A piece of cheap jewellery, a coin or a letter from an Irishwoman pleading for her child as she faced the gallows – these were mementoes left by mothers giving up their babies in 18th century London, writes MARK HENNESSY

Margaret Larney went to her death on the gallows at Tyburn on Monday, October 2nd, 1758, still protesting that she had been convicted of counterfeiting on the false testimony of a woman “known to her from child”. Larney, born in Wicklow 34 years before, had written to London’s Foundling Hospital, pleading that her son James should be given the chance to know his older brother, John, already an inmate of the Bloomsbury Fields institution.

Today, her letter forms one of the centre-pieces of an exhibition, Fate, Hope and Charity at the Foundling Museum on Brunswick Square in London, which includes love tokens left behind by 18,000 mothers between 1741 and 1760 as they lost sight of their children.

“I am the unfortunate woman that lies under sentens of Death in Newgatt, ” Larney wrote from her cell in Newgate Prison awaiting execution. She had two other children in the workhouse and a husband, Terence, who had fled the scene.

“I beg for the tender mercy of God to let them know one and other for Dear Sir I hear you are a very good Gentelman and God blessing and mine be with you and they for ever. Sir, I am your humble servant, Margaret Larney.”

The Wicklow woman’s steps towards her end came on December 1757 when Larney was held at her home in Drury Lane by bailiffs investigating the widespread tampering with “the King’s coin” by counterfeit, or by shaving the edges of the coins to remove the silver or gold. Two weeks later, she stood trial for her life in the Old Bailey charged with “feloniously and traiterously” using a file to “diminish one piece of good and lawful money of the current coin of this kingdom, call’d a guinea”.

Larney’s so-called friend, Alice Diamond, nee Boyce, had previously evaded charges of counterfeiting, but she was quick to support the prosecution’s case, even though she could not claim to have witnessed Larney’s recent alleged crimes. “How long is it ago since you saw her file a guinea?” Boyce was asked.

“It is rather better than 10 months ago,” replied Diamond. “Where did she file it?” pressed the prosecutor. “In her own room in Drury Lane,” he was told.

“How came she to let you see her?” the prosecutor went on. “I call’d there as an acquaintance to see her; I had heard something of her doing it, but never saw her do it before,” replied the woman, seen as a friend up until then by Larney.

However, Larney was not without friends. A woman by the name of Elizabeth Roberts told magistrates that not only was Larney innocent, but that the files found in her lodgings had been left there weeks before in suspicious circumstances.

The judgment was not long in coming: death. Larney was to be drawn “upon a burdle” from Newgate to Tyburn “and then burnt to death”, though that sentence had by then morphed into death by hanging.

Death, however, could not come immediately, as she was three months pregnant. Under British law, the unborn could not be killed, a distinction that allegedly encouraged some women to get pregnant if faced with execution – the so-called “pleading the belly” defence.

Larney, who was pregnant before she was arrested, came to believe that she could escape the noose: “She began to hope that these dangers and sufferings would have entitled her to a longer respite and exchanged her sentence for transportation,” wrote Stephen Roe, Newgate’s records-keeper.

“In vain she now found the sting of transgressing this law, too certain to be avoided; a law so important and necessary to the preservation of the current coin of the nation entire and undiminished, on which the public credit, commerce, national justice, and the facility of dealing do greatly depend.

“She now sound to her inexpressible grief, that private compassion, however Strong must give way to public justice and the common (weal),” wrote Roe, in records which are today available online from the Old Bailey.

However, she refused to accept she was guilty – conduct that disgusted Roe: “I know it has been often said that Popery is the finest religion in the world to be hanged with but I could never see the truth or reason of this unweigh’d opinion.” By refusing to admit her guilt, Roe, and most others of the time, would have believed that she had denied herself God’s grace and was “to be pitied and lamented, who, by thus trusting in lying vanities, forsake their own mercy”.

Larney’s story is “a tragic tale”, say the exhibition’s organisers, but it is not unusual for a time when 18,000 children were handed into the Foundling, set up by benefactor Thomas Coram in the teeth of objections.

“It was thought that it would encourage licentiousness behaviour, but he was shocked at the numbers of abandoned children on the streets in poverty. He saw it as a waste of life,” says the museum’s Stephanie Chapman.

Each day, Coram walked the streets, appalled at the sight of abandoned dead and dying babies. By then 54, the childless plantation-owner was spurred into action, although it was 17 years before his demand for an institution, backed by Royal Charter, bore fruit.

“He had worked in the colonies, he had seen the problems caused by a lack of men out there, a lack of workers. He thought these children could be turned into useful citizens and so that was really the basis behind the Foundling,” says Chapman. If accepted, children were sent by the Foundling to wet-nurses throughout London, who looked after them until they were four or five, and then they were brought back to Brunswick Square until they were 14 and sent for apprenticeship, or domestic service.

The Foundling, which was backed by composer George Frederic Handel and painter and satirist William Hogarth, was ahead of its time in its attitude to childcare. It did not, however, believe in upsetting society’s norms. Looking at the uniforms worn by the children – a military style for the boys, a servant’s for the girls – Chapman said: “They would have been brought up to know their place, to know that some things were possible and some weren’t.”

Each mother left a token to prove their connection to the child in the often forlorn hope that they could one day come back to reclaim. The token – sometimes a letter, a treasured memento, or a piece of cheap jewellery – was wrapped carefully in the child’s file.

Some had a special, tender, but unknown meaning: a punched hazelnut; or a coin punched carefully in 10 different places. Others carry the badge of history, for example, the “gun money” coins made of scrap used by King Charles to buy the loyalty of his soldiers a century before.

Just 500 mothers managed to return to reclaim their children though only half of them succeeded. Too often, the child had died. Sometimes the usually-illiterate mother could not remember “the date the child was admitted, or they gave slightly wrong information”. The pressure on space became acute with 1756’s “general reception”, when the government gave the Foundling – funded up to then by donations and popular charity concerts and art exhibitions – money to accept all children.

Up until then, it ran a ballot to decide who would be accepted, so great was the demand in an era when unwanted children were often strangled or left on the street in the hope that passersby would feel sympathy.

The extra money, however, brought death rather than life for many. “Previously, they wouldn’t have accepted children with obvious diseases. The admission rates increased to a ridiculous amount, they struggled to count,” says Chapman.

One of the dead was James Larney, renamed William Beach by the Foundling, though it is not known if he had died before his mother was hanged in Tyburn. Her other son, John, re-named George Millett, became an apprentice to a hat-maker.

“We don’t know much about him other than that he became an apprentice but that was pretty good. He made it through,” says Chapman, as she leafs through records. “That was a great result for the time.”

Fate, Hope Charity, the untold stories of the Foundling Hospital tokens, is at the The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, London until Thursday, May 19th foundlingmuseum.org.uk

The foundling hospital

The Foundling Hospital, set up for “the maintenance of exposed and deserted young children”, asked parents to leave “some particular writing, or peculiar thing” to prove their link to a child. Most, because they were illiterate, left tokens: halved-items, such as the sleeve of a child’s garment, or a playing card that could be joined up later; or coins with holes, threaded through with ribbons. An Irish half-penny left with Mary Russell (above, second from left) who was admitted in 1759, was given eight deep notches. Few were reunited, partly because a parent had to pay for the cost of raising the child before they would be told if their loved one was alive. Even if the child had died the bill had to be paid.