Endings
And in to-day already walks to-morrow
Friedrich Schiller, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Death of Wallenstein (1800)
What happened to the Bowditches after all the drama around the trials and their subsequent bankruptcy? The surprise is that they managed to retain Holway Farm. Joan Bowditch died there, aged seventy-six, in 1831. Sarah, her only unmarried daughter, inherited the largest part of the property (the farmhouse, orchard, meadows and arable fields) while William had only six acres of arable, which he sold at auction two years later.186 James was given nothing. In April 1839 Sarah advertised the farm for sale, probably knowing that she had not long to live (she died in October). After her death, her assets, valued at less than £300, were split between her brothers, William and James and her sister Susan’s son.
James Bowditch, the unsuccessful bridegroom, never married. The 1841 census lists him as a maltster living in East Reach, Taunton, probably working for his publican brother William. Ten years later he is listed as an annuitant, living or staying in Yeovil with his sister Ann Cozens and her husband John (Ann was the Bowditch sibling who had been working as a servant in Ireland when the abduction occurred and thus missed all the action). He died, aged seventy-five, in 1860, of ascites or abdominal dropsy, a common symptom of cancer, liver disease or cirrhosis. Perhaps some of the habits Tuckett hinted at had caught up with him.
The episode lived on in the family memory of the Bowditches’ descendants. A remnant passed down through James Scarlett and Mary Bowditch’s children, telling of heiresses, elopement and lost fortunes. It had James as the son of a wealthy farming family running off to Dorset with ‘an underage girl from the West Indies,’ the marriage due to take place at eleven o’clock the next morning but halted by the girl’s uncle, and lawsuits against the family resulting in ‘the loss of all the Bowditch possessions except for a few silver forks and spoons and a portrait of William.’ Mrs Bowditch’s time in the debtors’ prison was said to have ‘cured her rheumatism.’187
Details for some of the other players are more sketchy. The Bowditches’ friend Susanna Mulraine, who flitted between Bristol and Taunton as a young woman, might be the ‘Susan Mulraine,’ estimated to be aged about fifty, who died in St John’s workhouse in Hackney, East London, in 1843. Mary Ann Whitby disappears after her betrayal of Maria. In 1834 a woman of that name married a George Gunningham in Charlton Mackrell in Somerset, thirty miles from Taunton, but we cannot say for certain that this is ‘our’ Mary Ann. There is no trace of Jane Marke or of Elizabeth Snell. It is not known what happened to Joshua Whitby, although a man of that name died in Clerkenwell in London in 1853.
Henry James Leigh carried on his work as a solicitor and political agent in Taunton, where political strife continued unabated. In 1843 his beloved wife Anne died and was buried in the churchyard at Corfe Castle in Dorset. Leigh joined her there nine years later, aged seventy-one. The many letters they exchanged, about Henry’s cases, their children, siblings, servants, are now in the Somerset Heritage Centre. A separate set, from Leigh to his colleague Thomas Fooks, about the Maria Glenn case, is in the Dorset Archives at Dorchester.
And what of Maria’s enemies, the cabal of Taunton’s great and good? The relationship between William Kinglake and his protégé John Oxenham eventually foundered over the non-repayment of a bill during a transaction. They became mired in complicated lawsuits, with Kinglake alleging that Oxenham was not the attorney in the case but merely a clerk.188 Perhaps the Maria Glenn episode had opened cracks in the bonds of trust between them. Oxenham later set up independently in Taunton but retired to Llandilo, Carmarthenshire, where he died in 1859, aged seventy-one. William Kinglake, a committed Whig to the end, reached the age of ninety but sustained fatal injuries in the hustings crowd at a contested election.189
Tom Woodforde’s support for liberal causes continued. In 1833 he was campaigning in the pages of the Taunton Courier for improvements to the penal code. In his opinion, the earlier abolition of capital punishment for hundreds of crimes had not gone far enough.190 Ten years later, his name came up at a meeting of the anti-Union Repeal Association in Dublin, when the radical political reformer Daniel O’Connell handed in a subscription from Mr Woodforde, ‘a gentleman of rank and fortune’ in England.191 Woodforde died in Brighton in 1858, aged eighty-two.
