York

by Summer Strevens

  One wonders, if Sally had been in agreement with Whitworth’s suggested suicide pact whether he would actually have gone through with it. However, his behaviour after Sally’s refusal was clearly very far removed from that of any romantic Romeo’s to an un-obliging Juliet, as his ensuing violence and subsequent fatal assault on Sally proved.

  Whitworth’s behaviour after the crime did seem to be remorseful. While in police custody he asked to see Sally’s body and on being admitted to the room where she laid, kissed her three times in a very affected manner. However, no amount of contrite, conscience-stricken behaviour could atone for his taking Sally’s life, and Whitworth’s feeble defence of himself did nothing to help his case, as his following statement demonstrates:

  Such a sharp blade cut short Sally’s existence at the hands of her ‘lover’.

  The girl went out with me from the house, and we went together as far as we had often gone before, and then we stopped for a short time. She asked me when I was going with her to the feast at Tattershall Thorpe, and I said I thought there was no good me going there, and that she did not want me. She said if I did not care for her, she did not care for me. I said we have not been long together, but I hope to be comfortable. We got to further words, and I told her I thought she went with another man. She said before she would tell me she would lose her life. I said I did not wish to go with anyone else while she went with me. I then asked her if she would go any further, and she said she would not. She said, ‘We will part as we have always done before.’ She then told me to sit down and she would sit on my knee. I sat down, with my feet in the hollow of the ground, and she sat on my knee. When she sat down she said, ‘What have you got here?’ I said ‘It’s my knife.’ She asked me to let her look at it, and I asked her what for. She said she thought it was as much her knife as mine, and then she got the knife out of my hand and opened it. I said she should not open it, and that I should shut it again. I tried to get it out of her hand to shut it, and she said before I should have it she would try for her life. I tried to get the knife again, and it came through her fingers. She said, ‘Bill, you have cut my fingers’ and I said, ‘I’ll have my knife if it cuts your face off.’ She then said, ‘Then, you shall try for it.’ So I tried to get it again, and she got hold of the hair of my head. I asked her what she meant, and she said if I would not let her go she would let me know what she meant. I said we had better part good friends, and that I should have my knife. She then got hold of my hair again, and pulled me down. I rolled her twice over and her head caught my feet. I said I should not stand that, and she said she would not give into me. I told her she had better be starting, and she struck at me with the knife in her hand. I tried to keep her off my face, and it went on my jacket sleeve. I tried to get the knife again, but she had fast hold of it, and she said she would not part with it. Rolling about together, the knife went in the side of her face, and I tried to get it out of her hand. She stuck to it fast, and threw me over again. She then said, ‘Oh, Bill, the knife has run into my neck.’ I said, ‘I cannot help it; you should have let go of the knife, and let me go.’ She said, ‘Let’s get up, and I will give you a kiss and let you go.’ So we got up, and I said, ‘Come, then, my lass, put your arms round my neck and I’ll give you a kiss.’ Then she came to me and said, ‘Oh, Bill,’ I said, ‘What, my lass?’ She said, ‘My throat’s cut.’ I asked her what with, and she said, ‘This knife here.’ She said, ‘I will give you a kiss for the last.’ I said, ‘Come, then,’ and while I put my arms round her neck she struck the knife right at my throat, and said, ‘Go to hell with you, Bill.’ I then fell on my back, and she ran away. When I got up I saw no one, and made the best of my way home. I was taken to the lockup, and did not know what it was for till this morning, when they told me it was for cutting the throat of Sally Hare. I was taken to see her, and gave her three kisses, and was then brought away.

  The jury returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ against Whitworth, who was accordingly committed by the coroner to take his trial at the ensuing York Assizes. Despite Whitworth’s initial protestations that Sally’s death was an accident, he admitted his guilt while being held at York Castle. After he was hanged, Whitworth was interred within the castle precincts.

