DHC = Dorset History Centre
NA = National Archives
SCA = Somerset County Archive
PART ONE
In Health
1. We have no documentary evidence to confirm that Maria arrived at Falmouth – it is simply the most likely port.
2. St Vincent was a pawn in the games of empire fought by France and England: once taken from the indigenous population, the French had it, then the British, and then the French again, and finally the British. A few years before Maria was born French spies goaded the Black Caribs (the racially mixed, free descendants of shipwrecked Africans and the indigenous islanders) into a doomed rebellion against the British. It was swiftly crushed and 5,000 non-slave people disappeared from St Vincent, transported to an island off Honduras.
3. Mary Fenton Glenn to Maria Glenn, 17 March 1814 (Hudson family papers).
4. An obituary of Vicary Gibbs (1751–1820) in The Monthly Magazine (1 June 1820, Vol. XLIX) described him as a man of ‘strong mind, peevish temper, and great legal knowledge, perfected by vast industry and continual practice’ but hoped that ‘the asperity with which this lawyer treated all who differed from him, whether in a wig or without, will never be copied.’
5. Coleridge was at Jesus College while Tuckett was at St John’s.
6. Coleridge had presumably been inoculated against or was otherwise immune to smallpox.
7. A few months later, Coleridge’s brothers paid his debts and arranged for his discharge, pleading insanity, and encouraged him to return to his studies at Cambridge. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (ed), Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1. Houghton Mifflin, 1895.
8. Tuckett to George Coleridge. Hare Court [Inner Temple] Monday” [31 March 1794]. Part of this letter was reprinted in Earl Leslie Grigg’s Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol 1. The original letter was auctioned by Bonham’s in London in 2013.
9. The account of Clementina Clerke and Richard Vining Perry has been taken from numerous contemporary newspaper sources.
10. Perry published his version of events in a pamphlet: ‘The trial of Richard Vining Perry, Esq. for the forcible abduction, or stealing of an heiress, from the boarding-school of Miss Mills, in the city of Bristol; with all the arguments of the Counsel, before Vicary Gibbs, Esq. the recorder thereof. On Monday the 14th of April, 1794.’ Perry later took the name of Clementina’s benefactor, becoming Richard Vining Perry Ogilvie. He stood unsuccessfully for the parliamentary seat of New Windsor in 1797. After a spell in Edinburgh, he reinvented himself as a poet, producing several pamphlets of works, including ‘Fame, Let Thy Glorious Trumpet Sound!’ – a eulogy on the victory and death of Lord Nelson, and ‘The Battle’s Hot Hour’. He then headed for Jamaica and the sugar plantations he now owned as a result of his marriage to Clementina. In 1817, at about the time Maria was removed from Tuckett’s house, he is recorded as the owner of 147 slaves on his estate at St Mary’s. Clementina had died in Bath four years earlier, reputedly in a condition of great poverty. (George H. Gibbs, Bristol Postscripts, Bristol (1947); The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 1813, July–December, page 403).
11. The Act, which imposed a direct tax on legal documents, magazines and newspapers in the American and West Indian colonies in order to pay for the Seven Years War, provoked resistance and led to the famous rallying cry ‘No taxation without representation,’ which the American revolutionaries made their own. William Tuckett had been handed a poisoned chalice: the job of distributor was prestigious but dangerous. In December 1765 he became quarry for a mob of 500 angry colonists who forced him to resign and flee, humiliated and in fear of his life, to the nearby island of Nevis.
12. Moses Lowman started his career as a lawyer but became a non-conformist minister and Biblical commentator, famously publishing a tract defending Jewish religious practices. He was based in Clapham, London, and died in St Vincent in 1752.
13. NA, CO 137/143.
14. E. Neville Williams, The Eighteenth-century Constitution: 1688-1815. Cambridge University Press, 1960.
15. Edward Goldsworthy, Recollections of Old Taunton. 1883; David Gledhill, ‘Taunton Gas 1816-1949,’ Somerset Industrial Archaeological Survey No. 5, 1989.
16. Tuckett was on the periphery of this group. He knew Coleridge from Cambridge and may also have known others in his circle. On 21 April 1796, William Godwin noted in his diary that he had met ‘tucket’ for dinner at his friend Tobin’s. Tobin was either John Tobin, a lawyer-turned-playwright, or more likely his brother James Webbe Tobin, a fervent Abolitionist. Tuckett was connected to the Tobins through his grandmother, Frances Webbe, who was a relation of their mother, Elizabeth Webbe; Tuckett’s father William was a friend of their father. http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/diary/1796-04-21.html
17. NA, CO 137/143.
18. The Whitby family worshipped at Paul Street Independent Chapel in Taunton. England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975, index, FamilySearch.
In Sickness
20. By my estimation, King’s School, Taunton now occupies at least part of the land that was once Holway Green Farm.
21. Joshua Toulmin in his History of Taunton in the County of Somerset (1791) explains the peculiar Somerset custom of succession that allowed the widowed Joan Bowditch to inherit rather than her sons. ‘The mode of succession, in this manor, is singular, and is sometimes productive of very serious evils to families: for estates, according to the custom of it, descend to the widow of a man, though a second or third wife, to the prejudice of the issue under a prior marriage, who are totally precluded, though the lands were the ancient inheritance of their father. Another peculiarity, with respect to the right of succession, is that the younger son inherits before the elder.’