Taunton continued to be riven by political strife. In 1825 the town was in a ‘state of near continual political convulsion’ over the issue of Catholic relief, the loosening of restrictions on Catholics imposed during the Reformation. The inhabitants thumbed their noses at their MPs, who supported the bill: there was a noisy public meeting at the Taunton guildhall and 13,000 residents signed an anti-Catholic petition that was promptly taken to London and presented to the House of Lords. Thereafter parliamentary candidates were wary of standing as either Whig or Tory and presented themselves instead as ‘independent’. Among their number was Richard Estcourt Cresswell, backed by his brother the Reverend Henry Cresswell. Henry James Leigh was political agent for his opponent, Henry Seymour. The animosity between Leigh and the Reverend Cresswell, originally ignited over Maria Glenn, was unabated.
The legal fraternity must have forgiven Tuckett for defying the court and spiriting his niece and Mary Ann Whitby out of reach of the law for, by 1827, he was appointed Judge of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Jamaica. The Caribbean career he was so keen to restart before Maria was abducted was finally back on track. While the deaths of his sons Fenton in 1830 (who had followed his father into the law at St John’s College, Cambridge but had died suddenly of heart failure in the north of England192) and Glenn (cause and date unknown) must have given him and his wife Martha deep pain, the restoration of his career may have offered some comfort and diversion. Tuckett’s greatest opportunity came in October 1831 with the death of the Lord Chief Justice of Jamaica, William Anglin Scarlett, the younger brother of James Scarlett, the barrister who had led the Bowditches’ legal team (another illustration, as if we needed one, of the minuscule world of the law). The Governor of Jamaica, Earl Belmore, told Tuckett that it was his intention to appoint him to the post with a salary of £5,600.
It was not to be. Tuckett’s determination to do the right thing and his inability to win friends drew him to a different path.193 He had returned to Jamaica at a time when long-felt tensions between the white planters of Jamaica, the enslaved population, the colonial administration and Abolitionists were about to explode. The black and mixed communities, both slave and free, knew that emancipation was coming and they were expecting the King to make a proclamation at any moment. The planters, on the other hand, feared that they were about to lose everything. Added to this toxic mix were the Baptist, Moravian and Wesleyan missionaries who were preaching a message of tolerance and Abolition.
A rumour spread amongst the non-white population that Thomas Burchell, a white Baptist minister, would soon arrive from London carrying the much hoped-for royal proclamation. Of course, he had no such thing and he was totally unaware that his name was being used in this way. In anticipation, Samuel Sharpe, a ‘native’ Baptist preacher, called a peaceful general strike but the protest soon deteriorated into violence, which spread rapidly across the island. Within three days Belmore had declared martial law. The Baptist missionaries bore the brunt of official and unofficial retribution. Burchell was arrested on a perjured statement before his ship had even docked and for eleven days was kept a prisoner on board, without charge. When he was finally taken off the boat, a mob of hostile whites surrounded him, spitting, hissing and gnashing their teeth.
Burchell was released on Lord Chief Justice Tuckett’s orders but was then besieged at his lodgings by planters intending to tar and feather him, or worse. Tuckett tried to disperse the mob himself and when that failed, he asked for help from the army but they refused to intervene without an affidavit, which he quickly organised. Burchell and his family managed to escape on a frigate bound for New York.
Tuckett was shocked at what he saw as the unnecessary loss of life amongst the black and ‘coloured’194 rebels and persuaded Belmore to release fifty slaves from jail and send them back to their estates. His efforts did nothing for his career, however. Although he acted with authority (his policies had been approved by the Jamaican Privy Council) they resulted not in the confirmation of his appointment but in his ejection from office and ignominious return to London. Sir Joshua Rowe was given the post of Lord Chief Justice and Tuckett’s brief period of service was all but forgotten.195
Once back in England, Tuckett set up home near London’s Regent’s Park. He wrote repeatedly to the government pleading for compensation for his loss of earnings but none was forthcoming and he was fobbed off with assurances that he would be considered for similar suitable roles in future. In the end, the three years he spent arguing with the administration were, as he put it, ‘wasted… in privations, suspense and disappointment’. He had reached the age of sixty-one and was without an income while still supporting his four surviving children, Frederick, the eldest, who was in medical school, and his three unmarried daughters Lucretia, Gertrude and Anna Eliza.196
Martha died in 1837 and Tuckett moved to the North Devon seaside town of Ilfracombe, where he was looked after by his daughters. On 4 November 1851, aged eighty, he succumbed to heart disease. In his will he included £20 for his servant and, ever considerate of those who depended on him, a further £5 so that she could afford mourning clothes.
