Chapter 5

ESCAPING FROM THE SPIDER’S WEB DEFENCES TO CLAIMS FOR BREACH OF PROMISE

I have no wish to grieve you but I don’t wish to take you into a circle that will look upon you with ridicule.

(Michael Bright, The Guardian, 13 March 1866)

From the instant a woman received his offer of marriage a man was caught in a trap. Even if he regretted his folly as soon as the words left his mouth, there was no escape unless his beloved released him from his promise. It is likely that several thousand men discreetly bought their way out of an unwise proposal. If a man was not prepared to make a woman his wife and she was not prepared to accept his offer of financial recompense, the only option was a day in court whilst a jury decided how much money the jilted bride deserved for her blighted hopes. Breach of promise claims could bring out the worst in both parties and court hearings often highlighted to everyone present just how fortunate it was that the marriage had not gone ahead.

Before a case found its way into the courtroom lawyers would try to forge a settlement between the couple, but some offers of amends were too trivial to be taken seriously. In 1866, wealthy Michael Bright offered a paltry £20 to Annie Thorpe to return his letters and presents of jewellery. In court, the jury was infuriated by his comments about Annie’s low social status and awarded her £500. Several women had unrealistic hopes of how much money a court would give them. Others were intent on shaming the man in public and were not the injured innocents portrayed by their barristers. A few women had a reason other than money for having the claim heard. Women working as governesses and companions sometimes needed to prove their good character, by showing that they had given the man no grounds to break the engagement, in order to protect their future employment prospects.

Faced with the inevitability of a court hearing, a defendant had four options: he could claim that he lacked the legal capacity to enter into an engagement; admit that he had broken the engagement and try to mitigate the damages; deny that the couple were engaged; or argue that he was justified in refusing to marry the plaintiff. These lines of defence were not mutually exclusive and it was not unusual for the defendant to deny the existence of an engagement, state that the plaintiff had released him from his obligations and also put forward his reasons for breaking it. When a man successfully defended a claim it is not always apparent which of his many contentions had influenced the jury in his favour.

Defences based on the man’s legal capacity to form an engagement arose from contract law and related to the defendant’s level of understanding when he offered marriage. Contract law deemed that anyone under 21 had insufficient understanding to enter into a binding agreement and allowed the minor to walk away from their promise if they wished. Cases involving the defence of age were hardly ever heard by a jury, as someone’s date of birth was a matter of fact and not usually difficult to establish. Whether the plaintiff knew the man’s age when she accepted the proposal was irrelevant. If the man chose not to renew it when he reached his majority, then the woman had no grounds to bring a claim.

Not understanding the implications of a proposal or being unaware of making one were valid defences only when a man had a severe mental illness or a condition that would now be described as a severe learning disability, or if he had been so drunk that he had no idea what he was saying when he mentioned marriage. In practice, these points were rarely argued before a jury as clinical knowledge was low and expert witnesses were not abundant. Until the late nineteenth century, the law was more concerned about the plaintiff’s blighted hopes than the defendant’s impaired understanding. In 1801, Miss Vaughan was awarded the verdict against 75-year-old dementia sufferer Mr Albridge in a case the jurors were clearly uncomfortable with. The damages of £10 were derisory and the verdict appears to have been motivated by which party would pay the legal costs.

In 1896, Annie Sealy sued Devonshire solicitor William Creed. He had been compulsorily admitted to an asylum just after he made Annie a written offer of marriage. Creed went into the witness box and swore that he had no memory of several points in her evidence, including writing the letter containing his promise to marry her. Annie lost her claim because Creed could not remember what he had done during his illness. Defendants who became insane after making a proposal were held liable for damages and those with episodic mental illness also had to pay to escape the engagement if their symptoms had not been acute when the offer was made.

In the nineteenth century, men who had learning disabilities were considered to be responsible for their proposals, though juries might award trivial damages to a calculating woman. In 1893, Lucy Shepherd received only a farthing from her employer’s brother, Frederick White, an elderly and simple-minded man who was 40 years older than the enterprising housemaid. After rejecting one proposal she brought a ring for him to give her when he mentioned marriage again. Awarding a verdict against a vulnerable man, even if it was negated by a small award of damages, made this group of people more vulnerable to exploitation, as some families would settle a claim rather than help their relative to defend it.

