thomas Overburies vision With the ghoasts of Weston, Mris. Turner, the late Lieftenant of the Tower, and Franklin (London: R.M. & T.I., 1616), 31–32. 61. Barnabe Rich, The Irish Hubbub, or The English Hue and Crie Briefly Pursuing the Base Conditions [. . .] (London: John Marriot, 1618), 40. 62. Wager, New enterlude, n.p. 63. Francis Bacon, A True and Historical Relation. For more on the Overbury scandal and Turner’s role in the plot to murder him, see Bellany, “Mistress Turner’s Deadly Sins,” 179–210; and Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 137–46. 64. Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, 82. 65. Golding, Briefe discourse, n.p. 66. M. R., The mothers counsell or, live within compasse Being the last will and testament to her dearest daughter (London: John Wright, 1630), 36. 67. “stout, adj. and adv.” 3.a, OED Online. June 2019, Oxford University Press (accessed July 19, 2019). 68. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1576 edition, Book 12, 1969–72. 69. Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments, 1576 edition, Book 12, 1971–72. While Foxe celebrates this woman as an example of stoutness and patient virtue, her decision to leave her earthly husband and children and claim submission to her heavenly spouse reflects a subversion of social expectations concerning wifely obedience and patriarchal control. Megan L. Hickerson notes this seeming contradiction in Foxe’s work, observing that “his disorderly women martyrs are ultimately conceived as subordinate to a husband,” due to “their obedience to their heavenly spouse,” which allows Foxe to uphold these women as exemplars despite their rebellion against accepted social norms. See Hickerson, “Gospelling Sisters,” 1051. 70. Thomas Mason, Christs victorie ouer Sathans tyrannie Wherin is contained a catalogue of all Christs faithfull souldiers [.  .  .] (London: George Eld and Ralph Blower, 1615), 320. 71. Susannah Brietz Monta, “Foxe’s Female Martyrs and the Sanctity of Transgression,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, n.s., 25, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 10. 72. James C. W. Truman, “John Foxe and the Desires of Reformation Martyrology,” ELH 70, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 40.

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73. Katherine A. Craik, “Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ and Early Modern Criminal Confession.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 447. For a history of the ballad’s printing, see The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), vi–vii. 74. A Ballad of Anne Askew, Intituled: I am a Woman poore and blind (London: T. P., 1624). 75. Ballad of Anne Askew. 76. The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe latelye martyred in Smythfelde, by the wycked Synagoge of Antichrist, with the Elucydacyon of Johan Bale ([Wesel, Germany: D. van der Straten], 1547), n.p. 77. Lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe, n.p.

Epilogue 1. Andrea McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), xviii. 2. Gregory J. Durston, Wicked Ladies: Provincial Women, Crime and the Eighteenth-­ Century English Justice System (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 10–11. 3. V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770– 1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 316–17. 4. An account of the manner, behaviour and execution of Mary Aubry who was burnt to ashes, in Leicester Fields, on Friday the 2d day of March, 1687 for the barbarous and inhumane murther, committed on the body of Dennis Aubry, her husband [. . .] (London: D. Mallet, 1687). 5. See Gatrell, Hanging Tree, 316–17; and Andrea McKenzie, “ ‘Petty Treason’ dans son contexte: Genre et verdicts dans les procès pour meurtre entre conjoints aux assises du tribunal d’Old Bailey à Londres, Angleterre, 1674–1790,” Les cahiers de Framespa 25, no. 25 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/framespa.4500. 6. A True Account of the Behaviour and Manner of the Execution of Six Persons [. . .] (London: E. Mallet, 1685), 3. 7. Samuel Smith, The True Account of the Behaviour and Confession of Alice Millikin [. . .] (London: E. Mallet, 1686), 3–4. 8. The distressed mother: or, sorrowful wife in tears: being a full and true account of a most horrid, barbarous and bloody Murther [. . .] (London: J. Beuvet, 1690), n.p. See also Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse: Discovering the Devils Incarnate of this Age (London: Adam Islip, 1596), 42–43. 9. Distressed mother, n.p. 10. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, June 6, 2020), September 1714, trial of Elizabeth Fisher (t17140908–41). 11. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 160. Nadia Bishai notes that reporting of female crime also changed in post-­Restoration England and that popular literature focused not just on women who committed serious crimes like witchcraft or husband murder but also on “women who have committed

