For Richer, For Poorer
A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 24 December 1751
In the comfort of her aunt and uncle’s home in London’s West End, 150 miles from Taunton, Maria still did not feel safe.26 Two days after she arrived, perhaps to reassure her more than because he feared she was in real danger, her uncle John Burrows, a magistrate, took her to the police office in nearby Marlborough Street where he arranged for articles of the peace against the Bowditches to be issued and drew up a warrant for their arrest if they tried to approach her.
Tuckett was eager to get back to Taunton to start his investigation. Before leaving town with Doctor Thompson he had just had time to instruct Leigh to find out from Thomas Fooks, the Sherborne solicitor who had assisted in the rescue, whether a marriage licence had been issued and if so what James Bowditch had said to the officiating clergyman. Maria had told him about Mr Gould, the clergyman who had been in the hall at Thornford. She had not had Tuckett’s consent to marry, was not of age and had not lived in Thornford for the legally required four weeks, so lies must have been told. Quite apart from the conspiracy to steal Maria from his house, James Bowditch must be guilty of perjury.27
While Tuckett was in London, however, the Bowditches had deftly made their first strike against him. Only three days after the rescue, an arch and facetious paragraph appeared in the local newspaper, the Taunton Courier,28 probably written by James Scarlett, who was married to James Bowditch’s sister Mary and who worked at the paper as a printer and journalist.
ELOPEMENT. Miss G., a young West Indian lady of 17, entitled to a very large property on her coming of age, and who is a ward of chancery, eloped on Monday last with Mr J. B., a young man of about 24 years of age, residing with his mother, who keeps a farm at Holway Green, near this town. Miss G. lives with her guardian in this town, who is a respectable provincial barrister, and whose children, as well as Miss G. having the whooping cough, it was thought advisable to send them from home for change of air. Mrs B.’s house at Holway Green was selected for this purpose, and here the attachment originated, which led to the young lady’s elopement. The parties travelled with considerable expedition into Dorsetshire, and stopped at the house of a relative of Mrs B.’s, intending to proceed to London. A marriage licence had been duly provided, but the place of their retreat having been discovered, a respectable gentleman of this town was dispatched to the spot, who brought off this would-be Pastorella, without her Strephon,29 in a chaise and four, on Tuesday afternoon, and lodged her with her friends, like a deposit in our Savings Bank, to be reserved until a few more years have improved the amount of her fortune and the value of her affections. The lady professes the most enthusiastic and inviolable attachment to the object of her choice, but she wants four years to be of age; and some slanderers of the ‘belle passion’ have affirmed (though on the part of the ladies we protest against the heresy) that the flame of love’s torch is very apt to fade, and become extinguished in such an intolerable period. We are informed that during their absence, the conduct of the parties was irreproachable.
This was a disaster for Maria and Tuckett. The story was full of untruths and Tuckett knew that it would soon be reproduced by other papers across the United Kingdom and that eventually it would find its way to the West Indies. Maria’s mother, and her friends, would read it in St Vincent.
Elopement is an old story, of course, but in earlier times, women were generally too closely guarded and powerless to make absconding a reality. In the Georgian period, however, Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (which stipulated that a marriage was only valid with a formal ceremony) pushed delinquent couples into taking desperate measures to evade the legal rules surrounding the ceremony in England. This, coupled with changing ideas about middle-class marriage, in which love and romance now had a greater importance, led to a rise in runaway marriages. While the central goals surrounding marriage remained unchanged – to forge a suitable partnership that was likely to produce contentment, financial stability and plenty of children – there was an increasing acceptance that for many couples, there also had to be love, and that was not an emotion easy to control.
