Exeunt Omnes
May 30, 1754-June 22, 1773
[ #1 ]
“I hope,” said Elizabeth Canning in a low voice, “that Your Lordships will be favourable to me; I had no intent of swearing away the gypsy’s life; what has been done was only defending myself. I desire to be considered as unfortunate.”
Again the girl from Aldermanbury stood at the bar at the Old Bailey. Her lawyer’s bag of tricks was played out, and she stood there for sentence.
For a while it had looked as if she might escape after all. Two of the jury believed her guilty of no more than a mistake about the day she finished the water; hence the confused first verdict. Then they were told, quite wrongly, that having found her guilty, they could not now find her innocent; hence the recommendation to mercy, the only expedient they could think of. Finding, too late, how they had been misinformed, they combined with Elizabeth’s lawyer to obtain a reversal or a new trial.
All their legalities were hopeless, and the recommendation to mercy was hopeless. A majority of the court, including all the lawyers on the bench, was determined to transport the girl.
“I have observed,” the Lord Chief Justice had summed up the situation, “that collections have been made for her amounting to considerable sums of money; and if her sentence were only to remain in Newgate, there would be such sums collected, and such assemblies of an evening, as would render her sentence rather a diversion than a punishment. Nor the pillory I no ways judge safe, fearing much mischief would be done—” to the pillory, the learned judge meant—“and concluding, I think her notoriously guilty.”
Rising to pronounce sentence, the Recorder was of the same mind. He permitted himself the pleasure of rating the culprit soundly.
“It is your particular happiness,” he concluded piously, “that you are in a country where severe and sanguinary laws are not so familiar; and though many may expect, and the court could in this case justify, the most severe and exemplary punishment which the law can inflict; yet you will soon be convinced that your sentence is in no degree adequate to the greatness of your offence. The judgment therefore of this court is,
“That you shall be imprisoned in the gaol of Newgate for one month; and after the expiration of your imprisonment, you shall be transported to some of His Majesty’s colonies or plantations in America for the term of seven years; and if within that term you return, and are found at large in any of His Majesty’s dominions of Great Britain or Ireland, you shall suffer death as a felon without benefit of clergy.”
[ #2 ]
“What the plague!” exclaimed the old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s; “still more of Canning! These fellows that have nothing else to live by but scribbling—!”
The old gentleman had cause for complaint. Every day new rumours assailed his ears, while his eyes were dazzled by a very snowstorm of paragraphs, squibs, lampoons, broadside ballads, copperplate pictures, hasty accounts of the trial, and innumerable arguments ex post facto.
Harvard College Library
Everywhere the old gentleman looked, along the line of broadsheets, nothing but Canning met his gaze. There was no room for anyone there but Aldermanbury’s Bet. James Maclaine the Gentleman Highwayman at the bar of the Old Bailey is gone, but nobody misses him, for here is “ELIZABETH CANNING, Drawn from the Life, as she stood at the Bar to receive her Sentence, in the Session’s-House, in the Old-Bailey.” This copperplate is quite as good as the one of Maclaine, and it ought to be, because it is the one of Maclaine, with Maclaine neatly removed from the scene, and Elizabeth Canning engraved in his place.
This renovated scene of judgment is flanked by four or five portraits of Bet, looking wooden; a reproduction of the surveyor’s plan of Wells’s house and loft; Mary Squires on a broomstick crying: “Hey for Abbotsbury!” and several astounding pieces of Canningite poesy.
One of these purports to be a paean of self-praise by “Inspector” John Hill:
A NEW ADDRESS DIVERSIFIED
All ye Strollers Whores of London
Come to me, or you’ll be undone,
I’m your Guardian and Protector,
Stout as e’er a bouncing Hector
(refrain) Doodle, Doodle Doo.
When the Gipsy and Bawdy-Matron
Destitute where of a Patron
I no sooner the Case Inspected,
Than I bravely both Protected.
Newgate of the one I Cleared,
And the other from Tyburn Spared.
Here’s Rare News for Bawds and gipsys
Now Their Enemy in Eclipses,
That poor Girl young Betty Canning,
Charged with Perjury and Trepanning,
Now must make a long Voyagio,
While Egyptians sing Courragio,
Drink a Health to your Grand Protector,
Not forgetting the Bright Inspector.
