“Culprit, How Wilt Thou Be Tried?”
February 21–March 2, 1753
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“Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! You good men of the county of Middlesex, summoned to appear here this day, to try between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoners that shall be at the bar, answer to your names as they shall be called.”
There was a surge and a bustle in the Sessions House in the Old Bailey as the jurymen were called over.
“Set Mary Squires to the bar.”
The surge rose to a roar as the bent old crone was shuffled from the detention dock partitioned off in the corner of the courtroom. This was what the crowd had been waiting for, packed in like sprats in a barrel, since early morning on that February day, Wednesday, the 21st, 1753.
The accused woman was tall, black, and swarthy, just as the abused girl had said, and very bent and old, which she had forgotten to mention. She was hoisted into the dock, where she stood clinging to the bar, her old head shaking.
“How sayest thou, Mary Squires, art thou guilty of the felony whereof thou standest indicted, or not guilty?”
The old gypsy spoke: “Not guilty.”
“Culprit, how wilt thou be tried?”
She had to be prompted on that one: “By God and my country.”
“God send thee a good deliverance!”
Now they were swearing the jury:
“You shall well and truly try, and true deliverance make, between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, whom you shall have in charge, and true verdict give, according to the evidence; so help you God!”
“So help me God!” the first juryman was sworn.
“You shall well and truly try …”
The drone went on. Another juryman kissed the book. The old gypsy’s attention wandered.
Before her, and above her eye-level on their elevated platform, was ranged the fearsome majesty of the law—the Justices of Oyer and Terminer in their flowing robes and full-bottomed wigs. Presiding was Sir Crisp Gascoyne, Lord Mayor of London, splendid in brocade, with his chain of office about his neck.
The gypsy crone looked at Sir Crisp. His heavy arched eyebrows had a sceptical look, but his mouth was kind.
“… and true verdict give according to the evidence, so help you God!”
The procession of jurymen seemed interminable. The old woman looked down at the long table in front of her, under the dock. It was strewn with law-books and law-papers. About it sat the men of the law in their gowns and wigs—not bushy wigs, like the wigs on the bench, but tied up in bags behind. At one end of the table Elizabeth’s lawyer was yawning. Beside him sat Mr. Stow, counsel for the Crown. Mr. Stow’s judgment was allowed by the discerning to equal his candour.
At the other end of the table sat the lawyer who would defend the old gypsy, scanning with quick eyes the jurymen as one after another they kissed the book and took their places. There was a half-smile on his face as he leaned back in his chair and turned a dry quill in his blunt hand.
Mary Squires’s lawyer was William Davy, the ex-grocer of Exeter. As a grocer Davy had seen the inside of a debtor’s prison in his day. As a lawyer he was rising rapidly to the position of the most sought-after defender of criminals in London. Davy was something of a humorist. He was in process of becoming a legend; anecdotes about him were accumulating, for the lawyers to tell, riding the circuit or keeping terms at the Temple.
There was the time Lord Mansfield, on the bench, disputed a point of law with Davy: “If this be law, I must burn all my books, I see.”
“Your Lordship,” said Davy dryly, “had better read them first.”
A fellow lawyer reproached him once for disgracing the profession by taking silver instead of gold.
“I took silver,” remarked the ex-grocer of Exeter, “because I could not get gold; but I took every farthing he had, and I hope you don’t call that disgracing the profession.”
This was the lawyer who now watched on Mary Squires’s behalf as the jurymen were sworn. Old Mary looked at him without much hope.
“Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! If any of you can inform my lords the King’s justices, the King’s serjeant, the King’s attorney-general, or this inquest now to be taken, of the assault and felony of which the prisoner at the bar stands indicted, let them come forth, for now the prisoner stands at the bar upon her deliverance. God save the King.”
So began the trial of the gypsy woman for the outrage upon Elizabeth Canning. Susannah Wells was tried along with her for feloniously receiving, harbouring, comforting, concealing, and maintaining her, once the outrage was committed.
