“To Alarm the Publick with Some Further Discoveries”
March 6–March 13, 1753
[ #1 ]
“Tis all the talk in Chancery Lane,” remarked a lawyer’s clerk, “that the Lord Mayor hath written into Dorset to test the gypsy’s alibi; and affidavits and letters have come to his hand whereby ’tis fully confirmed.”
Dr. John Hill was very pleased to hear this piece of news.
Dr. Hill was a busy medico-literary jack-of-all-trades. He recommended valerian for the nerves and dock-water for the scurvy. He published A Compleat View of the Heavens and A Dissertation on Sea-Water. His farces attained a doubtful celebrity; in the words of Garrick:
For Physic and Farces
His equal there scarce is.
His Farces are Physic,
His Physic a Farce is.
Dr. Hill wrote a daily letter in the London Daily Advertiser; he signed it “The Inspector,” and he was very severe with free-thinkers, other people’s farces, and Henry Fielding. He had a nose for news and an eye for business.
It was his eye for business that took him down to Parliament Street on the evening of March 6. He had in mind to keep up a pleasant business contact with one Mr. Prentice, who had employed him to recommend the iron-pear-tree-water. At Mr. Prentice’s he found a distinguished company, probably not partaking of iron-pear-tree-water.
It was as well he brought his nose for news along, especially if, as Canning’s friends bitterly remarked, “he was sollicitous to alarm the publick with some further discoveries in Canning’s case.” For arriving already equipped with the news from Chancery Lane, about the Lord Mayor’s investigations, he here met with a very useful piece of information not known to the Mayor—namely, the whereabouts of Virtue Hall. An interview with Virtue Hall would scoop the town.
Dr. Hill’s luck that evening was phenomenal. Among the iron-pear-tree-water magnate’s guests was Justice Lediard, a magistrate of Westminster. His writ ran at the Gatehouse, and his curiosity was strong. He sent for the girl at once.
Presently the ugly little whore of the Wash was convoyed into Parliament Street by the keeper’s servant, and Justice Lediard went to work on her.
She said she had spoken the whole truth to Justice Fielding.
“Fielding,” said Hill, “pish.”
“’Twas a lie,” said Lediard severely, “and My Lord Mayor knows it.”
Virtue cast her eyes about and trembled.
Justice Lediard redoubled his efforts. He was very eloquent. He touched on innocent blood on her head, Newgate in this world and damnation in the next.
Virtue Hall wept.
Mr. Prentice, Dr. Hill, Justice Lediard, and the rest of the company thought this a very promising sign and applied renewed pressure for a confession.
“Give me some time,” said Virtue Hall, “give me the night to think upon what I should say further.”
“Very well,” said Justice Lediard, “but you must speak truly in the morning.”
“I will,” said Virtue Hall.
Dr. Hill was jubilant. He had copy for a month, and his enemy Fielding upon the hip.
[ #2 ]
While these events were happening, Sir Crisp Gascoyne was sifting through a sheaf of communications from Dorset, and it seemed to him that it was time to bring the matter home to Elizabeth Canning. As a first step the next day at noon he sent for her friends Francis Roberts the blue-maker, Thomas Miles the distiller, and Edward Rossiter the baker.
“I desire you, gentlemen,” said the Mayor smoothly, “as the next friends to the girl Canning, to be acquainted with these documents out of Dorset, but newly communicated to Mr. Justice Gundry and myself.”
Mr. Ford, clerk of the arraigns and Sir Crisp’s solicitor, read them out. There were letters from Mr. Willis, undersheriff of Dorset, and Mr. Harris, vicar of Abbotsbury; and more imposing-looking documents, affidavits signed and sealed.
“I have this morning,” went the vicar’s letter, “sent for several of my parish who well know this woman and her companions, one particularly with whom they always lodged till this last time of their coming here. And he tells me, that he has known this Mary Squires upwards of thirty years—That she, with others of that name, and some of other names, have in that space of time often come to his house, sometimes once or twice in a year, at other times once in two or three years—That they (this Mary Squires and others) were at his house about three years ago, which was the last time they were at Abbotsbury till the 1st of January last. That he often saw them at the house of John Gibbons between the 1st and the 9th of January—That they always went under the denomination of gypsies, that they had goods (as handkerchiefs, aprons, gowns, &c.) to sell, that they never wanted money, and always paid very justly for what they had. Their being here this last time could be proved by most of the younger sort in my parish, for as it was Christmas-time they had dancing almost every night at the house, and the son and daughter of Squires danced constantly with the people of the town.”
