ABSTRACT
Margaret Vincent’s crimes of killing of her own children were particularly heinous in large part because Margaret was known to be a sober, civil, witty, and educated gentlewoman. She was supposed to be a paragon of virtue in a society that looked to the upper orders to learn how to behave with propriety and modesty. After her crimes, Margaret was “now deserving no name of gentlewoman”. Instead, after her crime, Margaret was a “creature not deserving mother’s name” and (rather like John Arthur and Martha Scambler discussed in the last chapter) was “more unnatural than pagan, cannibal, savage, beast or fowl”. According to the author, Margaret’s crimes were motivated by her conversion to Roman Catholicism. As we have seen, this is a common theme in the crime chapbook genre in which “papists” are often depicted as being deceitful anti-Christs thirsting after the blood of true Christians. Like the Devil’s ease of enticing “the female kind” and the “weak sex” to witchcraft, so too were Catholics so persuasive that even an honest gentlewoman could be ensnared by their charms. Margaret became convinced that she had to end the lives of any Protestants who opposed the Catholic faith. She targeted her children for these murders because they had been “hoodwinked … from the true light” by her husband, who refused to be converted. While in prison awaiting death, she became repentant of her actions, and the author is convinced that, despite “the blood of her two innocent children so willfully shed”, her sins were washed away “by the mercies of God”. More than anything, this story is a warning to women, and especially gentlewomen, to be careful around Catholics and to be good wives and mothers, all of which were familiar themes in the crime chapbook genre.
