The Yorkshire Witch

by Strevens, Summer;

  In the Buxton letter, Miss Blythe directed William to take one of his wife’s gowns to Mary Bateman in Leeds, from whence it would be delivered to her in Buxton, though clearly the dress he chose did not meet with Mary’s approval, as in the next letter received in October, Miss Blythe berated William for sending her ‘such a shabby gown’, especially when she knew he had one better; apparently the ‘planets’ enabled Miss Blythe to assess the contents of a dead woman’s wardrobe too. Requesting instead one of Mrs Perigo’s best gowns, along with a petticoat and a skirt, Miss Blythe also required the Perigo family Bible be sent to her for her ‘to sit upon in the coach’ when she returned from Buxton; the reason for which remains a puzzle. We can assume that the family Bible extorted by Mary from the serving girl forced to steal from her mother, back in the days when she was casting fortunes while living in Marsh Lane, had long since been pawned.

  Two further letters received by William in October contained various requests for ‘a guinea and a half to buy a waggon load of coals’ specifically to be purchased from a ‘Mr Fenton’s, near Leeds’ in addition to ‘one stone and a half of flour; four ounces of tea, a pound or two of sugar, and a quantity of eggs’ - one of which was to be blown and a guinea note inserted into the empty shell ‘for a particular use’ – presumably lining Mary’s pocket.

  Miss Blythe’s missives continued until September 1808, latterly defending Mary Bateman’s good character and with hollow promises of the return of the monies laid out. Finally, William Perigo investigated the silken bags which had been stitched into his and Rebecca’s bed – perhaps he was understandably short of money. On 19 October, he steeled himself and opened them all. He must have recalled all the occasions when he had received from Mary a silk bag into which he believed her to have stitched what purported to be the coins and notes he had made over on the instruction of Miss Blythe. One wonders whether, in his heart of hearts, he was entirely surprised to find that inside each bag, where he expected to find guinea notes he found only scrap paper, and halfpennies and farthings where he expected to find gold coins. Even worse, the four bags containing the guinea notes that were the first to have been stitched into the bed were missing entirely. Now the game was really up, and William Perigo went to Leeds to confront Mary Bateman.

  Of course this wasn’t the first time that Mary had been faced with an accusation of deception, and her predictable retort to William with regard to the now worthless contents of the silk bags was that ‘you have opened them too soon’, breaking the magic of the charm and causing the contents to be magically changed into valueless coppers and paper. William responded ‘I think it is too late,’ and said he would return the following morning in company with two or three men to settle the matter. Though alarmed, Mary must have thought that her powers of manipulation might yet still have some effect, and begged that a private meeting be arranged, on the bank of the Leeds and Liverpool canal on the following morning, where she assured William that ‘she would satisfy him’.

  Though poorer, William Perigo was nevertheless now wiser. He agreed to the meeting with Mary the following day, but had no intention of going alone. This was a prudent precaution because as the canal side meeting played out, it was clear that Mary had intended to eliminate William once and for all. One of the two men he had asked to accompany him was William Duffield, the Chief Constable of Leeds. Clearly, Perigo was by this time highly suspicious of the ever-growing demands of Miss Blythe and her ingénue go-between. As a man who had once been of some means, it was natural that he should inform the authorities; Mary had bitten off more than she could chew this time. Both men kept a discreet distance but when Mary discovered their presence she feigned an attack of vomiting and accused William Perigo of having given her a bottle of poisonous liquid, which she had in fact brought along herself. During her examination before the Leeds magistrate, Mary alleged that William had given her the bottle the night before her arrest, and while her husband ‘did never take any of it’ she did and ‘was very ill after it’. On later analysis the bottle was found to contain a mixture of oatmeal and arsenic, and was presumably intended to silence William Perigo for good. Chief Constable Duffield was not impressed by Mary’s charade however, and promptly took her into custody.

