It’s a Man’s World, Even in Death: Mary Ann Weems, Murdered and Remembered at The Hands of Her Husband
“As a warning to the Young of both Sexes This Stone is erected by public Subscription.” These words greet passersby in Godmanchester’s St. Mary the Virgin Church. The gargantuan headstone above Mary Ann Weems’ grave serves not only as a memorial of her 1819 murder, but also invites a troubling tarnish of her identity.
Her story has stood in this cemetery for centuries, visible
to onlookers. Unlike other headstones, her role as the victim, murdered,
perhaps even blamed, is attributed to her memory. Mary Ann arguably cannot rest
in peace. The events of her life and death are brought up each time her final
resting place is passed. Unlike other headstones in this cemetery, her life is
memorialised, made permanent, in this stone.
A community decision to immortalise this event is crucial
for examining the involvement of gendered expectations being perpetuated even
in death. Murder is brutal. It is the action of intentionally taking away the
life of another human. Thomas Weems, her husband and murderer, is forever tied
to her story through her headstone. His actions, laid out on the stone, tell
the ghastly tale of deceit culminating in the barbarous act. This event would
have reached local newspapers and would have attracted considerable attention
from the time the murder occurred in May until the trial and execution in
August of the same year. As such, we must ask what prompted the community to
place such a stone?
The very nature of it, prominent, visible and detailed, shows
the desire for the event to be memorialised. Whether Mary Ann would have wished the circumstances leading to her ‘compulsory marriage’ — and the assumption that she was pregnant — to be made public is another question entirely. Furthermore, the fact that we know
how the stone was erected, through “public Subscription”, shows how important
it was for the local community to involve itself in Mary Ann’s situation. Could
this be a sense of guilt?
Close your eyes and imagine a Victorian. Who do you see?
Most likely, I’d imagine you would envisage a man dressed in dark colours with an
austere appearance. Victorian society has been typified as a serious society
guided by morals. These morals, including reserved attitudes towards sexual
relationships and behaviour, would likely have been present in Mary Ann’s life.
Her “compulsory marriage” was likely governed by her parish, which did not wish
for any potential child from these relations between her and Thomas to taint her
child. The idea of unmarried couples having a child would have been out of the
question. It was not the ‘done’ thing to do.
I believe that this stone, this story, this legacy for Weems
was an attempt to suppress guilt - a way to highlight to other parishioners
that this marriage was intended for good, and that the parish had done what
they thought was their duty. Yet, things went so badly for Mary Ann, and these
Victorian morals did their deed, complicit in her death.
The historian Sarah Murden has delved further into the
circumstances surrounding Weems's marriage on her blog All Things Georgian
[1]. Through her research, she discovered that Mary Ann and Thomas were married
in the parish church of Goldington, Bedfordshire, on January 3, 1818. This
marriage was indeed founded on the principle that Mary Ann was pregnant. This
turned out later not to be true. Thomas, who had departed soon after the
wedding, had found company elsewhere, leading to his diabolical actions in
1819.
Murden’s research suggests that Godmanchester as a parish
took the initiative to commemorate this poor woman who was murdered at the
hands of one of their former parishioners. Yet, including remarks about the
circumstances leading to her marriage suggests she was not entirely exonerated
by their judgment.
Even though Mary Ann had given her life at the hands of her husband’s
desires, she was still tied to societal expectations of morality and purity. She
could not rest. Even now, she remains judged by the moral standards of early
19th-century Godmanchester. She is much less a victim and much more a
cautionary tale. Still, instead of an allegorical novella of fictitious
characters, she is unfortunately real, dead and buried at the hands of her
husband’s actions.
As a modern observer, a woman, and someone turning 21 (the same age as Mary Ann when she was murdered), I find it hard to distance
the events of 1819 from today. Domestic violence still occurs, with many men
and women suffering in silence. This case of the nineteenth century highlights
how social pressures place women in dangerous situations. Mary Ann may have
escaped death had she and Thomas been spared a rushed marriage. Had their
parish waited to see if she were pregnant, perhaps this could have been
avoided? How many other women have died in similar ways, but their partners
live to tell the tale and avoid prosecution? These questions push me to view
her grave as not a caring monument, but instead an attack on her character and reducing
her to no more than the character of a story, rather than the real person she
would have been.
Perhaps the issue with cases such as these is the endurance
of husbands as murderers in the presence of the deceased’s resting place. Mary
Ann’s remains cannot be distanced from her story, unless she is exhumed and
reburied, or the headstone is removed. Neither of which, I believe, is likely
to happen anytime soon. The husband's role, even as the killer, is made
permanent. He could have been nameless, and her headstone could have been a
lament to the tragic events that occurred, but instead, his name is etched beside hers, inescapable. For this reason, her headstone must be viewed as this propaganda for
morality and not a memorandum for the person she was, or could have been.
[1] https://georgianera.wordpress.com/tag/godmanchester/
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