Notes to Epilogue 203

non-­felonious offences . . . such as theft, prostitution, and pimping.” See Bishai, “Women and Performance on the Stage and Scaffold in Late Seventeenth-­Century England,” in The Public’s Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth- ­Century England, ed. Laura Engel, 224–45 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 229–30. 12. J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 64–65. 13. Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 136–41. For evidence of female crime rings, see Adrienne L. Eastwood, “A Tribe of Roaring Girls: Crime and Gender in Early Modern England,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 44 (2018): 209–10. Garthine Walker also notes that women were more prone to steal in female groups of two or more than they were to steal with men. See Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order, 170–71. 14. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 66. 15. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 6.0, August 7, 2019), January 1716, trial of Mary Knight and Margaret Hopkins (t17160113–47). 16. Old Bailey Proceedings (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 6.0, August 7, 2019), Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, 27 January 1716 (OA17160127). 17. OBP, Ordinary’s Account, 27 January 1716 (OA17160127). 18. A. Boyer, The Political State of Great Britain (London: T. Cooper, 1736), 52: 18. 19. Suffolk Notes from the Year 1729, Compiled from the Files of the “Ipswich Journal” (Ipswich: Ipswich Journal Office, 1883), 153. 20. Boyer, Political State of Great Britain, 18. 21. Suffolk Notes, 153; and Boyer, Political State of Great Britain, 52: 18. 22. John Henry Druery, Historical and Topographical Notices of Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, and Its Environs, Including the Parishes and Hamlets of the Half Hundred of Lothingland, in Suffolk (London: Nichols & Son, 1826), 338.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abbot, Elizabeth, 123, 130–31, 179n2 abuse of women, 8, 20, 36–37, 40, 98, 106; by husbands, 40, 101, 106–10, 111–12, 120, 134, 146–47, 191n50, 192n53; by masters, 108–10; by parents, 120–21; postmortem, 89, 93 Acts and Monuments, The (Foxe), 178n70; influence of, 7, 54, 68, 175n33; women in, 59–65, 67–68, 129, 141, 171n67, 176n45. See also specific names Adultresses Funerall Day, The (Goodcole). See Clarke, Alice age, 77–78, 87, 119–21, 181n26 agency. See subjectivity anatomical dissection, 14, 30, 84, 89–90, 186n89. See also Evans, Elizabeth; Greene, Anne; Russell, Elizabeth animals: as familiars, 15–16, 79; women compared to, 16, 37, 41, 74–75, 79, 82–84, 95, 182n53 Arnold, Mother, 75–76 ars moriendi, 13, 22, 28–29 Askew, Anne, 7, 53, 69, 141–42, 175n32 Aubry, Mary, 146 Babington Conspiracy, 30, 164n61 ballads. See broadside ballads Bankyn, Annis, 82–83 Barton, Elizabeth, 48, 54, 92–93, 95, 187n104

Beast, Mistress, 39 beheading. See decapitation benefit of clergy, 44–45, 47 blazon, 78, 84–87, 185n76 Bodenham, Anne, 131–34, 198n30 bodies: display of after death, 2, 23–24, 30–31, 90–95; eroticism of dying women’s, 64–65, 86–87; as signs of repentance or guilt, 1–2, 4–5, 13–16, 19, 21–22, 24, 29–31, 33, 42, 53, 57, 66–71, 72–95, 132–33, 179n3, 183nn54–55, 184n72; of witches, 21, 74–79, 82–84, 95; women’s as beautiful, 2, 4–5, 14, 57, 72, 81–82, 84–88, 94, 119–20, 183n60, 184n69; women’s as grotesque, 2, 4–5, 14, 37, 53, 64–65, 74–84, 94–95, 130, 181n37; understandings of women’s, 15–16, 35, 54–58. See also body parts; witches’ marks body parts: breasts, 61, 78, 138, 173n6, 200n52; breath, 74–76, 78–79, 180n14; faces, 5, 19, 29–33, 56, 72–73, 75, 77–78, 80–81, 86–87, 94, 133; hands, 30, 60–62, 82, 129, 188n110; heads, 1, 21, 23–24, 30–31, 54, 80, 87–88, 92–93, 95, 113, 164n61, 184n72, 185n76, 187n104; skeletons, 2, 54, 90–91, 186n93; wombs, 15–16, 55–58, 63–65, 94. See also witches’ marks Boleyn, Anne, 12, 93, 171n67, 182n46; burial of, 89, 113,