Natus, Ford, and Dainty Davy,
They are the worthies that did save ye.
(refrain) Doodle, Doodle Doo.
From my Mansion in Grubb-Street July 15
Then there is Elizabeth Canning’s Declaration to the World, with an Account of her Late Visitation from an Angel with a Promise of her Deliverance in a few Days from Newgate. The author of this work, Batson’s could see, had his mind on higher things.
The angel described the late trial in strongly Canningite terms:
The trial lasted many a tedious day,
The tyrant strove to take thy life away;
The jury one and all did fear his wrath,
Tho’ they to bring thee in guilty was loath.
At length their benefactor for to please
And his fierce wrath in order to appease
They brought thee in guilty, tho’ but in part,
At which the tyrant and the court did start.
“You must bring her in guilty or not,” says my Lord.
“Guilty,” says they, tho’ not with one accord;
“We recommend her to the mercy of the court;”
With lives and liberties they thus do sport.
Before I fly up to the realms of bliss,
I must acquaint His Majesty of this;
He must take it into consideration,
If he expects a blessing on this nation.
If the heavenly visitant said any such thing to His Sacred Majesty George II, that monarch ignored it completely.
The old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s had no angelic representations made to him on the subject of Betty Canning, but everybody else talked to him about her. He heard every kind of rumour, surmise, and allegation.
He heard it confidently asserted that the court was partial, the jury was partial, the witnesses were perjured, and the judge was an old apple-woman.
He heard that in Newgate the condemned girl was inflamed with wine and made drunk with the enthusiasm of ranting Methodists. He heard that she had squeaked, and declared she would confess or reveal the whole if pardoned and permitted to conceal names.
The Methodism was indignantly denied in print by an orthodox divine in Old-Fish Street. The squeaking was denied roundly by Elizabeth herself:
I am compelled to declare, and do in the most serious manner, and with the strictest regard for truth, hereby declare, that I remain at this instant of time fully persuaded, and well assured, that Mary Squires was the person who robbed me; that the house of Susannah Wells was the place in which I was confined twenty-eight days; and that I did not in my several informations or examinations before the different magistrates, or in my evidence on the trial of the said Mary Squires and Susannah Wells, knowingly, in any material, or even in the most minute circumstance, deviate from the truth. As witness my hand this 24th day of June, 1754.
ELIZABETH CANNING
Elizabeth was not the author of A Letter from An Unhappy Young Lady, now Under Confinement in Newgate, to a certain Right Honourable Magistrate. This lampoon maintained a frivolous tone:
It has been said, by some malicious People, that the Story I told was improbable; for Heaven’s Sake where’s the Improbability of doing any Thing with a young Girl who was frightened out of her Senses, and that, to such a Degree, as that I cannot say I have been entirely in them ever since. To carry me to ENFIELD, incredible! why, my L—d? they were equally as able to have carried me to HOLYHEAD, and they might have done it if they would, I am sure I should have said nothing, for I knew not what they were about; and when I came to ENFIELD I was scarcely myself, nor indeed for some Time after, else you might very well imagine, I would have done Something, or tried hard to have got out of the Window before twenty Days to an end, and have secured my Virtue by a Leap.
Other facetious letter-writers leaped to the girl’s defence. The screed of Nickodemus to his Nunckell may serve as a sample:
“… a mere Drudge, with an ordinary Face, we have enough of such Creatures, had she indeed been a beautiful Damsel, with fine black Eyes, and had she the Honour to have been Bed-tucker to some great Man, she might have found a Friend able to have helped her in her Time of Need. But such a poor Dowdy, such an ordinary Creature as Bet C.’s boasting of her good Character, is quite insufferable Pride, Presumption, stupid Ignorance, and bold Face Impudence.
In short, all the Abettors of injured Innocence are great Rogues, to be sure, and ought, undoubtedly, to be delivered into the Hands of the Mob, to be soused Head over Ears into a Horse-pond, according to the Opinion of,
Sir,
Your humble Servant,
Nickodemus
Nickodemus was the only writer to insinuate that Lucy Squires had been bed-tucker to Sir Crisp. Most of the Canningites who harangued the old gentleman accorded that honour to George, when they did not whisper that the gypsy man was privy to even darker goings-on on the part of the ex-Mayor.
