Richard Cornish, also known as Richard Williams, was the master of a merchant ship and principal in a cause célèbre. Master of the merchant ship Ambrose, he was accused in 1624 of forcibly sodomizing crewmember William Couse. Surviving records suggest that the General Court—comprised of members of the governor’s Council and possibly the governor—heard testimony in the case from Couse and another member of the crew and that Cornish was hanged soon after. Others were subsequently punished for publicly disagreeing with the court’s actions, and then the case disappeared until the 1970s. Since that time it has come to symbolize the brutal nature of life in seventeenth-century Virginia as well as the often violent resistance faced by gay and lesbian Americans.
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