234 Index

185n77; conflicting depictions of, 80–82, 85; execution clothing of, 161n30; privacy of execution, 47–49, 51, 171n66; scaffold speech of, 26, 99, 121, 198n25 Briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders, A (Golding), 6, 117–18, 129, 136, 140. See also Saunders, Anne broadside ballads, 5–6, 156n36; audiences for, 8–9; didacticism of, 9, 40–41, 70, 102–7, 188n5, 192n53; emotional aspects of, 5–6, 9, 119–20, 195n106; female complaint and, 106–7, 120–21, 191n50; music associated with, 8–9; negative depictions of women and, 155n29, 181n34, 190n33; unreliability of, 9, 156n32; ventriloquized female voice and, 105–7, 128. See also specific titles Bulmer, Margaret Cheyne, 85 burial, 30, 39, 89–92, 95, 113, 132 burning at the stake: abolition of, 169n40; for heresy, 29, 67–70, 141; for petty treason, 13, 22, 41, 52, 167nn11–12; woodcuts depicting, 59–60, 60, 61, 64. See also martyrdom; petty treason; specific names Butler, Sarah, 47, 170n49, 171n61 Caldwell, Elizabeth, 111–12, 117, 134–35, 139, 178n71, 197n15 Catholicism: fears of, 20; martyrdom and, 20, 27, 31–32, 67–68, 155n30; negative assessments of, 62–64, 176n47; propaganda and, 67, 81–82, 176n45; Reformation and, 92–93. See also Clitherow, Margaret; Mary, Queen of Scots

childbirth, 15, 47, 131. See also infanticide; Massey, Perotine chronicles, 5–7, 23–24, 48–49, 51, 85, 92–93 Clark, Sandra, 3–4, 8, 36–37, 153n6 Clarke, Alice, 68, 73, 108–10, 112–13, 120–21, 197n15 Clitherow, Margaret: beauty of, 183n60; biography of, 7–8, 154n20; daughter of, 194n89; gifts to family and, 116; martyrdom of, 65–67, 66, 116 clothing, 32–33, 83, 127, 161n29; colors of, 25–26, 161nn31–32, 162n34; fabrics of, 25–26, 161n30; removal of, 65, 80; symbolism of, 22–23, 25–26, 51, 137–39, 161n31, 178n61, 200n52 confessions: authenticity and, 27–28, 72–73, 140, 197n15; and chaplains, 8, 25; enforced, 19, 27–28, 109, 122–23, 126; and execution ritual, 11–12, 14, 136; rhetorical differentiation and, 99, 122. See also Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, The; pamphlets: female complaints; scaffold speeches correspondence: female voice and, 97–98; as historical sources, 6–7, 171n67; written in prison, 111–12, 115–16, 134 crimes. See heresy; infanticide; parricide; petty treason; theft; treason; witchcraft Cromwell, Thomas, 26, 93, 115 Davis, Alice, 32, 46, 70, 104–5 death, 10–11, 23, 26, 28–29, 60–61 decapitation, 94, 184n69; and elite women, 48–51, 172n76; symbolism of, 23–24, 29, 160n23; and use of heads after, 30–31, 88, 92.

