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Last time, we talked about how Mary Toft of Godalming, in Surrey had attracted the attention of several of the Nation's most prestigious physicians due to her apparent ability to give birth to dead rabbits. Where we left off, the Doctors had brought their surprising patient back to London with them.

From Guildford to the centre of London is about 30 miles, nowadays about 40 minutes on the train or about an hour by car, and at the time would have been two days walk if you were poor, although Toft and the doctors probably went by coach, which would have taken about 8 hours. It would have been a busy route, with wagons and coaches and horses and people and animals moving between London and the ports of the South Coast. Mary Toft had likely never left small-town Surrey, and the biggest town she'd been to up to that point was probably Guildford, so Georgian London, probably the biggest city in Europe at the time, would have been an extraordinary spectacle to her.

She was put up in a Bagnio - that is, a boarding-house/spa/brothel - in Leicester Fields, now Leicester Square in the West End, a particularly posh part of London both then and now, near the apartments of both St André and the Prince of Wales. Late that night, he sent another message, as he had to Manningham, introducing the Toft Affair to yet another physician, this time the anatomist James Douglas.

"SIR,
I Have brought the Woman from Guilford to the Bagnio in Leicester Fields. She has now a live Rabbit in her, and I expect shortly a Delivery; you will infinitely oblige me to deliver her yourself."

He brought in another of the King's surgeons, Claudius Amyand, and eventually ended up with, according to one source, "All the eminent physicians, surgeons and men-midwives in London", waiting eagerly for the next rabbit to emerge.

Douglas was a well-known and well-respected anatomist and midwife. Unlike St André, his connections to the royal family were largely obtained on merit, rather than just by happening to be able to speak the same language as the King. As such St André was quite desperate to get him on his side. Unfortunately for him, Douglas, like Ahlers, and unlike St André, immediately dismissed the whole thing as a hoax. He reasoned, quite sensibly, that obviously humans can't give birth to rabbits, therefore Toft must have hidden them in her vagina and Howard and St André must have been either dishonest or incompetent not to have noticed.

Mary Toft, all this time, with so many people watching her, had not produced a single rabbit, and it had been over a week. St André desperately needed another rabbit in order to persuade Douglas that it was genuinely happening (remember Douglas, and for that matter Manningham, hadn't actually seen Mary Toft giving birth to a rabbit, so they had nothing to go on). Douglas as well wanted to actually prove once and for all that it was a fraud, but at present all he had to go on was his guesses based on what he had been told, nothing conclusive. He wanted to catch Toft in the act.

As November moved into December, the crowds kept growing. St André's invitations had expanded beyond just medical professionals to also include miscellaneous members of the nobility, and then to include basically anyone. "Every creature in town both men and women have been to see and feel her."

On December 1st, Mary Toft appeared to be in Labour again. She was convulsing with pains that Manningham describes as "strong and exactly like labour pains." Manningham prepared to deliver the long-awaited rabbit. He searched her vagina, it was empty. Douglas searched as well. He also found it empty. And they kept waiting. The leaping started again, but no rabbits were produced.

They were still waiting the next day, and Mary Toft's condition deteriorated.

"She fell into violent convulsions, which I never before observed in her, with frequent contractions of her fingers, rolling of her eyes, and great risings in her stomach and belly."

This kept on for two hours, and the next day she said she didn't remember it.

She was mostly fine the next day, then more convulsions, apparently "the motion in her belly was very little."

This dynamic continued for another three days. On Sunday 4th, Manningham, Douglas, and two other doctors examined her and concluded that

"The nature of the pains were such and so violent, as we apprehended something would soon issue from the uterus."

And that evening it began to fall apart. The apartment's porter reported to a justice of the peace that he had helped Toft get hold of a rabbit, and Toft was arrested. Toft denied everything, her sister (who had apparently been there in Leicester Fields the whole time) was questioned and admitted to knowing about the rabbit, but said it was just to eat, and then Toft agreed with her sister's story - she had asked for a rabbit to eat.

Manningham examined her again, and apparently thought there might still be something about to come out, so he persuaded the judge not to send her to prison just yet. He wrote to Molyneux as well, St André's friend, who, if you remember from a few minutes ago, had come to Godalming with St André right near the beginning to look at the rabbits, saying

"All this, I say, laid together, is to me such evidence of roguery, as makes me strongly believe the whole to be a fraud. Therefore, that our endeavours fully to detect the cheat may prove most effectual, and the unnatural imposture may most clearly appear to the public, I think Mary Toft should by no means be sent to prison, till the truth comes out, but that she should rather be kept, and most strictly watched in some private house, where all persons, those of the faculty especially, may have free and convenient access to her, which a prison will not so well afford, till the matter be as plainly and fully detected as possible."

Manningham told her to confess, he told her he thought she was "differently formed from other women", meaning that she was able to hide bits of rabbit in her uterus. In a sinister development, he threatened to carry out what he mysteriously describes as "a very painful experiment".

"I assured her also that there was no time left for delay, and if she would not confess, I should immediately proceed with the operation."

There was plenty of evidence already. While this debacle was playing out in the West End, back in Surrey, Lord Onslow, the Lord Lieutenant, had been asking questions of his own. All over the area, people told him they'd sold rabbits to Joshua Toft. This, combined with the porter's evidence, might be enough for a conviction, but Manningham and Douglas reasoned it probably wouldn't satisfy the public. I suspect they were right. You can easily see for yourself how much evidence people can ignore that would prove they were wrong. Anyway, an outright confession from Mary Toft that she had simply inserted the rabbits into her vagina for the doctors to remove was just about the only thing that would be enough.

