Just Cause
All truths are not to be told.
George Herbert,
‘Jacula Prudentum’ (1651)
Four months after Maria was taken from his house, Tuckett was almost ready to move to the first legal stage – a grand jury indictment of the Bowditches and their accomplices. First, however, he needed to speak to the boy who had driven the hired yellow gig from Mr Jacob’s premises in Taunton to Holway Green Farm. Jacobs told Tuckett that on the day of the abduction, Francis Smith, a labourer working for Bowditches, had delivered a cart horse to him and James Bowditch and Smith had hitched it to the gig.
Smith told Tuckett that he had driven the gig back to Holway Green. He was instructed to stay by the hayrick until James came to him later that night. ‘I got up in the gig and dropped asleep,’ Smith said. ‘James Bowditch came and waked me and told me I should not go to sleep.’ He saw no one else until James and William Bowditch and their mother came out of the house with Maria, Mrs Bowditch carrying a lantern.
‘Don’t ye stap about too long,’51 Mrs Bowditch had said, telling Smith to open the gate and let the gig out, and then to put a bridle on the saddle horse and light William Bowditch to the gate. ‘You’ve got no occasion to tell of it to anybody, how they be gone away,’ she’d added after the others had left.
Smith also told Tuckett, and swore in an affidavit, that a few days after Maria had been rescued, he was working in the fields with James Bowditch, who said to him, ‘If ever thou’rt sent for, you say that the young lady got up first in the gig and helped up me, and then said, “Come, let’s drive off by ourselves.”’ William Bowditch and Charles Puddy, who had the next door farm, had said the same to him. The order of events – that Maria got into the gig first – was important to the Bowditches because there was a widespread and erroneous belief that if a woman got up in the carriage or mounted the horse first the man could not be held to account for abducting her. She would be judged to have run away with him by choice.52
Tuckett was now confident that he had a strong case. By mid-January 1818 he was ready to put his indictment before the grand jury at Blandford Forum in Dorset. He had decided that the prosecution should not be in Somerset, where the Bowditches were well known and where they were building up a band of witnesses and supporters, but in Dorset where James Bowditch had committed perjury on the marriage bond and where Maria had been held prisoner.
The grand jury indictment was a precursor to a formal indictment at the Court of King’s Bench,53 and involved the witnesses for the prosecution giving evidence, either in person or through affidavits, to a panel of respectable citizens, who would decide whether a prosecution should proceed.54 The Bowditches themselves did not appear and there was no legal requirement to inform them of the process. As the proposed charges were misdemeanours rather than felonies, they would not be taken into custody pending a trial.
It all went to Tuckett’s satisfaction. The men of the grand jury duly found ‘true bills’ for conspiracy and perjury against James Bowditch and others. The magistrates then issued warrants for the arrest of James, William, Betsey, Susan and Joan Bowditch and Jane Marke and Elizabeth Snell.
The investigation was not over, however. Tuckett had two remaining tasks: to find Mrs Mulraine in Bristol and to bring about an incontrovertible identification of John Oxenham, the Bowditches’ solicitor, as the man who had forced Maria to sign the documents at William Bowditch’s house. His opportunity here came when a London friend told him that a clerk in William Kinglake’s office was claiming that he had seen letters written by Maria to James Bowditch. There could be no doubt that this was Oxenham who, although he was now a qualified solicitor, had started his career with Kinglake as an articled clerk.
Tuckett used his customary method of identification – confrontation. When Maria was next visiting the family in Taunton, he told her that someone in Kinglake’s office was circulating lies about her and that she and Mr Leigh were required to go to Kinglake’s office to clear up the matter. She was not pre-warned that she was about to come face-to-face with the man she had described. With Leigh she walked to Kinglake’s office in Mary Street and Leigh knocked at the door. Oxenham himself answered. Maria ‘started back,’ according to Leigh, but said nothing further. When Leigh told Oxenham that the purpose of their visit was to inquire about the letters, Oxenham objected, saying, ‘I am Mrs Bowditch’s solicitor,’ and that ended the encounter.
