Trial of Mary Blandy

In 1752, Mary Blandy was the respectable daughter of a country attorney in Henley-upon-Thames, until she became the most infamous woman in England. Her father opposed her relationship with the charming but penniless Captain William Cranstoun, and when he fell ill and died after repeated doses of a "love potion" Mary had given him, she found herself on trial for parricide. The case gripped a nation hungry for scandal. Cranstoun fled, leaving Mary to face the gallows alone, maintaining until her execution that she'd believed the white powder was merely a charm to win her father's affection. Was she a calculating murderess or a naive pawn in a darker man's scheme? Roughead reconstructs the trial with meticulous care, exposing the brutal mathematics of eighteenth-century justice, the peculiar romantic pharmacopeia of the era, and the precarious position of women whose only currency was their reputation. A devastating study of how love, desperation, and bad advice can destroy a life.