22. Scarlett family lore says that ‘James was apprenticed to a doctor… but did not take to the profession and ran away to sea. Leaving the sea also, he became a correspondent for a London newspaper, afterwards moving to Taunton and joining a paper there.’ Scarlett Letters 1995–2006 (James D. Scarlett, ‘The Taunton Scarletts: The Main Line’ – unpublished article)
Worldly Goods
23. Maddened (colloquial).
Just Impediment
24. Although neither Maria nor anyone else involved in the trial specifically alleged it, the inference was that this substance was laudanum, given to induce compliance and sleep. It could have been a particularly potent proprietary concoction called Quaker’s Black Drop, made of opium and vinegar macerated into a thick syrup. Arnold James Cooley, A Cyclopaedia of Several Thousand Practical Receipts and Collateral Information in the Arts, Manufactures and Trades, Including Medicine, Pharmacy and Domestic Economy. D. Appleton & Co, New York, 1846.
25. Damper is an obsolete term meaning ‘luncheon.’ Thomas Wright, Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English. Vol 1, A–F. London, Henry G. Bohn, 1857.
For Richer, For Poorer
26. 42 Gloucester Place, London.
27. The crime of perjury included lying on a marriage licence or bond.
28. Taunton Courier, 25 September 1817.
29. Pastorel(l)a = literally ‘little shepherdess’; Strephon = Arcadian shepherd.
30. Most of these titles have been gleaned from Allardyce Nicoll’s A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama (Cambridge University Press, London, 1930): Archibald McLaren, The Elopement; or A Caution to Young Ladies (1811); Richard Brinsley Peake, Amateurs and Actors; or The Elopement (1818); Anonymous, The Elopement Extraordinary (1814). In The Flitch of Bacon (reviewed in the Derby Mercury, 21 August 1778) a couple returning from their elopement (she absconded from boarding school) apply for the traditional Dunmow flitch of bacon granted to the most contented couple after a year and a day of marriage. John O’Keeffe’s comedy had political problems and was condemned by the Lord Chamberlain. It played only one night (19 May 1798) at the Drury Lane theatre. John O’Keeffe, Recollections of the Life of John O’Keeffe, Vol 2. Henry Colburn, London, 1826. In William Whitehead’s farce A Trip to Scotland, first staged at Drury Lane in 1770, Miss Griskin, a young heiress, and her lover Jemmy Twinkle, a city apprentice, are pursued on their journey north by Miss Griskin’s uncle and his housemaid. See Lisa O’Connell, ‘Dislocating Literature: The Novel and the Gretna Green Romance, 1770–1850’. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 5–23. Duke University Press.
31. Oxford Digital Library, JJ Games folder (7).
32. Jane Austen, Catharine and Other Writings. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Douglas Murray. Oxford University Press, 1993.
33. Marriott, a former lawyer, had worked with the Hunt brothers on their publication The News. After he moved from London to Taunton (his wife was from Chard in Somerset) he established the Taunton Courier. In order to receive early notice of news of the Peninsular War he set up a system of staged ‘horse expresses’ and was able to cut the journey time to London to 12 hours. The Taunton Courier was distributed in the West Country using one-horse carts enabling Marriott to extend its reach to Penzance in Cornwall. Sherborne Mercury, 28 February 1865.
34. Taunton Courier, 2 October 1817.
35. Henry James Leigh to Thomas Fooks, 11 November 1817. DHC, D/FFO/17/36.
36. Hampshire Chronicle, 25 June 1804.
37. Reports of Cases Heard and Decided in the House of Lords on Appeals and Writs of Error and Claims of Peerage, During the Sessions 1836, 1837 and 1838, Vol IV, page 378. The arguments about Baseley’s rights to his wife’s property lumbered on until at least 1837.
38. Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886 and Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714. Oxford: Parker and Co., 1888–1892.
39. Blakely Cooper was the Surrogate at Yetminster. That is, he was appointed to deputise for the Bishop of Salisbury in granting marriage licences.
40. Rebecca Probert, ‘Control over Marriage in England and Wales, 1753–1823: The Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 in Context,’ Law and History Review, Vol 27, No. 2 (Summer 2009).
41. Kentish Gazette, 15 October 1768.
42. Morning Chronicle, 10 November 1809.
43. Despite family opposition, Augusta Nicholson and John Giles married in April 1810. She died four days short of her 21st birthday, when she would have come into her fortune, leaving her husband and infant son with nothing. That fortune was now her brother’s. He was a naval captain and promptly sailed back to England to claim it. However, he died en route, and as there were no other legatees, it reverted back to Augusta’s son. Hampshire Chronicle, 18 November 1811.
44. John Cutler was born in Eton parish, Buckinghamshire in 1756. His CV includes deacon of Christchurch, Oxford; Chaplain on HMS Hero in Sir Edward Hughe’s fleet to the East Indies; assistant Master at Rugby school; Master of Dorchester Free School; Master to Sherborne Free Grammar School (until 1823); Rector of Patney in Wiltshire from 1815 until his death in 1833.