As they left, Maria turned to Leigh and whispered, ‘That is the man, Sir, who made me sign the paper.’
Now that Maria had positively identified Oxenham, Tuckett went with Leigh to speak to Oxenham’s boss, William Kinglake.55 This matter could not have come at a worse time for Kinglake, who was on the cusp of selling part of his business to Oxenham. ‘If the charge is true,’ he said, ‘all my plans are upset.’ He could not hand over to his protégé if a cloud of scandal hung over the man’s head. For Tuckett, the logical thing to do was to call Oxenham into Kinglake’s office to hear his side of the matter but Kinglake refused to do this, promising instead to look into it himself. The next day Tuckett received a letter in which Kinglake said that he had interviewed Oxenham, who denied everything, and that he, Kinglake, believed him.
This was simply not good enough and Tuckett could not let it go. Furthermore, Oxenham still had letters that were alleged to have been written by Maria, so he and Leigh called on Kinglake again, asking to see them. They were astonished at what followed.
Kinglake agreed to let them see the letters but when Tuckett offered to fetch Maria so that she could authenticate them (or not) his response was, ‘She need not be here.’
‘What!’ said Tuckett. ‘Produce letters against her and not allow her to be present?’ He immediately went to fetch her.
Once in the room with Oxenham, Maria accused him of being the man at William Bowditch’s house. He denied it. Kinglake then asked Oxenham to show him the letters. He refused. Kinglake insisted. Oxenham again refused. Tuckett was about to leave with Maria and Leigh when Kinglake, now furious with Oxenham, ordered him to produce them. Reluctantly, he handed them over.
The first was addressed to James Bowditch, with the address written in a different hand, reproduced here with the original spelling mistakes.56
In answer to your last letter, I wish you to buy the lisence, and assure that I was 21 the 28th of last August, remember that I have no independent fortune, can there then be blame in our forming this alience, when love, not interest actuates the deed?
Yours truely,
Maria Glenn
Sept. 14th, 1817
Mr J. Bowditch,
Holway Cottage.
Maria looked at the letter and said she did not think she had written it and ‘could not read it,’ whether because she could not bear to or because it was illegible is not clear. She thought this letter could be the document Mrs Mulraine dictated to her at William Bowditch’s house although she recalled that she was made to write that she was sixteen and not twenty-one.
The second letter was a note to Mrs Mulraine:
Miss Glenn sends her kindest love to Mrs Mulraine, and informs her, that it will be perfectly out of her power to see her before half past twelve to-night, as her aunt and uncle both will be with her, if she goes out to walk. She understands that she has something to communicate to her of consequence; if so, she should be obliged to Mrs Mulraine, if she could write, and inform her of it by the bearer.
Sunday Morning.
A note had been added at the foot stating that the letter had been sent in response to one in which Mrs Mulraine tried to dissuade Maria from what she was about to do (that is, elope) and telling her that James Bowditch wished to break off the relationship. This letter was apparently written on the Sunday morning when Maria was told she would be going to school in London. She disappeared that night.
In the presence of her uncle, his solicitor, the Bowditches’ solicitor and his employer, Maria denied she had ever written to James Bowditch or to Mrs Mulraine, but Oxenham stated that he could produce witnesses. Mrs Mulraine and Elizabeth Bowditch, William Bowditch’s wife, later both swore affidavits that, although it was dated 14 September, this was the letter they had seen Maria write in William Bowditch’s house on 20 September.
Tuckett, however, was so confident that both letters were forgeries that he offered to withdraw from the case if it could be proved that Maria had written them and said that he would submit them to bank inspectors, whose job it was to prove handwriting.