The public was well-versed in the elopement tale: the secret romance with an unsuitable lover, the plan, the anxious wait by the window, the tread on the gravel, the knotted blankets or rope ladder, the readied chaise, the complicit friend or servant, the dash for the Scottish border, the unsuccessful pursuit of the parent or guardian and marriage by the Gretna ‘blacksmith’. It was embedded in popular culture, a frequent theme on stage, in print and even on the walls of countless homes. Paintings of ‘runaway marriages’ were hung in genteel homes and cheap prints showing fleeing couples tearing through the countryside in chaises were found in the parlours of modest houses and cottages.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan explored its comic potential in The Rivals and revisited it in his libretto for the hugely popular comic opera The Duenna, or The Double Elopement. The subject also featured in the plots of a slew of comedies, musical farces and operettas.30 Elopement was even the theme for a board game, ‘The New game of elopement or A trip to Gretna Green. Designed & invented to enliven the winter evenings’,31 published in 1820, in which players moved through stages labelled The Alarm, The Pursuit, The Flight until, after reaching Carlisle Bridge and fighting off the Interception, they are Married.
As you might expect, there were sections of the press that loved elopement stories and delighted their readers with the most scandalous ones, especially those where one or more of the parties were married or where there was a huge difference in social rank. The young Jane Austen understood this. She dropped in to her story Frederic and Elfrida the fact that the eldest Miss Fitzroy ran off with the coachman. She also alluded to elopement in her story Jack and Alice: A Novel when Lady Williams describes the last words of her governess, Miss Dickins:
‘…Under her tuition I daily became more amiable, and might perhaps by this time have nearly attained perfection, had not my worthy Preceptoress been torn from my arms e’er I had attained my seventeenth year. I never shall forget her last words. “My dear Kitty” she said “Good night t’ye.” I never saw her afterwards,’ continued Lady Williams, wiping her eyes, ‘She eloped with the Butler the same night.’32
Many publications dismissed elopement as a subject beneath their readers’ interest, and among these was the Taunton Courier which was founded in 1808 by John William Marriott, a friend of London radical, James Henry Leigh Hunt, who, together with his brother John, established The Examiner magazine in the same year. The Taunton Courier followed The Examiner’s style; it branded itself as an independent paper with no particular allegiance to any party but appealed to the strong liberal tradition in the West Country and it circulated widely throughout the area.33
Marriott probably published the paragraph about Maria as a favour to his employee James Scarlett and thought little would come of it, that the parties would wish to slide quietly out of public gaze. Instead, he was forced to receive Leigh, who had been sent by Tuckett to demand that he despatch messengers to other local papers requesting that they refrain from reproducing the story. Tuckett’s tactic worked and the story was more or less stopped in its tracks.
Marriott also agreed to publish letters from Tuckett and Leigh.34 Leigh’s claimed that the facts had been ‘grossly misrepresented’ and were ‘an invention’. He had no doubt that the editor had been ‘imposed upon’. He blamed Maria’s abduction on the ‘allurement of [her] supposed property,’ and pointed to a ‘wicked conspiracy… most ingeniously contrived and veiled in secrecy by the most abominable arts.’ Maria’s youth and impressible mind meant that she had no free will in her abduction. As for Maria’s professions of attachment to Bowditch, this was nonsense as he had rescued her himself and ‘almost from the moment of my gaining possession of her she rejoiced in her deliverance, being convinced that in having been rescued from the author of her flight, she had escaped infallible ruin and misery.’ Unfortunately, the phrase ‘almost from the moment’, which was supremely accurate as Maria was at first reluctant to come away with him, returned later to do Leigh, and Maria, a great deal of harm.
Tuckett’s letter, published with Leigh’s, spoke of the personal hurt done to himself and his niece. ‘If you were acquainted with the real truth of this unheard-of wickedness, you would think there is no atonement too great to be made for the injury you have committed towards myself and towards my niece,’ he wrote. He described the conspiracy to remove Maria from his house as ‘a concerted villainy’ in which one of his own servants was involved (he meant Jane Marke, whom he had promptly dismissed). Addressing himself directly to Marriott, he said ‘Surely some commiseration was due to me, an inhabitant in the same town with yourself… My misfortunes have been made the subject of the most wanton levity, and the author, whoever he was, for I cannot believe it was yourself, has been indulged in gratifying his malignity towards me, at the expense of sacrificing the peace of mind of the most respectable families, and probably driving to an untimely grave an amiable, a lovely, and broken-hearted parent.’
