Come all you thoughtless young men, a warning take by me,
And think upon my unhappy fate to be hanged upon a tree;
My name is William Corder, to you I do declare,
I courted Maria Marten, most beautiful and fair.
I promised I would marry her upon a certain day,
Instead of that, I was resolved to take her life away.
I went into her father’s house the 18th day of May,
Saying, my dear Maria, we will fix the wedding day.
If you will meet me at the Red-barn, as sure as I have life,
I will take you to Ipswich town, and there make you my wife;
I then went home and fetched my gun, my pickaxe and my spade,
I went into the Red-barn, and there I dug her grave.
With heart so light, she thought no harm, to meet him she did go
He murdered her all in the barn, and laid her body low;
After the horrible deed was done, she lay weltering in her gore,
Her bleeding mangled body he buried beneath the Red-barn floor.
Now all things being silent, her spirit could not rest,
She appeared onto her mother, who suckled her at her breast,
For many a long month or more, her mind being sore oppress’d,
Neither night or day she could not take any rest.
Her mother’s mind being so disturbed, she dreamt three nights o’er,
Her daughter she lay murdered beneath the Red-barn floor;
She sent the father to the barn, when he the ground did thrust,
And there he found his daughter mingling with the dust.
My trial is hard, I could not stand, most woeful was the sight,
When her jaw-bone was brought to prove, which pierced my heart quite;
Her aged father standing by, likewise his loving wife,
And in her grief her hair she tore, she scarcely could keep life.
Adieu, adieu, my loving friends, my glass is almost run,
On Monday next will be my last, when I am to be hang’d,
So you, young men, who do pass by; with pity look on me,
For murdering Maria Marten, I was hang’d upon the tree.
Printed by J Catnach, 2 and 3, Monmouth Court.—Cards, &c., Printed Cheap
“Oh, she lives snug in the Holy Land,
Right, tight, and merry in the Holy Land,
Search the globe round, none can be found
So accommodating! as Old Mother Cummins—of the Holy Land.”
Catnach, like many others connected with the getting up of news broadsides and fly-sheets, did not always keep clear of the law. The golden rule is a very fine one, but, unfortunately, it is not always read aright; in some cases injured innocence flies at extremes. Jemmy Catnach for a long time had been living upon unfriendly terms with a party connected with the management of one of Mother Cummins’s lodging-house establishments in the immediate neighbourhood, so out of spite printed a pamphlet, purporting to be the “Life and Adventures of Old Mother Cummins.” Here Catnach had reckoned without his host, by reason of his not taking into consideration the extensive aristocratic and legal connection Mother Cummins had for her friends and patrons. The moment she was made acquainted with the “dirty parjury” that Jemmy Catnach had printed and caused to be publicly circulated, she immediately gave instructions to her Attorney General to prosecute the varmint, when a warrant was applied for and obtained to search the premises of the Seven Dials printer. But Catnach got the news of the intended visit of the Bow Street Runners, and naturally became alarmed from having a vivid recollection of the punishment and costs in the case of the Drury-lane sausage makers, so the forme containing the libellous matter was at once broken up—“pied,” that is, the type was jumbled together and left to be properly distributed on a future occasion. What stock of the pamphlets remained were hastily packed up and carried off to the “other side of the water” by John Morgan, one of Catnach’s poets! while another forme, consisting of a Christmas-sheet, entitled “The Sun of Righteousness,” was hurriedly got to press, and all hands were working away full of assumed innocence when the officers from Bow Street arrived at Monmouth-court, when, after a diligent search, they had very reluctantly to come to the conclusion that they were “a day behind the fair,” and that the printer had been a little too sharp for them this time. But Mother Cummins did not mean to be so checkmated by Catnach and Co., and vowed to pursue him and his dirty blackguards to the end of the world and back again, and instructed her lawyers to serve him with several notices of action for libel, defamation of character, and, more particular, as she expressed it, for “parjury.” Then Catnach became somewhat alarmed by her known vindictive disposition and long purse, that he consulted his own solicitor in the matter, who took “counsel’s opinion” when an instant compromise at all costs, together with an ample apology, was recommended as the only safe way out of the dilemma; a course which was ultimately agreed to by both sides. An apology was drawn up and approved of, with the understanding that Catnach was, after paying all costs incurred to print the apology and publish the same on three several places in front of his business premises in Monmouth Court for fourteen clear days. All this—and more—Jemmy promised steadfastly to observe. Yet in effect, he evaded the conditions by printing the apology in small pica type and sticking the three copies so high up on the premises, that it would have required Sam Weller’s “pair of double million magnifying gas microscopes of hextra power” to have been able to read the same.
Immediately after Mother Cummins’s death and funeral, March, 1828, the following announcement appeared:—
Published this Day, Price Sixpence, embellished with a
humorous Coloured Plate.
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF
MOTHER CUMMINS,