The Midwife Who Tortured Her Apprentices

Elizabeth Brownrigg is remembered as one of the most reviled murderers in the history of Georgian London — a respectable, trusted woman who used her position of care to torture the vulnerable children placed in her charge, in a case so shocking that it horrified an entire nation and led to a public outpouring of rage rarely seen even in that hard age. Her story is a grim reminder that cruelty often wears the most respectable of faces — and that the true victims of her crimes were powerless orphan girls whom the world had already failed.

To understand it, you have to understand the system that delivered those children into her hands. In eighteenth-century London, poor and orphaned children — those with no family to protect them — were often placed out as “parish apprentices,” bound into the service of a household to work as domestic servants in exchange, supposedly, for care, training, and a roof over their heads. It was meant to be a route out of destitution. In reality, it left the most vulnerable children in the country entirely at the mercy of whoever took them in, with almost no one to check on their welfare. And in 1765, an institution called the Foundling Hospital, along with the parish authorities, began placing some of these girls with a woman who seemed the perfect, respectable guardian: Elizabeth Brownrigg.

By every outward measure, Brownrigg was a pillar of her community. She was a practising midwife — a skilled and trusted profession — married to a plumber named James Brownrigg, and living in a house in Fetter Lane, off Fleet Street. She had borne sixteen children of her own, though only three survived, and she had been formally appointed by the overseers of the poor of her parish to care for the poor women of the workhouse, a duty she was said to perform to her employers’ complete satisfaction. She was exactly the sort of woman the system trusted. And so several young pauper girls were bound over to her as apprentices, to serve in her home. They were entirely in her power. And behind the respectable door of that house in Fetter Lane, Elizabeth Brownrigg became a monster to them.

The Horror

The abuse began, and then it escalated, over the course of about two years, into sustained and systematic torture. The accounts of the case, drawn from the trial evidence, describe a pattern of appalling cruelty inflicted on these girls for the smallest of faults, or for no fault at all. Brownrigg would strip them, and tie them up — sometimes binding a girl across two chairs, sometimes hanging her up by a cord fastened to a hook or a beam in the kitchen ceiling — and whip and beat her, repeatedly and savagely, with such ferocity that she was said, on occasion, to have to stop only because she was too exhausted to continue. The girls were half-starved, made to sleep in a coal-hole or a cupboard, and kept in filthy, freezing conditions, their wounds left untended until they festered. One early victim, a girl named Mary Jones, endured such treatment that she managed to escape and flee back to the Foundling Hospital to report what was being done to her. The response of the authorities, chillingly, was not to remove the other children — it was merely to write to Brownrigg’s husband and ask him to keep his wife’s conduct in check. The girls left behind were abandoned to their fate.

Two of those girls were named Mary Mitchell and Mary Clifford. And Mary Clifford, in particular, became the focus of Brownrigg’s most relentless cruelty. She was subjected to the worst of the beatings, the bindings, the starvation — a prolonged ordeal that the writers of the time struggled to find words to describe, one contemporary account calling it “this murder by inches.” By the summer of 1767, Mary Clifford was in a desperate state, her body a mass of untreated, infected wounds. The end came when neighbours, who had grown suspicious of the cries and the misery within the house, finally raised the alarm, and the Foundling Hospital sent an inspector to investigate. Brownrigg tried to conceal what she had done — she produced Mary Mitchell but tried to hide Mary Clifford away. But the searchers found the dying girl, hidden in a cupboard, her body covered in terrible sores and lash marks, so injured that she could barely speak. Mary Clifford was rushed to hospital. But it was too late. She died of her injuries and their infections. She was only a young girl — by most accounts around fourteen years old.

The Modern Relic

The Brownriggs fled, but public feeling against them was so intense that their capture was swift — Elizabeth and her son were recognised by a shopkeeper in Wandsworth and seized. They were brought to trial at the Old Bailey in the autumn of 1767. The evidence, including the testimony of the surviving apprentice Mary Mitchell and the medical witnesses, was overwhelming. Elizabeth Brownrigg was convicted of the wilful murder of Mary Clifford and sentenced to death. Her husband and son, though implicated in the cruelty, were acquitted of murder and given lesser sentences. And on the 14th of September 1767, Elizabeth Brownrigg was taken to the gallows at Tyburn to be hanged.

The public rage that met her there was extraordinary. An enormous crowd gathered to watch her die, and they did not come in solemn silence — they came seething with hatred, cursing and execrating her, so filled with fury at what she had done to those helpless girls that she was said to be trembling with terror on the scaffold. When she was hanged, the crowd cheered. And her punishment did not end with her death. Under the law of the time — the Murder Act, which allowed the courts to add “further terror” to a murderer’s sentence by denying them a normal burial — Elizabeth Brownrigg’s body was not laid to rest. It was carried away to Surgeons’ Hall to be publicly dissected and anatomised, her corpse cut open before an audience. And then her skeleton itself was put on display, hung up in a niche at Surgeons’ Hall, so that, in the words of the time, “the heinousness of her cruelty might make the more lasting impression” — her very bones turned into a permanent public warning of what she had done.

The relic, then, is that skeleton, and the lasting mark her crime left on the law and the conscience of the nation. Elizabeth Brownrigg’s dissected remains were preserved and displayed for many years as a grim exhibit — the bones of the child-torturer, kept as a lesson. The site of the Tyburn gallows where she died is marked today near Marble Arch in London, a spot walked past by thousands who never know its history. But the deepest legacy of the case was not the punishment of Brownrigg — it was the horror it awakened. The murder of Mary Clifford, and the exposure of how easily a respectable guardian could torture the children entrusted to her while the authorities looked away, shocked Georgian society profoundly, and became one of the notorious cases that slowly forced a hard question upon the age: who was protecting the most vulnerable children of all? Elizabeth Brownrigg is remembered as a monster. But the ones who should truly be remembered are the girls she was trusted to care for — Mary Jones, Mary Mitchell, and above all young Mary Clifford, an orphan child failed by everyone who was supposed to keep her safe, whose suffering and death at least forced a callous world to begin to look, for the first time, at the hidden cruelty behind respectable doors.

← Back to the archive