The first witness was Elizabeth Canning. When she came into the Sessions House yard, she was cheered to the echo. The unruly London mob had made her cause their own. They were there to see Bet Canning vindicated. The busy men of Aldermanbury had been handing out Cases to all comers, even to the very jurymen and the judges on the bench; and the crowd was howling for the gypsy’s life.
Elizabeth Canning made a very good witness. Pale, thin, composed, she told her story with exactly the right mixture of deference and assurance. Mr. Stow led her through it.
Cramming the balconies and crowded on the herb-strewn floor, the admiring populace listened breathless to her tale of mistreatment and imprisonment. It was not much expanded from what she had told Justice Fielding, but Mr. Stow asked her some new questions.
“Did not the jump hurt you?”
“No, it was soft clay ground.”
“What did you do for clothing?”
“I took an old sort of a bedgown and a handkerchief that were in this hay-loft and lay in a grate in the chimney.”
These objects were produced in court. Everybody stared at them.
“Did you see anybody when you jumped out at the window?”
“No, nobody at all; then I went on the back side the house up a lane and crossed a little brook, and over two fields, as I think, but I did not take notice how many fields; the pathway brought me by the roadside. Then I went by the road straight to London.”
Elizabeth’s counsel sat down. Elizabeth looked modestly at the affable Lord Mayor, sitting in the midst of the bench, and then turned her direct blue gaze to Mr. Davy as he rose from his place to confront her.
Mr. Davy had a reputation for being formidable in cross-examination, but he got no change out of the Aldermanbury serving-wench.
“Was you in any surprise,” he asked casually, “when she took your stays?”
“I was in a great surprise, and all of a tremble.”
“Then how can you tell who was there at the time?” swooped Davy.
“The terror,” replied Bet neatly, “made me look about me to see what company was there.”
“How long did the two men stay in the room?”
“They stayed no longer than till they saw my stays cut off, then they went away, before I was put up in the loft.”
“Did not you make an attempt to get out before that Monday you talk on?”
“I did not.”
“How came you not to make an attempt before?”
“Because I thought they might let me out; it never came into my head till that morning.”
“Did you pass many houses in your way home?”
“I did, and asked my way of people on the road.”
“How came you, being in that deplorable condition, not to go into some house and relate the hardships you had gone through?”
“I thought if I did, may be I might meet with somebody belonging to that house.”
“Had you any of your fits while in that room?”
“I had not, but was fainting and sick.”
All the while this examination was going on, old Mary Squires in the dock had never stopped mumbling and muttering to herself. At this point she burst into audibility:
“I never saw that witness in my lifetime till this day three weeks.”
The shorthand writer took it down, but everyone else ignored it. It was quite out of order and therefore had no legal existence. This was just as well, as it was inaccurate. She should have said “tomorrow three weeks.” Right or wrong, however, she was ignored, and the cross-examination continued:
“Had you used to hear anybody in the kitchen?”
“I heard people sometimes blowing the fire, and passing in and out.”
“When did you drink all your water?”
“I drank all that about half an hour before I got out of the room.”
Mr. Davy cannot have had access to Elizabeth’s statement to Fielding, in which she had said that her water was all gone on the Friday. It was about this point that he shrugged and sat down. He still had a card or two up his sleeve.
Sitting in the gallery or crowded about the dock, the eager spectators stirred and took breath. Gawen Nash was in the gallery, along with others of the Goldsmiths’ Company. He was a little discontented in his mind about some of the details that Elizabeth revealed, but his mind was divided. He had other things to think about. All the Goldsmiths’ men were distracted. There was to be a great feast at Goldsmiths’ Hall that day. Gawen Nash was the most distracted of all. He was butler to the company, and had on his mind the care of perhaps three or four thousand pounds’ worth of plate. He listened to Elizabeth Canning’s evidence with half his mind, sometimes less. At eleven o’clock he could linger no longer. He went away about his business.
