Although the date of this article should serve as a warning for homophobic content, it presents an extremely thorough dissection of three topics: the evidence for Henry Fielding as author of The Female Husband, the relationship of The Female Husband to the objective facts of Mary Hamilton’s life and trial (i.e., tenuous), and the most likely sources for Fielding’s fictional additions and substitutions. I’m going to skim over much of the detailed evidence, but will use this opportunity to include the text of the primary sources that Baker quotes.
England
Covering topics relating specifically to England or generally to the region equivalent to the modern United Kingdom. Sometimes lazily and inaccurately used generally for the British Isles, especially when articles don’t specifically identify the nationality of authors.
LHMP entry
In 1746, a young woman named Mary Price discovered that her recently-wed husband was assigned female at birth. She considered herself to have been defrauded and brought the matter to the attention of the law. Her husband was tried and found guilty under the vagrancy laws. England had no laws that addressed cross-dressing or gender-crossing specifically, and the legal records indicate that the system did a certain amount of head-scratching to figure out what charges to bring—though they were clear that they planned to find something.
The Second Edition Material
As done for Mary Read, here’s a highly speculative timeline structured around key events in the General History narrative, though there are fewer anchor points to specific dates. (Both women’s narratives make reference to things like the King’s Pardon, but in ways that don’t align well with the known timelines.) I’ve included some details from the 2nd edition which elaborate on events but don’t add substantial changes to the timeline. Many of the dates are vague estimates based on trying to coordinate descriptions in the General History to documented historic events.
The LIFE of ANNE BONNY.
Only two events in Read’s narrative can be tied with certainty to a specific date: her husband’s death around the date of the Peace of Reswick, which occurred in 1697, and her capture and trial in 1720. The following highly speculative timeline is worked backwards and forwards around these dates. Note that this timeline attempts to make sense of the General History narrative, without otherwise evaluating its likely accuracy.
The LIFE of MARY READ,
The General History of the Pirates
And now we’re ready to see what the General History says about Bonny and Read, three years after these events. The text I have is the second edition. My understanding is that the first edition also contained the material on Bonny and Read in the main text, but that only the appendices were new to the second edition.
Sorting Out Rackham’s Crew
Given the wide variety of numbers given for Rackham’s crew, it might be useful to digress a moment and try to sort things out.
I was inspired to tackle this set of material because of the flood of sapphic “pirate romances,” many of which are reworkings of the myth (and I use “myth” advisedly) of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, while others spin off from the Hollywood version of the broader myths of the Golden Age of Piracy derived from the anonymously authored General History of the Pirates. As often happens, I was curious to know the original primary source materials that set these myths in motion. Moreover, I was curious to try to determine what parts of that source material might have any basis in fact.
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