Containing the story in the press was one thing. Preserving Maria’s reputation, and his own, was another. Less than three weeks after Maria’s disappearance, Tuckett had already ‘fully determined on any and every prosecution that the law will authorise.’35 He had received nothing from the Bowditches by way of apology. He knew now that they would not confess, nor ask for forgiveness and would, instead, fight their corner. They were already spreading lies about his niece amongst their friends and neighbours. The only question was the nature of the charges he would bring against them.
Tuckett understood that he would have to fund and organize the case himself. Only exceptional criminal cases were prosecuted by the Crown, usually where there was a clear public benefit and where no private citizen or society could or would pursue the miscreants. A private prosecution was a major undertaking, even for someone trained in law as Tuckett was, and it fully occupied his time for the following twelve months and beyond.
Prosecutors were liable for all the costs of the court case. We can only speculate that he may have drawn on his inheritance (his father, who died in 1800, amassed a sizeable fortune during his own West Indian career), sold stocks, liquidated properties in the West Indies or taken loans from friends and family. He seems never to have expressed a reluctance to spend. Indeed, at times he showed disconcerting largesse. Shortly after Maria’s rescue, he sent Fooks, the Sherborne solicitor, a cheque for ten pounds and asked that a further three guineas be passed on to Mr Smith, at whose farm Maria had taken refuge after the rescue, with five shillings to each of Smith’s servants, as well as a further three guineas to the bailiffs. For Fooks, Tuckett’s generosity was troubling and Leigh commiserated. ‘I tried to evade a similar thing,’ he wrote to his colleague, ‘but it was all but impossible. He would have been quite unhappy if I had not accepted the present he made me.’ Perhaps they would not have expressed qualms if their client had been an obviously wealthy man.
Tuckett, having no alternative, and with years of experience in assessing evidence and prosecuting criminals, naturally assumed the role of detective. There was no police force to assist. Law enforcement was largely in the hands of lowly paid night watchmen and parish constables who focused on keeping the streets clear of thieves and prostitutes and arresting felons. Their duties did not include investigation; that was left to magistrates, who could pick and choose what to look into. Sometimes families outside London would hire one of the famous Bow Street Runners (London’s first professional police force) to take charge of serious cases.
Tuckett’s decision to prosecute was not taken lightly. Even if no real improprieties had taken place, Maria’s reputation was at risk. To forge a good marriage, a girl must have a spotless record, with no hint of sexual behaviour of any kind. He had to inform the world that Maria was blameless. Also, as Maria’s guardian, Tuckett had taken the decision to lodge her with the Bowditches. Perhaps the generosity Fooks and Leigh complained of was tinged with guilt. To mitigate the harm done to his own standing, he would ensure that the world knew that he too had been deceived by the Bowditches.
A court case came with specific dangers. Maria could be exposed to ridicule in the press, or the verdict could go against them. The infamous failure of the prosecution of Richard Vining Perry for the abduction of Clementina Clerke in 1794 showed how disastrous the outcome could be. Even if the Bowditches were convicted, the punishment was bound to be light. Abduction was only a misdemeanour; on a level with obtaining goods by false pretences. And in reality, although forced marriage could be a capital charge, the courts were lenient.
In 1804 Mary Pearce, a minor and a ward of Chancery, was forced to marry her stepmother’s new husband’s 64-year-old uncle.36 The conspirators were given eighteen months in the King’s Bench prison in Southwark and Mary, who was said to have what we would now call learning impairments, remained shackled to her ancient husband until he died in 1825. In 1815, just two years before Maria’s disappearance, Ann Wade, an eighteen-year-old orphaned heiress, was carried off and married by Charles Baseley, ‘a young gentleman of no property’. A restraining order was imposed by the Lord Chancellor but Baseley simply ignored it. With the help of Ann’s governess, he abducted her from her guardian’s house in Reigate and married her in Gretna Green and later again in Edinburgh. Baseley eventually presented himself to the Court of Chancery (which protected the property and assets of vulnerable people, including heiresses) whereupon he was committed to the Fleet Prison until Ann was of age. They went on to have eleven children together.37
These cases did not deter Tuckett. He was certain that calling the Bowditches to account was the only path to follow. He had, in any case, complete faith in the process of law.