The assistant of the Goldsmiths’ Company asked him how the trial was going.
“Oh,” said Nash, telling over the plate, “I think it impossible that the gypsy can be convicted on such an incredible story.”
Mr. Nash reported nothing about the evidence of Virtue Hall, because he did not stay to hear it. What he would have done if he had was a matter for speculation later. Mr. Nash thought he would have spoken up on the gypsy’s behalf. Others were not so sure.
Mr. Nash was the only one who did not stay to hear Virtue. All the rest of the close-packed sitters in the gallery and standers on the floor hung on her every word.
“Then Mary Squires took a knife out of the dresser drawer in the kitchen and ripped the lace of her stays, and pulled them off, and hung them on the back of a chair in the kitchen, and pushed her up into the room, and said: ‘Damn you, go up there, then, if you please.’”
John Hague the goldsmith, sitting in the gallery, could not believe his ears. It was not the gypsy’s strange mixture of the conventions of courtesy and profanity that startled him. It was the effrontery of Virtue Hall. His mind went back to her protestations of innocence at Enfield. He seemed to hear her once more answering Elizabeth’s accusation boldly: “God forgive you, madam, I never saw you in this house in my life.” Seeing such seeming innocence in her, and now to hear her swearing such a thing as he thought to be as false as the gospel is true, Hague was stricken dumb with astonishment. He sat in the gallery and gaped.
“Then,” continued the undisturbed witness, “the man that had come in with the gypsy’s son took the cap off E. Canning’s head and went out a’ doors with it; the gypsy man John Squires took the stays off the chair and went out with them.”
The witness was confused, and the prosecutor probed at her story a bit: how could the man take the cap off Elizabeth’s head after she had been sequestered in the loft?
“Where was E. Canning when the two men took away her things?”
“She was then up in the room,” replied Virtue.
This did not improve matters; Virtue had told Fielding that the unknown had gone off with the cap while Elizabeth was still in the kitchen. The prosecutor finally let it alone; no use cross-examining his own witness.
“I was there,” continued Virtue, “a quarter of a year in all, if not more; I was there the whole time E. Canning was there; but I never saw her once after she was put up in that room. I was the first that missed her; I asked the gypsy woman once whether that girl was gone. She answered; ‘What is that to you? You have no business with it’; but I durst not go to see if she was gone; if I had, very likely they would have served me so.”
The gypsy woman was mumbling and mowing worse than ever. Now she addressed a question to the world in general:
“What day was it that the young woman was robbed?”
The court answered her: “She says on the morning of the 2nd of January.”
“I return thanks for telling me,” said the old woman dramatically, “for I am as innocent as the child unborn.”
Mrs. Wells was glowering at her former lodger. She jerked her thumb at the old gypsy.
“How long were these people in my house in all, from first to last?” she asked Virtue Hall.
“They were there,” said Virtue, “six or seven weeks in all; they had been there about a fortnight before the young woman was brought in.”
Mrs. Wells said nothing.
Mr. Davy asked Virtue one question:
“Did you ever see this cap or bedgown before?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said Virtue.
Now the Crown put Mrs. Canning on the stand to tell of her daughter’s return on the night before King Charles’s Martyrdom.
“I went into a fit directly; my daughter is subject to fits; there was a garret ceiling fell in upon her head, which first occasioned them; and at times, when anybody speaks hastily to her, or at any surprise, she is very liable to fall in one; she has sometimes continued in one seven or eight hours, sometimes three or four; she is not sensible during the time she is in one, no more than a new-born babe.”
Her testimony flowed on in spate: she revived, she said, in time to hear Elizabeth telling Mrs. Woodward and Mr. Wintlebury that she had been in the Hertfordshire road, and “When she came into her warm bed, she was very sick, and had no free passage through her for stool or urine, till she was supplied with glysters, for seven days after she came home, but what was forced by half a cupful at a time.”
Davy shied away from this topic. No cross-examination.