Sir Crisp had his say in his Address to the Liverymen of London; he gave all the Dorset evidence, and blackened the managers of Elizabeth. They retorted with a promise of a full refutation (which came, in the end, far too late to help the girl) and an immediate appeal for funds to support their heroine among the savages of the Western savannahs.
The funds were forthcoming. The Inspector reported that the takings reached £1,500, an unlikely allegation; he characterized such donations as “the Reward of Perjury, and an Attempt to commit Murder, through the Laws of the Land.”
A young miss of ten, the old gentleman heard, was inspired by this lucrative hullabaloo. She was found half naked in the fields towards Enfield, telling a sad tale of being lured into the fields and stripped by a strange man. There was not a word of truth in it. The child had stripped off her own clothes and thrown them into a pond.
Dizzied by these reports, printed or whispered, and by twenty more like them, the old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s welcomed the rumour that promised surcease: the ship Tryal was lying at anchor at Blackwall, awaiting the transport convicts; Miss Canning would soon be on her way to Potapsico.
[ #3 ]
The Tryal was indeed almost ready to clear with her load of wretches consigned to the plantations; but the master was having a little trouble with his boatswain.
Robert Pladger, boatswain of the Tryal, had a friend who was footman to the vicar of Cripplegate, and by him the convict Elizabeth Canning was recommended to his seagoing friend’s care.
Other members of the crew also heard that this famous felon was to ship with them; but their reaction was different. They leered.
“Welcome to honest Elizabeth,” cried one. “If she is put on board us, I’ll board her!”
This scheme appealed to the fun-loving sailor-men of the Tryal. They all swore to lie with her, confirming it with a variety of salty oaths.
Honest Pladger rapped out an oath as salty.
“If the girl is put in this ship,” he asseverated, “not one of you shall use her ill!”
These noble sentiments fell upon the ear of Captain Isaac Johns, passing by. He summoned the boatswain to his cabin.
“What business,” he demanded, “have you with Elizabeth Canning?”
Pladger told him about the vicar’s footman.
“I expect,” said Captain Johns icily, “that you will take the same care of her as another transport, and lock her down under hatches every night.”
“I will never do that,” replied the valiant mariner, “for I will lay on my chest, that she may lay in my cabin.”
Captain Johns cut short the interview. The next morning he inquired whether the boatswain still continued in the same mind.
“If the woman comes aboard,” replied Pladger hardily, “she shall not be ill-treated!”
What happened next was a great shock to Boatswain Pladger. He was still brooding about it when he made an affidavit a few days later:
“… the said captain Johns discharged the deponent from the service of the said ship, and for no other cause whatever, as this deponent knows or believes: and after such conversation as aforesaid, the said captain Johns, in derision, called the deponent Mr. Canning!”
Revolving this horrid insult from the black-hearted master of the Tryal, Pladger went and told the vicar’s footman of the girl’s danger. It came very quickly to the threatened girl’s ear.
Faced with a fate worse than death, the unhappy convict fell forthwith into a fainting fit and then into a fever. Unimpressed, the Lord Mayor ordered the Tryal to await her recovery; to expedite which, or to stop malingering, he sent an official physician to examine the girl.
The Lord Mayor’s physician found the girl genuinely ill, and in danger of her life. There was never a physician who examined Elizabeth Canning who did not confirm whatever was her complaint of the moment. This one, though the Lord Mayor’s own man, was no exception.
Learning that the girl lay on what might be her deathbed, a friend of the doctor’s interrogated him closely; he was in hopes of a death-bed confession.
“Whether she discovers no remorse, or sense of guilt, under this threatening disorder?”
“No, no,” replied the Mayor’s man of medicine emphatically, “so far from it that I am more and more confirmed in the circumstantial truth of her story.”
Elizabeth’s friends redoubled their efforts to save the girl from the convict ship. They offered any reasonable sum for her passage in the cabin with a female friend; and they prepared to use legal means when the new sessions opened.
Meanwhile the Tryal lay waiting at anchor at Blackwall to carry Elizabeth Canning to Potapsico; the merry sailor-men laid plans for her reception, unhindered by a more broad-minded boatswain; and Elizabeth Canning, although her month in prison was up, lay in Newgate too ill to be moved.
