-
1. Foremothers: Divers Lewd Women
- The Feminist Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 foremothers:diverslewdwomen [18.234.55.154] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:41 GMT) 43 1 A seamstress named Margaret Nicholson waited by the garden entrance to the Palace of St. James’s for the returning carriage of King George III. In her gloved hands she carried a “memorial”—a written petition to the king—and, concealed beneath it, a long knife. The carriage arrived, the king descended, and Margaret Nicholson pressed forward to deliver her memorial and a stroke of the knife; but the king was saved by his exceedingly fine manners. As he took up the paper he bowed deeply to Miss Nicholson and so avoided the blow. Soon enough, the king’s attendant yeomen caught “her drift” and disarmed her. Under questioning Nicholson claimed she had not meant to kill the king but only to terrify him so that he would grant her petition . The paper, however, was blank. When her landlords testified that Nicholson mumbled to herself a good deal, the king clucked over the poor woman, magnanimously refused to press charges, and committed her temporarily to the custody of one of his messengers who, for lack of anything else to do with her, took her to his home in Half Moon Street. What else was the fellow to do? It was 1786, just a few years too late to pack her off to America, where for years England had been dumping her riffraff. From the very beginning of colonization, England had seen North America as (among other things) a convenient refuse heap. Abrupt changes in England from a feudal to a commercial economy had produced an enormous class of rootless, migratory poor people who turned for survival to crime. For the most part, their crimes were fairly trivial matters of shoplifting or pickpocketing, but the seventeenth-century Englishmen of property were alarmed and saw to it that the law defined more than three hundred crimes, including even such petty offenses, as major felonies punishable by death. Soon the country seemed to be overrun with felons, but the American colonies provided an out. Enforced transportation of felons to the New World, argued supporters of the policy, offered three distinct benefits: it relieved England of its criminal population; it improved the character of the individual criminals by giving them employment; and it provided labor needed to sustain the colonies. 44 James I initiated the policy in 1615, when he empowered members of the Privy Council to reprieve ablebodied felons “fitt to be ymploied in forraine discoveries or other services beyond the Seas” and willing to be transported to the colonies. Within the year, the first twenty convicts had been reprieved and handed over to Sir Thomas Smith, governor of the East India Company, for transportation to the East Indies. For the next twenty years Smith received convicts from the crown and shipped them to Virginia. Over the years, cumbersome legal procedures were changed several times to make conditional pardoning a formality. Sheriffs handed over reprieved felons directly to merchants who carried them to the colonies and sold them as indentured servants for the seven-year term required by law. By the mid-seventeenth century, transportation of felons was a private enterprise, and a lucrative one. Felons were brought in such numbers that colonial leaders feared for the health of society. Apparently the moral character of felons was not necessarily improved by moving them from one side of the Atlantic to the other. As one of the Georgia Trustees noted ruefully: “Many of the Poor who had been useless in England, were inclined to be useless likewise in Georgia.” Colonial court records, strewn with cases of convict-servants who burned their masters’ houses, stole their property, and murdered them, indicate that many people who had been criminal in England continued their criminal careers in America. In 1751, the Pennsylvania Gazette angrily commented on a recent series of convict robberies and murders: When we see our Papers fill’d continually with Accounts of the most audacious Robberies, the most cruel Murders, and infinite other Villainies perpetrated by Convicts transported from Europe, what melancholly , what terrible Reflections must it occasion! . . . In what can Britain show a more Sovereign Contempt for us, than by emptying their Jails into our Settlements; unless they would likewise empty their Jakes on our Tables? And Benjamin Franklin, petitioning Parliament in 1767 or 1768 to stop transporting felons, claimed the convicts “continue their evil practices” and “commit many burglaries, robberies, and murders, to the great...