Abstract
In 1746, travelling quack doctor Charles Hamilton married Mary Price. Within months, Price declared that her husband was in fact a woman. Hamilton was prosecuted, imprisoned, and publicly whipped. The case attracted notoriety thanks to reports in newspapers and in novelist Henry Fielding’s pamphlet The Female Husband; but the original case papers also survive. Through a detailed exploration of Hamilton’s case and its wider context, this chapter considers the motivations and experiences of eighteenth-century female husbands and their wives, husbands’ treatment as female impostors, and the reasons why such cases were prosecuted. It places them in a framework of legal, medical, and societal changes which were transforming eighteenth-century society. Those developments encouraged the emergence of silencing as a viable approach to policing lesbianism—and one which nonetheless allowed for the prosecution of female husbands.
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Notes
- 1.
As explained in Chap. 1, this book will use male names and pronouns to refer to the accused while they lived as men and female names and pronouns while they lived as women.
- 2.
The case was widely reported, including in the Bath Journal; Gentleman’s Magazine, Annual Register, and Newgate Calendar. The original case papers are in Somerset Archives (SA), Q/SR/314.
- 3.
Banns are oral notice of a forthcoming marriage , typically read out in church on the three Sundays preceding the wedding. The entry in the marriage register gave the groom’s name as James Hamilton (SA D/P/W ST C 2/1/4 p. 63) although the marriage certificate gave it as Charles (SA Q/SR/314/159).
- 4.
The actual charge may, in at least one of those cases, have been the same (fraud was an umbrella term for a variety of charges, not a single and distinct offence) but its presentation in court and the press were different.
- 5.
According to the Bath Journal (1746c), this was alleged by Gould in his opening speech; no trace of the claim survives in the court records.
- 6.
In light of this, it is surprising that Easton (2003, p. 131) argues that the case illustrates a shift in perceptions of female husband cases away from fraud and towards disorderly lesbian sexuality.
- 7.
The Annual Register chose to use ‘Marrow’. However, as the accused’s male name had been given as Marlow, this seems more likely to be correct.
- 8.
- 9.
Two people died in the pillory between 1775 and 1799, although for one of these, William Smith in 1780, the death may have been due to an improperly set-up pillory rather than the actions of the crowd (Shoemaker 2004, pp. 244–45).
- 10.
Beattie (1986, p. 18) suggests the Vagrancy Act was used similarly to briefly imprison those suspected of theft .
- 11.
The Bath Journal (1746b) stated ‘we hear that she was born at Yeovil’ but did not specify their source, and there is no corresponding information in the court record.
- 12.
The marriage register for St John, Glastonbury records her marriage to George Newton, soldier , on 1 March 1748 (SA D/P/GLAJ 2/1/4 p 2).
- 13.
Borthwick Institute’s account of the case notes the lack of entries in the ecclesiastical court records. There is no reference to court proceedings in local or national newspapers or the quarter sessions records held in York Archives and Local History Service.
- 14.
Liberty Smith’s article (2002) is a rare but flawed exception. Unfortunately, it both depends heavily upon literary accounts and makes some questionable claims, notably that these couples were engaged in a joint project of challenging heteronormativity.
- 15.
Locke’s views were by no means universally accepted; his Second Treatise was written in the context of a debate with Sir Robert Filmer over absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings.
- 16.
For example, there were several cases in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France where the death penalty was imposed (Faderman 1981, p. 51; Laqueur 1990, pp. 136–37; Jones and Stallybrass 1991, pp. 88–89; Fletcher 1995, p. 84); in the Netherlands, Henrika Schuria’s death sentence for tribadism was reduced to removal of the clitoris and exile (Laqueur 1990, p. 137); German Catherina Margaretha Linck was executed for marrying another woman and using a dildo (Faderman 1981, pp. 51–52; Hill 2001, p. 139; Peakman 2004, pp. 182–84).
- 17.
For a critical discussion of both theories, see Connell (2000).
- 18.
Harvey describes this dominance of Galenic over Aristotelian theory as ‘a relatively short-lived blip’ (2002, p. 211).
- 19.
- 20.
This view is supported by the near-absence of the hermaphrodite from the legal texts I have considered.
- 21.
Costs awards at the Surrey quarter sessions of 1767 ranged between seven shillings and a guinea, but probably did not represent the full cost of bringing the prosecution (Beattie 1986, pp. 46–47). A rough translation into current money values places those costs as between £30 and £91.62 at 2017 values, or between three and ten days’ wages for a skilled tradesman (The National Archives 2018). Lost earnings while attending court were also a significant cost for poorer prosecutors (Emsley 2018).
- 22.
See Faderman (1981, p. 52), Fletcher (1995, p. 85), Heidensohn (1996, p. 39) which suggest lesbianism was immune from legal intervention; Hitchcock (1997, p. 77) which claims no lesbians were prosecuted qua lesbians. Peakman (2004, p. 193) argues sex between women was not criminalised because it posed less threat to the social order than sex between men.
- 23.
Indeed, Fielding added a passage describing its discovery and use in evidence, an incident entirely absent from the actual records of the case.
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Derry, C. (2020). Mary/Charles Hamilton: Eighteenth-Century Female Husband Prosecutions. In: Lesbianism and the Criminal Law . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35300-1_2
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