Index 235

See also Boleyn, Anne; Grey, Lady Jane; Howard, Catherine; Mary, Queen of Scots de Carles, Lancelot, 80–81, 113 deferential treatment of women, 13, 44, 168n21. See also pleading the belly defiance, 15–16, 20, 96, 100, 130–34, 143. See also Abbot, Elizabeth; Bodenham, Anne; Hattersley, Jane; Thompson, Elizabeth Deloney, Thomas, 9, 195n106. See also Page, Eulalia Devereaux, Robert (“Earl of Essex”), 161n32, 163n49, 171n65, 172nn74–75 dismemberment, 24, 30–31, 159n16 distressed mother, The, 146, 147, 155n28, 192n59. See also Fox, Katherine divine providence. See providence Dolan, Frances, 3–6, 12, 14, 36, 38–39, 53–54, 134, 164n65, 190n28, 195n100 dramas: as adaptation of historical events, 6, 9–10, 159n7; and depictions of women’s deaths, 53, 184n69; and lack of infanticide depictions, 169n29; as reflection of culture, 50, 58, 114, 172n75. See also specific titles Drewrie, Anne, 117, 129, 140 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), 114, 176n38 dying speeches. See scaffold speeches Elizabeth I, 49, 89, 157n42, 172n72 equality: legal, 33–34; spiritual, 14–15, 56–58, 69, 174n19 Essex, Earl of. See Devereaux, Robert Evans, Elizabeth, 54, 90–92, 95, 110–13, 129 execution methods: as gendered,

13, 51–52, 54, 145–46, 167n12; as symbolic, 23–24. See also burning at the stake; decapitation; hanging; peine forte et dure execution narratives: as genre, 24, 97, 143, 161n25; as mediated accounts, 2, 9, 80, 97, 105–6, 118–19, 125, 128–29; unreliability of, 6, 21, 128, 192n59, 197n15 execution rituals, 6, 11–13; early modern, 25–34, 39, 47–52, 53–54, 160n24; medieval, 19–24, 160n20, 160n23. See also scaffold speeches executions: critical approaches to, 3–4, 19–22, 53–54, 158n3; and expectations for men, 32–33; and expectations for women, 2, 72–74, 81, 95, 112, 122–24, 130, 133–34; inconsistent contemporary interpretations of, 20, 31–32; privacy and, 47–52, 157n46, 171n66, 172nn74–75; religious symbols associated with, 22–26, 29–30, 39, 70, 89, 129, 160n20; similarities to theater, 6, 22, 131, 154n14; and social class, 13, 26–27, 33, 43–44, 47–51, 82, 88–89, 100, 160n23, 172n76; spectators of, 20–22, 31, 126, 134–35, 157n44, 171n66. See also execution methods; execution narratives; execution rituals Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 74–75, 181n37 family: definition of, 58–59; mentioned in scaffold speech, 1, 96, 99, 114–18, 121, 128, 194n84; parting gifts to, 10, 114–18, 124 Famous Historie of Albions Queene, The (R.G.), 94–95

236 Index

Famous Historie of Sir Thomas Wyat, The (Webster and Dekker), 6, 87–88, 159n7 female complaints. See under pamphlets feminine virtues: chastity, 97–98, 125, 127; constancy, 7, 54–55, 59, 62, 67, 69, 71, 141; humility, 137, 139, 140–42, 152; penitence, 7, 36–37, 53, 95, 96, 112–13, 117, 124, 126–28, 137–39; performance of on scaffold, 2–4, 12–13, 34, 37–38, 65, 124, 127– 30, 134–36, 152; submissiveness, 97–98, 124, 127, 129–30; weakness, 33, 54–55, 69, 124, 127, 129–30, 134– 35, 189n13. See also modesty topos Ferneseede, Margaret, 114, 122 Fisher, Elizabeth, 147 Fissell, Mary, 15–16 Foucault, Michel, 19–20, 96, 158n3 Fox, Katherine, 146–47, 151. See also distressed mother, The Foxe, John, 53–55, 59–70, 113, 116, 129–30, 201n69. See also Acts and Monuments, The (Foxe) Francis, Katherine, 192n53 Gatrell, V. A. C., 50–51, 87, 157n44 gibbeting, 90, 94, 160n23 Golding, Arthur. See Briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders, A (Golding) Goodcole, Henry, 25, 96, 197n15; and negative depictions of female criminals, 90–92; and positive depictions of female criminals, 73, 96, 111, 136; and sympathetic accounts of female criminals, 8, 108–11, 120–21, 129. See also Natures Cruell Step-Dames (Goodcole)

