Martha Ray

Martha Ray, by Nathaniel Dance 1777

Martha Ray (* 1742 in Covent Garden , London ; † April 7, 1779 there ) was an English singer ( soprano ). She was the maitresse of the Earl of Sandwich and her assassination by a jealous suitor in 1779 caused a sensation.

Life

Martha Ray was the daughter of a corset maker. Her mother was a servant in a noble household. She was considered good-looking. From the age of 17 - at that time she was an apprentice to a coat maker - she was the maitresse of the Earl of Sandwich and had five children with him. One of their children was Basil Montague (1770-1851), who as a lawyer played an essential role in the reform of the English bankruptcy law . Although the Earl of Sandwich was married (his wife was considered mentally deranged and lived in an apartment at Windsor Castle ) Ray and the Earl lived together as husband and wife in the Earl's house in Hinchingbrooke. In addition, she successfully pursued a career as a singer.

Around 1778 she met the officer James Hackman (1752-1779), whom the Earl of Sandwich had introduced her. He was considered a capable, sensitive young man from a respected family. They may also have had an affair, but that is not certain. Hackman, who fell in love with her, left the army to become a clergyman in 1779 ( ordained a priest of the Church of England in February and became rector of Wiveton ) and planned to marry Ray. But this refused his request, which drove his jealousy. He suspected that she had a new lover. On April 7, 1779 Ray and her friend Caterina Galli went to a charity opera performance at the Royal Theater in Covent Garden (the comic opera Love in a Village by Isaac Bickerstaffe was performed). In her box , which was close to the royal box, she also received male admirers during the performance, such as William Hanger (3rd Baron Coleraine, 1744–1814), a member of parliament whom Hackman suspected of being her lover (whether he really was, remained open). Hackman had secretly followed her to the opera. During the five-hour performance, he went to the opera several times and in between got drunk in a nearby coffeehouse. When Ray and her friend left the opera at a quarter past 11 a.m. under the admiring gaze of their numerous admirers, she shot Hackman while getting into a carriage with a head-on head shot. He then tried to shoot himself but only wounded himself and then tried to kill himself with his pistols . He was immediately arrested and found two letters on him, one rejection by Ray, the other a suicide note with a confession . Hackman was on April 16 in the Old Bailey accused sentenced to death and on April 19 in front of a large crowd in Tyburn ge depends .

The murder caused a sensation and hit the Earl of Sandwich hard. The journalist Herbert Croft made the subject of his popular novel s Love and Madness (1780), which initially appeared anonymously and was a bestseller that was reprinted into the 19th century, most recently in the literary revision of Gilbert Burgess ( The Love Letters of Mr. H and Miss R 1775-1779 , 1895). At the time, the audience initially thought that the letters reproduced there were genuine. Hackman is portrayed in a romantic light, and in medical literature the case was then often seen as an example of delirious love ( erotomania ). One of the themes of the novel, however, was falsification of literature, which was a concern of the public at the time. The Victorian era saw the affair as an example of the debauchery of the Georgian era of the 18th century.

She was buried in Elstree , Hertfordshire .

literature

• Martin Levy: Love and Madness: The Murder of Martha Ray, Mistress of the Fourth Earl of Sandwich. Harper & Brothers 2004
• William Weber: Ray, Martha (1742? -1779), singer and murder victim , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004

Web links

• John Brewer, Fatal Triangle, Smithsonian

References and comments

1. ↑ According to Weber, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, some sources cite 1745
2. ↑ Contemporaries described them as “not what one would call elegant, but nicely fitting under the description; she was about 1.64 m tall, had fresh complexion and wore a constant smile on her face that made every viewer pleasant "(" not what we would call elegant, but which would pass under the denomination of pretty; her height was about five feet five inches; she was fresh-colored, and had a perpetual smile on her countenance, which rendered her agreeable to every beholder "). An admirer described her as the second Cleopatra. Brewer, Fatal Triangle, Smithsonian  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )