In the year 1753, London was so deeply convulsed with a great question
at issue in the criminal courts, that the peace of the city was
seriously threatened. From the highest to the lowest grades, society
was divided into two parties on this question; and it was impossible
to speak of it at a dinner-table or in a street assemblage without
exciting a dangerous quarrel. This dispute was an extravagant
illustration of English zeal for justice and fair play. The real
question lay between an old gipsy woman and a young servant-girl. The
question at issue was--Had the gipsy robbed and forcibly confined
Elizabeth Canning, or had Elizabeth Canning falsely accused the gipsy
of these outrages? By the force of incidental circumstances, the
question came to be a really important one, in which the statesmen and
jurists of the age took a lively interest. In fact, it connected
itself with the efficacy of the great judicial institutions of the
land, and their capacity to do justice and protect innocence. Hence
the several trials and inquiries occupy as much space in the _State
Trials_ as three or four modern novels. In giving our readers an
outline of the events so recorded, only the more prominent and marked
features of them can of course find room.
Elizabeth Canning, a young woman between eighteen and nineteen years
of age, had borne an unexceptionable character, and was a domestic
servant in the house of a gentleman living in Aldermanbury, named
Edward Lyon. On the 1st of January 1753, she obtained liberty to pay a
visit to her uncle, who lived at Saltpetre Bank. As she did not return
at the specified time, Mr Lyon's family made inquiry of her mother
about her, and learned that she had not made her appearance among her
other relations after the visit to her uncle. Days and weeks passed,
in which every inquiry was unavailingly made after her, and her mother
suffered intense anxiety. Public notice had been taken of the mystery;
it was commented on in the newspapers, and much talked of. At length,
at the end of January, Elizabeth entered her mother's house in a
wretched condition--emaciated and exhausted, and with scarcely a
sufficiency of clothes on her person for mere decorum. She was, of
course, asked eagerly to give an account of her misfortunes. Her
narrative by degrees resolved itself into this shape: She set out on
her visit at eleven o'clock in the day, and stayed with her uncle till
nine o'clock in the evening. Her uncle and aunt accompanied her as far
as Aldgate. Then setting off alone, as she crossed Moorfields, and
passed the back of Bethlehem Hospital, two stout men seized her. 'They
said nothing to me,' she said, 'at first, but took half a guinea, in a
little box, out of my pocket, and three shillings that were loose.
They took my gown, apron, and hat, and folded them up, and put them
into a greatcoat pocket. I screamed out; then the man who took my gown
put a handkerchief or some such thing in my mouth.' They then tied her
hands behind her, swore savagely at her, and dragged her along with
them. She now, according to her own account, swooned, and on
recovering from her fit, she felt herself still in their hands; they
were swearing, and calling on her to move on. Partly insensible, she
was conveyed for a considerable distance, but could not say whether
she was dragged or carried. When she found herself at rest,
it was daylight in the morning. She remembered being in a
disreputable-looking house, in the presence of a woman, who said if
she would accompany her, she should have fine clothes. Elizabeth
refused, and the woman taking a knife from a dresser, cut open her
stays, and removed them. The woman and the other people present then
hustled her up stairs into a wretched garret, and locked the door. She
found here a miserable straw-bed, a large black pitcher nearly full of
water, and twenty-four pieces of bread, seeming as if a quartern-loaf
had been cut in so many pieces. Her story went on to say, that she
remained in this place for four weeks, eating so much of the bread and
drinking a little water daily, till both were exhausted. She then
succeeded in making her escape, by removing a board which was nailed
across a window. 'First,' she said, 'I got my head out, and kept fast
hold of the wall, and got my body out; after that, I turned myself
round, and jumped into a little narrow place by a lane, with a field
beside it. Having nothing on but 'an old sort of a bedgown and a
handkerchief, that were in this hay-loft, and lay in a grate in the
chimney,' she managed to travel twelve miles through an unknown
country to her mother's house, not daring, as she said, to call at any
place by the way, lest she should again fall into the hands of her
persecutors.