Drunkenness was regarded as a form of mental illness but it was a difficult defence to succeed with. Men whose tongues were loosened by a few drinks were not considered to lack capacity and had to suffer the consequences of raising the woman’s hopes, even for a short period of time. Chronic alcoholics, and men who were very inebriated when they proposed, usually managed to escape from their promise if the woman had deliberately taken advantage of words uttered without understanding. This was normally reflected in an award of low damages rather than a successful defence of the claim.

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In contrast to the small number of defendants who argued their lack of capacity to enter into a valid engagement or marriage, around 50 per cent of defendants offered no defence at all and acknowledged breaking the engagement. Not all men did so willingly. Poorer men had to keep the legal costs as low as possible and one way was to hand victory to the woman and hope that the jury would not ruin him when compensating her. Sensible men explained their reasons for breaking the engagement temperately and offered no criticism of the woman.

In legal terms there was no difference between a woman who had lost little from the broken engagement and one who had suffered great harm, but juries were sometimes pragmatic on this point when a man’s change of mind arose from a change in his circumstances and not from a selfish whim. In 1875, a sympathetic judge summing up at Monmouth Assizes emphasised that William Haines had not been unreasonable in refusing to marry when his health began to fail and told the jury to consider this when assessing the injury to Margaret Williams’s feelings.

An occasional man may have had his own reasons for not defending a case. Limiting the collateral damage of wide press coverage may explain why Harcourt Master, a married man with a young family, did not defend actress Carlotta Huntly’s claim in 1896. The day after the hearing, Caroline Master noticed whilst having breakfast that a portion of the daily newspaper had been torn off. When Master left for work, she fetched another copy and discovered that her philandering husband had pretended to be single to seduce the actress and then lied about moving to Africa when he decided to abandon her. Four months later, Caroline cited this to support her successful request for a judicial separation.

For men like Harcourt Master, who possessed little sense or scruple, the law offered a tantalising opportunity to escape their engagement without having to pay a penny, if they could prove that certain circumstances applied. Men with low moral standards were prepared to argue, with varying degrees of ingenuity, that their situation fell into one of those categories. To a modern eye, some of their contentions appear ludicrous. A few would also have appeared so to contemporaries, but many were rooted in the values of their age. For defendants to put forward any argument indicates a hope that it would find favour with the men who sat in the jury box. Most defendants were represented by experienced lawyers who understood what might just, and what definitely would not, sway a jury in their client’s favour.

Two arguments became known as the standard defences. These were that there had never been a promise of marriage or, if there had been such a promise, the parties had released each other from their obligations. It was not always easy to determine when a courtship became an engagement and the way a couple behaved towards each other, or were regarded by other people, could be used as evidence of their intention to wed. Sometimes a woman’s family or friends colluded by pretending that the defendant had spoken of marriage or plied him with drink until he actually did so.

After the Evidence (Further) Amendment Act of 1869 raised the standard of proof required, it became easier for a man to deny that marriage had been offered, although juries were not easy to convince on this point. A few defendants appealed successfully on the basis that there was inadequate confirmation of a promise of marriage, after failing to persuade a lay jury that a promise had never been uttered.

It was unusual for a man to convince a jury that a couple had agreed to end their engagement. The notion that a woman would willingly free a man and risk remaining a spinster was difficult to comprehend in a society that perceived a woman’s true purpose in life was as a wife and mother. In 1860, when Thomas Bomford alleged that Fanny Davies had released him from his promise almost everyone in the Worcester courtroom expressed surprise that his word was believed instead of hers. It is possible that the jury found the idea of a woman enriching herself more than once with damages for breach of promise unacceptable, as Fanny had received £54 from a Mr Skinner by agreement a year earlier.

Mimicking the requirement for sufficient proof of a promise of marriage, juries usually required strong confirmation that a woman had agreed to end her engagement before they found for the man. In 1876, this led a Bury alderman, George Yates, to deceive Betsy Barlow into signing a receipt for £100 in full settlement of her claim against him. Betsy explained that when she signed the paper it contained much less writing and related to a different debt. In 1880, John Wootton argued that as Anna Palmer had given birth to a child by another man in 1876, she must have considered their own youthful engagement had ended by this date. Mr Justice Bramwell, hearing her claim at the Norfolk Assizes, described it as the most impudent action he had ever heard of.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, engagements were sometimes entered into with conditions attached by one or both parties. The bride’s age at marriage was one consideration for her parents. Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter was engaged at 14, on the understanding that her wedding would not take place for another three years. Another condition often imposed was that satisfactory enquiries were made into the background and finances of the suitor. This reflected the social and economic mobility brought about by the Industrial Revolution. It was more necessary when the man was a stranger to the area than when he was from a local and well-established family.

