Mary Toft - Confession

Confession

The hoax was uncovered on 4 December. Thomas Onslow, 2nd Baron Onslow, had begun an investigation of his own and discovered that for the past month Toft's husband, Joshua, had been buying young rabbits. Convinced he had enough evidence to proceed, in a letter to physician Hans Sloane he wrote that the affair had "almost alarmed England" and that he would soon publish his findings. The same day, Thomas Howard, a porter at the bagnio, confessed to Justice of the Peace Sir Thomas Clarges that he had been bribed by Toft's sister-in-law, Margaret, to sneak a rabbit into Toft's chamber. When arrested and questioned Mary denied the accusation, while Margaret, under Douglas's interrogation, claimed that she had obtained the rabbit for eating only.

I told my sister of my having sent for a rabbit and I desire her to give it to the porter to be carryed away which my sister did saying she would not have it known for 1000 pd. —Mary Toft

Manningham examined Toft and thought something remained in the cavity of her uterus, and so he successfully persuaded Clarges to allow her to remain at the bagnio. Douglas, who had by then visited Toft, questioned her on three or four occasions, each time for several hours. After several days of this Manningham threatened to perform a painful operation on her, and on 7 December, in the presence of Manningham, Douglas, John Montagu and Frederick Calvert, Toft finally confessed. Following her miscarriage and while her cervix permitted access, an accomplice had inserted into her womb the claws and body of a cat, and the head of a rabbit. They had also invented a story in which Toft claimed that during her pregnancy and while working in a field, she had been startled by a rabbit, and had since become obsessed with rabbits. For later parturitions, animal parts had been inserted into her vagina.

Pressured again by Manningham and Douglas (it was the latter who took her confession), she made a further admission on 8 December and another on 9 December, before being sent to Tothill Fields Bridewell, charged on a statute of Edward III as a "vile cheat and imposter". In her earlier, unpublished confessions, she blamed the entire affair on a range of other participants, from her mother-in-law to John Howard. She also claimed that a travelling woman told her how to insert the rabbits into her body, and how such a scheme would ensure that she would "never want as long as I liv'd". The British Journal reported that on 7 January 1727 she appeared at the Courts of Quarter Sessions at Westminster, charged "for being an abominable cheat and imposter in pretending to be delivered of several monstrous births". Margaret Toft had remained staunch, and refused to comment further. Mist's Weekly Journal of 24 December 1726 reported that "the nurse has been examined as to the person's concerned with her, but either was kept in the dark as to the imposition, or is not willing to disclose what she knows; for nothing can be got from her; so that her resolution shocks others."