If Elizabeth's absence created excitement, her reappearance in the
plight she was in, and with such a story to tell, increased it
tenfold. She was an attractive-looking girl; and seeing the sympathy
she excited, had no objection to assent to the theory formed by her
friends, that the people in whose hands she had fallen had the basest
designs upon her; that they had resolved to conquer her virtue by
imprisonment and starvation; and that she had magnanimously and
patiently resisted all their efforts. The story was hawked about
everywhere. It was spoken of in every tavern and at every
dinner-table. The indignation of many respectable citizens was roused.
They were parents, and had daughters of their own, who might be made
the victims of the diabolical crew from which this poor girl had
escaped. Many of them resolved to rally round her--avenge her wrongs,
and punish the perpetrators. Elizabeth found herself one of the most
important people in London. She received many presents, and
considerable funds were raised to prosecute the inquiry. In these
circumstances, she was bound of course to assist her friends by
remembering every little incident that could lead them to the place of
her sufferings. She believed that it must have been on the Hertford
road, for in looking from the window, she had caught sight of a coach
on that road with which she was familiar, as a former mistress had
been accustomed to travel in it. This circumstance, with the distance
travelled by the girl, afforded her champions a clue, and they
concentrated their researches at Enfield Wash. There they found a
questionable-looking lodging-house kept by a family of the name of
Wells, which seemed to answer to Elizabeth's description. It had a
garret with an old straw-bed, and a black pitcher was found in the
house.
Elizabeth was taken to examine this house in a sort of triumphal
procession. Her friends went on horseback, making a complete
cavalcade; she and her mother travelled in a coach. As many as could
find room seem to have simultaneously rushed into the squalid
lodging-house, and the natural astonishment and confusion of its
inmates on such an invasion were at once assigned as the symptoms of
conscious guilt. Elizabeth seemed to be at first somewhat confused and
undecided; these symptoms were attributed to the excitement of the
moment on recollection of the horrors she had endured, and to a
feeling of insecurity. She was told to take courage; she was among her
friends, who would support her cause; and she at last said decidedly,
that she was in the house where she had been imprisoned. A gipsy woman
of very remarkable appearance was present. One of the witnesses
recognised her, from her likeness to the portraits of Mother Shipton
the sorceress. She sat bending over the fire smoking a pipe, and
exhibiting through the hubbub around the imperturbable calmness
peculiar to her race. Elizabeth immediately pointed to her, and said
she was the woman who had cut her stays, and helped to put her in her
prison-room. Even this did not disturb the stolid indifference of the
old woman, who was paying no attention to what the people said. When,
however, her daughter stepped up and said: 'Good mother, this young
woman says you robbed her,' she started to her feet, turned on the
group her remarkable face, and said: 'I rob you! take care what you
say. If you have once seen my face, you cannot mistake it, for God
never made such another.' When told of the day of the robbery, she
gave a wild laugh, and said she was then above a hundred miles off in
Dorsetshire. This woman was named Squires. Her son, George Squires,
was present. Elizabeth did not seem completely to remember him at
first, but she in the end maintained him to be one of the ruffians who
had attacked her in Moorfields. Her followers were now eminently
satisfied. All the persons in the house were seized, and immediately
committed for examination. The strange, wild aspect of the gipsy seems
to have added an element to the horrors of the affair; and in the
afternoon, when two of Elizabeth's friends were discussing the whole
matter over a steak in the Three Crowns at Newington, one of them said
to the other: 'Mr Lyon, I hope God Almighty will destroy the model
that he made that face by, and never make another like it.' It was
found that Mrs Wells, who kept the lodging-house, belonged to a
disreputable family, and she admitted that her husband had been
hanged. If Elizabeth had given a false tale to hide the questionable
causes of her absenting herself, she had probably found that it took a
much more serious turn than she intended, and she must now make up her
mind to recant her tale or go through with it. She resolved on the
latter course, to which she was probably tempted by having all London
to back her. She could not well have carried on the charge alone, but
the popularity of her cause brought her unexpected aid. A woman named
Virtue Hall, who lived in Mrs Wells's lodging-house, thought it would
be a good speculation to be partner with Elizabeth Canning, and she
gave testimony which corroborated the whole story.
