“The bridegroom, that is to say, the husband that is to be, and the bride, who is the wife that is to be, conducted by their parents and accompanied by two bridesmen and two bridesmaids go early in the morning with a license in their pocket and call up Mr. curate and his clerk, tell them their business; are married with a low voice, and the doors shut; tip the minister a guinea and the clerk a crown; steal softly out, one one way, and t’other another, either on foot or in coaches; go different ways to some tavern at a distance from their own lodgings, or to the house of some trusty friend, there have a good dinner and return home at night as quietly as lambs. If the drums and fiddles have notice of it, they will be sure to be with them by day break, making a horrible racket, till they have got ‘the pence;’ and, which is worst of all, the whole murder will come out.”
Although the law prescribed that marriages should be only performed by licenses or the giving out of banns, there were many churches and chapels towards the end of the seventeenth century which claimed to be “peculiar” and exempt from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. But the rector of one of these, St. James, Duke’s Place, was proceeded against under the ecclesiastical law and suspended from duty for three years on a charge of having married persons without banns or license. Other churches claimed to be “peculiar” such as the chapel of Holy Trinity, Minories, on the ground that it was a crown living and entitled to the same privileges as Westminster Abbey or the Deanery of Windsor; so did the chapels of the Tower and the Savoy as royal chapels. The number of chapels where irregular marriages took place was about ninety, and it became necessary to check them by obliging incumbents to keep registers under a penalty of one hundred pounds, and the same amount was levied on them for every irregular marriage. This penalty was extended to the gaolers or keepers of prisons who permitted marriages to be performed within the walls, which had now become a very common practice in the metropolis. These Fleet parsons were not clergymen, but mere laymen who assumed the garb of cassock, gown and bands. These sham marriages were solemnised in a room in the Fleet, called the “Lord Mayor’s chapel,” where the prison parson received the couples bent on matrimony. The officiating parson was Mr. John Mottram who transacted an enormous amount of business, and performed in one year alone as many as two thousand two hundred marriages. He was convicted of unlawful practices and fined £200 but he was not deterred from repeating them, or giving false dates to their certificates to suit the desire and convenience of the contracting parties. Pennant in his account of London (1793) tells us that as he walked the streets near the Fleet prison he was invited to walk in and be married. The sign over the door portrayed a male and female hand joined with the words, “Marriages performed within.” A tout or “plyer” as he was called, stood there soliciting the passers-by and swearing that his employer would do the job cheaper than any one else. Sometimes the parson himself, temporarily at large, was to be seen walking before his shop: “A squalid, profligate figure, clad in a tattered plaid night-gown, with a fiery face, ready to couple you for a dram of gin or a roll of tobacco.”
These Fleet parsons drove a roaring trade. There were a great number of them and a long list is given by no means exhaustive in Burns’ “History of Fleet Marriages,” of some sixty in all who flourished between 1681 and 1752. Among the most notorious was John Gaynam who was commonly known as the “Bishop of Hell.” He is credited with having performed two thousand marriages within a few years. In person he was of commanding presence and swaggered along Fleet Street in his silk gown and white flowing bands drawing admiring attention to his handsome rubicund face. He was always smug and self-satisfied. Nothing, and no one, could put him out of countenance. When in the witness box to give evidence in a trial for bigamy, a cross examining counsel asked him if he was not ashamed to confess that he had made so many clandestine marriages, he laughingly replied, “Video meliora deteriora sequor.” When someone chastised him with a stick he took his punishment with well bred composure. It was said of him that although he was bishop of an extremely hot diocese he was personally remarkable for his coolness in demeanour and language. Another popular Fleet parson was Daniel Wigmore, who was not satisfied with his marriage fees, but was convicted in 1738 before the Lord Mayor of selling spirituous
A Fleet Wedding
From the picture by Hogarth
The Fleet Prison was a popular place for clandestine marriages in the seventeenth century, and the Fleet parsons, so-called, did a thriving business. Two thousand marriages were performed within a few years by one of the parsons entitled the “Bishop of Hell,” who was, like most of them, merely a layman assuming cassock and gown. Bridegrooms were kept on hand for emergency, and a “plyer” stood outside soliciting business for his employer, the “parson.”
liquors contrary to the law. Edward Ashwell, known as the “archdeacon” was a third. He was a notorious scoundrel, a bigamist three times over who yet dared to preach in church when he could get a pulpit. This Dr. Ashwell died within the Rules of the Fleet in 1746 and was recorded as “the most noted operator in marriages since the death of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Gaynam.”
Walter Wyatt did a very profitable business and made a large income out of his clandestine marriages, no less then £700 a year, equal to four times that sum in our modern money. On the cover of one of his registers still preserved, he gives notice that “Mr. Wyatt, minister of the Fleet, is removed from the Two Sawyers, at the corner of Fleet Lane (with all the register books) to the Hand and Pen near Holborn Bridge, where marriages are solemnised without impositions.” But there seem to have been other establishments which traded on Wyatt’s sign, probably because he was so prosperous. Joshua Lilley kept the “Hand and Pen” near Fleet Bridge. Matthias Wilson’s house of the same sign stood on the bank of the Fleet ditch; John Burnford had a similar name for his house at the foot of Ludgate Hill and Mrs. Balls also had an establishment with the same title.
One of these “Hand and Pen” public houses was kept by a turnkey of the Fleet prison, who had a room in his house for solemnising marriages with the assistance of mock clergymen, one of whom he pretends in one of his handbills to be a “gentleman regularly bred at one of our universities and lawfully ordained according to the institutions of the Church of England and ready to wait on any person in town or country.”