  The mechanics of Mary’s arrest and detention are far from clear. The Extraordinary Life skates over them, presumably because its readers would know how the system worked. The Borough Corporation Act and the later Constabulary Act meant that more modern police forces were set up, sweeping away the old. We know that the Chief Constable appointed in 1836 to head up the new force in Leeds already held a similar position but the size and exact nature of his old force is not specified. Mary would have been taken into custody by Constables of the Watch, ‘Charlies’ as they were known because the post had been set up in the reign of Charles II. These men were barely literate, some of them not physically up to the job of chasing criminals and they were under the control of Duffield, whose job was honorary and unpaid. There were no women in any police force as early as this, although for delicate jobs, such as searching Mary’s person, a local civilian female was probably drafted in.

  William then accompanied Duffield to Mary’s house where a search revealed many of the items bought by the Perigos and supposedly sent on to Miss Blythe in Scarborough were in fact in Mary’s possession, amongst them the bed, tea caddy and set of china purchased in the April of the previous year, along with various other items including articles of clothing, two or three hat boxes, some sacking in which malt had been delivered and a pair of pincers – presumably those used to hammer home the horseshoe shaped pieces of iron over Perigos’ front door, one of the earliest charms recommended by Miss Blythe.

  Clearly, there was no way that Mary could talk herself out of this damning predicament. She was brought before the Leeds magistrates the following day charged with fraud, and after undergoing several long examinations she ‘in part confessed her delinquency, and admitted that there was no such person as Miss Blythe in existence, but that the whole was a mere phantom, conjured up to forward her vile purposes’. It was clear however that she was guilty of more than fraud, and Mary was held pending the investigation into the suspicious death of Rebecca Perigo. The magistrate, whose name is not given in The Extraordinary Life, was a local gentleman who worked, as did many law officers, in an unpaid capacity for the good of the community. Mary had no defence counsel, either at this arraignment or her later trial and there were no rules governing how evidence was obtained. She clearly underwent hours of questioning and only had her wits to keep her going.

  Though Mary was arrested toward the end of October 1808, it was 6 January 1809 before the murder charges were formally laid, after which time she was committed to York Castle Gaol where she awaited trial on suspicion of the wilful murder of Rebecca, which she had brought about more than eighteen months before.

  Depending on the severity of an accusation, prisoners could spend some considerable time on remand awaiting trial before the Assize Courts, or ‘Great Sessions’, as these were normally held in York only twice a year during Lent and summer. Judges rode on horseback from one county town to the next, trying all those charged with criminal offences too serious to be dealt with by the magistrates at the Quarter Sessions. At these Assize Courts capital offences were heard – crimes including murder, manslaughter and rape as well as treason, major fraud or theft, arson, riot and rebellion. Guilt on any of these counts carried the death penalty before 1836, the year in which capital punishment was abolished for crimes other than those of murder, attempted murder and, in theory at least, treason.

  Mary would have been detained in York’s ‘Female Prison’, which had been built in 1780, next to the Debtor’s Prison, in a bid to ease the gaol’s overcrowding. At the end of the seventeenth century, it was decided to build a new prison inside the bailey of York Castle and work commenced on the new County Gaol which opened in 1705, having taken four years to build – this building became known as the Debtor’s pri
son but proved inadequate with regards to the increasing prisoner population. The impressive façade of the Female Prison mirrored the architecture of the newly appointed County Court opposite, designed by John Carr and completed three years earlier in 1777. This was where Mr Justice Simon Le Blanc would preside over Mary’s trial during the Lent Assizes which opened on Friday 17 March 1809.

