Having made you sup on horror a la Bretonne, or Continental fashion, I
am now to give you a savoury from England. This lest you imagine that
France, or the Continent, has a monopoly in wholesale poison. Let me
introduce you, as promised earlier, to Mary Ann Cotton aged forty-one,
found guilty of and sentenced to death for the murder of a child,
Charles Edward Cotton, by giving him arsenic.
Rainton, in Durham, was the place where, in 1832 Mary Ann found mortal
existence. At the age of fifteen or sixteen she began to earn her own
living as a nursemaid, an occupation which may appear to have given
her a distaste for infantile society. At the age of nineteen and at
Newcastle she married William Mowbray, a collier, and went with him to
live in Cornwall. Here the couple remained for some years.
It was a fruitful marriage. Mary bore William five children in Cornwall,
but, unfortunately, four of the children died--suddenly. With the
remaining child the pair moved to Mary's native county. They had hardly
settled down in their new home when the fifth child also died. It died,
curiously enough, of the ailment which had supposedly carried off the
other four children--gastric fever.
Not long after the death of this daughter the Mowbrays removed to
Hendon, Sunderland, and here a sixth child was born. It proved to be of
as vulnerable a constitution as its brothers and sisters, for it lasted
merely a year. Four months later, while suffering from an injured
foot, which kept him at home, William Mowbray fell ill, and died with a
suddenness comparable to that which had characterized the deaths of his
progeny. His widow found a job at the local infirmary, and there she
met George Ward. She married Mr Ward, but not for long. In a few months
after the nuptials George Ward followed his predecessor, Mowbray, from
an illness that in symptoms and speed of fatality closely resembled
William's.
We next hear of Mary as housekeeper to a widower named Robinson, whose
wife she soon became. Robinson had five children by his former wife.
They all died in the year that followed his marriage with Mary Ann, and
all of 'gastric fever.'
The second Mrs Robinson had two children by this third husband. Both of
these perished within a few weeks of their birth.
Mary Ann's mother fell ill, though not seriously. Mary Ann volunteered
to nurse the old lady. It must now be evident that Mary Ann was a
'carrier' of an obscure sort of intestinal fever, because soon after her
appearance in her mother's place the old lady died of that complaint.
On her return to her own home, or soon after it, Mary was accused by
her husband of robbing him. She thought it wise to disappear out of
Robinson's life, a deprivation which probably served to prolong it.
Under her old name of Mowbray, and by means of testimonials which on
later investigation proved spurious, Mary Ann got herself a housekeeping
job with a doctor in practice at Spennymore. Falling into error
regarding what was the doctor's and what was her own, and her errors
being too patent, she was dismissed.
Wallbottle is the scene of Mary Ann's next activities. Here she made the
acquaintance of a married man with a sick wife. His name was Frederick
Cotton. Soon after he had met Mary Ann his wife died. She died of
consumption, with no more trace of gastric fever than is usual in her
disease. But two of Cotton's children died of intestinal inflammation
not long after their mother, and their aunt, Cotton's sister, who kept
house for him, was not long in her turn to sicken and die in a like
manner.
The marriage which Mary Ann brought off with Frederick Cotton at
Newcastle anticipated the birth of a son by a mere three months. With
two of Cotton's children by his former marriage, and with the infant
son, the pair went to live at West Auckland. Here Cotton died--and the
three children--and a lodger by the curious name of Natrass.
Altogether Mary Ann, in the twenty years during which she had been
moving in Cornwall and about the northeastern counties, had, as it
ultimately transpired, done away with twenty-four persons. Nine of these
were the fruit of her own loins. One of them was the mother who gave
her birth. Retribution fell upon her through her twenty-fourth victim,
Charles Edward Cotton, her infant child. His death created suspicion.
The child, it was shown, was an obstacle to the marriage which she was
already contemplating--her fifth marriage, and, most likely, bigamous at
that. The doctor who had attended the child refused a death certificate.
In post-mortem examination arsenic was found in the child's body. Cotton
was arrested.
She was brought to trial in the early part of 1873 at Durham Assizes. As
said already, she was found guilty and sentenced to death, the sentence
being executed upon her in Durham Gaol in March of that year. Before
she died she made the following remarkable statement: "I have been a
poisoner, but not intentionally."
It is believed that she secured the poison from a vermicide in which
arsenic was mixed with soft soap. One finds it hard to believe that she
extracted the arsenic from the preparation (as she must have done
before administering it, or otherwise it must have been its own emetic)
unintentionally.
What advantage Mary Ann Cotton derived from her poisonings can have been
but small, almost as small as that gained by Helene Jegado. Was it for
social advancement that she murdered husbands and children? Was she a
'climber' in that sphere of society in which she moved? One hesitates to
think that passion swayed her in being rid of the infant obstacle to the
fifth marriage of her contemplation. With her "all o'er-teeming loins,"
this woman, Hecuba in no other particular, must have been a very sow
were this her motive.
But I have come almost by accident on the word I need to compare Mary
Ann Cotton with Jegado. The Bretonne, creeping about her native province
leaving death in her track, with her piety, her hypocrisy, her enjoyment
of her own cruelty, is sinister and repellent. But Mary Ann, moving from
mate to mate and farrowing from each, then savaging both them and the
litter, has a musty sowishness that the Bretonne misses. Both foul, yes.
But we needn't, we islanders, do any Jingo business in setting Mary Ann
against Helene.