Some conditional engagements were made with no marriage date in mind. One practical problem for men contemplating marriage was the Poor Law which obliged children to maintain parents unable to support themselves, so that indigent, elderly people did not become a burden on the ratepayers of the parish. For a young man providing for a widowed mother or an unmarried sister, it was impossible to estimate when he might be able to afford a wife and family.

To a young woman, an open-ended engagement was not necessarily undesirable, as someone who was ‘spoken for’ enjoyed a respect that an unattached spinster did not. She could assist in running the family home, caring for older relatives, helping with younger siblings or in the family trade or business, or possibly doing a bit of sewing on her own account to save some money for married life. Her relatives knew that at some point her fiancé would take responsibility for her living costs, or if he did not then a claim for breach of promise could be made. To protect themselves from this eventuality, astute men placed a limit on the time it might take them to acquire the means to support a wife. If the marriage did not take place within that period, both parties became free from their obligations. It was practical, if unromantic.

There was no particular level of income that determined when a marriage was affordable; everything depended on the needs and aspirations of the couple. Jane Austen revealed that neither Elinor Dashwood nor Edward Ferrars, a genteel, upper-middle-class couple contemplating marriage in 1811, were quite enough in love to think that £350 a year would supply them with the comforts of life. A claim brought in 1886, by governess Elizabeth Myers against an Islington dental assistant revealed that, for a couple with pretensions of gentility, marriage was likely to be a miserable experience for both if their income was less than £150 a year. This equated to £3 (60 shillings) a week.

A review of The Times in 1886 demonstrates this. Rented accommodation for a married couple cost around 10 shillings a week. Furniture was available on hire purchase but, with a piano costing four shillings a week over three years, this type of refinement was unaffordable if a bed, lounge furniture and kitchen equipment were also needed. Food could cost around 20 shillings each week. Coal for cooking and heating cost around five shillings a week depending on the time of year. The couple would need clothes and the man might have to travel to work by public transport, swallowing up a few more shillings over the working week. With theatre seats costing one shilling, entertainment would be a rarity and help with domestic chores an unaffordable luxury, obliging the woman to do all the shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing and mending herself. If children came along the extra cost would be very hard to absorb.

Conditional engagements began with a young man’s honest intention to work diligently and earn the money to marry his sweetheart. Geographic mobility was common amongst men aspiring to a career in a retail, commercial or professional establishment and some moved many miles away to find employment. Respectable lodgings for single men cost around 40 shillings a week, if meals and laundry were provided. Accommodation, food and the necessary incidental costs of working might swallow the majority of the weekly wage, making it hard to accumulate savings quickly and set up a marital home without help from the family or an inheritance. If the young couple did not see each other regularly there was a strong probability that they would grow apart, especially if they had not known each other for very long.

Distant courtships might be sustained by letter for a few years, though if one or both parties could not write, even this limited form of contact could not maintain the affection between them. It was usual for couples to write to each other several times a week and when Kate Lamb sued Arthur Fryer, her barrister produced more than 900 letters written almost daily by the pair over 18 months and stated their total length as 2 and three quarter miles. In court, the man’s correspondence was usually described as profuse and affectionate after the initial parting, but then gradually petering out. Later letters usually contained stilted assurances that the man still loved the woman and intended to make her his wife, clearly answering reproaches and uncertainties raised in her letters to him. At some point the relationship ended when the man finally failed to reply to her letters.

In November 1886, the Girl’s Own Paper described how close friendships formed between young women at finishing school withered away in nine out of ten cases. Letters became shorter and fewer as the distant friends developed new lives and interests and struggled in fitful correspondence to find meaningful topics to write about. The paper advised that when the kernel of a once-strong relationship had gone, it was better to fling away the empty husk and make new friends with people who were available to provide companionship than cling on to the past. Ironically, when the fitful correspondence was between a young man and woman who had become strangers, the man was castigated as heartless and cruel. In breach of promise cases he could be ordered to pay a couple of hundred pounds damages if he concluded that he and his former love now had so little in common that marriage would be foolhardy.

