A window had to be opened before the neighbourhood could ever see Mary Clifford. A hog had been shut up in the covered yard of the Brownriggs; the stench growing insufferable, a pane had been removed from the skylight. Through this breach, a servant of the neighbouring baker caught sight of a prostrate form. He heard low moans. He called out, receiving no intelligible answer, and then dropped something down to draw her attention. That which groaned beneath him was a child.
The servant alerted his master, who had the parish officers informed. These men arrived to demand that Mary be shown to them. James Brownrigg answered that she was in the country. Thus, the moment someone knocked at its door, the house had resumed the appearance of a dwelling where everything admitted of an explanation.
We are in London, in the summer of 1767. Before crossing the threshold with these officers, one must return to another door, which one of the apprentices had already managed to pass through. The affair might have begun far sooner.
A House Where Children Were Placed
Elizabeth Brownrigg practised as a midwife. She had borne sixteen children; three were still living when she stood trial. Joseph Moore, the Ordinary who visited her in prison and published an account of their conversations, denies her neither affection for her family nor a reputation as an attentive practitioner. The parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West had entrusted her with the poor women of its workhouse. She had thereby acquired, in an office requiring some degree of trust, a standing from which the parish apprentices placed in her care were to derive no succour whatever.
Her husband was a plumber. Into their house in Flower-de-Luce Court, near Fleet Street, came successively Mary Mitchell, Mary Jones, and Mary Clifford. The first and the third depended upon the overseers of Whitefriars; Jones came from the Foundling Hospital. Three girls, three paths that the record preserves only from the moment their existence became enclosed within that address. It is crucial not to confuse them: one escaped, the second bore witness, and the third perished.
Apprenticeship presupposed that a child should learn to work and earn her sustenance from those who employed her. In the account collected by Moore, the demands multiplied as the rations diminished. Labour grew heavier as strength failed; the impossibility of performing it then furnished the pretext for chastisement. This circle required no extraordinary fury to perpetuate itself. It was enough that the woman who gave the order was also empowered to judge the fault, determine the punishment, and decide what the condemned creature should eat.
Mary Jones succeeded in securing the key to the street door while her master and mistress slept. She slipped out and returned to the Foundling Hospital. There she recounted the cruelties she had suffered. Her testimony carried sufficient weight to prompt an application to the Chamberlain of London; the indentures were discharged. She never returned to that house.
One girl had thus found adults who would listen to her. But the deliverance obtained for her offered no shield to those who remained. A contract had been dissolved; the Brownriggs’ door could close once more upon the rest.
What Had to Be Concealed
Mary Clifford enjoyed no such avenue of escape. Privation had driven her to force open the cupboard where the victuals were kept. Brownrigg turned this attempt to eat into a fresh pretext for punishment. Moore goes on to record the nights spent in a coal-hole beneath the stairs, the wretched bedding, the days of drudgery, and the confinements during her master and mistress’s absences. Mary Mitchell endured much the same treatment. She survived and lived to testify.
It would be easy to draw up an inventory of instruments and injuries here. They crowd the depositions. Yet they reveal less than that succession of ordinary acts rendered impossible: taking a meal, lying in a bed, stepping outside, crying out for aid. The cupboard, the cords, and the withholding of food served to keep the children beneath an authority from which they could not withdraw. It was no single correction gone awry. Time itself had become an instrument of the torment.
Brownrigg’s account, as preserved by the clergyman, acknowledges the violence while disputing certain particulars of Mitchell’s testimony. In it, she also seeks to shield her husband. She asserts that he was ignorant of the use made of a hook fixed at her bidding; on the other hand, she admits that her son John had beaten the girls at her command. These distinctions originate with her. To receive them as her own declarations allows one to hear her defence without leaving it to her to judge her entire household.
By the time the aperture in the skylight drew the neighbour’s gaze, Mary Clifford could no longer make herself understood in any ordinary fashion. Another had been required to look, call out, persist, and raise the alarm. The window opened onto a London courtyard; above all, it opened onto persons capable of demanding a reckoning.
Show Us Mary
The parish officers did not turn back on the assurance that she was in the country. James Brownrigg protested their presence, sent for an attorney, and threatened them. A search was begun, without discovering the child at once. The master of the house still held this considerable advantage: the searchers knew what they sought; he knew where it lay.
At length, they took him into custody. Only then, according to Moore’s narrative, did he produce Mary. The promise of a sojourn in the fresh air collapsed before the very creature whose absence it had served to explain. The child was carried to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Medical care arrived after weeks of brutal ill-usage. She expired on the 9th of August, 1767, the date set down in the indictments printed in the contemporary tract.
Elizabeth and John had fled. They were discovered in lodgings at Wandsworth; the mother was subsequently conveyed to Newgate. The affair, until then confined to a few neighbours, the overseers of the poor, and the walls of a single house, now belonged to all London. Rumour outstripped the precautions necessary to verify it.
People soon attributed other disappearances and other deaths to Brownrigg. Moore took alarm at this. He questioned the prisoner upon these allegations, took down her denials, and denounced the inventions that blackened a case already terrible enough. His testimony does not permit us to establish every passage of her life; it forbids us, at least, from transforming common gossip into a roll of victims. To tell the story of Mary Clifford, we have no need to add unknown children to those whose names the record has preserved.
The Verdict and the Voice of the Street
The case came on for trial during the September Sessions, held at the Old Bailey from the 9th to the 12th. Elizabeth, James, and John pleaded not guilty. Questioned upon her defence, Elizabeth declared, according to Moore’s account, that she had harboured no intent to kill the child. The jury found her guilty of murder; her husband and son were acquitted of that charge. The distinction stood firm against the fury of the populace, which would gladly have pronounced a single sentence against the entire household.
The prison interviews provided the Ordinary with different matter. He describes his exhortations, the prayers, the acknowledgement of guilt, and the prisoner’s anxieties for her family. He reports that she confessed the justice of her sentence. He relates too how he strove to bring her to repentance. His tract is that of a man concerned with the salvation of a soul he was accompanying to the grave; his words must be kept within that frame, rather than taken as a miraculous window into Elizabeth’s thoughts.
On the 14th of September, she took leave of her husband and her son. Moore records that James spoke of their two youngest children and the possibility of providing for their livelihood should he be released from prison. Elizabeth begged that they might not suffer the treatment inflicted upon the girls who had been entrusted to her. The solicitude she still showed for her own flesh and blood makes this utterance painful to read: she knew full well how to name the misery from which a child ought to be spared.
The cart moved towards Tyburn. Along the way, Moore heard spectators clamouring for the prisoner’s damnation; one man even demanded that he pray for her perdition. The minister was seized with indignation. He had contested neither the murder nor the sentence. Yet he discovered, among those who accounted themselves righteous, an eagerness to prolong punishment beyond death itself.
Elizabeth Brownrigg was executed on that Monday. Too feeble, by Moore’s account, to address the crowd herself, she charged him to make known that she acknowledged her guilt and the justice of her condemnation. The minister was able to carry her final words to the throng. Mary Clifford, when they had found her at last, had had scarcely any voice left at all.