  At this point, with Mary’s court case pending, we must examine the knowledge and extent of John Bateman’s involvement in his wife’s criminal activities. Mr Snowden, whose house in Leeds had been left in Mary’s care, had happened to see the newspaper article concerning Mary’s arrest and had hurried back to Leeds from Bradford to discover that his home had been plundered of just about every item he owned. On the issue of a search warrant, as some of the Snowden’s belongings were found in the Bateman’s house, along with those of the Perigos, John Bateman was arrested. It is difficult to believe that at no point did he question his wife as to the influx of furniture and goods into their house, clearly not their property. If Mary had indeed bought the items herself, where had she found the money to do so? As his was not a capital offence, John Bateman’s case would have been heard at the next Quarter Session, the Leeds charter of incorporation of 1661 having given the Borough the right to hold its own Quarter and Petty Sessions, which were independent of the West Riding courts. As the name suggests, Quarter Sessions were county courts held by magistrates four times a year, dealing with criminal matters from petty theft rising to rape, along with administrative matters such as licensing. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the Order and Indictment Books for Leeds Quarter Sessions for the period 1809–1844. We do know, however, from the account of Mary’s trial, that John Bateman was imprisoned pending his own appearance at the next session. The fact that he was acquitted as either principal or accomplice to Mary’s crime was thought at the time more on account of his good luck than good conduct, though up to this point, he was considered to have been of irreproachable character, having been in the same employment for sixteen years, noted for the sobriety of his conduct and his ‘close application to business, not having lost a single day during the whole of that period, except when he visited friends’. After all, John himself had been practiced upon by his own wife. He could not, surely, have been entirely ignorant of Mary’s frauds, as he had collected the bedstead purchased by the Perigos for Miss Blythe from where it was being kept by Mr Sutton, at the Lion & Lamb Inn on Kirkgate, allegedly awaiting collection by the boatman of Miss Blythe’s brother. Taking the bedstead to his employer’s workshop, and then on to their home in Water Lane, on enquiry, John claimed to have bought the bedstead himself. Though cleared of the charges against him, things did not end well for John Bateman. In spite of all the money that Mary had extorted over the years, she didn’t enrich her family; her husband was left in extreme poverty, his debts unpaid, and eventually his house was broken up and his furniture sold. With regard to John Bateman’s culpability in the knowledge of the murder, or perhaps we should say murders perpetrated by his wife (which in view of Mary’s history must be pluralised, even though she was only tried and convicted of the single murder of Rebecca Perigo), we cannot know if he was free from all or any criminal connivance in the acts, only that he was never placed on trial as an accessory.

  At this juncture, we must look at the prevalent contemporary chauvinistic attitude to female criminality. Another moralising gem drawn from The Extraordinary Life, that as women were ‘naturally much more amiable, tender and compassionate than the other sex, [they] become, when they pervert the dictates of nature, more remorseless and cruel, and can conceive and execute the most diabolical of crimes’ summed up the feeling of the age. Mary’s guilt, and guile, was doubtless viewed as wholly in accord with this universal view, and while criminality held a certain fascination in the nineteenth century, and still does as we shall see in the concluding chapter of this book, murder represents the ultimate appalling act and murders committed by women have always been regarded as more shocking. Since women were regarded as the weaker sex, legally passing all they owned to their husbands with their wedding vows, a situation in which a woman was exposed as a murderer violated their femininity and turned the world upside down. There is a sense in which the law was harsher – and society more outraged – by a female killer than a male. In court, these women were tried as individuals and allowed to give their own testimony.

  Even modes of execution personified the inequality of the sexes - a stark example was that while hanging was the standard capital punishment for a husband who murdered his wife, the ultimate inequality was exercised in the sentencing of wives who murdered their husbands, as those found guilty of maricide were executed by strangulation and their bodies then burned at the stake under the old Tudor law of ‘petty treason’. The last person to be executed in this way in Yorkshire was Elizabeth Boardingham, her death penalty carried out at York’s Tyburn on 20 March 1776.