Conditional, open-ended engagements were rooted in aspiration and fantasy. They could unrealistically raise a woman’s hopes and placed a heavy burden on a man to honour an idealistic commitment made when he was young and without much experience of life. History only reveals the women who were successful in court. It leaves no trace of those who consulted a solicitor only to find that they could not prove the promise; those whose courtship never turned into a formal engagement, those who were unable to locate a missing fiancé in order to sue him or who refused other opportunities out of misplaced loyalty. In the twentieth century public opinion turned against long engagements and women were criticised for deluding themselves that marriage lay ahead. Men were no longer held responsible for wasting the best years of a woman’s life; she was considered to have done that herself.

Faced with a court hearing, men sometimes argued that the conditions attached to an engagement had not been fulfilled, though if a man had married someone else, the law considered that he had broken his promise at that point, whether the stipulated condition had been met or not. Taking a wife made it impossible for him to honour the commitment to his first love.

Some conditional promises were based on the mercenary consideration that an inheritance would provide the funds to support the couple. How long a father in good health would remain alive was unknown and expectations from a bachelor uncle could evaporate in an instant if he decided to marry, or changed his will. It seems likely that some men who based their promise on the expectation of an inheritance were not completely sincere. An unusual breach of a conditional promise was Edward Paty’s refusal in 1887 to marry Jane Green. Their engagement was based on Jane’s expectations from her grandfather. When he died without leaving anything to her, Paty considered that his £70 annual salary was too small to support a wife. The jury decided that, whether he could afford a wife or not, he should pay Jane £100 for reneging on his commitment.

When an inheritance was involved, the man was often of a higher social rank and most women appear unwise in placing any trust in the proposal. Marriages where a woman moved into a significantly higher social class were unusual, unless her father had made money in a trade and could provide her with a good marriage settlement. Even when the man remained loyal, family opposition to a son marrying a poor girl could prove insurmountable. James Rollinson’s love for Margaret Turner, one of the family servants, incensed his father who stated in his will that James would forfeit the ancestral estate in Cumberland if the couple ever wed.

Between 1815 and 1818, a poor farmer’s daughter, Esther Dawson, refused at least four offers of marriage, including one from Jonas Hayward who had £500, a good suitor for a girl of such limited means. Esther believed she was engaged to Isaac Newton, the son of a wealthy landowner, who lived at Foulstone near Huddersfield. Growing up a mile apart, the pair had known each other from childhood and affection appears to have existed on both sides. Nelson was a regular visitor to her parents’ cottage and gave Esther an engagement ring and a silk dress for their wedding, which was to take place when his father died and he inherited an estate producing income of £20,000 a year. In spring 1818, Nelson abandoned her in favour of heiress Hannah Dunn from Howden, a more suitable match for a landowner’s son.

In 1819, Esther went to court. Nelson’s barrister attacked her character, arguing that she could not rely on bantering promises that his client had made in public houses, and at fairs and wakes. He asked whether it was likely that a man of Nelson’s social standing would wish to marry a part-time barmaid. Although her morals were denigrated by Nelson, who was described in newspaper reports as ‘a fat, stout, coarse-looking man’, the testimony of his witnesses on this point served only to prove that Esther, described in the same papers as ‘handsome, modest and interesting’, was a very principled woman. She was awarded £300. The following year, she attracted a sixth proposal and married Peter Haigh, a local man. She spent the rest of her life in Holmfirth with her husband and children. It was not the wealthy lifestyle she had once been promised, but it was a realistic one for the daughter of a tenant farmer. Whether she would have been happier with Jonas Hayward or any of her other rejected suitors is an intriguing unknown.

A small number of breach of promise claims were defended with the contention that one of the couple was too ill for married life. If, after promises to marry had been exchanged, the health of one party deteriorated substantially, the other could break the engagement with impunity. The sick person occasionally managed to escape an engagement using this defence, until 1857 when a landmark case confirmed that a person could not rely on their own weakness to evade a promise. George Wright said that it would be dangerous for him to marry Isabella Hall because he was too frail to fulfil the duties of marriage without risk to his life. Recognising that a legal point was involved, the judge asked the jury to decide whether they accepted Wright’s contention and if they did, to state what damages they would have awarded if they had found that Isabella had been jilted without a proper reason.

The jurors initially found for Wright but Isabella tenaciously pursued a series of appeals in every possible court until the judges of the Exchequer Court, the final possible arbiter, decided by a slim majority that Wright’s inability to carry out the duties of marriage did not dissolve his contract. In 1859, coachman’s daughter Isabella finally collected the £100 that the original jury would have awarded had it upheld her claim.

