"A Hellish Murder": A Case of Petty Treason in Early Modern England
On March 2, 1688 a French midwife by the name of Marie Hobry was taken by Sheriff’s Officers from Newgate Prison in London and removed to Leicester Fields, where she was hanged before being burnt at the stake.[i] Marie was executed for the crime of murdering her husband of four years, Denis Hobry on January 27, 1688. Under the laws of England at the time, the murder of a husband by a wife was considered a crime against domestic authority and required a charge of petty treason rather than just murder. Popular accounts of the early modern period reveal that petty treason was seen as a deeply gendered crime, designed and enforced to protect the entrenched domestic social structure that demanded obeisance from a wife just as a man did the same for the King. Women were indicted for petty treason at ten times the rate that men were, and given that a husband inherited the right to “correct” or beat his wife “within limits” from the moment they were married, just as it was expected for a mona