Gowing, Laura, 51, 97–98, 127 Greene, Anne, 42–44, 43, 91–92 Grey, Lady Jane, 9, 12, 92; execution clothing of, 161n32; and gifts to sister, 115–16, 118; privacy of execution, 48–49, 51; scaffold speech of, 27, 121–22. See also Famous Historie of Sir Thomas Wyat, The (Webster and Dekker) hagiographies: Catholic, 7–8; martyrdom tradition and, 31, 119–20; and men, 33; Protestant, 59–65; and women, 55–57, 65–71, 140–43. See also Acts and Monuments, The (Foxe); Clitherow, Margaret; Foxe, John hanging, 38–39, 42–43, 50, 87, 123. See also specific names Hattersley, Jane, 131, 168n23, 198n29 Heavens speedie hue and crie (Goodcole). See Evans, Elizabeth Henry VIII, 11, 29, 48–49, 92–93, 115, 162n36, 182n46 heresy, 29, 38, 67–70, 129 Holinshed, Raphael, 6–7, 30 Hornes, Joane, 59–60, 60 Howard, Catherine, 48–49, 51 humoral theory, 55–58, 66, 167n13 Hut, Katherine, 59–60, 60 infanticide, 39–44, 46, 168n23, 169n29; circumstances and, 40, 91, 100, 110; depictions of women who committed, 37, 40–41; gender and, 13, 36, 39, 52; laws pertaining to, 11, 35–37, 39–40; and marital status, 168nn21. See also specific names Insatiate Countess, The (Marston), 184n69

Index 237

James I, 39, 89, 137, 199n48 Jenkenson, Helen, 76 Klemp, P. J., 20, 26, 154n14, 164n64 Knight, Mary, 148–49 “Lamentation of Master Pages Wife of Plimmouth, The” (Deloney). See Page, Eulalia laws relating to women, 12–13, 35–40. See also infanticide; petty treason Lee, Prudence, 102, 162n34 Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene, The (Wager), 138–39 Marian martyrs, 59–65, 69, 164n58, 177n61. See also specific names mariticide. See petty treason marriage: age discrepancy and, 118–21; women’s inability to choose spouse and, 100, 119–20; women’s lack of agency within, 38, 56, 100, 109–11, 119–20, 123 Martin, Randall, 3–4, 8, 33, 36–37, 45, 53, 96, 112, 122, 186n87 martyrdom: anxieties about, 164n58; of Catholics, 8–9, 65–66; connection to motherhood, 57–58, 62–65, 66–67; cultural impact of, 54, 68–70, 177n61, 178n71; gendered understanding of, 62–69, 176n39; language of, 6, 33, 59; of Protestants, 7, 59–65; as sacramental act, 53; symbolism of, 31, 129; and women’s bodies, 53–71, 72 martyrologies. See hagiographies Mary, Queen of Scots, 9, 12, 113, 172n72; negative depiction of execution, 79–80, 83, 181n37;

privacy of execution, 47–49, 51; treatment of corpse of, 89 Mary Magdalene, 137–39, 142, 200n54 Massey, Perotine, 62–65, 64, 67, 176n45, 176n47, 177n60 May, Edward. See “On a woman burned in Smithfield” (May) McKenzie, Andrea, 145, 157n45, 161n29, 177n61 modesty topos, 14–17, 125–43; bodies and, 53, 152; definition of, 4–5, 125; and self-deprecation, 134. See also feminine virtues Monta, Susannah Brietz, 55, 62, 69, 141, 175n32, 176n39 mothers: spiritual impact on children, 116–18, 140, 194n89; unnatural, 39–41, 103–4; unwed, 40–42, 103, 110, 168n21. See also infanticide murder. See infanticide; parricide; petty treason Natures Cruell Step-Dames (Goodcole), 40 Newes from the Dead (Watkins). See Greene, Anne Newgate Prison, 25, 142, 145, 148–49 Nights Search, A (Mill), 83–84 No Naturall Mother, but a Monster (Parker), 40–41, 103 Old Bailey, 12, 145–48 “On a woman burned in Smithfield” (May), 86–87, 95 Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, The, 145, 148–49, 157n45 Ormes, Cicelie, 60–62, 61, 129–30, 179n75 Overbury, Thomas, murder of, 136–39, 199n48, 201n63 Owens, Margaret, 53, 160n20, 185n76