This case restricted a plea of ill-health to mitigating the damages rather than providing an absolute defence, but jurors continued to struggle when a man’s health was involved. In 1868, the London jury considering Dora Otte’s claim against Ronald Grant was discharged when it was unable to decide whether Grant had acted reasonably by asking Dora to defer their wedding until his health improved. Two years in India had left him ‘a mere bag of bones’. The question was not put to a second jury as Dora found a new suitor and married him a few months later.

It took until 1920 before men with serious health problems received some protection from being sued for breach of promise. In March that year, Mr Justice Darling, who was determining a claim without a jury, awarded a contemptuous farthing to Caroline Gamble. She had sued a shell-shocked and war-wounded soldier, William Sales, who argued that he was too weak and nervous to marry and that it was against public policy to force him to. In reasoning that now makes uncomfortable reading, the judge supported the view that children born to a man in the defendant’s condition were likely to be ‘practically useless’ and ‘a burden on the state’.

Given this decision, it is surprising that later in the year, four days after the burial of the Unknown Soldier and the unveiling of the cenotaph had honoured all those who died in the Great War, a London jury awarded Louise Savage £500 from Charles Thacker, a 30-year-old war veteran decorated with the military cross. Thacker explained that recent surgery left him unfit to contemplate marriage. Louise argued that it was a woman’s prerogative to decide whether her fiancé’s health was an obstacle for her. In its short report of the case, The Guardian focussed on the jury’s disapproval of Thacker’s selfish and unmanly decision to break the engagement. The Times covered the case in more depth and the tremors of shell-shock reverberate through Thacker’s defence like the pounding of heavy artillery. To a modern reader it seems indisputable that a serious operation proved the final straw for a brave and decent man whose nerves had been stretched to breaking point by bullets and mustard gas in the trenches.

Patrick Scanlon was also held responsible for being too weak to rise above an external event that had changed his life. He received no sympathy from a Lancashire jury in 1934 when he explained that after a motor accident his whole outlook changed and he did not think it was right for him to form a union with anyone. Press coverage hints that his fiancee’s mother thought the accident had perceptibly affected his health. Advances in knowledge about psychological trauma suggest that Scanlon and Thacker each had good insight into their fragile mental condition. Better public understanding of the subject would probably have resulted in different verdicts. There were no cases of women refusing to marry men who developed psychological illnesses, so the law did not have to decide whether their refusal was reasonable.

A feature of breach of promise cases is that a successful argument in one immediately led to copy-cat reasoning in another. Shortly after George Wright’s initial victory about his own health, Frederick Rosenberg, a Manchester tobacconist, alleged that Estelle Abrahams was too frail for marriage, as he needed a strong, healthy woman to help him with the business. Rosenberg lost the case because the jury did not accept his contention that Estelle was ill. Although Rosenberg might appear heartless, a woman’s state of health could be a major consideration when making a proposal. Working men sometimes selected a wife not for love or affection, but to provide help in earning a livelihood. Running a shop entailed hard physical work moving stock, and long hours standing up to serve customers. If a wife’s delicate health meant hiring assistance in the shop or a servant to help in the house this could be the difference between making a living and scraping an existence.

The few men who contended that their fiancée was unsuitable for marriage because of her poor health usually stated or hinted that she had tuberculosis, also known until the 1850s as consumption. Tuberculosis is a contagious bacterial infection which often attacks and damages the lungs and leads to symptoms such as coughing up blood, loss of appetite and weight, night sweats and fever. Until the discovery of antibiotics there was no effective treatment or cure. Sufferers were advised to live a quiet lifestyle and to rest as much as possible.

Although the defence that a woman was ill proved unsuccessful in the nineteenth and twentieth century courts and usually resulted in exemplary damages for the woman because of the serious accusation made against her, it generally failed because the man could provide no evidence for his claim. A woman was not obliged to submit to an independent medical examination and generally provided a statement from her own physician that her health was sound. It is unclear whether a jury would have accepted a woman’s ill-health as a valid reason to end an engagement if the man had been able to prove it.