  The Burning Issue of Inequality in Execution

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  While hanging was the standard capital punishment for a husband who murdered his wife, wives found guilty of murdering their husbands were executed by strangulation and burning at the stake. A woman who killed her husband was thought to have broken the ‘natural hierarchy’ – it was the accepted norm that men ranked above women in the scheme of things, and as such, a wife was not only guilty of murder but also of petty treason, which carried the more severe penalty at the stake.

  Burnings did not feature as a frequent execution spectacle at York, and while usually associated as a punishment for witchcraft, there were only four instances of women being burnt for petty treason. Elizabeth Boardingham was the last woman to be burned at the stake in York, at Tyburn on 20 March 1776. The judge presiding over Elizabeth’s case, Sir Henry Gould, particularly alluded to the matter of ‘natural hierarchy’ when he summed up his sentencing thus:

  The law of man, consistent with that of the gospel, has determined, that there is a submission due from the wife to her husband, and a degree of subordination the husband has over the wife, therefore constitutes a degree of allegiance from the wife to her husband, as her head, which, if she transgresses, is called by the law, a small, or light degree of treason. For this offence, and in order to deter women from breaking their marriage vows (and from the evidence we have heard given, you have done), the law has stamped a punishment full of ignominy upon such offenders.

  Thankfully, only effigies are burnt today – a grim reminder of past horrific execution methods.

  Sir Henry further remarked that:

  The sentence which the law obliges me to pass upon you, is that you, Elizabeth Boardingham, shall be led from this to the gaol from whence you came, and from thence upon Wednesday next, you shall be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution, and there you are to be burnt with fire till you are dead, and your body consumed to ashes. There is nevertheless, such a spirit of lenity in the common law of this country, tho’ this is the sentence you have received, and, for my own part do not believe that sentence could ever be more properly executed in the strict letter thereof, than upon you, however severe the punishment is, that you, who have been found guilty of a crime of the greatest magnitude, are condemned to undergo, the law has allowed some mitigation – you are first to be strangled at a stake, and then to be burnt with fire. You have reason to admire the excellency of that constitution by which you have been tried and found guilty.

  Quite how Elizabeth was expected to appreciate the ‘spirit of lenity in the common law’ that Sir Henry thought she should is beyond modern comprehension, but the contemporary view of Elizabeth’s crime was coloured entirely by the patriarchal society of the eighteenth century, appallingly unfair though that reality may have been.

  Elizabeth Boardingham was not condemned alone, however, as Thomas Aikney, her lover and accomplice in murdering her husband John, was sentenced to death also – but by hanging of course.

  Elizabeth’s late husband John Boardingham was no stranger to York Gaol himself, having spent frequent spells in prison for smuggling, leaving Elizabeth alone to raise their five children. In October 1775, still in her early thirties and understandably dissatisfied with her feckless and unreliable husband, Elizabeth ran away to Lincolnshire with Aikney, leaving the care of her children to her husband. However, whether through guilt or worry at leaving her offspring in such questionable custody, within three months Elizabeth had returned to the marital home. The reconciliation was flimsy to say the least, and with Elizabeth’s patience worn through she pressured Aikney into agreeing to murder her husband. On the night of 13 February 1776, Aikney went to the Boardingham residence and stabbed John twice before running a
way. John managed to stagger out in to the street and, pulling the knife from his body, shouted, ‘Murder! Murder!’ before collapsing dead.

  Elizabeth and her lover were soon arrested, and Aikney admitted to murdering John Boardingham but accused Elizabeth of repeatedly coercing him to do so. They were both found guilty and scheduled for execution on the same day. Elizabeth was variously described as ‘showy’ and ‘worthless’, and was somewhat younger in years than her husband, she was also portrayed in the press at the time as a broad, tough woman. When it came to the time of their execution, observers claimed that Elizabeth shook Aikney’s hand as they parted for the last time, although Rede’s York Castle In The Nineteenth Century has an account which states that, ‘An inhabitant of York, who perfectly remembers the occurrence, informs us “That her associate in crime, a very young man, was hanged as an accessory”, and that Elizabeth turned to him and asked him to kiss her at the stake, which he refused.’

