A woman took her own life after being subjected to a campaign of “physical and sexual violence” by her husband, a court has heard.

Tarryn Baird, 34, was found dead at her home in Swindon, Wiltshire, on 28 November 2017, after leaving her family a note that said: “I am so sorry but I just couldn’t take it any more.”

Christopher Trybus, 43, is charged with his wife’s manslaughter as well as two counts of rape and coercive and controlling behaviour. He denies all of the charges against him.

Opening the trial at Winchester crown court on Tuesday, prosecutors said Trybus’s behaviour towards Baird had escalated in the two years before her death and that he is alleged to have raped her twice in late 2016.

The jury was read some of Baird’s diary entries, in which she appears to note a change in her relationship with Trybus, whom she married in 2009. The couple had moved to the UK from their native South Africa two years earlier.

One read: “One night, during sex, I felt his hands around my neck. Something was unleashed that night. Progressively, sex got rougher. The more I fight back, the more he enjoys it.” In her diary, Baird added that this was “a side” of her husband “that has been hidden all these years”.

It is alleged that one of the rapes took place after an argument over whether Trybus would pay school fees for Baird’s cousin.

Tom Little KC, prosecuting, said Trybus had tried to strangle his wife before forcing himself on her.

The court heard that Trybus had installed an app on his wife’s mobile phone so he could monitor her whereabouts and, on one occasion, queried how long she had spent at a GP surgery.

Little said Baird had visited her doctor on numerous occasions in the months before her death, eventually alleging that Trybus had been violent to her.

In October 2016, she told her doctor and a domestic abuse charity that her husband had tied a rope around her neck. “We ask you not to lose sight in this case of how she would eventually take her own life by hanging,” Little said.

In November 2016, Baird told her doctor that she had tried to leave Trybus but he had hit her with a metal pole.

The court heard that Baird did not “know how many more beatings she could take” but was “scared to leave”.

She made “detailed plans” to escape to a women’s refuge a few weeks later, Little said. He said these were foiled when Trybus, a software developer, returned early from a business trip.

Trybus allegedly threatened to tell Baird’s parents she was addicted to drugs and alcohol “and that would prevent them from believing her if she told them about domestic abuse”.

Little said: “It was the control and physical violence meted out to her, including sexual violence and the threat of and fear of physical and sexual violence on his part towards her and over time, which led to a deterioration in her already weakened mental state and was, we say, a cause of her deciding that she should take her own life.”

The trial, before Judge Linden, continues. It is expected to last seven weeks.