45. Templer was born in India but his father, an East India Company man, had returned to his Somerset roots and bought the manor of Shapwick, 24 miles from Thornford. His mother, Jane Paul, was sister to Thomas Paul but he was also connected to the Pauls through his wife, who was his first cousin. Educated at Westminster and Merton College, Oxford, he was ordained in 1806 and appointed Rector of Thornford in 1810 and prebendary of Wells a year later. Templer was a pluralist, that is he held more than one living, and is cited in John Wade’s The Extraordinary Black Book: An Exposition of the United Church of England and Ireland, Effingham Wilson, London, 1831, p 531. This volume was similar in aim to Wade’s Black Book: Corruption Unmasked of 1819, which gave information on the revenues of the aristocracy and clergy, the Civil List, the police and the law courts, and the relationship between government and companies such as the East India Company.
46. Cases Decided in the House of Lords on Appeal from the Courts of Scotland, 1828, 1829, Vol 3, William Blackwood, Edinburgh; T. Cadell and M. Stevens and Sons, London, 1830. The Paul-Montgomery marriage may have played a part in Templer’s appointment as Chaplain in Ordinary at Windsor to George IV when Prince of Wales and later as King.
47. In 1793 Richard Gould married Charlotte Giles in Beer Hackett, a village a mile and a half from Thornford. He signed his name with a cross, indicating that he was illiterate. DCA, ‘Dorset Parish Registers’; Reference: PE/BEH:RE2/1.
These Thy Servants
48. Bath, the fashionable health spa, is only 50 miles from Taunton.
49. William Kinglake was the father of lawyer, travel writer and historian Alexander William Kinglake (1809–1891).
50. The inn was probably The Rose and Crown in Bradford Abbas, which is still in business.
Just Cause
51. ‘Hang around’ (colloquial).
52. The belief that the order of getting into the carriage or mounting the horse was legally significant came from advice dispensed by Serjeant Maynard quoted in ‘Law Quibbles’ or ‘A Treatise of the Evasions, Tricks, Turns and Quibbles, commonly used in the Prosession of the Law, to the Prejudice of Clients, and others’ (London, 1724): ‘If a Man steal an Heiress, it is Felony. Stat 3. H 7. But if she carries him to the Place appointed for Marriage, he will not be Criminal’. Maynard’s advice was recalled in the Leeds Intelligencer on 29 March 1802 in relation to a case on the Northern Circuit in which James Alan Park defended Mr Hewitt, who had made a fortune in the West Indies, and Colonel Sowerby, a former officer in the artillery, who were charged with conspiring to make the son of Bacon Frank, a magistrate, elope with and marry Colonel Sowerby’s daughter. Frank’s son had learning impairments and it was alleged that he had been ensnared, but there was insufficient evidence and the prosecution was withdrawn. Fifteen years later, as Judge Park, the defending barrister heard Tuckett’s prosecution of the Bowditches.
53. So called because medieval monarchs sat above the judges, who were in benches at their feet.
54. If the grand jury judged the accusation sufficiently proved, the clerk of the grand jury wrote the words ‘true bill’ (billa vera) on the indictment. In these cases, the indictment was said to be ‘found’ and the accused was required to stand trial. Once an indictment was found, a bench warrant for the arrest of the accused was issued. This was usually the first notice the defendant had of the charges. By the mid-19th century it was recognised that the process of preferring indictments for misdemeanours such as perjury and conspiracy was open to misuse. In cases where the prosecutor felt that he stood to gain an advantage in a related civil suit in the Court of Chancery it could and did lead to false, malicious or frivolous accusations.
55. William Kinglake was an attorney-at-law as well as a banker. He and his family lived at The Lawn in Mary Street, Taunton, later moving to The Vivary.
56. The originals of the two letters have been lost. The versions given here are taken from newspaper reports published after the first trial. Tuckett’s ‘Narrative’ gives the letters without spelling or grammar mistakes. Mr. Richardson’s printed trial transcript includes them, as does the Taunton Courier, which printed them in February 1819. My guess is that Mr. Richardson had seen the original documents and that his is the correct version.
57. 304 Wells Road, Bristol. The pub is now closed.
58. Albert Pell (junior), Reminiscences of Albert Pell, Sometime MP for South Leicestershire. John Murray, London, 1908.
59. Biography and Obituary 1833, Vol XVII. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, London.
60. Originally known as narrators, serjeants-at-law acted as advocates in the Court of Common Pleas and became a select group from which judges were chosen. (www.innertemple.org.uk).
61. Amicus Curiae (John Payne Collier), Criticisms Upon the Bar Including Strictures on the Principal Counsel Practising in the Courts of Kings Bench, Common Pleas, Chancery and Exchequer. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, London, 1819.
62. Abraham Moore (1766–1822) was from a Devon family of clergymen. Having been called to the bar, he went on the Western Circuit, worked as a special pleader and held other legal offices in Kent and London. At the general election of 1820, he was returned as a member for Shaftesbury, his patron being the 1st Earl Grosvenor. At the beginning of August 1821 Moore fled to America having, as Grosvenor put it, ‘turned one of the greatest scoundrels in existence’ by leaving his patron in debt for the ‘frightful amount’ of about £80,000. He and his wife died of yellow fever in New York in late 1822, leaving six young sons.
