The china teacup was not part of the bargain. Mary Cox had purchased from Mary Benson a gold watch and diverse sundry articles for the sum of eleven pounds; on the twenty-fifth of October, 1797, she requested that a teacup standing upon the mantelpiece be thrown into the bargain. Shortly thereafter, she lay bleeding to death in the house in Garden Street. At the trial of Benson, otherwise known as Maria Theresa Phipoe, this teacup re-emerged within two divergent accounts that agreed neither upon the commencement of the affray nor upon the severance of a finger. The contemporary account published in the European Magazine for December 1797 records the depositions, the sentence, and the execution.
The mistress of the house heard the noise of a violent struggle and deep groans issuing from Benson’s chamber. She summoned several neighbours and knocked at the door, which was locked from within. Benson replied that the woman had been taken ill, but was now reviving. When she at last set the door ajar, the bystanders beheld her covered with blood. One of the women presently forced her way into the room and discovered Cox lying upon the floor. She ran down the stairs crying murder. The chronicle adds that the wounded woman followed her down into the kitchen, where she remained until the arrival of the surgeons and parish beadles.
Cox had lost the power of speech, yet succeeded in making herself understood to a beadle: she pointed to the woman above stairs as her assailant. The officer ascended and found Benson seated upon the bed. Interrogated as to what she had done, she is reported to have replied: “I do not know; I believe the devil and passion bewitched me.” Upon the table lay a piece of a human finger and a knife. Benson acknowledged the knife and declared that the finger was her own, severed by Cox. The beadle thereupon put the question to the wounded woman, who denied having cut off the finger.
On the day following the affray, Cox delivered a formal deposition before a magistrate. She stated that she had demanded the cup after completing the purchase of the watch and the other effects. As she reached her hand toward the mantelpiece, Benson struck her in the neck with a knife, continued to wound her repeatedly, and held her down upon the bed. Cox maintained that her assailant sought solely to silence her voice forever.
At her trial, Benson assigned an entirely different origin to the violence. According to her narrative, a dispute had arisen concerning one John Cortois. Cox, she alleged, had upbraided her with an intent to return to Cortois to become his mistress anew; Benson retorted that she had never been such. The altercation descended into bitter vituperation. Two knives lay upon the table. Cox allegedly seized one of them and aimed a blow at Benson, severing her finger. Overwhelmed by pain and fury, Benson struck Cox in return. She declared that she retained no recollection of what transpired thereafter. This defence admitted the blows inflicted by Benson, while placing the wound to the finger and the initial violence upon the other party. It did not dispute the reality of the wounds; it altered their provenance, representing the fatal strokes as an involuntary reaction to agony.
Pelham records an earlier trial involving Benson in 1795, connected with this same John Cortois. That was a wholly distinct affair, and not the murder of Cox. Here, the name arose solely in the course of the quarrel as related by Benson; Cox had allegedly retorted that it had already been proved at the Old Bailey that Benson had been Cortois’s mistress. Benson vehemently denied the imputation. The court proceedings juxtapose these mutual recriminations without admitting them as independent proof of what transpired within the chamber.
The surgeons testified to five wounds upon the neck and throat, alongside various other injuries. The practitioner who had examined Cox at the scene and he who had tended her at the hospital concurred that these wounds had occasioned her death. Thus, the physical lesions and their fatal issue rested upon more than the uncorroborated assertions of Benson or the victim. Yet the precise nature of the encounter remained contested: who first caught up the knife, by what hand the finger was severed, and at what instant the struggle became a mortal assault.
The landlady with whom Cox had lodged, together with an acquaintance, gave evidence of the high esteem in which Cox held Benson. They had frequently heard her express her conviction that this affection was mutual. The chronicle does not place these witnesses in the chamber during the encounter; they spoke merely to the relationship they had previously observed. Their testimony introduced into the court a history of mutual regard, at the very moment when the opposing narratives resounded with malignant abuse. It served to demonstrate that the prisoner and the deceased had lived on intimate terms prior to the fatal day, but offered no elucidation regarding the bone of contention or the sequence of the blows. While it stood in stark contrast to the insults reported by Benson, it could not determine the truth between the two accounts of the opening assault.
The trial came on at the Old Bailey before Mr. Baron Perryn. After twenty minutes’ deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. During the passing of sentence, the prisoner desired the learned judge to speak louder, adding that she was not afraid. When the traditional formula was pronounced commending her soul to divine mercy, the report attributes to her an attitude of cold scepticism. Upon being searched as she quitted the bar, a large bottle of laudanum was discovered in her pocket. The periodical records the fact without explaining the presence of the drug.
According to Pelham, Benson was executed on the eleventh of December; the contemporary report notes only that it was a Monday, before the Debtor’s Door at Newgate. The narrative states that she was attended by a Roman Catholic priest, that she bestowed a guinea upon the debtor esteemed most deserving, and gave another to the executioner. She hung suspended for an hour in the sight of a vast multitude, after which her body was delivered to the surgeons for dissection. The chronicle portrays this public end with greater particularity than it can accord to the dark instant wherein the bloodshed began.
At the root of the affair lay a woman’s request for a china teacup, which she believed the other had consented to yield. In Cox’s deposition, the hand stretched forth toward the mantelpiece immediately precedes the stroke to the throat. In Benson’s defence, an altercation touching Cortois precedes the clash of steel, with Cox first severing her finger. The witnesses, the wounds, and the material relics are common to both testimonies, yet they fail to reconcile their essential contradictions. The jury settled the question of guilt; the historical record leaves to the reader the perplexed and shadowy path by which the voices and the evidence brought them to that conclusion.