Boulogne was the end of the road for Maria, for the time being at least. She was unable to return to England without risking arrest and she was no longer of interest to the public. After 1823, when Tuckett tried and failed to get her case heard again, she sank into obscurity.
We have only bare details of her life. Her perceived value in the marriage market was certainly affected by her failure to inherit her grandfather’s estates in St Vincent and probably also by her diminished reputation. Nevertheless in February 1826, aged twenty-five, she married. Newspapers across Britain noted it:
Colonel de la Salle, late distinguished officer in the French service, to Miss Maria Glenn, formerly of Taunton. This is the young lady who, a little while ago, appeared before the public in the Bowditch abduction case.197
We do not know anything about de la Salle, except that he was twice her age. Maria soon became pregnant with her first son, who was stillborn in November 1826. Two healthy boys followed, George in 1828 and Henry in 1830.
It is perhaps unsurprising that she was prone to emotional upsets. In 1830, she fell out with her cousin Frederick, George Lowman Tuckett’s eldest son, over the trusteeship of her money and sent him an angry letter. He declined to help her further. His brother Fenton had just died and quite possibly he did not feel strong enough to cope with her. Maria herself may also have been aware of impending heartache. Colonel de la Salle survived for only two more years. By the summer of 1832 she was a widow and five years later her beloved mother died in Boulogne at the age of fifty-six and her grandmother followed two years after that.
After this Maria ‘disappears’, only resurfacing when she remarried. Her new husband, Etienne Dougnac, a sub lieutenant of the Voltigeurs (literally, vaulters – they were supposed to jump onto their mounts in order to engage in targeted skirmishes), made a name for himself in August 1840 by disarming Louis-Napoleon when he secretly sailed to Boulogne with fifty hired soldiers in an attempt to stage yet another coup.198 In 1842, aged nearly forty-one, Maria Dougnac gave birth to their daughter Marie Irma. She adored the baby but the marriage was a disaster and the couple soon parted. Once more she showed her mettle: it was not easy to live as a separated wife.
It must have taken yet more emotional strength to leave France and return to England after an absence of twenty-eight years. By 1848, while revolutionary fervour raged across Europe, with France again at its epicentre, she, her eldest son George and little Marie were living at 19 Kennington Green, a dank and damp pocket of south London.199 She had probably slipped into the country disguised by her new name.
Later, Maria moved to Canterbury in Kent, where she lived on a small income from her French property (probably inherited from her first husband) and railway shares. Her surviving letters to her daughter show her as a reliable, practical and likeable woman, loving towards her children and kind to servants, sincerely religious and deeply oriented in her domestic routine.
In her own estimation, she was capable of great forbearance. After her daughter Marie told her that Etienne Dougnac had spoken badly of her, she responded with equanimity. ‘You must not, my child, allow your mind to be depressed at the horrid aspersions cast on me by your cruel father. You have learnt to know him now, and can better comprehend the martyr I have been.’ Her own model was Christ, she said, and she encouraged Marie to follow him too. ‘We have only to remember whose steps we have to follow, and our trials, my darling, what are they compared to our blessed Lord’s? Think my Pet what he suffered on this Earth – ought we to complain?… I can bear much, but to see you unhappy is worse than all to me.’ She could indeed ‘bear much’. Although she did not say so, nothing could have compared to the traumas she had faced as a young woman, when she lost everything: home, reputation and friends.