Tuckett’s solicitor, Leigh, had discovered that the marriage licence was signed by the entirely respectable Oxford-educated Reverend Blakely Cooper,38 who lived at Yetminster,39 three miles from Thornford. Cooper told him that on the evening of Thursday, 18 September, four days before they took Maria from Tuckett’s house, James Bowditch and his brother William called on him. Cooper told Leigh that when he asked James for the bride’s age he seemed to hesitate and looked towards his brother who said, ‘I know she is twenty-one,’ and that James had replied, ‘It must be so.’ James’s hesitation worried Cooper, who then insisted that he swear to her age ‘upon his peril’ in front of his servants. James had also told Cooper that he lived at Taunton but that his intended bride was on a month-long visit to Thornford. Maria, of course, had never set foot there. James took the oath and Cooper started filling in the bond. ‘What is the lady’s name?’ Cooper had asked, to which James answered ‘Maria Glenn.’ Cooper wrote it and showed him. He had mistakenly written Glynn and James did not correct him.
There were two routes to marriage in England at this time, both requiring a four-week waiting period. Couples could either request the reading of banns in church for three Sundays in a row before the ceremony or, if marrying outside their parish, they could do so by licence, which meant registering with a member of the clergy and signing a bond to swear that at least one party had lived in the parish for at least four weeks. The consent of parents or guardians was required for participants under the age of twenty-one. Couples of all faiths, even Catholics and Nonconformists, had to be married by a Church of England minister. Quakers and Jews were the only exceptions. Naturally, there were ways to evade the rules. Minors could marry in large cities, where there were many parishes, and hope that their parents would not hear of their banns and object to them. The simplest, if not the cheapest, method, however, was to elope to regions where English law did not apply, such as Scotland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands or France. Another way was to simply lie to the clergyman, as James and William Bowditch had done.
Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, officially ‘An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage,’ which came into effect in March 1754, aimed to put an end to secret and forced marriages and to impose stricter rules on how ceremonies were to be conducted. Priests who knowingly solemnized illegal marriages were liable to transportation to America for fourteen years.40 Although prosecutions for this were rare, a failure to read the banns or to obtain the appropriate sworn statements for the licence could cause clergymen anxiety.
In 1768, a curate in Berkshire who had married ‘a young lady of immense fortune’ to her father’s groom without licence or publication of banns absconded from his parish to avoid being sent to the plantations.41 In 1809, heiress and ward of Chancery Augusta Nicholson, an ‘infant’ (so-called because she was under twenty-one), eloped with John Giles, a comic actor who had caught her eye at the theatre in Tunbridge Wells. The couple succeeded in having the banns read twice at Marylebone Church in London but were intercepted before a marriage could take place.42 The clergyman was called in to the Lord Chancellor’s chambers to explain why he had not personally made the appropriate checks on Miss Nicholson’s residence.43 The Reverend Blakely Cooper made no such checks on Maria and may have had some worried moments after Bowditch’s lies became apparent.
To Tuckett’s surprise, Leigh and Fooks’ investigation also uncovered another deception involving the Bowditch family. The conspiracy went deeper than simply lying on the marriage bond.
