The Female Husband

Mary Hamilton
A fanciful 1813 illustration of Hamilton being whipped, wearing male boots and breeches, but naked from the waist up
Born	Mary Hamilton c.1721-4 Somerset
Died	unknown
Nationality	UK
Occupation	'quack' doctor
Years active	1746

Mary Hamilton (fl. 1746) was the subject of a notorious 18th-century case of fraud and female cross-dressing, in which Hamilton, under the name of Charles, duped a woman into a supposed marriage.

While the surviving records of the case indicate that Hamilton was only prosecuted for deceiving one woman into marriage, newspaper reports at the time claimed that there had been 14 marriages in all. A 1746 account in the Newgate calendar gives other details.

Henry Fielding published a partially fictionalised account of the case under the title The Female Husband.

In 1746 Hamilton was brought before the summer Quarter Sessions in Taunton, Somerset. According to the local newspaper report, "There was a great Debate for some Time in Court about the Nature of her Crime, and what to call it", but at last it was agreed that she should be charged with fraud."

According to Hamilton's own deposition, she was born in Somerset, the daughter of Mary and William Hamilton. Her family later moved to Scotland. When she was fourteen, she used her brother's clothes to pose as a boy, travelled to Northumberland and entered the service of a Dr. Edward Green (described in the deposition as a "mountebank") and later of a Dr. Finey Green. She studied to become a "quack doctor" as an apprentice of the two unlicensed practitioners. In 1746, she moved to Wells, and set up a medical practice of her own under the name Charles Hamilton. She met Mary Price, a relative of her landlady, whom she married in July 1746. The marriage lasted for two months before her true sex was discovered, and she was arrested.

A deposition from Mary Price says that after the marriage she and Hamilton travelled selling medicines. During the marriage Hamilton "entered her body several times, which made this examinant believe, at first, that the said Hamilton was a real man, but soon had reason to judge that the said Hamilton was not a man, but a woman". When they were in Glastonbury, Price confronted her. Hamilton admitted the truth to Price, at which point she reported the matter and Hamilton was arrested.

The justices delivered their verdict that "The he or she prisoner at the bar is an uncommon, notorious cheat, and we, the Court, do sentence her, or him, whichever he or she may be, to be imprisoned six months, and during that time to be whipped in the towns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shepton Mallet ..."

The report in the Newgate Calendar concludes "And Mary, the monopoliser of her own sex, was imprisoned and whipped accordingly, in the severity of the winter of the year 1746".