Volume II
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at Tyburn on I 7th of December, 1708 within six miles of the city of Norwich, in the county of Norfolk, of worthy honest parents, who gave her a very good education, and brought her up in her younger years in the ways of religion and good manners; but she had wickedly thrown off all those good things which were endeavoured to be fixed in her, and abandoned herself to all manner of filthiness and uncleanness, which afterwards proved her shame and ruin. She was first married to one John Churchill, an ensign in Major General Faringdon's regiment, by whose name she commonly went, but seldom by her second husband's, who, two or three years before her misfortunes, was married to her in the Fleet Prison, upon agreement first made between them both that they should not live together, nor have anything to do with each other. Which agreement was strictly performed; and so she continued freely to keep company with one Hunt, a Lifeguardsman, as she had begun to do in her former husband's time. She had lived with the aforesaid Bully Hunt for seven years together in a lascivious and adulterous manner, which broke her first husband's heart, by whom she had two children surviving at the time of her unfortunate death. She had lived also in incontinency about three months with one Thomas Smith, a cooper, who was hanged at Tyburn, on Friday, the 16th day of December, 1709, for breaking open and robbing the house of the Right Honourable the Earl of Westmorland. She was committed to New Prison for picking a gentle man's pocket of a purse wherein was a hundred and four guineas. Whilst she was there she seemed to be really a pious woman; but her religion was of five or six colours, for this day she would pray that God would turn the heart of her adversary, and to morrow curse the time that ever she saw him. She at last got out of this mansion of sorrow also, but soon forgetting her afflictions she pursued her wickedness continually, till she had been sent no less than twenty times to Clerkenwell Bridewell, where, receiving the correction of the house every time, by being whipped, and kept to beating hemp from morning till night for the small allow ance of so much bread and water, which just kept life and soul together, she commonly came out like a skeleton, and walked as if her limbs had been tied together with packthread. Yet let what punishment would light on this common strumpet, she was no changeling, for as soon as she was out of jail she ran into still greater evils, by deluding, if possible, all mankind. After Madam Churchill had reigned a long time in her wickedness, as she was coming one night along Drury Lane, in company with Richard Hunt, William Lewis and John Boy, they took occasion to fall out with one Martin Were, and she aggravating the quarrel by bidding them sacrifice the man, they killed him between King's Head Court and Vinegar Yard. The three men who committed this murder made their escape, but she, being apprehended as an accessary therein, was sent to Newgate, and shortly after condemned for it, on the 26th of February, 1708. After sentence of death was passed on her, her execu- tion was respited, by virtue of a reprieve given her upon account of her being thought to be with child; which she pretended to be, in hopes it might be a means to save her life, or at least put off her death for a time. But when she had lain under condemnation almost ten months, and was found not to be with child, she was called to her former judgment. Then, being conveyed in a coach to Tyburn, on Friday, the 17th of December, 1708, she was there hanged, in the thirty first year of her age. [208] |