A man who could not deny an engagement sometimes resorted to the high-risk strategy of arguing that he had discovered the plaintiff had a bad character; entitling him to withdraw the offer of marriage he had made in the belief that she was a virtuous woman. If he succeeded then he paid no damages, but if he could not provide evidence of his allegation the woman usually obtained a much higher award of damages than she might have anticipated. Despite the risks, around five per cent of defendants were prepared to take a chance, though usually with a woman from a lower social class than their own.

Bad character was usually synonymous with sexual impropriety with a man other than the defendant. One of the very few men to succeed was Samuel Brighouse, an elderly gentleman who was conned into proposing to Betty Wadsworth, a weaver with low morals, in 1872. She lived nearby and appeared to him as a respectable young woman. Her barrister stated her case, called her to give evidence and then squirmed with embarrassment as she refused to answer any questions from Brighouse’s barrister about her relationships with other men. After the judge threatened Betty with prison unless she answered the questions, her barrister withdrew his services as her advocate and her claim collapsed.

A man who wanted to walk away from a promise of marriage because of a woman’s bad character had to convince a jury that he was not aware of it when proposing and had not confirmed his promise after he found out. It was conventional for a woman who had a dubious episode hidden in her past to reveal it in confidence after receiving a proposal. If the man did not withdraw his offer immediately, then he was unable to plead bad character to justify a later change of mind. This was a reasonable approach, as most defences alleging a woman’s bad character arose because the man had a different reason for wishing to end the engagement.

A woman’s sexual immorality could not be offered as a defence by a man who had been her lover, unless she had concealed from him similar conduct with another man. Around 1820, a short-lived, and unsuccessful, line of reasoning developed that if a woman allowed herself to be seduced by the man she was engaged to, then she did not value her virtue. When this happened, the man should be entitled to rescind the offer of marriage as he could not trust her to respect her marriage vows. In 1884, the defence of bad character became much more restricted when Henry Smith, a Fulham publican who had cohabited with widowed Helen McHale, was not allowed to rely on his recent discovery that her children were illegitimate to justify leaving her for someone else.

As the scope for a defence of bad character narrowed, lawyers rediscovered an argument used early in the nineteenth century. Their clients began to contend that the woman had chosen to live as a mistress without any expectation of marriage. This proved a very effective means of walking away from an engagement, as it removed all onus from the man to prove bad character and placed the burden on the woman to prove a promise of marriage. It was a barrier that working-class women struggled to clear.

Occasionally men identified bad character in other aspects of conduct. More than one asked an incredulous jury to believe that the woman was a drunkard who imbibed in secret, unknown to anyone else in the house, from hidden supplies purchased anonymously. When Richard Woosnam accused Emma Partridge of drinking nine glasses of alcohol on a day out in Epping Forest, the jury awarded her £500. The foreman of the jury stated that Emma left court without a stain on her character as the allegations against her were totally unfounded.

Bad character brought a few absurd contentions into the courtroom, displaying immaturity, lack of judgement or social snobbery. In 1837, an attempt to prove that a young Somerset dressmaker, Mary Ann Hunt, had a bad character rebounded on William Chick after he broke their engagement and married Betsy Rason. Chick anxiously confided to Abraham Stoodleigh that Mary Ann would be given half his property unless he could prove that he was justified in leaving her. He offered 10 shillings to any local man prepared to stand up in court and declare that Mary Ann was a common prostitute. Stoodleigh declined the money, told Mary Ann of the plot and appeared as her witness instead. She was awarded £300, a third of the capital Chick had recently inherited on his twenty-first birthday.

In 1877, Cambridge undergraduate Harry Crotton regretting his hasty proposal to rector’s daughter, Mary May, told her family that she was untruthful. Pressed to be specific about her lies, Crotton said that she once described travelling in a carriage with her brother from Bath to Devizes. The truth was that they only travelled together from Trowbridge, as her brother rode the first part of the journey in a different carriage. The allegation proved catastrophic for Crotton as the May family would have accepted the broken engagement if the accusation of lying had not been made. He was ordered to pay Mary £1,000 in damages, and was fortunate to negotiate a reduction following an appeal.

Joseph Joplin, a 28-year-old wine and spirit merchant from Liverpool, tried to justify ending his engagement to Georgiana Reeves in 1867 because she was illegitimate. This was not regarded as proof of bad character, and her guardian also gave evidence that Joplin knew this when he proposed. He was not the only man to cite illegitimacy as a stigma, but he was from a lower social class than others who raised the point, indicating how the tightening morality of the Victorian period was penetrating down the social scale.