The apothecary was there to confirm Elizabeth’s symptoms. A knot of her friends were there, too, to give her a good character and account for the Enfield raid: Mr. Wintlebury, Mr. Adamson, Mr. Scarrat, Mr. Lyon, Mr. Rossiter.
Mr. Wintlebury and Mr. Scarrat had been with Elizabeth before Alderman Chitty, and Mr. Rossiter had been with her at Justice Tyshmaker’s. They now said that the account she had given just now, here in the Sessions House, was in all respects the same as those two previous accounts.
Mr. Adamson gave himself the leading role among the avengers of Elizabeth:
“I, seeing the room before she was brought in, thought she was capable of giving some account of it. I returned to meet her and asked her about it; she described the room with some hay in it, an odd sort of an empty room. I went with her to the house, and carried her out of the chaise into the kitchen, and set her on the dresser, and ordered all the people to be brought to her, to see if she knew any of them, she was then very weak. I took her in my arms like a child.”
The crowd looked at the injured girl, thin and small, and their hearts went out to her. They thought the next step ought to be the conviction of her persecutors.
Even more emphatically, the unruly mob hanging about the Sessions House yard thought so too. They took some very practical steps to that end.
Wells’s relatives, and one or two of her neighbours, were ready to testify on her behalf. They presented themselves at the Sessions House door, subpœnas in hand.
They never got across the threshold. They pushed and battered their way through the surging crowd until they got to the right-hand stair, but they got no nearer the witness-stand. The constable at the door kept them out. Fortune Natus never forgot him, a tallish man pitted with smallpox, who turned some of Wells’s witnesses out of the Sessions House yard.
Wells’s daughter Elizabeth fared the worst. She was standing on the step with her half-brother John Howit when someone in the mob recognized her and raised the outcry: “Mother Wells’s daughter!”
The temper of the crowd was dangerous. They rushed the girl. It made a story afterwards:
“Somebody knowed me to be Mother Wells’s daughter, and they pushed me back and would not let me come in; they frightened me very much, and I went back again, and up two or three pair of stairs in a house in the Old Bailey and heard the mob cry out: ‘Mother Wells’s daughter!”
“We had like to have been knocked on the head,” John Howit would add, “them that had got subpœnas and them that had not.”
The mob was knocking the wrong people on the head. They should have turned their attention to an uncouth trio in countryfied neckcloths. These three came in unmolested, and soon were succeeding one another on the stand. John Gibbons was sworn first:
“I live at Abbotsbury, six miles from Dorchester; I am master of the house called the Old Ship; on the 1st of January 1753 the prisoner Squires came into the house; there was George her son and Lucy her daughter with her, as she called them; she came with handkerchiefs, lawns, muslins, and checks to sell about town; she stayed there from the 1st to the 9th day of the month, and lay at my house.”
Mr. Davy smiled blandly; this was a staggerer for the prosecution: Mary Squires could not be guilty of robbing Elizabeth Canning on January 2 if she spent January 2 at the Old Ship in Abbotsbury.
Nevertheless Mr. Stow attacked the salient point, the date:
“By what do you recollect the day?”
“There came an exciseman to officiate there for one John Ward that was sick, and I put the day of the month down when he came; the excise office is kept at my house; the man that came was Andrew Wicks, or Wick.”
Next came William Clarke. He looked at the old gypsy, and then at her daughter Lucy, standing close to the dock in the press. She was a pleasanter sight than her old crone of a mother, neatly dressed in white camblet, with a capuchin hood framing her dark, pretty face. The countryman’s eyes rested on her for a moment, and then he capably gave his evidence:
“I live at Abbotsbury, and have for seven years; I remember seeing the gypsy there; the last time I saw her was on the 10th of January last; I met with them on the road; we went some way together; we parted at Crudeway-foot, four miles from Abbotsbury and three from Dorchester.”
“Had you ever seen her before?” asked Mr. Davy.