The vicar gave Gibbons and Clarke a good character. So did Mr. Willis, the under-sheriff, writing to his good friend and countryman Justice Gundry:
“Gibbons and Clarke both came to me the day before they set out for London, to be informed what method to take to be paid for their journey, when they shewed me the subpœnas they were served with, and said that George Squires … came down to serve them, and that he waited at Abbotsbury to go up with them, and told the same story as I imagine they proved on the trial; and I since find that Clarke fell in love with Lucy the young gypsy, and went with them or followed them to Ridgway, when they left Abbotsbury, and tarried with them a day or two, and both he and Gibbons must well remember the old woman, and from what knowledge I have of them, and the information I have from others, I verily believe that they are both very honest men.…”
Miles and Rossiter scowled over the enclosed affidavits. The first one came from Abbotsbury. The tythingman, the churchwardens, the overseers of the poor, in all fifteen substantial citizens had set their hands to it. They certified that Gibbons and Clarke were honest, that the gypsies had put up at the Old Ship for nine days in January, and the rest of it. Six zealous friends of Gibbons had bustled up to Dorchester and sworn to the same facts before the Mayor of the town and busy Mr. Willis, the under-sheriff. Somebody’s zeal had gone far afield; there was even a good character for Greville, the innkeeper of Coombe, certified by the overseer and churchwardens of Coombe.
Roberts, Miles, and Rossiter were unconvinced.
“How do we know the gypsy was the same gypsy?” they demanded.
For answer Mr. Ford read again a sentence from the Abbotsbury certificate:
“The old woman was about five feet seven or eight inches high, of a very black rusty complexion, with black eyes, a large nose, and an uncommon thick underlip.”
The Aldermanbury men let that go for a moment.
“The accounts of the alibi witnesses at her trial,” said Miles, “are yet inconsistent with what Squires herself said at her sentencing.”
“Lord, gentlemen,” said Sir Crisp, “at that time I believed her as guilty as you do; but when I consider the confusion and terror in which she gave this account when she received sentence, I think that no regard ought to be paid to what she said.”
“Nay,” said Miles, “she persists in her account to this day, and hath repeated it so often that I hear the gaoler for that reason alone believes it to be true.”
“I suppose,” said Sir Crisp,” she might reckon by old style, for ’tis known that gypsies always reckon by old style.”
“If she reckoned by old style,” said Roberts, “she would not have called New Year’s Day the 1st of January, for by it she must mean old New Year’s Day. Or if she had, yet she could not have distinguished it as happening on Monday; for though New Year’s Day, by the new style, fell on a Monday, yet old New Year’s Day happened on a Friday.”
Sir Crisp was to hear far, far more of old New Year’s Day and new New Year’s Day; but for the moment he was sick of it.
“A truce to trifling, gentlemen,” he cried. “Squires, the horse-dealer of the Borough, is determined to save the gypsy and has applied to me for the purpose, so there’s an end on’t.”
The Aldermanbury men looked surprised.
“As to Virtue Hall,” said the Mayor, changing the subject, “are you willing that I should examine the wench?”
“Yes, sir, whenever you please.”
“There is no hurry,” said Sir Crisp comfortably. “In a day or two I shall be at leisure, I will let you know.”
Whereupon the Aldermanbury champions made a leg and withdrew, but not without a Parthian shot:
“Though there was an ugly old Mary Squires at the Abbotsbury dancing, ’twas never the one we know, for she was at Enfield.”
The Mayor pondered that. It was manifest nonsense, but people would be saying so until it was proved otherwise.
“Pray, Mr. Ford,” said Sir Crisp, “write again to the good vicar. Beg him to send me two good men, whose characters he can certify, to speak to the identity of Mary Squires.”
“Sir, I will do so,” said Mr. Ford.
Sir Crisp was in no hurry to interview Virtue Hall; but shortly after the departure of the Aldermanbury men he had a caller, hitherto unknown to him—Dr. John Hill.
The Aldermanbury men went home to Rossiter’s house. They sat in the warm, yeasty atmosphere and shook their heads. Sir Crisp was a mighty antagonist. The best thing to do, it seemed to them, was to collect evidence to place Squires at Enfield on the fatal day and so break the alibi.
“We must go to Enfield,” said Miles.
“No, sir,” said Rossiter, “we may do better than that. Hall will tell us to whom to apply at Enfield. Let us go to the Gatehouse.”
The three men stepped into London Wall and hailed a hackney coach, and so, rattling over the cobbles and splashing through the mud, they came to the Gatehouse.