On the 21st of February, Mary Squires and Susannah Wells were brought
to trial for a capital offence. The evidence adduced against them was
the story just told. When Mrs Squires was called on for her defence,
she gave a succinct account of how she had from day to day gone from
one distant place to another during the time when Elizabeth said she
was in confinement. Two or three witnesses came forward somewhat
timidly to corroborate her statement; and it is a melancholy fact,
that others would have appeared and offered convincing testimony of
the innocence of the accused, but were intimidated by the ferocious
aspect of the London populace from venturing to give their evidence.
That it was not very safe to contradict the popular idol, Elizabeth
Canning, was indeed experienced in a very unpleasant way by the
witnesses John Gibbons, William Clarke, and Thomas Greville, who came
forward in favour of Squires. Money was collected to prosecute them
for perjury. Dreading the strength of the popular current against
them, they had to incur great expense in preparation for their
defence. Before the day of trial, however, some of Canning's champions
began to feel a misgiving, and no prosecutor appeared. The counsel for
the accused complained bitterly of the hardship of their position.
They had incurred great expense. They felt that it was necessary for
the complete removal of the stain of perjury thrown on their
character, that there should be a trial. They said they had witnesses
'ready to give their testimony with such clear, ample, convincing
circumstances, as would demand universal assent, and fully prove the
innocence of the three defendants, and the falsity of Elizabeth
Canning's story in every particular;' whereas, without a trial, all
would be virtually lost to the accused, who, instead of obtaining a
triumphant acquittal, might be suspected of having agreed to some
dubious compromise.
Mrs Squires was at length convicted, and had judgment of death. But
Sir Crisp Gascoyne, the lord mayor of London, who was nominally at the
head of the commission for trying Squires, believed that she was the
victim of falsehood and public prejudice. He resolved to subject the
whole question to a searching investigation, and to obviate, if
possible, the scandal to British institutions, of perpetrating a
judicial murder, even though the victim should be among the most
obscure of the inhabitants of the realm. In the first place, an
inquiry was instituted by the law-officers of the crown, the result of
which was, that the woman Squires received a royal pardon. The lord
mayor, however, having satisfied himself that this poor woman had but
narrowly escaped death from the perfidious falsehood of Elizabeth
Canning, aided by an outbreak of popular zeal, was not content with
the gipsy woman's escape, but thought that an example should be made
of her persecutor. Accordingly, although he was met with much obloquy,
both verbal and written--for controversial pamphlets were published
against him as an enemy of Elizabeth Canning--he resolved to bring
this popular idol to justice.
On the 29th of April 1754, she was brought to trial for wilful and
corrupt perjury. Her trial lasted to the 13th of May. It is one of the
longest in the collection called the _State Trials_, and is a more
full and elaborate inquiry than the trial of Charles I. The case made
out was complete and crushing, and the perfect clearness with which
the whole truth connected with the movements from day to day, and from
hour to hour, of people in the humblest rank was laid open, shews the
great capabilities of our public jury-system for getting at the truth.
One part of the case was, the absurdity of Elizabeth Canning's story,
and its inconsistency, in minute particulars, with itself and with the
concomitant facts. When her first description of the room, in which,
she said, she was shut up, was compared with the full survey of it
afterwards undertaken, important and fatal discrepancies were proved.
She professed to have been unable to see anything going on in the
house from her place of confinement, but in the room at Enfield Wash
there was a large hole through the floor for a jack-rope, which gave a
full view of the kitchen, where the inmates of the house chiefly
resorted. She professed to describe every article in the room she was
confined in, but she had said nothing of a very remarkable chest of
drawers found in that which she identified as the same. That this
piece of furniture had not been recently placed there was made
evident, by the damp dust gluing it to the wall, and the host of
spiders which ran from their webs when it was removed. She had escaped
by stepping on a penthouse, but there was none against the garret of
Mrs Wells's house; the windows were high, and she could not have
leaped to the ground without severe injury. She stated that no one had
entered the room during the four weeks of her imprisonment, but it was
shewn that, during the period, a lodger had held an animated
conversation from one of the windows of the identical garret with
somebody occupied in lopping wood outside. Nay, a person had seen a
poor woman, with the odd name of Natis, in bed in that very room. His
reason for entering it was a curious one, which has almost a
historical bearing. He went to try the ironwork of a sign which had
once hung in front of the house, and lay in the garret. The sign had
been taken down when the Jacobite army penetrated into England in the
Rebellion of 1745. Probably it had been of a character likely to be
offensive to the Jacobites, and its removal is a little incident,
shewing how greatly the country apprehended a revolution in favour of
the Stuarts.