  The three other cases of women being burnt in York for the petty treason of murdering their husbands before the execution of Elizabeth Boardingham, were those of Elizabeth Webster in 1744, Mary Ellah in 1757 and Ann Sowerby in 1767.

  Webster was tried for the poisoning of her husband John and convicted at the Summer Assizes of 1743. However, because Elizabeth was pregnant her execution was held over until after the birth of her son, who was christened William in York Castle Gaol on Michaelmas Day, 29 September 1743. Elizabeth’s sentence was finally carried out on 5 March 1744. There is no record as to what became of the orphaned William Webster. While a prison birth in the eighteenth century was not the most auspicious of beginnings for a child, some were lucky enough to receive support for their upkeep from the Three Ridings of York until old enough to be put out to an apprenticeship, usually around twelve years of age.

  Mary Ellah, a native of Broomfleet in the East Riding, was found guilty of murdering her husband with an axe, apparently prompted by a ‘fit of jealous excitement’. She was strangled and burned at the stake on Monday, 28 March 1757. Details of Mary’s crime were apparently deemed newsworthy outside of the county, and reported as far afield as Worcester in the Berrow’s Worcester Journal, where the County News section mentioned that, ‘On Friday last, Mary Ellah, of Broomfleet in the East Riding, was committed to the said Gaol, upon the Coroner’s Warrant, for the Murder of Thomas Ellah, her Husband, by giving him a Blow on his Temples with an Axe.’ While the London Chronicle recorded that ‘Yesterday, Mary Ellah who was convicted of the Murder of her Husband Thomas Ellah, was burnt, Pursuant to her sentence. She confessed the Crime for which she suffered, and died penitent.’

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  ‘strangled and burned at the stake’

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  Ann Sowerby poisoned her husband Timothy in collusion with one John Douglas. Although Douglas was acquitted, Ann was executed by strangulation and burning at the stake. Prior to being removed from her cell for execution, Ann protested that Douglas had supplied her with the poison nux vomica, and that she had burned the remainder of the substance. She further claimed that Douglas had supplied her with more poison, this time arsenic, some days later and assisted her with mixing it in with some curds that she fed to her husband for breakfast, resulting in his death a few hours later. Possibly Ann (and for that matter Douglas) may have thought the latter poison was a more viable option – arsenic’s popularity as a poison (before the advent of forensic testing) lay in its virtual tastelessness, a supposedly faintly sweet and metallic taste easily masked by food, as opposed to the strong, bitter taste of nux vomica. Drawn on a hurdle through the streets to the Tyburn, Ann at the last acknowledged the justness of her sentence and ‘died penitent’.

  Parents and Siblings

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  A brutal case of patricide occurred around noon on 18 July 1803. When Mr Oldroyd senior complained of feeling unwell and went to lay down in his parlour, his son Benjamin (aged forty-six) subsequently seized his father and fastened a rope around his neck, suspending the helpless old man from a nail some 7ft from the ground.

  It was heavily inferred that Mrs Oldroyd was an accessory to the murder of her husband, as neither mother nor son saw fit to raise the alarm until six o’clock that evening. It was assumed that the delay between the murder and the report of Joseph Oldroyd’s ‘suicide’ was occasioned by Benjamin and his mother dragging the body into the garden and fastening the corpse to a cherry tree in an attempt to make it appear that Mr Oldroyd had taken his own life, (although it was observed that the tree was not substantial enough to have borne the body). Mrs Oldroyd maintained that her husband had made many attempts on his own life before and had been in ‘a desponding way for two years’, and that she believed he had hanged himself as he had often told her he would.