[ #4 ]
The other characters in the drama melted back into the obscurity from which they had come. One gets a last glimpse of George Squires. He applied to the turnkey at Newgate for permission to see the girl who had given him so much trouble.
“What is your business with her?”
The swarthy young man showed his teeth in a smile.
“To laugh at her.”
He was turned away, and passes out of this chronicle. His trembling old mother lived another eight years; they buried her, with gypsy pomp, in February 1762.
Old Mother Wells went back to her uncertain livelihood at the Wash. She was sour and surly with the neighbours. She went up Marsh Lane and threatened Sarah Starr:
“You must be put in prison, and stand at the judge’s left hand, as I did!”
It put Goody Starr into a taking.
Enfield sympathized with Goody Starr. They were more than ever down on the old bawd of the Wash. A new rumour was going the rounds.
A shepherd of Cheshunt had bought John Howit’s dog, Christmas was twelve months ago. Now he lay ill of a fever, and something he knew was heavy on his mind. He begged a friend to impart it to Elizabeth Canning before he died.
“My new dog,” he whispered out the story, “would be ever rambling home to Wells’s. On the 15th of January, by the new style, I went into Wells’s to ask after the creature, and it snowing very hard, and being very stormy weather, I sat in the kitchen for a space to shelter myself. Judith Natus was sitting by. Presently she opened the stair-foot door. Hearing something in the room, I looked up, and saw a woman in the workshop, shuffling about as if she was very cold and weak, and in a ragged condition, with no gown on, only a petticoat, and something dirty over her shoulders.”
His friend was agog.
“What said Judy?”
“Never a word, but clapped the door to. ‘What’s the matter?’ says Sal Howit. ‘’Tis that bitch abovestairs,’ says Judy.”
“How came you never to mention this before?”
“Living retired at Cheshunt, and hearing no more of the matter, I apprehended it was over, until I heard the trial came on. But now I desire to take an oath in the matter before I die.”
The oath was duly administered. Its credit was somewhat impared, to the superstitious mind, by the fact that the ailing shepherd did not die.
[ #5 ]
The Tryal could not wait. She finally weighed anchor and cleared for Potapsico, Maryland, without Elizabeth Canning.
On July 17, when the new sessions opened, her friends were ready with their appeal. The contractor under whose dispensation the Tryal had sailed came into court and waived his right to transport Elizabeth Canning; and accordingly another contractor was found, a friend of Canning, who would see that she was transported in the manner to which she had become accustomed.
The news was medicine to Bet Canning. It completed the cure that the sailing of the Tryal had begun. Within three days she was ready to leave the old prison.
On Saturday, July 20, armed with a warrant directed to the keeper, her friends descended upon Newgate with a hackney-coach. It was six o’clock in the evening when Elizabeth Canning slipped out the old grey door and got into the coach. The door was shut by a little sharp man in a white coat—it must have been the faithful baker Rossiter—and the coachman drove away immediately without the least mob or confusion.
Just as quietly, on Wednesday, August 7, she slipped on board the Myrtilla, Captain Budden, bound for Philadelphia. She carried with her the competency her friends had collected, and letters of recommendation to well-disposed persons in the plantations. There is no record of her thoughts as the ship dropped down the river and stood out to sea for the New World.
[ #6 ]
From the New World news came back of Elizabeth Canning: Virtue Triumphant, or, Elizabeth Canning in America; being A circumstantial Narrative of her Adventures, from her setting sail for Transportation, to the present Time; in whose miraculous Preservation the hand of Providence is visible. Blessed are the poor in spirit for their’s is the kingdom of Heaven. Matth. v. 3. Boston printed, London reprinted.
In America, the pamphlet recited, Bet Canning was far from finding peace. She escaped shipwreck by the skin of her teeth and the piety of her prayers, only to fall in with a lecherous master. Fleeing from his advances, from the frying-pan into the fire, she was carried off by Indians and placed in the power of a libidinous French friar in Quebec. These crosses endured, she was finally rewarded by the hand of her formerly lustful master.
There was not a word of truth in this farrago. Virtue Triumphant, from beginning to end, was nothing but an impudent fabrication, one part Pamela, one part the Decameron, and one part an anticipation of the skipper’s revolting little daughter in “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” I have yet to be convinced that there was ever any Boston edition.