These discrepancies were, however, far from being the most remarkable
part of the evidence. Not content with shewing that Elizabeth Canning
had told falsehoods, the prosecutor set to the laborious task of
proving where the gipsy woman had been, along with her son and
daughter, charged as her accomplices, during the time embraced by the
mere active part of Elizabeth's narrative. From the vagrant habits of
the race, evidence to the most minute particulars had thus to be
collected over a large range of country; and the precision with which
the statements of a multitude of people--of different ranks and
pursuits, and quite unknown to each other, as well as to the person
they spoke of--are fitted to each other, is very striking and
interesting. The most trifling and unconsequential-looking facts tell
with wonderful precision on the result. Thus a lodging-house keeper
remembered the woman Squires being in her house on a certain day, and
she made it sure by an entry in an account-book, as to which she
remembered that she had consulted the almanac that she might put down
the right day. The day of the woman's presence in another place was
identical with the presence of an Excise surveyor, and the statements
of the witnesses were tested by the Excise entry-books. The position
of the wanderers was in another instance connected with the posting of
a letter, and the post-office clerks bore testimony to the fact, that
from the marks on the letter it must have been posted on that day. It
was, as we have seen, on the 1st of January that Elizabeth Canning
said she was seized. The journey of the gipsy family is traced from
day to day through distant parts of England, from the preceding
December down to the 24th of January, which was the day of their
arrival at Enfield Wash. Thus fortified by counteracting facts of an
unquestionable nature, the counsel for the prosecution felt himself in
a position to turn the whole story into ridicule, and shew the innate
absurdity of what all London had so resolutely believed.
He proceeded in this strain: 'Was it not strange that Canning should
subsist so long on so small a quantity of bread and water--four weeks,
wanting only a few hours? Strange that she should husband her store so
well as to have some of her bread left, according to her first
account, till the Wednesday; according to the last, till the Friday
before she made her escape; and that she should save some of her
miraculous pitcher till the last day? Was the twenty-fourth part of a
sixpenny loaf a day sufficient to satisfy her hunger? If not, why
should she defer the immediate gratification of her appetite in order
to make provision for a precarious, uncertain futurity? Shall we
suppose some revelation from above in favour of one of the faithful?
Perhaps an angel from heaven appeared to this mirror of modern virtue,
and informed her, that if she eat more than one piece of bread a day,
her small pittance would not last her till the time she was to make
her escape. Her mother, we know, is a very enthusiastical woman--a
consulter of conjurors, a dreamer of dreams; perhaps the daughter
dreamed also what was to happen, and so, in obedience to her vision,
would not eat when she was hungry, nor drink when she was thirsty.
However that was, I would risk the event of the prosecution on this
single circumstance, that, without the interposition of some
preternatural cause, this conduct of the prisoner's must appear to
exceed all bounds of human probability.'
Notwithstanding the conclusive exposure of her criminality, Elizabeth
Canning was not entirely deserted by her partisans to the last. Two of
the jury had difficulty in reconciling themselves to the verdict of
guilty, suggesting that her story might be substantially correct,
though undoubtedly she had made a mistake about the persons by whom
she was injured. There was a technical imperfection in the verdict,
and her friends strove to the utmost to take advantage of it. When it
was overruled, and a verdict of guilty was recorded, she pleaded for
mercy, saying that she was more unfortunate than wicked; that
self-preservation had been her sole object; and that she did not wish
to take the gipsy's life. The punishment to be inflicted on her was a
matter of serious deliberation, as many of the common people were
still so unconvinced of her wickedness, that an attempt to break the
jail in which she was imprisoned might be feared, and as at that time
the transportation system had not been established. It was not,
however, unusual to send criminals, by their own consent, to the
plantations, and the court gladly acceded to a desire by her
relations, that she should be banished to New England.