  While Benjamin was described as being of ‘very weak intellect’, the court decided he was capable of distinguishing right from wrong, and he was eventually found guilty of the murder of his father at the Spring Assizes of 1804. Until the sentence was confirmed, Benjamin had been of a placid demeanour while held in York Prison. However, on 20 May when the order of execution was confirmed, Oldroyd’s demeanour changed, and when it came to the day of execution on 27 May Benjamin refused to join in the prayers. On the platform his conduct was described as ‘dreadful’, and he physically resisted being hanged, ‘He fought and struggled with the officers of justice until from exhaustion, he fell upon his face; yelling and struggling, he was encircled in the fatal noose, and the drop fell.’

  An Insistent Sister: The ‘Kirklington Murderer’

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  On 18 August 1874 at 2.30 a.m., twenty-nine-year-old William Jackson, formerly a private in the 77th Regiment of Foot, confessed in the condemned cell of York Gaol that he was responsible for the murder of his sixteen-year-old-sister Elizabeth. On 5 May that year, Jackson’s sister had been accompanying her brother on the initial leg of his outward journey from the family home in Kirklington, as he went to seek work. She was desperate for him to take her along with him but Jackson had refused, and, in spite of his sister’s pleas, tried to make her see the sense in her waiting for him to send for her once he had secured a position. Elizabeth, who was terribly upset, continued to follow her brother, who on his own admission, ‘Opened my black bag and took out my razor, and cut my sister Lizzie’s throat. She screamed out when the blood flew out.’ Lizzie dropped to the footpath, and on realisation of what he had done Jackson fled the scene, but was arrested in Bishop Aukland the following Saturday.

  A cut-throat razor from the 1870s – a convenient instrument to silence Jackson’s sister.

  Utterly remorseful for his actions, Jackson, who became known as the ‘Kirklington Murderer’, paid the ultimate penalty later that day after his confession. His was the first execution to take place within the castle grounds, after Parliament passed the Capital Punishment (Amendment) Act ending public hangings in 1868. A black flag was hoisted over Clifford’s Tower indicating that Jackson had been hanged and was lowered once again when his body had been cut down.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  INFANTICIDE AND ‘PLEADING THE BELLY’

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  In the Family Way

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  ‘Yea, mothers have with desperate hands wrought harm. To little lives which their own bosoms lent.’

  Maturin

  In the past, stillbirths and what we now class as cot deaths must have been far more prevalent, particularly with the lack of medical knowledge to remedy prenatal problems and when a parents’ own bed might have been the only place where a poor mother and father could offer warmth to their baby. Natural deaths and ‘over-layings’ – where an infant would be accidentally suffocated in the parental bed – must then have been difficult to distinguish from deliberate infanticide by suffocation, or the result of fatal negligence. Backstreet abortions resulting in a deliberately induced miscarriage would also be passed off as stillbirths.

  Consequently, proving infanticide was something of a problem, and while failu
re to disclose a stillbirth was made a capital offence in 1624, it was not until 1803 that the law on infanticide was revised, with proof of murder now a requirement to secure a conviction. In circumstances where a murder charge was unlikely to stick, the accused could alternatively be charged with concealment of birth instead, punishable by a maximum of two years’ imprisonment. (In cases where the defendant was charged with infanticide the jury was empowered to return ‘concealment of birth’ as a lesser verdict.)

  Of course, procuring or performing unlawful abortions also fell within this criminal sphere. Prior to 1803, having an abortion or the offence of ‘attempting to induce a miscarriage’ was punishable by a fine or a short term of imprisonment – in fact, abortions carried out before the ‘quickening’ (where the mother could feel the movement of the foetus around the thirteen-week mark) would go entirely unpunished. While abortion laws were progressively tightened as the nineteenth century progressed, with the proviso concerning ‘quickening’ removed in 1837, it was not until after the passing of the 1861 Offence Against the Person Act that the pregnant woman herself (as opposed to the abortionist) could be prosecuted under the law. The effects of poverty, ineffective contraception, the incidence of birth defects and attitudes to illegitimacy as well as prostitution all ensured a steady stream of offenders coming before the assizes.