“I saw her, and her son and daughter, three years ago come March, at Abbotsbury; they come with handkerchiefs, lawns, and muslins to sell. I saw the landlord’s wife at the Ship buy some aprons of them the last time they were there.”
Counsel for the Crown rose to cross-examine this assured young man. If the jury believed him, the gypsy would get off.
“How came you to take particular notice of the day?”
“By keeping my other accounts; I carried goods out with me the same day to Portersham.”
“Have you your book with you?” demanded the prosecutor.
“No, I have not,” Clarke admitted; “but,” he added defiantly, “I cannot forget the day, because I do not go so often.”
“Which way were they going?”
“They were making for London; they talked so.”
“Did they give you any account to what place they were bound next?”
“They did not,” replied Clarke; and added, to bring the lawyer back to the point: “They lodged at this man’s house at Abbotsbury.”
“Did you see them there?” asked the prosecutor, taking his cue neatly.
“I did, on the 1st of January; I commonly go there of an evening, to have a pot of liquor.”
Now counsel for the Crown brought up a question that was to be asked over and over again before the case ended:
“Do you remember when you kept Christmas Day?”
“I do not.”
“Can you give any account of new style or old?”
There were probably not many in the courtroom who could. The reform of the calendar had been in effect less than a year amid a welter of confusion and a double system of dates to plague the lawyer at the bar and the witness on the stand.
“No, I cannot; but,” Clarke burst out passionately, “if I was to die for the woman, I’ll speak the truth.”
“What are you?”
“I am a house-keeper, and have been in business about six years; I am a cordwainer.”
The shoemaker’s evidence was confirmed by another Dorset man.
“I live at Coombe,” said Thomas Greville, “three miles from Salisbury; I keep a public-house there, at the sign of the Lamb. I saw Mary Squires at my house on the 14th of January.”
“Who was with her there?”
“There was her sister and her brother, as she said; they sold handkerchiefs, lawns, and such things.”
“How long did she stay at Coombe?”
“They stopped there but one night.”
“What January,” cross-examined Mr. Stow, “do you mean?”
“I mean last January, five weeks ago last Sunday.”
“How came you to take such particular notice of it?”
“There came a carpenter at my house,” explained the landlord of the Lamb; “he had spent the biggest part of his money. It being Sunday night, I would have him go about his business, and put him out of the house two or three times, and after that he went over the way to another house and pawned his axe.”
This memory of the prodigal behaviour of the carpenter fixed the day to be a Sunday clearly enough. How it fixed the month to be January Greville did not state, and the prosecutor did not ask. Instead, he put a rebuttal witness on the stand.
“I sell fish and oysters,” said John Inifer, “about Waltham Cross and Theobalds. I know the prisoner Squires very well by sight. The last time I saw her before now was at the time she was taken up at Susannah Wells’s house; before that I have seen her several times every day up and down.”
“Are you very certain of that?”
“I am, that I saw her three weeks before; that she walked into people’s houses, pretending to tell fortunes. She told me mine once.”
“Did you see any goods she had to sell?”
“No, I did not; I always saw her by herself. I saw a young man in blue-gray when she was taken up, and two young women, all taken in the house of Wells.”
This ended Mary Squires’s defence, and the rebuttal thereto. Since it was a felony case, Mr. Davy was not allowed to argue for his client.
Wells had no lawyer. One Talmash of Red Lion Street had sued out the subpœnas for the witnesses that the mob had chevied off the steps; but her cause was so very unpopular that he did not care to be concerned in it further.
Now the court asked the old bawd what she had to offer in her defence. Mother Wells looked about at the hostile faces. Where were her witnesses? The thing looked hopeless.
“As to my character,” she said, giving up, “it is but an indifferent one; I had an unfortunate husband who was hanged.”
In the galleries the spectators from Enfield nodded. They knew how Wells came to be hanged. The late butcher had brought his shady career to an untimely end by butchering one sheep too many. It was somebody else’s sheep.