238 Index

Page, Eulalia, 102, 118–20, 128 pamphlets, 36, 45, 100, 121, 146–47, 168n21; authenticity and, 197n15; female complaints in, 106–7, 112–13, 120–21; moralizing messages in, 121, 153n6; readership of, 8; as reflection of culture, 6, 8; and reprinting, 155n28, 179n75, 192n59; sensationalism of, 8; title pages of, 24; writers of, 25. See also specific titles Parker, Martin, 191n50. See also No Naturall Mother, but a Monster (Parker); Warning for Wives (Parker) parricide, 94–95 peine forte et dure, 65, 177n50. See also Clitherow, Margaret Pepper, Elizabeth, 176n49 petty treason, 35, 156n36; circumstances leading to, 100, 102, 106–12, 118–21, 184n66; laws pertaining to, 38–39, 145–46, 167n10; punishment for, 13, 54, 145–46. See also specific names plays. See dramas pleading the belly, 45–47, 51, 56, 170nn49, 171n61, 176n49 poetry, 9–10, 42–43, 139, 184n68. See also specific titles Potten, Agnes, 59, 141 pregnancy: execution and, 62–65, 117, 176n49; unwed mothers and, 103, 109–10. See also infanticide; pleading the belly prison, 24–25, 134, 147, 149. See also Newgate Prison prison chaplains: spiritual assistance of, 24–25, 82–83, 122–23, 136; as writers, 8, 145. See also Goodcole, Henry; Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, The

prostitutes: murder committed by, 90, 145; negative depictions of, 83–84. See also specific names prostitution: accusations of, 111, 139, 176n45; confessions of, 122, 148 Protestantism: and executions, 28, 73; resistance to, 20; and understandings of death, 10–11, 156n38; and women’s bodies, 15. See also Acts and Monuments, The (Foxe); Askew, Anne; Foxe, John; hagiographies; martyrdom providence (providentialism), 8, 11, 70, 84, 92, 153n6, 163n45 punishment. See specific types Ralegh, Walter, 32–33, 115, 164n65, 189n21 rhetorical strategies, 31; apologia, 98–101; differentiation, 96, 99–101, 110–11, 121–23; exemplarity, 4, 7, 28–29, 59, 63–65, 69, 88, 96, 129–30, 137–38, 141, 188n5; men and, 32–33, 100; negative exemplarity, 102–5, 107–8, 112; self-deprecation, 15, 97–98, 126, 135–36, 197n22; visual, 14, 55, 63–64, 68–69; women and, 4–5, 14–15, 33–34, 96–98, 106, 111–12, 125–26, 142. See also feminine virtues; modesty topos; pamphlets: female complaints Royer, Katherine, 11, 21, 23, 24, 25, 160n20 Russell, Elizabeth, 42–44 Samuell, Alice, 76–77 Saunders, Anne: pregnancy of, 46, 170n56; scaffold speech of, 16, 26–27, 135–36, 163n52, 191n47. See also Briefe discourse of the late murther of master George