63. Robert Matthew Casberd (1772–1842), the son of a Bristol doctor, was educated at St John’s College, Oxford. He was MP for Milbourne Port, a ‘Scot and Lot’ constituency of about a hundred voters, from 1812 to 1820. He was described in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1842, 1, 219) as ‘A man of excellent moral character… although not of brilliant talents, [he] possessed a fund of good sound practical sense… add to which, he had read much, and possessed a large fund of useful information… of mild and gentlemanly manners, and although reserved in a mixed company, was a pleasant companion.’ William Selwyn (1775–1855) was educated at Eton and at St John’s and Trinity College, Cambridge, where it is likely he knew George Lowman Tuckett. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1793 and called to the Bar in 1807. The youngest of the team was Henry Jeremy (1787–1849), who was educated at Trinity, Cambridge and admitted to the Middle temple in 1812.
PART TWO
Dorchester
64. The Times, 28 July 1818.
65. ‘Report of the Select Committee appointed to consider the Bankruptcy Laws, presented to the House of Commons’, 16 March 1818.
66. The Shire Hall is opposite the lodgings of Judge Jeffreys, the notorious ‘Hanging Judge’ who tried participants in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. Of the 300 people tried at the Dorchester Assizes, which were held in a room at the Antelope Inn, 72 were sentenced to be hung on Gallows Hill. Many others were transported or died in prison. The courtroom in the new Shire Hall is most famous for the 1834 trial of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six farm workers who were sentenced to seven years’ transportation for forming a trade union by taking an oath of secrecy.
67. Judge James Alan Park’s primary field was marine law. His 1787 Treatise on the Law of Marine Insurance was reprinted six times during his life. He was known for his grumpiness, but he had a reputation for compassion towards defendants ‘where life or liberty is at stake.’ Two days after the Bowditch trial, he moved on to Salisbury, where he sentenced a Mr Hopwood to 18 months imprisonment and hard labour for stealing a bag of oats. Hopwood made a cheeky remark about getting paid wages for his labour, so Park upped the sentence to seven years’ transportation. He also sentenced ten people to hanging but only one, a habitual offender, was not reprieved (Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 27 July 1818).
68. Maria was actually 16. She turned 17 on 28 August 1818.
69. Canning died in America in 1773, having married the great-nephew of the Governor of Connecticut and produced five children. There was no deathbed confession and her whereabouts in January 1753 remain a mystery. It has been suggested that she absented herself in order to give birth or to undergo an abortion, or that she was pursuing an illicit affair or was pushed temporarily into prostitution. John Treherne’s The Canning Enigma (Jonathan Cape, London 1989) is recommended reading on Canning, as is the chapter in The Secret History of Georgian London by Dan Cruickshank (Random House, London 2010).
70. Caraboo: A Narrative of a Singular Imposition. London, 1817.
71. ‘Special juries were originally introduced in trials at bar when the causes were of too great nicety for the discussion of ordinary freeholders, or where the sheriff was suspected of partiality, though not upon such apparent cause as to warrant an exception to him. He is in such cases, upon motion in court and a rule granted thereupon, to attend the prothonotary or other proper officer with his freeholders’ book: and the officer is to take indifferently forty-eight of the principal freeholders in the presence of the attorneys on both sides; who are each of them to strike off twelve, and the remaining twenty-four are returned upon the panel. By the statute 3 Geo. II. c. 25, either party is entitled, upon motion, to have a special jury struck upon the trial of any issue, as well at the assizes as at bar; he paying the extraordinary expense, unless the judge will certify (in pursuance of the statute 24 Geo. II. c. 18) that the cause required such special jury.’ Sir William Blackstone, Of the Trial by Jury: Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, Vol. 2 (1753). As it was, not enough gentlemen could be found and two ordinary jurors joined their social superiors.
72. The foreman, Henry Bankes (or Banks), was a member of an aristocratic Dorset family. He was MP for Corfe, an influential Tory bencher, a chief Trustee of the British Museum, and a friend of both Pitt the younger and of the Duke of Wellington. In 1834 James Frampton wrote to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to complain about the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, invoking an obscure law from 1797 prohibiting people from swearing oaths to each other. Six labourers from Tolpuddle were convicted and sentenced to transportation to Australia.
73. Mary Fenton Glenn married in 1800, aged 18 or 19. Without saying so, Casberd wanted to imply that Maria, and her mother, had been affected by tropical conditions in the West Indies, which were thought to have an effect on female sexual maturity.
Falsehood and Truth
74. Writings = documents or deeds.
75. Gotton Manor, just over four miles from Holway.
76. James Bowditch’s father’s will was witnessed by a Joseph Warren in 1811.
77. NA, PRIS 4/31.
78. Mary Priest was born Mary Peake, and married Aaron Priest in 1810 in Staplegrove. Samuel Poole, another witness for the Bowditches, was probably related to Aaron, having married Hannah Priest in Staplegrove in 1808. Aaron Priest is recorded in the 1841 census as an innkeeper living in the parish of St James in Taunton.
A Continuation of the Conspiracy
79. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/8.