The bird had flown.
She had been sent for, said the keeper, to the Mansion House, she was not fifteen minutes gone.
The men of Aldermanbury damned His Honour, the coachman whipped up his horses, and back they posted to the Mansion House.
They got there first. When in a few minutes Virtue Hall arrived, attended by two officers and a turnkey, they trooped along with her into the presence of the dumbfounded Lord Mayor.
“How did you know of this?” demanded he.
They told him about the Enfield witnesses. Making the best of a bad bargain, the Mayor began to question Virtue Hall.
At first he got no further with her than Fielding had in the first six hours, or Hill the night before. She was sullen, and she stuck to her story, as far as “Yes” and “No” would take her.
“You are perjured,” cried the exasperated magistrate, “but,” he added soothingly, “if you will tell me the truth, no harm shall come to you.”
Virtue rolled her eyes uneasily at the friends of Canning.
“Look at me,” said Sir Crisp sternly, “for ’tis I can protect you, and not them. Will you tell me the truth?”
Virtue Hall burst into her ready tears.
“Perhaps,” said somebody, “she will speak to Your Lordship freer alone.”
At this Sir Crisp rose from his chair and took his candlestick in his hand.
“Come, then,” he said to the snivelling girl, “and go along with me.”
Perhaps he intercepted a glance between Miles and Rossiter, for he added to one of his friends in the crowd: “Come, Sir John, do you go along with us,” and the three ill-assorted conferees passed into the withdrawing-room and closed the door.
The Aldermanbury men were on tenterhooks. It seemed long to them before Sir John came back crying:
“Why, gentlemen, ’tis even so, this wench has denied all she swore at the Old Bailey; but there are some difficulties, which His Lordship cannot yet get over.”
Another minute passed before Sir Crisp returned with the sniffling wench. He seated himself in his great chair, looked about triumphantly, and put the formal question:
“Virtue Hall, whether what you swore at the Old Bailey against Mary Squires and Susannah Wells was false or true?”
“It is all false, My Lord,” said Virtue Hall.
[ #3 ]
The next day they all came again before the Lord Mayor, and this time they brought Betty Canning with them.
They also brought along the pitcher and the bedgown. There was no use questioning Virtue about them. Even as Canning’s witness Virtue had denied ever having seen the bedgown; and everybody admitted that the broken-mouth black pitcher belonged to Mother Wells. However, there they were, as tangible evidence of the truth of Elizabeth’s story.
They confronted the two girls, the quiet, well-spoken, composed heroine from Aldermanbury with her sullen, ugly little accuser from the Wash. It was not a success. Bet Canning, for all her composure, had no new questions to ask, no new details to entrap her adversary. She asked the old questions over, and Virtue Hall now said “No” where before she had said “Yes,” and “Yes” where before she had said “No.”
Then everybody else took a hand in the questioning.
“How came you,” asked someone, “to forswear yourself?”
“Sir,” said Virtue, “when I was at Mr. Fielding’s I at first spoke the truth, but I was told that that was not the truth, and they terrified me and threatened to send me to Newgate and prosecute me as a felon unless I would speak the truth, until in the end I swore what was false to save my own life.”
At this there was a murmur. Dr. John Hill murmured the loudest, and struck his brow dramatically with the heel of his hand.
“Pray, My Lord,” Edward Rossiter stood forward, “I desire to ask this woman if she does not remember that the first Sunday after she was committed to prison I came to see her in the Gatehouse, and brought with me my wife and another young woman?”
“Yes,” said Virtue wryly, “I remember it very well.”
“Pray, mistress,” said Rossiter, “acquaint His Lordship with what you said to me concerning an apron.”
“Speak up, girl,” said the Mayor.
“I asked,” muttered the recusant, “what sort of an apron it was that the young woman was robbed of. Mistress Rossiter said she could not tell; and speaking to the young woman, she said: ‘Can you, Mary?’ and the young woman described it.”
She paused.
“And then?” prompted the implacable Rossiter.
“Then,” mumbled the girl, “I said, I will be hanged if the gypsy woman, Mary Squires’s eldest daughter, has not that apron; for she had a good white apron after the girl was brought to the house, which I never knew her to have before.”
“If that was a false story,” shouted Rossiter, “how came you to tell it? Did I or anyone else ask you about an apron until you yourself mentioned it?”
“No,” said Virtue Hall, “you never did.”
Sir Crisp brushed this colloquy aside. Virtue had been lying, and the precise nature of her lies was beside the point. The hearing was at an end.