In sober fact, Wethersfield, Connecticut, was the scene of Elizabeth Canning’s exile. Wethersfield was not the edge of the wilderness, but the oldest town in Connecticut, and one of the most important. The centre of gravity has since moved to Hartford, four miles to the north; but in Elizabeth Canning’s day the two towns were rivals in importance.
Wethersfield lies on the bank of the Connecticut River, where the woods meet the alluvial plain. In 1754 the town had three churches, four schools, a town hall; grist-mills, brick kilns, tanyards; a saw-mill, a smithy, a fulling-mill, a rope-walk. Ships out of Wethersfield went down to the sea and beyond it, for the river was navigable as far up as Glastonbury bar. Wethersfield men commanded many a brigantine, sloop, and schooner that Wethersfield men had built. They traded to all the islands of the Caribbean, and brought back luxuries such as Elizabeth Canning in all her days in Aldermanbury had never seen: sugars, coffee, rum, indigo, limes, lemons, oranges.
What with tropical foods from the Indies, and books, hangings, and furniture from England and France, life was comfortable in Wethersfield. Broad Street was wide and lined with rising elms. The houses that bordered it were built to last, of riven clapboards of white oak, and bricks lining the walls to keep out the cold.
In one of the spacious houses lived the Reverend Elisha Williams, one-time rector of Yale, and his charming young English wife. Rector Williams had been a Methodist since he heard Whitefield preach under the Broad Street elm fourteen years before; among English Methodists, last year, he had found his second wife. To him his English friends recommended Elizabeth Canning.
There is a story that Elizabeth fell in with the Williamses on their wedding journey from England. It is a pretty legend—the friendless young serving-maid, the kindly old clergyman, his warm-hearted wife—fortune smiling at last on her young victim—a good home and friends after her long trials. It was a pretty legend in 1790, when somebody in Wethersfield thought it up to tell to a junketing Congressman, surely the pioneer of the type. It is nothing but a legend. Rector Williams’s bride had been at home in Broad Street for a year when Elizabeth Canning came to her with her letters of recommendation and became a part of the rector’s family.
Elizabeth found in her new country the bustle and stir of anticipated war. The rector was as busy as the busiest raising and equipping Connecticut volunteers. It was not enough to disturb Elizabeth’s peaceful daily round of household duties, but at night it combined with her own misfortunes to trouble her dreams.
Her presence in the colony had aroused great interest, for her fame had preceded her. That is why, when she told her dream, the story spread rapidly, about the town, to Boston, to London. The Boston merchant who wrote his London friend about it soon saw his letter in print on a broadside. He must have laughed at the illustration, with its vignette from the window of the savages of the Western savannahs, mighty chilly in breech-clouts, toting munitions under palm and pine trees; but the text was straightforward enough:
Extract of a Letter from a Merchant in Boston, to his Correspondent in London, dated Nov. 5. 1754.
The public Papers from time to time must certainly have informed you of the Encroachments of our sworn Enemies, tho’ Neighbours, the French, particularly on the Ohio; notwithstanding, we flatter ourselves soon to be in such a State as to retaliate with Interest, the many Insults we have received from them; the different Provinces raising Forces with the utmost alacrity, with which, and the Assistance expected from England, we doubt not of making the Monsieurs bid us a long adieu: The Spirits of the common People are highly rais’d, as are likewise several of the better Sort. I hope you won’t smile when I acquaint you, that a Dream has greatly contributed to the same. On Wednesday Night the 30th of last October, Elizabeth Canning a pious Virgin, lately arrived from England (and as many here think, as does likewise several eminent sober Citizens of London unjustly exiled,) being in a sound Sleep, dreamt, that being employed at her Needle, there appeared before her, a venerable old Matron in a high crown’d Hat, and antique Garb, informing her that her Name was Shipton; and that she was a Prophetess of her native Country some hundred Years ago, advising her to take upon her for the good of her Country, to imitate the Maid of Orleans. Canning replied, she knew not who the Maid of Orleans was: to whom the other answered, my pious dear Child, as your Situation has always been that of Servitude, which may have hindered you the Study of History, I will in brief relate to you her Story.