80. Flagitiousness = scandalous crime or vice.
81. Taunton Courier, 30 July 1818 and 6 August 1818.
82. For example, the Newbern Sentinel (North Carolina) reported it on 3 October 1818.
83. Morning Chronicle, 29 July 1818; The Examiner, 2 August 1818.
84. There was no appeals procedure as such. However, an application for a rule ‘to show why there should not be a new trial’ allowed those convicted of misdemeanours (felonies were excluded) to seek a hearing at which they hoped to overturn the verdicts against them. Applications had to be made within four days of the original verdict. Baker John Sellon, The Practice of the Courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, Volume 1 (originally compiled by George Crompton). Gould, Banks and Gould, Sign of Lord Coke, New York, 1813).
85. One example: In 1810, the Reverend Charles Caleb Colton wrote to the Taunton Courier to report that he could find no rational explanation for symptoms of poltergeist in a house in a small village in Somerset. Marriott sensed a hoax and when he received a letter warning him that if he took ‘improper liberties with any Gentleman’s name he would be called to account for doing so’ (Colton denied that he had any involvement in this letter), he decided to work it up into a threat by the conspirators behind the hoax to shoot him. The story was picked up by Marriott’s friend Leigh Hunt, who published it in The Examiner in London and from there it spread quickly to The Times and provincial papers across the country. When the Taunton Courier followed up the story it made a specific allegation that Mr Chave, the current tenant of the affected house, who was in dispute with his landlord, was behind the hoax (he and his wife were supposed to have used mop handles to bang on the walls and the joists), and that Mrs Chave’s brother, Mr Taylor, who also lived at the house, had studied necromancy. Colton was incandescent. From the outset, he had asserted only that he had no explanation for the strange occurrences in the house. He wrote a pamphlet and published it at his own expense; the pages of ‘Sampford Ghost, An Appendix to a Plain and Authentic Narrative’ almost spit with fury. He detailed Marriott’s sins: multiple libels, gross misrepresentations and downright lies. ‘Suppose fifty or an hundred copies extraordinary of the Taunton Courier are thrust into circulation in consequence of the contemptible farrago it has of late contained, yet must it derive from so mean a source but a momentary popularity, and now that the bubble is burst, it must fall below its former level. That man deserves to starve and shiver who burns down his neighbour’s house to warm his fingers at the blaze.’ Colton, like many a clergyman who has found himself featured in the popular press, knew why Marriott had fixed on him. ‘A parson is nuts to a half-starved printer.’
86. In 1790 Thomas Woodforde, with Sir Benjamin Hammet and others, established the first bank in Taunton. It later later became Woodforde, Kinglake, Woodforde and Poole.
87. R. G. Thorne, The House of Commons 1790–1820: Survey. Martin Secker and Warburg, London, 1986.
88. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) eloped with singer Elizabeth Ann Linley in 1772, having first fought two duels in defence of her honour.
89. George Henry Nettleton, ‘The Books of Lydia Languish’s Circulating Library,’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 5, No. 4, Oct., 1905.
90. In 1836 Maria’s cousins, the sons of Maria’s paternal aunt, Fanny Earle Ponsonby, were paid a total of £2760 12s 11d by the British government in compensation for the loss of their ‘property’, which included 103 enslaved persons at Revolution Hall on St Vincent (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/27016). In 1834 the enslaved persons of Rivulet, the other of William Glenn’s estates, were registered as the possessions of Duncan Forbes Sutherland and the heirs of Duncan and Daniel Brown.
‘More Like an Angel’
91. Exeter Flying Post, 18 November 1818. Kersey is a coarse woollen cloth, manufactured in Taunton.
92. Charles Abbott (1762–1832) 1st Baron Tenterden, was Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench between 1818 and 1832. John Bayley (1763–1841), a judge of the King’s Bench since 1808, was known for his intelligence, knowledge and strict impartiality. Yorkshire-born Sir George Sowley Holroyd (1758–1831), sat as a judge of the King’s Bench from 1816. William Draper Best (1767–1845), Tory MP and barrister, later Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Privy Councillor (1824), was raised to the peerage (1829) and was appointed deputy speaker of the House of Lords.
93. On the death of Lord Ellenborough, the previous Lord Chief Justice, the natural successor was passed over for political reasons. Abbott was appointed to the surprise of many. See The Lives of the Chief Justices of England, from the Norman Conquest Till the Death of Lord Tenderden, Volume 3, page 248. London, John Murray, 1849.
94. 270 ft in length and 70 in breadth (80 × 21 m).
95. Lord Melville was the first Secretary of State for War. In 1806 he was impeached for misappropriation of public money. He was acquitted but never again held public office.
96. Tuckett had no doubt that the letters were forgeries. However, he may also have been influenced against the use of bank inspectors by the forgery case of Brooks in 1818, prosecuted at the Old Bailey, in which the jury criticised the quality of evidence presented by the Bank of England. John W. Cairns, Grant McLeod (eds), The Dearest Birth Right of the People of England: The Jury in the History of the Common Law. Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2002.
97. Affidavit of William Kinglake, published in the Taunton Courier, 25 February 1819.
98. As a Quaker, Elizabeth Smith made affirmations rather than sworn statements.
99. British Press, 11 November 1818, reported that James Scarlett cited The King v. Best (3rd Salkeld Reports), where it was held, ‘that the conspiracy itself, and not the overt acts, constituted the offence. The conspiracy was where the act of meeting took place, and not where the transactions for carrying the plan into execution happened. Here the conspiracy, if any, was in the county of Somerset, and there the venue ought to have been laid.’ Scarlett also questioned whether a man and wife (Thomas and Juliana Paul) could be indicted for conspiracy, ‘for they were but one person.’
