‘Mariticide’ is a fancy word for the crime of murdering one’s husband. Killing your husband is generally frowned upon nowadays but in early modern England—until 1828, in fact—it fell under the definition of ‘petty treason’. That a wife killing her husband was ‘petty treason’ was simply because husbands held a socially superior position and therefore, in addition to breaking the law, a woman who committed mariticide was not just a criminal but a transgressive figure—and early modern balladeers really wanted to make sure you knew that.
Anne Wallen and Alice Davies were both executed for murdering their husbands in 1616 and 1628, respectively. Shortly after each crime, ballads were written about their crimes and executions. I shall be looking at two in particular, one by an author called T. Platte and the other written anonymously.
In many ways the ballads are very similar. Both share a woodcut, both include an execution by burning, and—most interestingly—both are written from the perspective of the woman being sentenced to death. The latter quality was by no means uncommon though, as adopting the voice of the criminal was useful in emphasising their repentance and, as a rhetorical device, allowed (or rather forced) the reader of the ballad to adopt the position of the criminal, whose path they were supposed to avoid. As Una McIlvenna notes, the balladeer is trying to remove any possibility of innocence or moral complexity by fictionalising a comprehensive confession, both legally and morally.
In Anne Wallen’s case, there is a lot of moral nuance. She was accused of murdering her husband after arguing with him. Her husband had ‘strooke [her] on the eare’ before she then grabbed a nearby chisel (a tool of his trade), which she threw at him, resulting in his death. In a letter to Sir Dudley Charleton that same year, John Chamberlain remarks on ‘a joiner’s wife [that was] burnt in Smithfield for killing her husband’ but argues that from what he’s learned of the case, ‘she had summum jus, for her husband having brawld, and beaten her, she took up a chesill’ and attacked him in self-defense. Randall Martin concludes that Chamberlain may not have known of the ballad, because his ‘justification of Anne stood in contrast’ to it, but there isn’t really any reason to go that far. The act of violence on the husband’s part is referenced in the ballad (I quoted it a few sentences ago) and Chamberlain qualifies his judgement by emphasising that it is dependent on ‘the case [being] no otherwise than I can learn it’, which is probably in reference to his having seen the ballad or coming into contact with the gossip it had inspired.
The fact that the ballad admits that Wallen was acting in defence and does not imply that she was deliberately trying to kill her husband is not really an admission at all. In fact, far from attempting to justify or exonerate her, this information is included to make it clear that domestic abuse did not justify a response from the victim because the husband had both the right and obligation to discipline his wife.
Both ballads are clearly didactic. ‘A woman that is wise should seldome speake’ is probably not untrue insofar as women could be punished for even the slightest acts of disobedience but the author—who we should note is performing an act of literary ventriloquism by playing the part of a woman—is presenting this as a moral duty rather than a means of self-preservation. The ballad concerning Alice Davies is more direct as, once again a puppet of the balladeer, Davies informs all wives that ‘Your Husbands are your Lords & heads,/you ought them to obey.’ Of course, the word ‘heads’ here has a double-meaning given that husbands were the head of the family both because they were in a superior position to their wives, but also because they were deemed more ‘rational’ and were thus the ‘head’ of the family body politic.
This preaching about gender roles, transgressive women, and violent crime serves to give both ballads a very ‘real’ foundation which gives an insight into the gritty reality of seventeenth-century London. Both ballads include the sequence of legal events which followed the crime. Davies explains that ‘hands upon me there was lay’d,/And I to Prison sent,/[…] When Sizes came I was arraign’d,/by Jury just and true,/I was found guilty of the fact,/for which I have my due.’ The inclusion of this description is not just to relate what most likely actually happened. Once again, the guilt of the woman is assured by a legal system which is shown to operate swiftly and justly. This reassures readers but, more importantly, scares those who might try and commit mariticide themselves. Another ballad written about Davies, The unnaturall Wife, also includes this process, again adopting her voice—in fact the similarities are so great that comparing the two isn’t very fruitful, although it does feature an interesting woodcut which can be seen below.
At the same time, both ballads also include interesting views about death, the soul, and religion. In Davies’ case, the murder itself is described as follows:
And then I tooke a little knife,
and stab’d him in the heart.
Whose Soule from Body instantly,
my bloody hand did part.
This depiction of the moment of death is interesting because it reveals the author’s view that death is essentially the parting of the soul and the physical body. Rather than being predicated on a state of the soul, or its location, it is its relationship with the body which distinguishes life from death. The line is uncannily similar to John Donne’s choice of words in his sonnet ‘This is my play’s last scene’ where he speculates on dying as the moment when ‘gluttonous death will instantly unjoint/My body and my soul’, although in the ballad’s case the role of ‘death’ is taken on directly by Davies. There’s a moment later in the ballad where the author shifts very briefly from first person to third:
Then to the Reedes they fire did put,
which flamd up to the skye,
And then she shriek’d most pittifully,
before that she did dye.
This sudden change could simply be a mistake, although one which would have had to get past both the author and typesetter’s scrutiny. It’s possible to view this shift as having a sort of metaphysical significance; The perspective is still Davies’ but now that her soul has parted her body, it comments on it as though it is another person. This interpretation is appealing because it would give the ballad a deeper interpretation of death but if the woman is ‘shriek[ing]’ then she’s implicitly still alive (which the next line confirms) and to bestow the lines with a deeper meaning probably gives too much credit to the author, who we shouldn’t forget was writing a cheap ballad aimed at exploiting a recent drama to edify audiences and make money.
The ballad concerning Wallen says lots about religion and repentance but describes her husband’s death in a much more literal sense (‘his breath from body fled’). The final two lines, a rhyming couplet, succinctly link the religious and practical purposes of the ballad:
In burning flames of fire I should fry,
Receive my soule sweet Jesus now I die.
Grammatically, the rhyme links the two themes and the alliteration in the first line almost mimics the sound of a flame—it’s also interesting that ‘burning flames of fire’ is essentially using three words which all say the same thing, their meaning repeated to emphasise the extent of the punishment. The first line asserts, supposedly from the perspective of the criminal wife, that her death is justified. The ‘should’ positions the burning as an event which will occur in the future but also presents it as a moral imperative. On the other hand, the second is a religious expression of repentance.
The extent to which Davies or Wallen had even done anything wrong is unclear, especially in the case of the latter, but the ballads must be viewed as prescriptive rather than descriptive (even if they were a news source for many people). Execution ballads were a popular genre and sold well. Unlike other crime literature, both of these ballads are more focussed on the punishment of wives who kill their husband, both legally and religiously, rather than giving gruesome accounts of murders which often had nothing meaningful to say. Above anything else, these ballads reveal that mariticide (as a type of ‘petty treason’) was condemned more than any normal homicide because if there was one thing worse than a murderer in early modern England, it was a woman who didn’t know her place.