Bet Canning took this with her customary aplomb. She was reaching for the bedgown, where it stood on the table by the black pitcher, when the Mayor stopped her.
“Child,” he said, not unkindly, “you must not take it away with you.”
“Ay,” muttered Ford, “for I doubt not but I shall put it upon its right owner in two or three days.”
“Yes,” said Bet in her weak little voice, “My Lord.…” The next few words were unfortunately low, but everybody heard the last words: “… my mother’s.”
The remark was reported later in two versions. Sir Crisp was triumphant; he thought she said: “It is my mother’s.” Rossiter was equally positive that she said: “I must take them to my mother’s.”
Whether as part of the home wardrobe or as evidence, Bet took them nowhere.
It was Mr. Ford who took the bedgown down to Aldermanbury. He intended to put it upon Mrs. Canning as the right owner. For a while rumours were rife that certain washerwomen had sworn that the bedgown was Mrs. Canning’s and had often appeared in that lady’s laundry bundle; but nothing came of it, and no washerwoman ever came into court to identify the undesirable garment.
[ #4 ]
When the Mayor rose, he had further investigations in mind. On Friday he gathered about him several gentlemen of distinction and went down to Newgate. He had a mind to see what Susannah Wells would say. He wanted to talk with her before she heard about Hall’s recantation; though since the news had been all over town for three days, this hope seems a little naïve.
His Lordship ensconced himself in the best room in the keeper’s house, and Wells was brought before him.
She denied everything.
“I am a weak and aged woman,” she snivelled, “I am seventy years of age, I am the mother of children, I will not speak a word but what is true; and I do not doubt but time will, though too late, discover mine and Mary Squires’s innocence. My Lord, no such person as Canning was ever at my house, no robbery was committed there, Squires and her family came there but eight days before they were taken up.”
This had been her story from the first. Now it coincided with Virtue Hall’s. Satisfied, the Mayor dismissed her and called for Squires.
Squires was not to be seen. She lay gravely ill of gaol distemper. The ordinary, or chaplain, of Newgate discussed her case with the Mayor:
“She appears, My Lord, perfectly resigned, continues to protest, in the most solemn manner, her innocence, and doubts not (this is her very expression) that God Almighty, who knows her innocent, will protect her.”
The Lord Mayor was resolved to do the same.
[ #5 ]
Susannah Wells was triumphant. She saw not only freedom, but revenge within her grasp. Her daughter, Elizabeth Long, carried the news to Enfield Wash. Wells’s friends at the Wash soon plucked up heart and came forward. They had had no chance to tell their stories at the Old Bailey, but now they had the ear of the first citizen of London. Elizabeth Long marshalled her forces and led them to the Mansion House, bright and early on Monday morning.
Sir Crisp regarded the delegation with his well-opened intelligent eyes. He was prepared to believe what they said.
“My Lord,” said Susannah Wells’s daughter, “I well remember the doings at my mother’s house in January, for I lived near by and went there almost daily. I remember the room in which Elizabeth Canning said she was confined, for during that very month of January I was frequently in that room.”
“What for?” inquired His Lordship.
“My mother kept in that room hay to feed her horse, and pollard for the sow, and frequently I fetched one or the other for her, or ashes for my own use.”
“Who lived in your mother’s house during January?”
“My mother, and my sister, and Virtue Hall, and Fortune Natus and his wife.”
Elizabeth Long pushed forward the squatty little couple.
“These people,” said Mrs. Long, “slept in the loft the entire month of January. I have seen them there, for I used to come for Judith, to come to my house and do what I wanted done; I have seen her and her husband in bed in the month of January there.”
“So have I too,” struck in John Howit, Wells’s carpenter son. He told how it was:
“I was coming from a job at Breman Green, and I turned in at my mother’s and lodged my tools in the shuffle-board room. I returned on the Sunday, January 21 by the new style, to fetch my axe and saw to cut some wood for my wife. These people were then in bed, or,” said the carpenter, regarding his mother’s lodgers with contempt, “what they call a bed; they had sacks to lie on and what they thought fit to cover them.”
“My Lord, this is all true,” said Fortune mildly.
“Further, My Lord,” volunteered Judith, “some time in January Susannah Wells came into the loft in the morning, while I was in bed, to look for part of a sign that was missing; it was under the foot of the hay bed I lay in; and a man with her, that wanted the irons in the wood; his name is Ezra Whiffin.”
“Is this man here?”