100. Taunton Courier, 19 November 1818.
101. Anne Leigh to Henry James Leigh, 19 November 1818 (evening). SCA, A/CYW 1/1/8.
102. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 21 November 1818. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/8.
103. Alphabetical list of the Honourable East India Company’s Bengal Civil Servants from the Year 1780 to the Year 1838. London, Longman, Orme, Brown and Co., 1839.
104. Tom Woodforde was indebted to Roy for 5,000 rupees; in return he allowed a clause in Roy’s contract that he should not be kept standing in Woodforde’s presence. When Woodforde became Registrar of the Appellate Court of Murshidabad, he kept Ray on as ‘munshi’ (writer or secretary) and the friendship between them continued for decades thereafter. Roy died in Bristol in 1833 during a two-year tour of England, and the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser reported that he had been on the point of setting off to see Woodforde. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, University of California Press, 1998; Mich Franklin, Romantic Representations of British India, Taylor and Francis, 2006; Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 2 October 1833.
105. Tipu Sultan (1750–1799) was the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore and an implacable enemy of the East India Company.
106. Hindu and Muslim sepoys, offended by the introduction of a new hat and rules about facial hair and caste marks and reacting to years of poor pay and decreasing status, had turned on their colonial masters with unprecedented ferocity. About 100 British soldiers and 14 officers were killed and many more wounded. In the bloody aftermath, 350 sepoys were put to death. The rebellion may have been encouraged by the presence of Tipu Sultan’s family at Vellore Fort. His 12 sons (the Mysore Princes) and eight daughters, and their vast entourage, had been prisoners of the British since 1799 and lived in splendour, albeit stripped of power, in part of the fort complex.
107. Khyroola used traditional methods to uncover thieves and was, said Woodforde, a ‘conjuror or necromancer.’ It was a practice ‘so despicable as almost to surpass credibility.’ Woodforde claimed that personal business called him back to England and just before he set sail sent the Governor General his resignation, in which he simultaneously threatened legal action against Thoroton and pleaded to be reinstated (Thoroton died before any proceedings could be started). NA, Records of the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India: Board’s Collections, IOR/F/4/194/4421 (Jul 1806–May 1807) and IOR/F/4/211/4720 (Sep 1806–Sep 1808)
108. Despite its name and location in louche Covent Garden, this was a respectable and reasonably priced no-frills hotel.
109. DHC, D/FFO/17/36
110. Henry James Leigh to Thomas Fooks, 9 January 1819. DHC, D/FFO/17/36
111. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 6 and 9 January 1819. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/8
112. Pell had married well. His wife was the daughter of Lord St John.
Support
113. Chief Justice Abbott appeared to accept that the conspiracy started early in Maria’s stay at Holway, before she turned 16.
114. In fact, Justice Best said later it was more likely to have been written after William Bowditch’s consultation with Oxenham, on the evening of the 20th.
115. The account of the hearing has been taken from the Taunton Courier of 11 and 18 February and 5 March 1819, and ‘The Judgement of the Court of the King’s Bench in the Prosecution of the King against James Bowditch and nine others, for conspiracy for the forcible abduction of Miss Maria Glenn on discharging the rule for a new trial on the 9th February, 1819.’ J. W. Marriott, Taunton, 1819.
Inside
116. Dr Robert Kinglake was an expert in gout, for which he advocated treatment with cloths soaked in ammonia and cold water. Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, volume 31.
117. Taunton Courier, quoted in Exeter Flying Post, 4 March 1819.
118. The Times, quoted in The Examiner, 26 September 1819.
119. Taunton Courier, 3 May 1819.
120. The Examiner, 22 February 1819.
121. Taunton Courier, 5 March 1819.
122. The description of the King’s Bench Prison has been compiled from various contemporary sources: John Richardson, Recollections, Political, Literary, Dramatic, and Miscellaneous, of the Last Half-century, Containing Anecdotes and Notes of Persons of Various Ranks Prominent in Their Vocations, with Whom the Writer was Personally Acquainted. London 1853; Thomas Allen, History of the Counties of Surrey and Sussex. London, I. T. Hinton and Holdsworth and Ball, 1829; Sholto Percy and Reuben Percy, London or Interesting Memorials of its Rise, Progress and Present State. T. Boys, London, 1824; Jeremy Bentham, Sir John Bowring, John Stuart Mill, The Westminster Review, Vol IX, Jan-Apr 1828. Baldwin and Cradock, 1828.
123. The Examiner, 3 October 1813.
124. The Examiner, 12 June 1813.
125. All the Year Round, 21 July 1860. Charles Dickens also wrote of the prison in three novels: in David Copperfield the feckless Mr Micawber is confined there; in Nicholas Nickleby Madeleine Bray and her father live within the Rules; and in Little Dorrit Mr Rugg tries to persuade Arthur Clennam to go to the more spacious King’s Bench Prison rather than the squalid Marshalsea nearby. In 1824, the 12-year-old Dickens lodged in Lant Street, close to both the King’s Bench Prison and the Marshalsea, where the rest of his family was imprisoned for debt.