“I never,” added the widow Wells, “saw the young woman till they came to take us up; and as to Squires, I never saw her above a week and a day before we were taken up.”
That was useless, and she knew it. The jury was not long in reaching the popular verdict:
Squires, guilty.
Wells, guilty.
The mob howled its approval. The two old women were hustled away through the backward passage into Newgate.
The verdict against the gypsy made the Abbotsbury men, legally, liars. Witnesses on the losing side of an Old Bailey case were likely to be penalized for their bad judgment in choosing sides.
“My Lord,” said the leading counsel for the Crown, “I move that the three witnesses from Abbotsbury should stand indicted for perjury, in giving false evidence.”
His colleague disagreed.
“’Tis not clear to me,” he said thoughtfully, “that they merit any such imputation.”
“No more it is to me,” agreed Mr. Justice Gundry from the bench. He was himself a Dorset man, and had already formed a design to write down into Dorsetshire and inquire about the gypsy alibi.
The same idea was in the mind of Sir Crisp Gascoyne as the honourable judges rose. In stately procession they passed from the Sessions House in their billowing gowns and their full-bottomed wigs, each plying his nosegay, the better to repel the noxious vapours of the gaol fever. First and stateliest, with his gold chain about his neck, walked Sir Crisp Gascoyne, Knight, Lord Mayor of London.
The verdict of the jury put new zeal into the defenders of Elizabeth. They put out another reward for the apprehension of
“JOHN SQUIRES, well known by the Name of GEORGE SQUIRES, in Blackman-street, Newington Butts, Norwood, and in the Towns and Villages thereabouts.
N.B. The said Squires is about five Feet ten Inches high, walks upright, is well made, of a dark, tawny gypsey Complexion, about the Age of Thirty, generally wears a dark Horseman’s Great Coat, knapped, with large inside Pockets; under that a blue Coat, a scarlet Waistcoat, with Glass black Buttons, and black Buttonholes, and a dark-brown Bob Wig.”
But this unaccountable gypsy man was more afraid of the duns of his creditors than he was of a capital charge and ten pounds on his head. The former drove him from his own house and caused him to lurk at Enfield Wash. The latter could not keep him from showing himself in London.
True, he had made off when Justice Tyshmaker discharged him. He had made for Dorset, and there he had marshalled the three alibi witnesses. With them he had returned boldly to London. He had stayed away from the Old Bailey; but about Blackman Street, on the Surrey side of the river, he felt at home, and did not hesitate to show himself.
Some informer spied him and ran across the river to Bow Street to lay an information. Justice Fielding issued a warrant, and that very evening a posse armed with firearms sallied forth to take the gypsy fellow. They thundered on the door in Blackman Street, in the name of the law. When the door was opened, no George Squires was to be found, though they searched the house. They combed several other gypsy kens in Kennington Lane and another in Lambeth Marsh, and finally concluded that he must have slipped away in disguise.
They never did catch him. When next he appeared, he appeared of his own free will.
While they were looking for her son in Southwark, the old gypsy woman was sitting in Newgate waiting to be sentenced, her long, meagre face and prodigious under lip regarded even by her fellow prisoners with a mixture of fascination and aversion. Mother Wells was more at home; she had been there before.
On Monday, February 26, the last day of the session, they carried the two women back to the Sessions House for sentence.
Wells’s punishment was set at six months in Newgate and branding on the thumb. This was done on the spot, with uncommon severity, to the vicious howls of the mob. Even those who cheered were not sure what the brand was, or whether she was punished as a felon or a bawd. Whatever the reason, branded she certainly was; the odour of burning flesh carried the news to the end of the street.
Then the old gypsy stood before the judges.
“Have you anything to say,” the judge rattled off the formula, “why sentence of death should not be pronounced against you?”
“Yes,” said Mary Squires. She had been thinking and thinking about all this; and now, though they had told her to keep quiet, she was determined to speak for herself.