“Yes, My Lord.” The innkeeper of the White Hart and Crown stood forth.
“My Lord,” he narrated, “I well remember the day I had those sign-irons of Mother Wells; she took me up seven steps out of the kitchen into the room called the lumber-room; and the top of the sign, with the irons in it, was braced under the foot of the hay bed, and in it lay this woman here; she had a bag of wool for a bolster, and a large piece of blue cloth instead of a sheet to cover her. This was on the 18th of January, My Lord.”
The minuter took it all down. The Enfield people signed and made off.
The next day a couple of bumpkins came gaping to the Mansion House, middle-aged men in outlandish countryfied frieze coats, round hats, neckerchiefs instead of ruffles, and their own hair. They were Melchizedeck Arnold, blacksmith, and Gibbons’s Uncle John Ford, carpenter, of Abbotsbury in Dorsetshire. They had papers from the vicar to give them a good character, and they were ready to tell what they knew.
The Mayor welcomed the countrymen, round hats and all. He put them in a hackney-coach and sent them over to Newgate. Mary Squires was better. They greeted her, and she them, like old friends. Then they returned to the Mansion House to answer such questions as might be asked of them.
They found a considerable audience assembled to listen to them. Besides the Mayor’s friends, the friends of Canning were there. Melchizedeck and John could not tell one from t’other. They gave their story unabashed by the press of wigs and silk small-clothes.
“I know the woman well,” said Melchizedeck, “and I saw her and George her son and Lucy her daughter at the Old Ship, in Abbotsbury, Gibbons’s house, on the 1st day of January last. On that very evening, My Lord, I played on the violin to some young people who were dancing—”
“Dancing. Ha,” said Edward Rossiter.
“Innocently dancing,” said Melchizedeck, unabashed, “and George and Lucy were of the number, and Mary Squires sat by the kitchen fire.”
“I saw her there that night,” said Uncle John, “and her children at the dancing.”
“And on Saturday, the 6th of January, being Twelfth Day in the evening,” the blacksmith fiddler went on, “there was another match of dancing at the Old Ship, and George and Lucy were of that party; and I played to the dancers, and Mary Squires sat by the fire and looked on. And I saw her about Abbotsbury divers other times during that New Year’s week.”
“Do you mean old style or new?”
“My Lord, I mean this present calculated time.”
“My Lord, this is all true,” said Uncle John Ford. “I have known the woman this three years past. John Gibbons is my nephew, and I live directly across the way from his inn. I saw these people about town from the 1st to the 9th of January last, and on the 9th, it was a Tuesday, they went away. I sell bread and tobacco, My Lord, and divers other goods, and they used frequently to come and buy things of me during their stay.”
The minuter wrote it all down. They read out the Abbotsbury affidavits, and the men confirmed them; Uncle John had put his hand to both of them. They affirmed that the Mary Squires in Newgate and the Mary Squires of Abbotsbury were one and the same. They gave Clarke and Gibbons a good character.
The friends of Canning had next to nothing to say.
“The people of the seacoast,” they muttered, “are notoriously smugglers and wreckers of ships—”
“All of them,” said Miles.
“Not excluding the vicar,” mumbled Rossiter.
The Lord Mayor ignored their mutterings. He ordered the countrymen lodged at his expense. They repaired to the White Horse, in the Haymarket.
When they were all gone away, the Mayor turned over his papers. The thing seemed certain, that the old gypsy woman was innocent. He turned over the letters and papers from Abbotsbury; he reread the testimony of Wells’s friends from the Wash. Lastly he turned over the minutes of the trial.
“Mr. Ford,” he said presently.
“My Lord?” said the man of law.
“Listen to this; this is Gibbons, the innkeeper of Abbotsbury, speaking at the trial of Squires.…”
“They asked him: ‘By what do you recollect the day when the old woman came?’ And this is what he replied: ‘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.’”
“What is this to the purpose?”
“Why, sir, we have here a witness that cannot be impugned. He has no friendship to sway him, no interest to serve; an accident occasioned his being at Abbotsbury; and the excise-books must be a record of his stay there. We will send for this Wicks, or Wick, with his books.”
“Very good, My Lord,” said Mr. Ford, and took up his quill.
For a moment only the scratching of the quill was heard as Sir Crisp Gascoyne bent his heavy brows over the papers before him.
“And, Mr. Ford—”
“My Lord?”
“Pray draw up a warrant.”
“A warrant, My Lord?”
“A warrant for perjury.”
“Against Virtue Hall, My Lord?”
“Against Elizabeth Canning.”