Mary "Molly" Hamilton aka Charles Hamilton (born 1721 - after 1752) was publicly whipped and sent to prison for ‘marrying’ three unsuspecting women, was punished, not as a female sodomite, but as someone who had ‘by false and deceitful practices endeavoured to impose on some of his Majesty’s subjects’. In Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746), a highly fictionalised account of the female cross-dresser, May Hamilton, the heroine is first seduced into same-sex passion by a Methodist, Anne Johnson.
Born in approximately 1721, she came to light having been arrested under the Vagrancy Act in 1776, ‘for having by false and deceitful practices endeavoured to impose on some of his Majesty’s subjects.’ It was claimed that whilst posing as a physician she had tricked two women at least about her gender when starting relationships with them, and indeed, married two of them; in court it was also alleged that a dildo was found in her belongings and this was shown as evidence of her intent to deceive. ‘Charles’ was found guilty, publicly whipped in four market towns and imprisoned for six months. Author Henry Fielding was so intrigued by this case that he wrote a partly fictionalised account of it in his pamphlet The Female Husband, published in 1746.
In England Hamilton had taken the name of Charles, claimed to be a physician, and married a woman named Mary Price. After two months of marriage, Price reported her husband to the authorities, claiming that Hamilton had “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.” After suffering four public floggings and six months in prison, Hamilton seems to have set sail and ended up outside Philadelphia, where in 1752, again as a doctor, she was discovered to be a woman. She was detained in case anyone came forward to accuse her of fraud, but apparently no one did.
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