The Boston merchant included the history lesson in full, and went on with the prophetical visitant’s discourse:
As Providence has in Store a Relief for all Countries, so you, my dear Babe, are destin’d to be in Revenge the Scourge of the French by the English; for which Purpose, behold I have brought you a Khevenhuller Hat with a large Cockade, a fine scarlet Coat richly trim’d, adorned with a long Shoulder-knot, and other military Equipments suitable to the present Age; as to the Sword which shall render you victorious, that must be procured from the Royal Abbey of Westminster, which, as it has before vanquished the Monsieurs, I prophesy shall in your Hands do it once more. Canning affirms the Relation gave her great Pleasure in the hearing, except the fatal Catastrophe of the poor Maid of Orleans being burnt for a Witch; Goody Shipton assured her as a Prophetess that she, Elizabeth Canning, never should, but sooner the old Gipsey Mary Sq—rs; the pronouncing the last Name immediately waked her, and in the Morning she related the above.
Bet Canning never donned the Khevenhuller hat and the scarlet coat of her dream, perhaps because not long after she had the misfortune to break her leg. It healed without complications, however, and she stayed quietly in the big house on Broad Street, learning to spin and making herself useful. From that house, on November 24, 1756, she was married.
Harvard College Library
A SCEENE of SCEENES.
Elizabeth Canning’s Dream, for ye good of her Native country, which she Dreamt soon after her arrival in America.
John Treat was a scatter-brained young fellow of good family; his great-uncle Robert had been Governor of Connecticut. They had between them, it is said, a house and £1,500 to start their married life with, but being of too easy a disposition, this sum was soon spent and their house had to be sold. This hardly sounds like the girl who slept on the stone wash-house floor lest she should not rise in time to do the Wintlebury’s washing. Of course they had no such sum of money. The story is merely an echo of the tale which “Inspector” John Hill put about.
The difficulties of John Treat, however, seem to have been more than legendary. On March 26, 1757, barely four months after he set up housekeeping with Betty Canning, he went for a soldier. He enlisted in Captain Eliphalet Whittlesey’s company of one hundred picked men, and marched away to Fort William Henry. He was mustered out on December 8. On June 4, 1758, Elizabeth bore their son Joseph Canning Treat; not a week before that, the scatterbrained young husband had taken the colony’s shilling a second time and gone with Whittlesey’s company against Ticonderoga.
Bet Canning’s trials were not over. On September 26 John Treat was set down in Eliphalet Whittlesey’s roster among the “Dead and captivated.” Dead he certainly was not. Whether captivated or missing, it is certain he returned, perhaps like an apparition, perhaps prosaically on the heels of a reassuring message. He came back cured of his wanderlust, and begot daughters and sons.
His daughter was born on September 19, 1761, and christened Elizabeth. No news of the child crossed the water, but in that year England had news of Elizabeth Canning, in an item in the Annual Register:
“Nov. 23. Elizabeth Canning is arrived in England, and received a legacy of 500 l. left her three years ago, by an old lady of Newington-green.”
In August 1761 Betty’s seven years were up. There was plenty of money to tempt her in England; besides the legacy, there was a hundred pounds from a Mrs. Cooke of Stoke Newington waiting to set her up in business on her return to London.
Nevertheless, I do not believe she returned. Not a single newspaper item, not a single new or reissued broadsheet or copperplate corroborates the item that some hack scraped up at the year’s end to fatten the Annual Register. That hack knew that her seven years were up. He may have been correctly informed about the five hundred pounds from Newington. But certainly he had no new information about the Aldermanbury girl, not even her married name. The item is very dubious.
The next news London had of Elizabeth Canning came in the Connecticut Courant, No. 444, for June 22–29, 1773:
“Hartford, June 22d. Last week died very suddenly, at Wethersfield, Mrs. Elizabeth Treat, wife of Mr. Treat, formerly the famous Elizabeth Canning.”
This was what the curious had been waiting for. Unfortunately, Elizabeth died without making that death-bed confession which was a respected institution in eighteenth-century London. The Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1773 spoke the city’s disappointed curiosity:
“Notwithstanding the many strange circumstances of her story, none is so strange, as that it should not be discovered in so many years, where she had concealed herself during the time she had invariably declared she was at the house of Mother Wells.”
