The Yorkshire Witch
Page 16
Chapter 4
Map of Leeds dating from 1806 showing the spread of urban development. By this date the Batemans had moved again, to Black Dog Yard, within an area of Leeds known as ‘Bank’ which fell within the area of spreading housing seen in the southeast corner of the map.
Self-proclaimed prophetess Joanna Southcott
Claiming herself to be a devotee of Joanna Southcott, whose following of ‘Southcottians’ flourished in the climate of expectant frenzy whipped up by her assertions that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent, Mary was able shore-up her shaky reputation prior to announcing that she had been granted a vision in which she had been told that one of her hens would lay fourteen miraculous eggs, the last of which would signal the beginning of the Apocalypse.
Joanna Southcott was able to count how many followers she had by the number of people she had ‘sealed’. Lord Byron described these proclamations as considered by many to be ‘Passports to Heaven’. Within an inscribed oval, each ‘seal’ had the same wording inside and was signed by Joanna Southcott, and her own seal affixed, confirming that the ‘sealed’ person had renounced Satan. Southcott claimed not to charge for these passports coveted by her followers, however Mary did charge and profit from the sale of her own versions of Southcott’s ‘proclamations of faith’. (Image courtesy of Bonhams of London)
Title page of A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times written by Richard Brothers in 1795, the year he was committed to a lunatic asylum. Brothers was a contemporary of Joanna Southcott, their careers overlapping; he was another zealot emerging in the climate of religious radicalism which facilitated Mary’s audacious and sacrilegious hoax.
Detail from the frontispiece of The Extraordinary Life and Character of Mary Bateman (abbreviated title) published in 1811. In her right hand Mary holds up the infamous hen’s egg bearing the inscription ‘Crist is coming’.
Old Leeds Bridge
It was on the old Leeds Bridge that Mary, in one of her more petty enterprises of theft, posed as a cook in order to intercepted a hapless butcher’s delivery boy; relieving him of another customer’s purchase; scolding him she gave the lad a thump on the back for good measure.
Chapter 5
In telling fortunes and providing ‘Love charms’ and magical cures, Mary employed the alter-ego of a ‘Mrs Moore’, later supplanted by the equally fictitious ‘Miss Blythe’. Both of these spurious seers were equally adept at seeing into the future though the latter was an exponent in the removal of “evil wishes”, their clients charged exorbitantly through the agency of Mary. This design for a love amulet comes from the eighteenth century Black Pullet Grimoire; the book also contained instruction on how to produce the ‘Black Pullet’ (from which the book takes its title) otherwise known as the ‘Hen that lays Golden Eggs’ – not such a far remove perhaps from Mary Bateman’s money-making ‘miraculous’ egg laying hen.
Chapter 7
The Female Prison, York
The ‘Female Prison’ was built in 1780, adjacent to the Debtor’s Prison, in a bid to ease that 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 prison but proved inadequate with regards to the increasing prisoner population.
Chapter 8
York’s County Courthouse
The impressive façade of the Female Prison mirrored the architecture of the newly appointed County Court situated opposite, designed by John Carr and completed three years earlier in 1777. Here Mary Bateman was tried for the wilful murder of Rebecca Perigo on Friday 17 March 1809.
Judge Simon Le Blanc (c.1748–1816)
Depicted by portraitist John Opie as a country gentleman, Le Blanc would have been attired in the traditional scarlet robes lined with ermine and wearing a full-bottomed wig in the seventeenth century style when he presided over Mary’s trial during the Lent Assizes of 1809.
Thomas Rowlandson’s depiction of a court hearing at the Old Bailey, drawn in the same year that Mary Bateman was tried, gives an idea of the judicial proceedings that would have taken place.
Hogarth’s ‘The Reward of Cruelty’
The body of a convicted and executed criminal has been delivered to the Royal College of Surgeons for an anatomy lesson. This was the fate that also befell Mary’s corpse, a stipulation of her sentence in accordance with the ‘Murder Act’ passed in 1752, mandating the dissection of the bodies of executed murderers.
Rowlandson’s ‘A Gibbet’ (c. 1790’s) – two riders start back in horror before the ghastly corpse dangling in its iron cage. A prolific caricaturist, Rowlandson (1756–1827) seemed to have a fascination with death, scaffolds and gibbets; though the ‘Murder Act’ sanctioned the dissection of both sexes, ‘gibbeting’ was reserved for male malefactors found guilty of particularly heinous or high profile crimes. (Courtesy of York Art Gallery, York Museums Trust)
Chapter 9
Rowlandson’s artistic predilections are further evidenced by his ‘Execution Day at York’. (Courtesy of York Art Gallery, York Museums Trust)
The interior of the condemned cell, York Castle Gaol (Courtesy of York Museums Trust)
An original copy of the Broadsheet sold on the day of Mary’s execution, detailing ‘The last dying words, speech and confession of Joseph Brown and Mary Bateman…’ Brown had also been found guilty of murder by poisoning at the Lent Assizes and was hanged alongside Mary. (Courtesy of York Museums Trust)
Chapter 10
Sarah Malcolm, convicted triple murderess, painted by William Hogarth in the condemned cell of Newgate Gaol two days before her execution on Wednesday 7 March 1733. Her notoriety was such that prints of the portrait were sold for sixpence each to a morbidly curious public – Hogarth is reputed to have said of his subject ‘I see by this woman’s features, that she is capable of any wickedness.’ While no profit was made from the reproduction of an image of Mary, the treatment of her corpse post-mortem certainly presented a lucrative financial opportunity to monopolise on the notoriety of her name.
The only near contemporaneous image of Mary is the engraving for the frontispiece of The Extraordinary Life and Character of Mary Bateman published in 1811, two years after her execution.