A leather-bound book, a silk handkerchief, and four guineas: upon these trifling articles the fate of Mary Standford closed forever. The gentleman with whom she had supped swore she had stripped him of them; she answered that the guineas were a gift. Between a lover’s bounty and a felony lay all the frightful distance separating a casual night’s encounter from the gallows. The ancient criminal calendar that records her history preserves this irreconcilable breach, though its author dwells with almost equal fervor upon the moral lapses he imputes to her youth as upon the strict proceedings of her trial.
The woman whom the chronicler names Mary Standford was born of parents whom he characterizes as thoroughly reputable. They placed her in school, seeking to form her for the sober discharge of those duties proper to her station. Yet, by his account, she grew inordinately fond of the company of young men and the profane revelry of country wakes and fairs. Wearied by her conduct, her kin at length dispatched her to London—a remove which the writer describes as having been rendered imperative by her dangerous acquaintances.
In the metropolis, Standford secured one or two respectable places in domestic service, both of which she forfeited, according to the moralist’s censure, through her own untoward behavior. A footman seduced her; thereafter, she descended into street-walking. The chronicler depicts her as the frequent associate of one Mary Rawlins, known as Black Mary, who had formerly been kept in style by a wealthy merchant of the City before sinking into penury. The two women plied the stones between Temple Bar and Ludgate Hill. At times they drew ample coin from their gallants; at others, their takings were so wretched that they were obliged to pawn nearly all their apparel, taking turns with what garments remained to walk abroad by night.
The chronicle presently departs from Standford to trace the fortunes of her companion. Rawlins took to husband a former trooper of the Life Guards and removed to the vicinity of King Street, Westminster. The chronicle dismisses the notion that matrimony wrought any reformation in her: it asserts that her husband sought only to seize the vails and presents bestowed by her admirers, urging her to continue upon the town. Rawlins could not long endure such thralldom. One evening she sought out Standford, persuading her to repair to a fresh quarter of the town, where she had taken sanctuary after abandoning her spouse.
Near Wapping, the pair recovered a measure of prosperity. The mariners who thronged the waterside afforded a novel clientele: whenever their pockets were lined, they spent freely in the women’s company. When their pockets were empty, intermediaries were at hand. The chronicler hints at profitable dealings with crimps and agents managing seamen’s tickets and advances, though he forbears to furnish any exact reckoning of the commissions. In this maritime traffic, both broker and bawd found their account. The scene had shifted, yet the commerce of the passions remained, with the sole difference that the two former confederates had once more united their common interests.
In time, Standford likewise wed. She encountered a man willing enough to take her to wife, and she accepted the match; yet within a twelvemonth she quitted him, precisely as Rawlins had forsaken her trooper. Later, she formed an attachment with a servant employed in the City, by whom she bore a child. The infant’s birth augmented her necessities; she consequently severed her ties with her old associates and returned alone to the streets, persuaded, as the chronicler observes, that she might thereby secure a larger revenue.
Shortly after this solitary return to her trade, Standford fell in with a gentleman who showed himself, by the text’s report, extraordinarily enamored of her. He treated her to supper, lay with her, and, as she consistently maintained, presented her with four guineas. The gentleman, on the contrary, deposed that she had picked his pocket of a leather-bound memorandum book, a silk handkerchief, and the aforementioned sum. Upon this irreconcilable contradiction turned the capital indictment for which she was committed to Newgate.
Following her conviction, certain of her acquaintances buoyed her up with the prospect of a reprieve, suggesting that her sentence of death might be commuted to transportation beyond the seas. Standford rejected the expedient with indignation, declaring she would rather die in England—even by the most cruel and ignominious death—than be carried into foreign plantations to drudge for a livelihood. Her obstinacy astounded the chronicler, who embarks upon an extensive digression concerning this fatal aversion. In his view, a blind dread of the colonies frequently impelled felons to cast away the sole remaining means of life; he deemed it the duty of authority to depict the trans-Atlantic existence in far softer colors.
The writer argues the virtues of transportation with a complacency that Mary in no wise shared. He proposed that an instructive treatise be printed and put into the hands of the condemned, to persuade them that the ocean passage would not deliver them to the horrors they imagined. According to his reasoning, the labor required abroad was no heavier than that of an English husbandman, while the planters, being themselves Englishmen, retained all the mild virtues of their race. Such were the specious arguments of a partisan of the penal code, bearing no relation to Mary’s own terrors. Where she perceived nothing but hopeless bondage, he professed to offer a fair field for reformation.
He pursues his homily further: in England, a pardoned felon is cast back into indigence, ruined character, and former snares. In the colonies, he contends, she might serve out her term and thereafter establish herself in comfort. Those who returned clandestinely from exile faced the gallows if retaken, a peril which, in his judgment, only rendered them desperate and capable of greater outrages. Yet this entire apologetic unfolded around a woman who had already spurned the glimmer of hope offered by her friends. They did not bring her a royal pardon, but merely the distant prospect of a commutation; even this faint overture could not bend her purpose.
During the brief interval left to her, she manifested, in the chronicler’s estimation, very little maternal solicitude for her child, whom she resigned without apparent distress to the charity of the parish. She confessed that she had lived a grievous sinner, and placed her reliance upon the mercy of the Almighty. The narrative records that she prayed fervently, both in the condemned hold and beneath the beam, declaring she harbored no malice against her prosecutor or any living creature. She was launched into eternity at Tyburn in the year 1726, being then in the thirty-sixth year of her age.
For her babe, Mary had trusted to the parish overseers. For her soul, she implored the pardon of Heaven, refusing utterly the alien existence offered her across the sea. The gentleman who had sworn away her life stood by his loss of the four guineas; she had stood by her claim of a gift. The law had decided between their oaths; it had not prevailed upon Mary to choose the chain of the exile over the rope of the executioner.