Real Historical Punishments 28-30

Real Punishments - 1767 Mary Clifford

28. Three indentured English apprentice girls (all named Mary), were caned and forced to work naked in front of men by their mistress, Elizabeth Brownrigg. Mary Clifford was treated worst. She was suspended from a beam to be caned, and kept in appalling conditions of dirt and starvation.

Mary C escaped to a hospital after intervention by parish officials, where she died. Brownrigg was hanged for murder, with the people lining the streets of her last ride to 'boo' and berate her. At one time the crowds would have liked to watch such canings, but this was the Age Of Enlightenment, and feelings were starting to change.


Real Punishments - 1768 Rosa Keller

29. At Arceuil near Paris, Rosa Keller was offered a job as a servant by a young nobleman. When she arrived for work she found out the true agenda of her new master, the Marquis de Sade. He made her strip naked at gunpoint, chained her up in the attic, and whipped her cruelly. He was jailed for this, and not for the last time.



Although he wrote about all kinds of strange perversions, the Marquis' actual practice was the simple situation pictured. He wasn't a nice guy by any stretch of the imagination, but unlike his contemporaries (both aristocrats and revolutionaries) he never killed anyone.


Real Punishments - 1786 Countess de LaMotte

30. This Countess of the noble Valois family became involved in a fraud concerning Queen Marie Antionette's diamonds. The Queen was furious and vengeful. Not present in court, LaMotte didn't hear her sentence until it was carried out. She was stripped bare in her cell and brought naked to Paris's public place of punishment, the Cours de Justice. The humiliated Countess was then flogged - some accounts say with switches, others with rods. All the time, she screamed insults at her captors and struggled violently. Then she was branded with a hot iron and jailed.




After she was released, the Countess travelled through England making money from her memoirs and stirring up support for the French Revolution. She was quite willing to show the marks of her punishment to gain sympathy. Marie Antoinette, of course, got a worse sentence than the Countess when the Revolution came. I wonder if Dickens' "Madame DeFarge" (who knitted and laughed as the guillotine did its work) was really Countess de LaMotte in disguise. :)