The lawyer then found out that Mead, back in London, had more knowledge of Bridget’s situation than he had at first said because he took out articles with a man called Dodamy with a plan to sell Bridget’s estate for the then huge sum of £3,600. The pressure was then on Kimberly to get a desired result in his negotiations to prise Bridget from her guardian and to speed her to the altar with Mead. Again and again, Kimberly insisted that there had been no forced marriage: ‘soon after, and by my consent, and inducement, Mead applied to said Bridget by way of courtship and on 11th April, 1728, said Mead married her in Dublin, when and where no force, threats, or compulsion was made use of by any person towards said Bridget to come into said marriage.’

Understanding this case is all a matter of believing that Kimberly was ‘sold out’ to the law or not. His argument was that Mead was largely responsible for duping him and setting him up, as he was seen as the actual agent of the affair, and so would be assumed to have used force on the girl. When Mead was arrested and imprisoned and the network was about to be destroyed (and heads to roll) Mead was threatened by Mr Reading to apply a charge of rape against him unless he had the marriage annulled, Kimberly was apparently ‘stooged.’ He did understand that the right moves had been attempted, though. Applications were made to the Doctors’ Commons, and though the intentions may have been good, to dissolve the contract, perhaps the Doctors’ Commons was not the right place to go. Later, Dickens was to call that institution of Doctors of Law ‘a cosy, dozy, old-fashioned and time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little family party’.

As with all such convoluted narratives of crime, it all depends who is believed at the time, and by the people who matter. Daniel Kimberly was clearly not believed; we have his side of the story, but we also have the weight of history and statistics to show how hard the authorities were coming down on abductions of heiresses. It may be that, in the end, Kimberly was being harshly punished as a precedent to other professional gentleman not be involved in that nefarious and amoral trade.

He faced his death on the scaffold with courage, offering some dramatic entertainment to the crowd. He even ended his speech with the surprising attitude of forgiveness: ‘As for my prosecutors, or such as have persecuted me. Or fought any perjurious or indirect ways to take away my life, I freely forgive them.’ Reading between the lines, there is still rancour there, and a ‘spin’ towards showing himself in a better light than his enemies. But, as with many others in his final minutes, his main concern was for his reputation:

In order to prevent the publishing of any false or spurious accounts of me… I do therefore humbly entreat my very worthy friends, the Rev. Dean Percival, Mr Derry, John Hacket, Edmund Fenner… to order the printing and publishing of this declaration.

He did have some friends (Dean Percival has gone down in history as one of the men who lampooned Jonathan Swift in a satirical poem) but clearly their exertions were not strenuous enough to save him from the gallows.