Index 239

Saunders, A (Golding); Warning for Faire Women, A (Heywood); “Wofull Lamentacon of Mrs. Anne Saunders, The” Sawyer, Elizabeth, 76 scaffold speeches: cautionary messages within, 2, 14, 28, 52, 83, 93, 96, 101– 8, 112, 120, 123, 133, 149; gendered approaches to, 32–33; generic conventions, 1–2, 23–24. See also execution rituals; social criticism Scambler, Martha, 41 scolds, 58–59, 125–26 sexuality: double standards and, 109–10; of women, 67, 83–84, 86–88, 90, 97, 109–10, 125–26, 151 Shakespeare, William, 57, 64–65; Hamlet, 184n68; Romeo and Juliet, 85, 183n63; The Taming of the Shrew, 58 Shank, Jannet, 188n110 Shearwood, Thomas, 90–91, 110–11 Smithfield, executions performed at, 46, 48–49, 86–87, 108, 117 Snook, Edith, 183n54, 184n72 social criticism, 4, 33–34, 36–37, 105–14, 127–28, 147–52; of husbands, 106–7, 111–13; of lovers, 109–11, 113; of masters, 109–10; of parents, 118–20; of unfair marriage practices, 118–21 spectators. See under executions Staub, Susan, 91, 181n34, 187n99 subjectivity: and conformity, 37, 51–52, 96–98, 105–6, 127–28, 139–40, 152, 153n10; and legal justice, 3–4, 35–36; and martyrdom, 20, 68, 70–71, 179n75; and moral guidance, 2, 28, 34, 105, 118, 197n13; and motherhood, 116; and

spectators of executions, 158n3; unmediated accounts of, 97–98; and violence, 36; and women’s bodies, 4–5, 55–59; women’s scaffold speeches and, 2–3, 12–13, 16–17, 96–98, 105, 152, 153n6. See also defiance; feminine virtues; modesty topos; pamphlets: female complaints; rhetorical strategies Swetnam the Woman-Hater, 50 Thacknell, Elizabeth, 59–60, 60 theft, 12, 44, 62, 148, 151, 202n11. See also Evans, Elizabeth; Shearwood, Thomas; Wolfe, Alice Thompson, Elizabeth, 149–51 Tower Green, executions performed at, 48–50, 88–89, 171n65, 172n75 treason, 20; laws pertaining to, 11, 156n41, 157n42; punishment of, 23–24, 167n12, 172n76. See also petty treason trials, 44, 48–49, 65, 122, 136, 138–39, 148 Triumphs of Gods Revenge, The (Reynolds), 1–2 Trunchfield, Joan, 59, 141 Turner, Anne, 136–39, 137, 199n48, 200n52, 201n63 Two Lamentable Tragedies (Yarington), 44–45 Tyburn: executions performed at, 48, 139, 145, 149; riots at, 186n89 Unnaturall Wife, The. See Davis, Alice “Upon the Sight of an Old but Very Deformed Woman” (Heath), 77–78 Virgin Martyr, The (Massinger and Dekker), 184n69 virgin martyrs, 69, 119–20

240 Index

virtues. See feminine virtues; modesty topos visitors. See prison chaplains von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, 56–57 Walker, Garthine, 40, 58, 166n7, 203n13 Wallen, Anne, 70, 106–7, 116–17 Warning for Faire Women, A (Heywood), 6, 117–18, 159n7 Warning for Wives (Parker), 104, 192n53 whippings, 59, 108, 147, 173n6. See also abuse of women Willis, Anne, 40 witchcraft: accusations of, 136, 140, 157n43, 182n46; and gender, 11, 166n1, 181n26; and motherhood, 15–16, 38–39,

140, 167n15; in pamphlets, 8 witches’ marks, 75–79, 180n14 witch of Wapping, The, 102, 162n34 Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse (Lodge), 107–8. See also distressed mother, The “Wofull Lamentacon of Mrs. Anne Saunders, The,” 102–3, 191n47. See also Saunders, Anne Wolfe, Alice, 93 Wonder of Wonders, A (Burdet), 91 woodcuts, 72, 200n52; and ars moriendi, 28–29; of martyrs, 7, 14, 54, 59–68; reuse of, 175n37; sensationalism of, 8–9, 54, 63, 168n23, 173n6 World of wonders. A masse of murthers, A (T.I.), 75–76 Wynkfield, Robert, 79–80