Tuckett had not seen Mrs Mulraine since their encounter on the Tone Bridge, hours after Maria’s disappearance, when she’d told him where Maria had been taken in the yellow gig. She had offered Maria friendship at Holway, promising to teach her to draw and to paint on velvet and bringing her toddler daughter to Maria to play with, but she had proved a false friend. She had bullied Maria into going to William Bowditch’s house to sign the mysterious documents and frightened her with reports of James Bowditch’s threats to murder her. On the night of the abduction she had come with the others to Tuckett’s house and waited outside for Maria to be handed through the window and walked with her to Holway, where she had refused Maria’s appeals for help.
Tuckett knew that Mrs Mulraine’s friendship with the Bowditches was strong but he nevertheless hoped that, like Mary Ann Whitby, she could be brought over to Maria’s cause. Besides, she was the only person who could shed some light on the letters.
Soon after the abduction, Mrs Mulraine had returned to her husband in Bristol. With Maria in tow, Tuckett went there and had a magistrate issue a warrant for her arrest. Then he commissioned two police officers, Mr Roberts and Mr Reed, to track her down. They found her quickly enough, in Clifton, and brought her and her young daughter to the Talbot Inn on the Wells Road,57 where Tuckett and Maria were lodging. During the journey, Mrs Mulraine chatted to the officers and told one of them that she had a bonnet and pelisse like those Maria used to wear and that she had often been mistaken for her in Taunton.
Tuckett had decided that he would speak to Mrs Mulraine in the parlour of the inn, with Maria standing by.
‘Mrs Mulraine, notwithstanding what you have done…’
He was intending to make a proposal similar to his offer to Mary Ann Whitby and Elizabeth Snell – a confession in exchange for forgiveness, but she immediately took umbrage.
‘Done, Sir! What have I done?’
‘Mrs Mulraine, you were at my gate when Miss Glenn was taken away.’
‘I grant it!’
‘You were there, James Bowditch was there, Betsey Bowditch was there.’
‘Yes, they were.’
‘I do not wish you to incriminate yourself,’ said Tuckett, ‘but I have abundant evidence against you. I have a proposal to make to you, and if you comply I solemnly offer you forgiveness. Tell me who was the author of the two letters which have been imputed to Miss Glenn.’
‘I know not what you mean. I know of no letters.’
He described them and she admitted that she remembered the letter to herself and she could also remember how it was signed (it was unsigned). She claimed she had brought it with her to Bristol and then sent it back to Taunton (presumably to the Bowditches). When Tuckett challenged her and said the letter to her was a forgery and that she was implicated, she blamed Jane Marke, the cook, who had given it to her. Again Tuckett offered forgiveness in return for honesty. At this point, Reed took Mrs Mulraine aside to advise her privately that she should say who wrote the letters. She wanted to know whether Tuckett would keep his promise of forgiveness and Reed assured her that he would. However, when she returned to the parlour she suddenly became so vociferous that Tuckett had to ask Reed to remove her again.
‘Beware! Beware!’ she said as she left, gesturing to Maria, who was terrified. The officers took Mrs Mulraine to Gloucester jail and her name was added to the indictment for the trial.
Roberts later told Tuckett and Maria that during the journey to the Talbot Inn Mrs Mulraine had claimed that Maria had stood godmother to her young daughter. Maria reacted angrily: ‘How can she be so wicked to say so! She knows that she asked me to stand godmother to her child, and that I refused to do so because I was only sixteen and I asked her what she thought my aunt and uncle would think of me if I did such a thing without their knowledge.’
Roberts added that when he told Mrs Mulraine that Maria denied being there, she eventually said, ‘If she was not there, I look upon it the same as if she was there – for she did it by proxy.’
The christening, irrelevant to the central crime of taking Maria away, was beginning to assume an unexpected importance. As Tuckett wrote later: ‘a young lady might be tempted to go to a christening and, being conscious of no intentional impropriety, she might take no pains to conceal it.’ However, the Bowditches alleged that it was Maria’s idea to be godmother to Mrs Mulraine’s child alongside James Bowditch as godfather, providing further evidence of the relationship between them. Even more serious was the allegation that she had behaved improperly at the party afterwards in the kitchen at Holway.