The letters also include a reference to a legal affair she was required to settle, which involved making payments to a firm of lawyers in Canterbury. Was the ‘business’ connected with her trial or perhaps her return to England? It is a tantalizing possibility but there is no way to confirm it. ‘Thank goodness that business is terminated,’ she wrote to Marie, who was by then living in Hastings. ‘I did the job so well, I am worthy to be the daughter of so good a lawyer as my poor father was.’ She had hardly known this man, who died when she was three. We do not know why she made no mention of George Lowman Tuckett, her guardian and defender during her teenage years and beyond and a barrister himself.
In 1860 her son George died suddenly from an infection at the age of thirty-two. With her other son Henry working abroad on ships, her daughter was now her ‘last remaining treasure,’ it was natural that she should fret about Marie’s health, and her own, which was well below par. Her letters to Marie describe frequent pains, headaches and colds and a persistent cough, but she tried to reassure her that she was fine. ‘You surely know, I never speak or write what is not quite true,’ she added, perhaps with more meaning than her daughter appreciated.
Maria’s ill health was a prelude to a heart attack and on 11 November 1866, she died suddenly at home with Marie at her side. The doctor wrote ‘spasms of the heart’ on the death certificate and a short time later she was buried under a yew tree at the beautiful and ancient church of St Martin’s, Canterbury. Although the wording on the gravestone defines her almost entirely by the men she was related to or married – she is the ‘only surviving child of the late William Glenn, barrister at law’ and the ‘granddaughter of George Lowman, the Lord Chief Justice of St Vincent, West Indies’ and the wife of Colonel De La Salle and Etienne (Stephen) Dougnac – the inscription announces her solely as Maria. The stone was commissioned by Marie, who was probably unaware that she had been deceived about her mother’s age. Maria’s birth year is given as 1806, an error of five years. It is a small irony in a story hinging on her age almost fifty years previously.
Maria had been economical with the truth in other ways. Her children were given the impression that she had lived in France in order to finish her education. Nothing about her character or person would have alerted them to the fact that she was once labelled the notorious teenage liar Maria Glenn whose story was the subject of gossip and debate in drawing rooms and snugs across the country.
Her story was not totally forgotten, however. Even while she was alive, her name cropped up from time to time. In 1846, 26-year-old Earl Ferrers was sued for breach of promise of marriage by ‘a young lady of great personal attractions.’ In court, his barrister read out letters in which Ferrers had apparently expressed ardent love for Mary Elizabeth Smith and sought her hand in marriage. The passages, which the defence said had been written by Smith herself, were so over the top that they provoked gales of laughter in court. It turned out that the defence was correct, Smith had indeed forged them all herself. The instructive story of Maria Glenn, who had lied about her so-called abduction and lied about letters she had written, was a perfect example of why teenage girls should not be believed.
‘Incredible as it may seem that a young girl could be wicked enough and ingenious enough to undertake such a conspiracy, there were precedents,’ said the Attorney General in court, citing Maria and Elizabeth Canning in the same breath. ‘Female ingenuity and determination had been capable of such things.’200
Maria was a perfect lesson in the untrustworthiness of women. In his 1857 work on the principles of circumstantial evidence, William Wills wrote that ‘women, when they do lie, generally do it much more artistically than men – a fact which makes caution and vigilance the more necessary in cases of this kind.’201 He bunched Mary Elizabeth Smith’s pursuit of Earl Ferrers with Maria’s claims against the Bowditches and the lies of Elizabeth Canning.
Wills’s tome was the last public reminder of Maria and her entanglement with the Bowditches until June 1870, when the seasoned journalist Walter Thornbury202 dredged up her story in ‘A Once Famous Abduction,’ an extensive piece written for Charles Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round and probably commissioned by Dickens himself.203 In his view, the case was ‘a sequence of deliberate perjury… never more clearly proved,’ and he too compared Maria to Elizabeth Canning. The Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser reprinted the story in its own pages the following month, perhaps not realising that one of the protagonists was still alive and still in Taunton. William Bowditch, once a criminal in the King’s Bench Prison, now aged eighty-eight and a widower, was living at Gray’s Almshouses in East Street, having retired from a respectable and lucrative career as a publican and vintner.204