  Chapter 8

  The Gates Of Mercy Are Closed

  Mary was to be tried at York Crown Court, opposite the Female Prison in which she was held, on Friday 17 March 1809. Charged with the wilful murder of Rebecca Perigo of Bramley in the West Riding, in the month of May, 1807, Mary appeared in the dock of the packed courtroom before the presiding judge, Sir Simon Le Blanc. Wearing scarlet robes lined with ermine and a fullbottomed wig in the seventeenth century style, Le Blanc appeared as the ‘face of justice’. While literacy levels were increasing amongst the population, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were still a visual culture, and the importance of visual symbolism was not lost on the judicial system, with the importance of spectacle evoking awe from ‘ordinary men’, as asserted by Judge William Blackstone in his Commentaries published in 1831, ‘the novelty and very parade’ of a judge’s appearance having ‘no small influence on the multitude.’ The black cap was placed on a judge’s head when he pronounced the death sentence and the royal coat of arms flashed a gilded power on the wall behind him. Le Blanc was a graduate of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and had been called to the Bar of the Inner Temple in 1773. In 1799, he was knighted and appointed as a judge of King’s Bench.

  As the trial got underway, Mr Williams opened the case for the prosecution. Mr John Hardy, Recorder for the Borough of Leeds, who would later go into politics, then addressed the jury telling them that ‘he had to detail circumstances of as extraordinary folly on the one hand, and of iniquity on the other, as ever came before a court of justice.’ And while the event which occasioned the accused’s prosecution had taken place nearly two years previously, he would nevertheless be able to show, in evidence, why the case had not been brought sooner – a case he described as ranking ‘amongst the most artful and diabolical that ever entered the human imagination’. The jury, whose names we do not know, was made up of ‘twelve men and true’ who would have been property holders in the Leeds area. In theory at least, they would have no prior connection with the case.

  The pivotal aspect of the case was whether or not Mary Bateman had actually supplied the poisonous powders which had killed Rebecca Perigo, and whether she knew them to be poison. Hardy pursued the line that, in defrauding the Perigos, Mary knew that she would not escape detection forever, and had therefore decided to employ poison to avoid exposure and punishment.

  If Mary’s plans had worked, the ‘Miss Blythe’ correspondence would have been destroyed and both Perigos would have been found dead in their own home, the victims of a tragic suicide pact to which they had been reduced by poverty. As matters stood, it was ‘Providence’ that the life of William Perigo had been preserved, and Mary Bateman disclosed as ‘an imposter and a cheat’.

  Hardy dwelt on the destruction of Miss Blythe’s letters, and while in most instances the Perigos had done as they had been instructed, William had committed the contents of those letters burnt to memory, and the two surviving letters that he hadn’t consigned to the fire, dated 12 and 28 August 1808 and purporting to have come from Miss Blythe, were proven
to be in Mary’s hand. Summoned to give evidence in court, the prosecution produced John Bateman’s employer, Mr Wright, as a witness, and he confirmed that the letters shown to him were in Mary’s handwriting, he having been acquainted with the accused for seventeen years. He may even have seen Mary’s earliest written fraud when she had hurried to Wright’s premises nearly fifteen years earlier carrying the forged letter with the news that her husband’s father was near death, the false pretext which had allowed her to strip and sell the contents of their marital home in John Bateman’s absence all those years ago.

  The prosecution further alluded to the instruction that if the Perigos were to fall ill as a consequence of taking the powders supplied by Miss Blythe and given them by Mary, they were on no account to seek medical advice. It was also noted that the date in 1807 on which the Perigos were to start using the powders, the 11 May, was also convenient, allowing a comfortable margin before Mary was supposed to have made reparation to the Perigos on behalf of Miss Blythe in the sum of £20. This was to have been on the 20th of that month, by which time she anticipated that the couple would be dead. Hardy drew attention to the instruction in another of Miss Blythe’s letters, dated 5 May, urging the Perigos not to let the boy who regularly ate with them eat any of the puddings. Hardy put it to the jury that this may have been compassion on Mary’s part, but it was more likely that a child would show the symptoms of poisoning more quickly. This would not only put the Perigos on their guard, it may have put the authorities onto Mary all the sooner. These points, coupled with the direction that the Perigos should start taking the poison-saturated honey if any ill effects did come about, caused Hardy to exclaim ‘can any person after this entertain a doubt, that the prisoner at the bar wished their destruction!’