For William Brenton, a doctor with a large practice in Plymouth, snobbery proved an insuperable barrier to his marriage with a nurse in 1896. He broke his engagement to Mary Maunder, alleging that she had misled him about her social standing by speaking about her father as though he were a man of means and pretending that she worked for interest rather than to earn a living. Mary denied that she had ever deceived the doctor about her family’s income or her father’s work as a parish verger. The jury decided that Brenton’s mistake about the lowly social standing of his fiancée, or his belief that she was a social-climber, did not justify him breaking his promise to marry her.

Incompatibility and falling out of love were never defences to a breach of promise claim, even as the belief grew that marriage should be based on love and affection. Breach of promise law rigidly regarded one party as injured and the other as at fault, though several engagements floundered because of problems on both sides. In nineteenth century Britain a large number of religious sects and beliefs jockeyed for supremacy and souls, and differences of outlook or belief caused irreconcilable problems for Catholic and Protestant, Christadelphian and Spiritualist, Quaker and Methodist, Christian and Jew.

Even between apparently well-matched couples, differences in personality or values could emerge. In 1858, after a three-year engagement, Richard Stirzaker, a market gardener from Lancaster, and Elizabeth Ridley quarrelled a few weeks before their wedding. Needing a personal maid for her new home, Elizabeth appointed a very reliable woman on a salary of £12 a year without consulting her fiancé. Scandalised, Richard told her that a servant could be hired for £9 and that he could not afford such extravagance. Elizabeth dismissed the unfortunate woman and told her husband-to-be that she would leave him the pleasure of appointing a good quality servant for her. Richard found her attitude saucy, sarcastic, and insulting and he suddenly realised that Elizabeth was not the woman he wished to spend his life with but proud and haughty; unlikely to make him a fit wife and create a comfortable home.

In the nineteenth century, breach of promise law ignored the role of the plaintiff when an engagement broke down and considered that a woman’s poor conduct was not a reason to reduce her damages. Any man who drew attention to unreasonable behaviour by a woman risked an exemplary award of damages against him. It seems possible that Catherine Knights of London charmed landowner Samuel Thistlewood into a proposal in 1861 and then behaved in a deliberately disrespectful manner until she managed to provoke him into calling off the wedding. She then succeeded in winning £600 damages for his broken promise and married someone else a few months later.

By the early twentieth century, juries refused to be liberal with damages when the woman’s conduct had caused or contributed to the break. This became clear in 1914 when Elsie Lummis received one farthing from John Taylor, whose change of mind arose from her repeated outbursts of temper. Unsurprisingly, others copied the defence. Later that year, Herbert Zeal walked out on Florence Oxley after she spent an evening finding fault with him. In court Zeal said that Florence could be bad-tempered, though this was not deemed sufficient reason to avoid paying her £75. The different approach of the two juries probably reflected the fact that Taylor had discussed Elsie’s temper with her several times before and given her opportunities to control her tantrums.

From the 1920s, defences to breach of promise claims became temperate, if pointed, arguments about whether there had been a valid promise of marriage, occasionally going through the legal system and to the House of Lords for decisions on points of law. The harsh attitude of judges and juries towards fanciful defences, vindictive claims and plaintiffs whose own conduct contributed to the breach meant that the parties found it in their interest to resolve any differences by negotiation and the number of cases reaching court was reduced to a handful.

Defences to breach of promise claims ranged from fair and honest to implausible and insulting. In their inventiveness, men who tried to walk away from their obligations without making proper recompense were no more outrageous than women who lied about proposals or schemed to entrap. Around a tenth of cases reaching the courtroom were defended successfully. In a third of these the woman could not prove that a promise had been made. A sixth were attempted extortion and a similar proportion involved a rescinded promise. Only in six per cent of cases was the man deemed justified in ending the engagement because of the woman’s bad character. The remaining claims involved very specific factors, such as the jury failing to reach a verdict or the court not having jurisdiction over a promise made abroad.

Some men appear to have mitigated the damages by a temperate defence presented well. Two per cent of defendants paid only a farthing in damages and a further five per cent may have lost solely because the jury wanted to ensure that the woman was not left to pay the lawyers’ bills. Despite criticism of the breach of promise action for bias in favour of women, male defendants with a strong case could escape an engagement without too much hurt to their pockets. Yet a fine judgement was involved between taking a chance with a jury and offering a sufficient sum to avoid this gamble.