The officiating clergyman at St Mary Magdalene church in Thornford was not the Reverend Templer, Thomas Paul’s nephew, who lived in the other half of the parsonage, but the Reverend John Cutler,44 who lived four miles away at Sherborne and who conducted all the ceremonies at Thornford. Cutler visited the parsonage every Sunday and used a room in the Pauls’ half of the parsonage for disrobing. If the Bowditches had attempted to marry James and Maria in front of Cutler, they would have been instantly discovered in the lie about Maria being resident at the Thornford parsonage. Cutler would have wondered why he had not been introduced to the bride-to-be in the weeks she had been staying at the parsonage. Thomas Paul therefore called on the Reverend Bellamy, the rector at Sandford Orcas, six miles from Thornford, to ask him to perform the ceremony. However, Paul needed to give a plausible explanation as to why he, rather than Cutler, was being asked to do this and he would also have to explain to Cutler why the couple had chosen Bellamy over him. The solution was to tell different lies to each of them.
Paul told Bellamy that the young couple had a particular aversion to being married by the Reverend Cutler and that he would seek Cutler’s permission for Bellamy to officiate. So, on Sunday afternoon after services, at precisely the time when Maria was returning from church in Taunton and was feeling relieved and happy in the knowledge that she would soon be at school in London, Juliana Paul followed Cutler into the disrobing room and shut the door behind her. She asked if Bellamy would marry Maria and James. ‘The young lady is a relation of Mr Bellamy and particularly wishes to be married by him,’ she told the Reverend Cutler, who had no objection to the request. Then Thomas Paul went back to Mr Bellamy’s house to confirm the arrangement and to request that he come to Thornford the next morning at nine o’clock for the marriage.
The ceremony was cancelled at the last minute. The Pauls sent a servant with a note to avert Bellamy but by then he was already on the road and decided to continue on to the parsonage to find out what had happened. Juliana Paul met him at the door and made an excuse. He did not see Maria and left soon afterwards.
There was much for Tuckett to contemplate. What caused the change in the arrangement made with Bellamy? Did the Pauls suddenly have an attack of cold feet, realizing the consequences of lying to local clergymen and of carrying off a young woman against her will? And what was the role of Thomas Paul’s nephew, George Henry Templer, rector of Thornford, and a clergyman and magistrate, who had sat at dinner with Maria on the afternoon of her arrival there? He had helped her to the beef and cracked a feeble joke about her being too full to eat, but had he really failed to notice or did he just ignore her distress?
Soon after his return from London, Tuckett set off for Thornford to interview Templer himself, accompanied by Doctor Thompson. Although he understood that Templer’s loyalties would probably remain with his uncle, Tuckett assumed that his calling, as well as his gentlemanly scruples, would oblige him to be truthful. He was disappointed. Templer adopted an attitude of stiff and uncooperative aloofness. He told Tuckett that he had not been properly introduced to Maria at dinner and was unsure who she was. As for her demeanour and appetite, he would only say that he could not tell whether Maria had eaten the meal in front of him or not.
Templer found his uncle’s connection with the Bowditch family mortifying. His own family was rather grand.45 His wife (and first cousin) and her sister, who was married to Sir James Montgomery of Stanhope,46 were connected to the Douglases of Lochleven. These were probably the ‘two nieces married to baronets’ to whom Mrs Bowditch had referred when she angrily asserted at Holway that her family was as good as Maria’s.
While they were in Dorset, Tuckett and Dr Thompson took the opportunity to speak to Templer’s servant, Edward Jones. He was just as unhelpful as his master. ‘I only saw them at dinner and took little notice. I was told she [Maria] was Mr Bowditch’s sister,’ Jones said, adding that no one else had visited the house that day. By the next day, however, Jones had revised his story. He called on Tuckett at the Reverend Blakely Cooper’s house to tell him that he now remembered that Robert Guppy, a horse dealer, and another person whose name he did not know, had been at the parsonage.
Tuckett had made solid progress in unravelling the conspiracy in Dorset but he had not identified the mysterious Mr Gould, who had so nearly ‘married’ Maria to Bowditch. A few weeks later, Blakely Cooper, who was born in Yetminster and knew all the local families, was able to help. The part of the parson had been played by Richard Gould, an uneducated labourer who lived in the nearby village of Beer Hackett. When Tuckett tracked him down, he would admit only that he had indeed been at the parsonage that morning and that the Pauls had sprinkled powder in his hair.47