On the morning of January 10, 1854, laborers walking through the English county of Surrey spotted a blood-soaked pillow hanging from a cottage window. When their knocks went unanswered, one man climbed a ladder and broke in. Inside, they found Mary Anne Bruff lying on the carpet with her throat cut. Beside her lay the bodies of two dead children, and a continued search of the cottage revealed four more young victims, along with the bloodied razor used to kill them.
A local surgeon pronounced all six children dead at the scene, but Bruff herself miraculously survived. Word of the killings reached Queen Victoria, who wrote in her diary that a “most awful and horrid tragedy” had taken place. The woman at the center of the horror was no ordinary mother: Mary Anne Bruff had served as wet nurse to the Queen’s oldest son, the future King Edward VII. Born in Surrey around 1811, Bruff had lived a respectable working-class life.
Her husband, George, worked as an underservant at Claremont estate, home of Prince Leopold, an uncle of Queen Victoria. The Queen was a frequent visitor to the property, and it was likely during one of those visits that she became aware of Mary Anne. When Victoria gave birth to her first son, Bertie, in 1841, the search for a royal wet nurse began. The Queen notoriously disliked pregnancy, describing herself as feeling “more like a rabbit or a guinea pig.
” She found breastfeeding repellent, writing that it made her hair stand on end that her daughters had “turned into cows. ” Outsourcing infant care was common among upper-class women of the era. Several women reportedly sought the honor of nursing the prince, but the Queen specifically requested someone from the Esher neighborhood. A messenger from Buckingham Palace arrived at Claremont House on November 9, 1841, directing Mrs.
Bruff to travel to London by the next train. The Queen and Prince Albert personally inspected Bruff’s own child and arranged for it to be cared for at royal expense. Bruff moved into Buckingham Palace with her own baby to keep her milk supply steady. Once she began nursing the prince, her baby was sent home, where the infant eventually died.
After eight months as wet nurse to the heir to the throne, Bruff was dismissed. Newspapers speculated that Victoria had found her drunk in the royal nursery, while other reports claimed her milk no longer agreed with the prince. Either way, she was sent back to Surrey. By 1854, Mary Anne and George Bruff had seven surviving children, six of whom still lived at home.
George worked as a house servant at Claremont, spending days away from the family. He began to suspect his wife was having an affair and hired private detective Henry Field to follow her on trips to London. Field reportedly watched Bruff meet another man at a tavern. Furious, George confronted his wife, telling her he was leaving and would seek full custody of their children.
Mary Anne knew she would almost certainly lose that legal battle. On the night of January 9, consumed by the thought of losing her children, she took a razor and murdered six of them before attempting to take her own life. After she was revived, Forbes Winslow, a leading Victorian psychologist, published an excerpt of Bruff’s confession in the Journal of Psychological Medicine. She described going to her daughter Georgie first, then Carrie, then Henry, who pleaded, “Don’t mother.
” She said her son Bill was asleep and never woke. The youngest two, Harriet and George, made no resistance. She then cut her own throat. At trial, Winslow testified that Bruff was acting under a spell of insanity.
He published articles defending that position, citing witnesses who described her as a faultless mother who kept her children well-dressed and clean. One witness called her “as good a mother as ever lived. ”
Professor Andrew Mangum has argued that Victorian society drew a strange line between intense motherly care and murder. The mid-19th century was familiar with the paradoxical idea of child murder as a form of parental obligation, with newspapers full of accounts of women killing their babies to spare them from slum life.
But Bruff was not destitute; she lived comfortably, making that justification less straightforward. Nevertheless, Bruff was acquitted on the grounds of insanity. One contemporary, John Charles Bucknill, suggested she likely killed her children to stop her husband from gaining full custody. The acquittal of a woman who had slaughtered six children stunned many, including the Queen, who called Bruff “a depraved woman, morose, ill-tempered, and stupid.
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Bruff was committed to Bethlem, a London psychiatric hospital, where she died eight years later.