“On New Year’s Day,” she began, “I lay at Coombe at the widow Greville’s house; the next day I was at Stoptage; there were some people who were cast away, and they came along with me to a little house on the top of the moor, and drank there; there were my son and daughter with me. Coming along Popham Lane, there were some people raking up dung. I drank at the second alehouse in Basingstoke on the Thursday in the New Year week. On Friday I lay at Bagshot Heath, in a little tiny house on the heath. On the Saturday I lay at Old Brentford at Mrs. Edwards’s, who sells greens and small beer. I could have told this before, but one pulled me, and another pulled me, and would not let me speak. I lay at Mrs. Edwards’s on the Sunday and Monday; and on the Tuesday or Wednesday after, I came from thence to Mrs. Wells’s house at Enfield.”
She might better have listened to Mr. Davy, or whoever it was who pulled her about. He knew that she was not to be trusted to reckon dates. Gibbons had come into court and sworn that she was in Abbotsbury on New Year’s Day. Greville had sworn that she lay at the Lamb in Coombe on January 14. Even on New Year’s Day, old style, by the new style January 12, she was not at Greville’s. She should have kept her mouth shut.
Not that it would have made any difference anyway. The jury had found her guilty, and the question was closed.
The judge put on the black cap.
[ #4 ]
So much for the old gypsy. “The Canningites triumphed, Io Pœans were sung at the Corner of every Street, in Praise of the Girl, for the noble Defence she had made in Behalf of her assaulted Chastity; the old Woman’s Dying Speech was prepared, and nothing was now wanting, but her Execution to render the Scene compleat.”
In anticipation of that pleasing event, the friends of Canning hurried before the public with new appeals for donations. They added fuel to the fire of public indignation with sensational paragraphs in the papers:
February 28.
Saturday last a poor Man who cries Sticks about the Streets, by the Names of My little Tartar, My little Jemmy, was knock’d down near the Leathern Bottle, on Norwood Common, by two Gipsey Men and three Women; the Men used him in a most cruel Manner, by stamping on his Stomach and Neck, robb’d him of what little Money he had, and because it was no more than three pence, stamp’d on one of his Eyes, and bruised it in a very dreadful Manner. This is a further Instance of their Barbarity to our Subjects, and shews the immediate Necessity of rooting these Villains out of their Dens.
Such items kept the public at the boiling point. “On this occasion there appear’d every where the true English Spirit of Generosity. This generous Compassion did not only fill the Breasts of Tradesmen and Mechanics; but Noblemen and Gentlemen of the first Distinction, bore a compassionate Share of her Misfortunes. For as they had not the least Doubt but that her Case was truly represented, their noble Sentiments inspired them with a Resolution becoming their elevated Station, to reward and encourage Virtue, tho’ in the lowest Degrees of Life. Accordingly she was sent for to White’s Chocolate House in St. James’s; when, after they had ask’d her many Questions in relation to the Manner of her Treatment at Wells’s House, and having receiv’d satisfactory Answers thereto, they made her up a purse of thirty Guineas among them.”
It appears that the virtue of Elizabeth Canning was rewarded and encouraged at a very high rate. For carrying on a prosecution at the Old Bailey forty shillings were reckoned to be ample, even allowing for the expenses of a large number of witnesses; while it was generally allowed that nearly three hundred pounds were collected for Elizabeth by her zealous friends at this time.
So there was no lack of money. Betty Canning had new stays, and a new gown, and no doubt a cloak and a pair of mittens. She was able to go abroad a little; but when she undertook to refurbish her draggle-tail petticoat, it made her eyes ache, and she gave over working and became a lady. She moved from Mrs. Woodward’s to Mr. Marshall’s, the cheesemonger’s, and there she lived on her fortune and was much resorted to. Everyone admired her bearing, not puffed up, but modest and courteous to all. She was still pale and wasted, and her arms were still black and blue.
She had no notion of the letters that were passing back and forth between London and Dorset or what they would mean to her.