CONVICTION 160 YEARS ON
But what was her motive?
Two witnesses claimed John was abusive, had a drink problem and often struck her.
They also accused him of having an affair with local woman Mary Davis.
The truth only came out while Martha was awaiting execution and a chaplain persuaded her to confess to the crime.
She admitted killing John, but insisted it was in self-defence.
Martha wrote: “I asked him what he had done with his hat and he abused me and said, ‘What’s that to do with you, damn you?’ I said, ‘What makes you so cross? Have you been to Mary Davis?’
“We continued quarrelling to 3am when he struck me a severe blow to the side of the head and reached down from the side of the mantelpiece a heavy hand whip with a plaited head and struck me across the shoulders with it three times. He immediately stood down to unlace his boots and, much enraged and in an ungovernable passion at being so abused and struck, I seized a hatchet and struck him several violent blows on the head.
“As soon as I had done it I would have given the world not to have done it.
“I’d never struck him before after all his ill treatment but when he hit me so hard this time, I was almost out of my senses and hardly knew what I was doing.”
Incredibly, until 1898, defendants in Britain were not allowed to give evidence.
Jeremy said: “What you often found is when they made their statement before execution, it was the first time they had actually spoken. It’s tragic. There’s no guarantee she had a fair trial.”
He believes a defence of loss of control could have seen Martha convicted of manslaughter and saved from the hangman’s noose. But even a petition to spare her was treated with contempt.
Because the Home Secretary was on holiday at the time, it was denied by a public official.
“That was outrageous,” said Jeremy. “Someone who didn’t even have the power turned her plea down.
“If that hadn’t happened she may not have been executed and we wouldn’t have had Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”
Martha’s hanging – the last ever public execution in Dorset – haunted Hardy for the rest of his life. Seventy years later, he described her on the scaffold in a letter, and wrote: “What
Hardy’s literary masterpiece a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back.”
When he wrote Tess Of the D’Urbervilles in 1892, critics slammed Hardy for his dark pessimism.
But the story persisted. Tess, played by Gemma Arterton in the 2008 BBC dramatisation of the book, is believed to have inspired many suffragettes.
And Hardy’s novel is now praised as a courageous call for righting wrongs against women.
He hit me so hard this time, I hardly knew what I was doing Martha brown CONVICTED MURDERESS
■■Murder, Mystery and My Family will be on BBC One tomorrow morning at 10am.