'The cat' Gets its Nine Tails

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THE OED attributes the first appearance of ‘cat-o’-nine-tails’ to Congreve's The Way of the World (1695); his use of the phrase indicates its meaning had already become familiar: ‘If you should give such language at sea, you’d have a cat-o’-nine-tails laid cross your shoulders’.1 The word was in fact recorded earlier, but more interesting was the way it first entered public discourse through a sensational crime in a non-naval context: a domestic murder in Ratcliff on 24–5 December 1680. 1 ‘Cat-o’-nine-tails, n.1. A whip with nine knotted lashes; till 1881 an authorized instrument of punishment in the British navy and army’ (OED). The term ‘cat’ derives from name of several kinds of ship-ropes, such as ‘cat-harpings’ for bracing the shrouds (‘Cat-o’-nine-tails’, E. C. Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Philadelphia, 1898), http://www.bartleby.com/81/3164.html. OED, harpings, n. pl.2, cat-head, n.). The crime attracted extraordinary attention for several reasons: its cruelty, its grotesque imitation of a naval flogging, its intimations of sexual perversion, and perhaps its seasonal ironies. It centred on the fatal whipping with a cat-o’-nine-tails of a thirteen-year-old maidservant, Elizabeth Houlton, at the hands of a man named John Sadler and on the alleged instigation of his landlady and Houlton's mistress, Elizabeth Wigington. The number of reports and notices published in news pamphlets, execution accounts, and newspapers was unprecedented for a non-aristocratic domestic murder.2 Publication in the last of these printed genres was especially telling, since newspapers at this time concentrated on political, religious, and foreign news, and only the most unusual or spectacular private crimes managed to gain a place in their restricted half-broadsheet format.3 2 Wigington mentions that news-ballads of the crime were published, but none of these have survived (The Confession and Execution of Leticia Wigington Of Ratclif, who suffered at Tyburn, On Fryday the 9th of this instant September, 1681, written by her own hand in the Goal [sic] of Newgate, two days before her death, being Condemned for whiping [sic] her Apprentice Girl to death (1681), 4). 3 James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and Its Development (Cambridge, 1986), 68–72.