126. The prison was often the scene of major disturbances: a mob tried to rescue the radical journalist John Wilkes from its walls in 1768, resulting in riots at St George’s Fields and the death of a spectator (the soldier who shot him was later executed); and the prison was burnt to the ground by Lord George Gordon’s anti-Catholic rioters in 1780. The site of the King’s Bench Prison is approximately where the Scovell housing estate now stands.
Firefighting
127. In 1816 the pillory was reserved as a punishment for perjury alone, and its use was not abolished until 1837. On 26 May 1819 William Millner was sentenced to an hour in the pillory followed by transportation for seven years for wilful and corrupt perjury. However, it is unlikely that females, especially genteel ones, would have been sentenced to the pillory.
128. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 23 September 1819. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/9.
129. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 25 September 1819. SCA, AC YW 1/1/9.
130. Henry James Leigh to Thomas Fooks, 21 September 1819. DHC, D/FFO/17/36.
131. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 27 September 1819. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/9.
132. The (Kirby’s) Wonderful and Scientific (Eccentric) Museum, Vol 6.
133. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 29 September 1819. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/9.
134. The Times, 26 September 1819.
135. The Examiner, 7 November 1819.
136. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 27 January 1820. By pleading that Maria and Mary Ann should be protected from liability for the costs of bringing new charges, Mr Moore created a legal precedent: when a prosecutor chose to quash an indictment and replace it with another, the defendant was not liable for additional costs and, crucially, the name of the prosecutor or prosecutors would have to be revealed. Rex v. Glenn, 3 B & A (K.B.) 373. The Journal of Jurisprudence: A New Series of the American Law Journal, Vol. 7.
137. NA, PRIS 4/31.
138. Thomas Erskine (1788–1864).
139. Unfortunately, there is no mention of fines or other punishments imposed.
140. Hampshire Telegraph, 4 September 1820.
141. Henry James Leigh to Thomas Fooks 21 September 1820. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/10B.
142. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 24 September 1820. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/10B.
143. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 29 September 1820. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/10.
144. The Reverend Clapp died on 19 October 1818. He had been too ill to attend the Dorchester Assizes.
145. Clapp was ‘in the habits of the closest intimacy with Mr. Kinglake, and in almost daily intercourse with him or Mr. Oxenham.’ Taunton Courier, 5 March 1819.
146. Taunton Courier, 25 February 1819.
Marvellous or Horrible
147. Morning Chronicle, 3 October 1820.
148. Woodford had never denied being in church on the 25 June. It was a day seared in his memory as he had been at the funeral of the young boy he had fished out of French Weir, whose coffin he had screwed down himself. Woodford’s day-book showed that he had been employed at home on 27 August but this merely meant that the day was his own. Woodford had chosen to go into the church and work on fixing his pew.
149. Taunton Courier, 6 December 1820.
150. Henry James Leigh to Anne Leigh, 3 October 1820. SCA, A/CYW 1/1/10.
Celebrations
151. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 16 October 1820
152. George desperately wanted to stop Caroline claiming the title of Queen Consort and to divorce her, so the government prepared a Bill of Pains and Penalties which would allow her to be tried in Parliament, where a legal standard of proof of her alleged adultery with Bartolomeo Bergami (‘a foreigner of low station’) would not be required. On the 17 August the House of Lords demanded that Caroline appear before them and after 52 days the divorce clause was carried. But Lord Brougham spoke brilliantly in her defence and the Lords dropped the case. The Queen was a popular Whig cause, more for her symbolic quality as a thorn in the side of the King and of the government than for her personal attributes.
153. ‘The Trial of Her Majesty, Queen Caroline, Consort of George IV, for an Alleged Adulterous Intercourse with Bartolomo Bergami.’ T. Kaygill, London, 1820
154. ‘The Trials of Maria Glenn and Mary Whitby, for Wilful and Corrupt Perjury, against the Bowditches, Which Took Place in the Court of King’s Bench, Before the Lord Chief Justice and Special Juries, On Monday and Tuesday the 2d and 3d Days of October, 1820. Verdict—Guilty. J. W. Marriott, Taunton Courier, 1820.’ SCA, A/CTP/7/27.
155. The Examiner, 8 October 1820.
156. Irrefragable = Not able to be refuted or disproved; indisputable.
157. The Examiner, 22 October 1820.
158. NA, HO 47/59.
159. NA, PRIS 4/31.
160. The Times, 8 December 1820; Morning Post, 17 January 1821.
161. Morning Chronicle, 22 November 1820.
162. The Examiner, 31 December 1820, quoting The Times.
163. Taunton Courier, 6 December 1820.
164. Morning Chronicle, 4 June 1823.
165. Thomas Haynes Bayly, Musings and Prosings. Boulogne, 1833.
166. Taunton Courier, 13 December 1820. The report explained that funds raised previously were not put towards the perjury trial costs but used only for subsistence while in prison.