The christening had taken place on 27 August, and Tuckett now realized that this was the day he had visited his daughters and Maria at Holway, the day he had intended to tell Mrs Bowditch that they would be leaving in a week. He had reached the farm at about eleven o’clock and spent the afternoon with the children. If this was so, the Bowditches’ claim that Maria had been at St Mary Magdalene church for the ceremony at midday could not have been correct as Tuckett himself had been with her until about four o’clock.
The investigation seemed to have become a fire-fight. Every time Tuckett addressed an accusation about Maria from the Bowditch camp, another flared up. To disprove the christening story, he would need the evidence of Francis Hunt Clapp, the clergyman who had conducted the ceremony, who would surely know who stood godmother and who did not. Clapp, however, was both unwilling and unable to help. Not only was he a close friend of William Kinglake, Oxenham’s employer, he was also seriously ill, probably not far from death. However, his clerk, James Long, remembered the christening and told Tuckett unreservedly that the godmothers were Betsey Bowditch and her sister Susan (he remembered her squint), and that Mrs Mulraine and Mrs Priest, her husband’s cousin, were also there. The only time he had met Maria was in the evening of the day of the christening when he and his wife visited Holway Farm to ask Mrs Mulraine about her husband’s occupation and he had heard Maria play her harp.
By the beginning of July 1818, eight defendants had been indicted, the charges had been agreed and Tuckett had hired a team of four prosecuting barristers, headed by Albert Pell, a friend from his Cambridge days (they had both graduated from St John’s College in 1793). Pell had risen from humble beginnings in the East End of London and Tuckett admired his intelligence and work ethic. As a young barrister on the Western Circuit, Pell could not afford private transport between Assizes and instead walked through the night from town to town.58 Now aged fifty, he had matured into an energetic but cautious advocate with a solid track record,59 and had been rewarded in 1808 with an appointment as serjeant-at-law.60 Tuckett knew that Pell’s core skill was examining evasive witnesses,61 something that was going to be crucial in this prosecution. Pell was assisted by Stephen Gaselee, five years his elder, who was vastly knowledgeable about the law and who had trained, like Tuckett, under Vicary Gibbs. They were joined by two juniors, Abraham Moore62 and Charles Frederick Williams.
The Bowditches had also hired barristers Robert Casberd,63 William Selwyn and Henry Jeremy. All the lawyers, both defence and prosecution, knew each other and Tuckett well. They had appeared in numerous trials on the Western Circuit, sometimes on the same side, sometimes opposing. If the world of West Country gentlefolk was small, the subset of lawyers within it was minute.
Just six days before the trial was due to begin in Dorchester, on 19 July, Leigh sent the final bench warrants, for the arrests of Thomas and Juliana Paul, to his Sherborne colleague Fooks, to be delivered to the couple at the Thornford parsonage. By now, the charges against the ten defendants had been agreed. They were all accused of conspiracy to forcibly abduct, assault and false imprisonment.
Tuckett was more than ready for battle. He had acquired solid evidence, tracked down credible witnesses and hired skilled barristers. But more valuable than all of this put together, was Maria herself. Although she had not revealed all of her story to him at first she had not wavered at any point in any of its details. She was coherent and consistent, and not only that – she had right and truth on her side.
Until this point, Maria’s story had not been heard in public. Tuckett had managed the case while she built her new life in London, occasionally returning to Taunton to see her aunt or to help Tuckett in his investigation. She had submitted a long and detailed affidavit but only in the courtroom would she have the chance to tell her story in person, for the jury to assess and the world to observe. Apart from her experience at the hands of the Bowditches, a court case would be one of the most testing times of her short life, involving hours of examination and hostile cross-examination in front of her enemies and a sceptical court. She and Tuckett had no doubt that she would withstand the pressure and that together they would vanquish the wrongdoers and emerge triumphant.