The next day, December 7th, probably realising the whole thing had got wildly out of hand, Mary Toft - presumably exhausted, and probably quite seriously ill - confessed. She began:

"I will not go on any longer thus. I shall sooner hang myself."

Her confessions across three days, were taken down by James Douglas, and here I'm relying on the transcription from his barely-legible scrawl by Dennis Todd, available on WordPress. Being a hastily-transcribed stream of consciousness from an illiterate early-18th-century farmhand, it is very difficult to read, so I'm relying in a large part on other people's interpretations - particularly Manningham's and Dennis Todd's. Toft's story changed several times across the three confessions, trying to maintain her own innocence, trying to protect her collaborators, and gradually being bullied by the Justice of the Peace Thomas Clarges into incriminating herself and several others.

Mary Toft said that the whole thing had begun when she genuinely did undergo what she describes as a "monstrous birth". She said that whatever it was resembled guts, and included "a substance as big as my arm". Over three weeks later, she says, was when the first rabbit parts were produced - what she describes as "a liver and guts". Her mother-in-law sent it to John Howard, and he didn't know what was going on. Next came the trunk of a rabbit, and it sort of spiralled from there. What actually happened isn't easy to grasp from the text of the confessions. In the first, she says nothing about where the rabbit came from. In the second, she seems to implicate her mother while implying that she herself believed she was genuinely giving birth to rabbits.

"When my mother touched me my body was so open as if a child had just come away. Then I was touched again but brought nothing away at that time only put her to great pain and I felt a pain like a pricking of bones within me which continued for an hour or more after which my mother brought away some part of a monster which she said was the trunk of the body."

The implication seems to be that Mary Toft's mother had been inserting rabbit parts into her without her knowledge.

The third confession gives another story again, implicating her mother-in-law, Ann Toft, saying it was Ann who persuaded her to do it, originally starting with the guts and liver of a cat.

"She told me how to strip a young chit or cat, she persuaded me to throw the head and skin away and told me that the guts and liver I should save and call for the pot and let it fall in the pot."

In the same confession, she also says, referring to Ann,

"She told me that if I would do it and goe thro' I should get a good living and be ruled by her and not tell of her."

Anyway, Mary Toft goes into inconsistent detail about how she got hold of the rabbits. In the first confession she says she paid "A woman whom I don't know if I was to be put to death" to procure them for her, but in the second she says "There was no such thing as a woman advising me to any such thing nor never brought me any rabbits."

At one point Toft says that the mystery woman attempted the extraordinary feat of inserting a whole rabbit into Mary's vagina, and we get a rather graphic insight into how the whole process actually worked.

"I told her that such a thing could not be done. She said it could and desired to try. She fetch a rabbit which was a little bigger than a sidling rabbit of a fortnight old. She stripped it wholly and tried to put it up whole which I told her I was not able to bear it, it was like to kill me and that I would not do it. Then she pulled out again and said she would cut it. She cut it with her scissors and screwed the bones round having cut it in two pieces only. Then she first put up one part and upon examining again found it would hold the other part also which she like ways put and desired her to keep it as long as I could and then sent for Mr Howard. It put me to so great pain that I could not wag one way nor another nor stand up."

Even in spite of this particular failure, you still have to admire Mary Toft's dedication to the bit. She describes at many points the pain she was in.

"I was all night in a most violent rack and torture."

"All night before the head came away only grinding pains. But in the morning my mother upon examining put me to so much pain that I thought some thing would run through me."

"I used to aske when this would have an end, sure it would kill me."

All this was presumably genuine. She was after all spending considerable amounts of time with dead rabbits, complete with teeth, fur, bones and claws, chopped up and shoved haphazardly throughout her reproductive system. The convulsions in the last few days were probably for real as well, she had, unsurprisingly, picked up some kind of weird and unpleasant infection from the disembowelled rabbits she was keeping inside her and was described as "very dangerously ill" a few days later. Manningham, who seems to be one of the more sensible characters in this story, cites this (in combination with deliberate fraud) as his explanation for a lot of what he observed in the later stages of the affair that seemed to resemble genuine labour.

"Now, by the constant irritation of those extraneous bodies, thus artfully conveyed into her vagina, the whole uterus suffered much, and became larger in bulk than it ought to be in its natural state, and the bones, and other parts of those rabbits, so conveyed into the vagina, did often offend the neck of the uterus, which, together with artful management of herself, did occasion those violent bearing-down pains, which came on by intervals and which exactly counterfeited the true labour-pains."

Honestly I'm impressed she lasted as long as she did.

In summary, what we know from Mary Toft is that her and her mother-in-law had contrived together to hide rabbits in her vagina, that the various physicians would then deliver, and Nathanael St André had completely fallen for it.

After she confessed, Toft was finally taken to Bridewell Prison in central London, close to where Blackfriars station now stands, about a mile and a half - half an hour's walk - east from where Toft was staying in Leicester Square.

Of course, was an age that has become known to some as 'the golden age of satire'. Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope and William Hogarth were all at the heights of their careers, Gulliver's Travels came out in 1726, while the Mary Toft Affair was ongoing, and The Beggar's Opera would come out the following year. Of course the satirists had great fun with the case. But we're going to talk about that in the next episode.

Thank you for listening, come back next time to hear about the media's response to the Mary Toft affair.