167. Bristol Mercury, 23 December 1820.
168. The hard-drinking and gambling Rev Henry Cresswell (1787-1849), vicar of Creech St Michael, just outside Taunton, was the third of seven legitimate sons of Escourt Cresswell, MP for Wootton Bassett. An outspoken and argumentative political radical, Henry Cresswell supported the Radical agitator Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt (one of his eight children was named after him) and was on the committee that greeted him on his release from Ilchester Prison in October 1822. Cresswell incurred large debts in order to support his brother Richard Escourt Cresswell, a Whig candidate for Taunton in 1826 (he was unsuccessful).
169. Taunton Courier, 20 December 1820.
170. Cresswell’s largely incoherent reply in which he referred to ‘the well-drained client’ and the ‘well-fed attorney’ hinted at a back story between them, perhaps one involving the payment of lawyers’ fees.
171. ‘A Letter to the Bowditch Committee Containing an Answer to a Personal Attack Made Against Him by Mr. J. H. Leigh, Attorney, Taunton.’ Bristol, J. Baller, 1821. SCA, Tite 110-11.
172. In April 1821 Henry Cresswell published a second pamphlet, ‘The Bowditch Case’, including his own comments on the Dorchester trial. The profits went to the relief of the Bowditch family. This pamphlet appears not to be indexed anywhere other than at the British Library, which cannot find it. I have been told that it may have been destroyed during enemy bombing in the Second World War.
173. The Examiner, 14 January 1821.
174. Taunton Courier, 24 January 1821.
175. HC Deb 15 February 1821 vol 4 cc687-9. John Ashley Warre (1787–1860) was MP for Taunton from 1820 to 1826. He was born in nearby Hestercombe and was known as a supporter of of civil and religious liberty, parliamentary reform and rigid public economy. R. Thorne (ed), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1790–1820, Secker, 1986.
176. Bristol Mercury, 23 December 1820.
Loyalty and Betrayal
177. Morning Post, 13 September 1821.
178. ‘Sequel to A Narrative of the Conspiracy for the Forcible Abduction of Miss Maria Glenn &c. &c. &c.’ was advertised in the Taunton Courier on 5 February 1822, priced at 2s 6d, a shilling less than the first pamphlet.
179. Bristol Mercury, 9 February 1822.
180. Morning Chronicle, 16 May 1822.
181. Abbott had sat in judgment at Mary’s trial and was effectively criticizing his own performance.
182. Taunton Courier, 15 May and 22 May 1822.
183. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 27 May 1822.
184. John Cam Hobhouse (1780–1869), English writer and politician, entered Parliament in 1820 as a Radical, sitting for Westminster. He was the son of nonconformists and a life-long friend of the poet Robert Byron. He was imprisoned in Newgate in late 1819 after publishing a pamphlet entitled ‘A Trifling Mistake, &c.’
185. The Examiner, 30 June 1822.
186. Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 6 November 1833.
187. The portrait of Wiliam Bowditch, donated to Somerset County Archives by his brother-in-law James Scarlett, who wrote this paragraph, was painted well after the events covered in this book. ‘Scarlett Letter’, May 1996.
188. In 1828 Oxenham sued Kinglake for £1,000, which he said was owed to him in settlement of a bill he paid during the sale of the Brickdale bank, which had gone bust before he could be reimbursed. Kinglake countered that Oxenham was not an attorney, but only his clerk, in direct contradiction of his evidence at Dorchester. Oxenham’s suit was dismissed with costs. Edward Young, Sir John Jervis, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Courts of Exchequer, Vol 2. Sweet, Pheney etc, London, 1829.
189. W. Tuckwell, Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake. George Bell & Sons, London, 1902.
190. Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 6 March 1833.
191. Caledonian Mercury, 2 December 1843.
192. Registers of the Parish Church of Barton, Westmorland, 1666–1830. Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 1917.
193. Tuckett’s account is given in his letters to Lord Manchester (NA, CO 137/173) and is borne out by that in F.A. Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society, Vol. 2. T. Ward & Co, and G. & J. Dyer, London, 1842. Two Baptist missionaries, Mr Gardner and Mr Knibb, were placed on trial for their lives, but at Tuckett’s direction Gardner was acquitted and the case against Knibb was dismissed.
194. The term ‘coloured’ was the contemporary term and is not used here pejoratively.
195. The Jamaican historical archives have no portrait of him and no information about his role.
196. Frederick, who became a ship’s surgeon, did not marry and died of pulmonary apoplexy a year after his father.
197. The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol 96, page 364.
198. Attentat du 8 Août 1840, Interrogatoires des Inculpés. Imprimerie Royal, Paris, 1840
199. Maria lived a few hundred yards from Kennington Common (now the much smaller Kennington Park), where Chartists gathered in April 1848 to process to Parliament and present a petition.
200. Western Times, 21 February 1846; Morning Post, 18 February 1846.
201. William Wills, An Essay on the Principles of Circumstantial Evidence, Butterworths, London, 1862.
202. All the Year Round, 18 June 1870, page 53. The account was reprinted in the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser in three parts (20 July, 27 July and 3 August 1870).
203. Dickens died suddenly on 9 June 1870.
204. William Bowditch died in 1873, aged 90.
Monsters
205. Taunton Courier, 1 August and 12 September 1816.
206. In later life, Edward Wakefield became active in prison reform. He played a role in the development of South Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Ellen Turner died in childbirth at the age of 19. Wakefield did not remarry.
207. Liverpool Mercury, 12 August 1812