In 2010 I was browsing through the British Library’s online newspaper archive when I came across an extraordinary tale from 1830. A man had been sent anonymous letters by a woman who wanted him to rescue her from her uncle’s house on the Clapham Road, which happened to be a couple of hundred metres from my own home in south London.
To effect the escape he should bring a rope ladder, some cash and a gun, she wrote, adding that for his gallantry he would be rewarded with her hand in marriage, and her fortune – for everything a woman owned, if it was not tied up in trusts, would automatically belong to her husband. He was keen as mustard and showed up, suitably equipped, with a friend. They were both promptly arrested.
It turned out that the inhabitant of the house, an unpopular hardline magistrate, had also been sent an anonymous letter, but this one warned that his house would be under attack that night. He had fled, but had left his brother in charge, armed, and asked the night watchman to be especially vigilant.
Of course, there was no captive woman and the whole thing was a hoax, probably set up by one of the magistrate’s enemies.
This peculiar story set me thinking about the way marriage was viewed two hundred years ago. Here was a young man, perhaps not rich, who had a chance of getting something for almost nothing. For this, he was prepared to lock himself into a relationship that could last for his entire life, without ever having previously met, seen or talked to his bride-to-be.
After that I was on a mission to look at elopement stories and to try to understand their meaning. ‘Elopement’ means simply flight, running away or escaping and there were certainly many hundreds of cases in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of elopement reported or advertised in the newspapers. Servants and apprentices absconded from service, sometimes with possessions or clothing they were not entitled to; wives and husbands left their partners and children to chase new romantic interests or end abusive regimes; and of course runaway lovers duped their families and friends and headed for Gretna Green or other destinations where they could marry without the consent of others.
It is this last type of elopement that has come to define the word. In England, the main players in these family dramas ranged from rebellious and misguided teens to besotted or money-grabbing stalkers who kidnapped their victims and dragged them off to Scotland or anywhere else where English law did not run.
In the developed world now, adults rarely have to elope in order to be together: we can generally marry whom we please. But there should be no room for complacency about couples that run away to be together. In 2012 a fifteen-year-old girl absconded to France with maths teacher Jeremy Forrest. He was arrested, extradited and convicted of child abduction. In the end, it looked less like a romance than an everyday story of vulnerability and exploitation.
In the UK, forced marriage is still with us. In 2013 the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit dealt with over 1,300 cases of coercion, of which fifteen per cent involved people under the age of fifteen. In that same year, schoolgirls suspecting that they may be forced to marry when taken abroad were advised to put cutlery in their underwear to set off airport metal detector alarms. Meanwhile, in Kyrgyzstan bride kidnapping is said to be endemic.
My research into elopements eventually brought me to sixteen-year-old Maria Glenn and the mystery over what happened to her on the night she disappeared from her uncle’s house in Taunton. After the prosecution of her alleged abductors she emerged as both a victim and heroine, but she and her enemies had told such utterly different versions of events that it was clear that one of them was lying. Public opinion chose to doubt her and she endured not just humiliation but what we might now call a campaign of ‘slut shaming.’
As an adult Maria tried to put her teenage experiences behind her and never spoke of them to her children. She would be astonished by the attention she is now getting, and probably more than a little pleased that, at last, nearly two hundred years later, her story is finally being told in full.
Much of this tale is told through reports published in newspapers but I was also fortunate that the solicitor Henry James Leigh left two sets of invaluable correspondence (one in Dorset County Archives, the other in Somerset County Archives), both of which contain important information about Maria and her uncle George Lowman Tuckett, and that Tuckett wrote and published two pamphlets in her defence. Maria’s descendant, Mike Hudson and his wife Ann, gave me access to family letters passed down through the generations.
That this is a true story and relies entirely on documented information is obvious. However, the reader should know that I have added three imagined scenes to open the three separate parts, each of them based on known facts.