There was a Peter Symson who performed marriages from 1731 to 1754, and who claimed to have been educated at the University of Cambridge and to have been late chaplain to the Earl of Rothes. His chapel was at the “Old Red Hand and Mitre” three doors from Fleet Lane. When examined in court on one occasion, he declared that he had been ordained in Grosvenor Square Chapel by the Bishop of Winchester.
Another Fleet parson was William Dare, who had so large a connection that he employed a curate. John Lands had been chaplain on board a man-of-war and boasted that he had “gloriously distinguished himself in defence of his King and Country.” His chapel was at the corner of Half Moon Court, at the corner of the Old Bailey. Lands advertised that he was a regularly bred clergyman and no mere Fleet parson, and “conducted everything with the utmost decency and regularity such as shall always be supported in law and equity.”
There was competition further afield and in such outwardly respectable chapels as that of Mayfair, built in 1736, to meet the needs of a growing neighbourhood. It was situated in Chapel Place off Curzon Street, and was pulled down in 1900, to give place to the imposing town mansion of the Duke of Marlborough, which now bears the name of Sunderland House. Its first incumbent was the Rev. Alexander Keith, a properly ordained clergyman who did a great trade in irregular marriages. It was in Mayfair Chapel that the Duke of Hamilton wedded the youngest of the beautiful Gunnings, in such indecent haste that the ceremony was performed with a ring from the bed curtain at half an hour past midnight. Besides the Mayfair Chapel, Mr. Keith had a small private chapel of his own near Hyde Park Corner and he was so active in the two that he interfered greatly with the vested interests of the neighbouring clergy. One of these, Dr. Trebeck, rector of St. George’s, Hanover Square, brought an action against him and he was sentenced to excommunication. Keith retaliated by excommunicating the Bishop of London, the judge who had condemned him and the prosecutor Dr. Trebeck, but nothing came of it all except a warrant for Mr. Keith’s apprehension, on which he was committed to the Fleet prison. He lay there for some fifteen years, during which other parsons performed his functions, notably the Peter Symson mentioned above. Keith, in the end, fell into great poverty, for the Marriage Act introduced by Lord Hardwicke in 1754 summarily put a stop to these illegal practices. The new law came into force on March 25th, 1754, but the evil custom died hard. On the day before, according to one register alone, two hundred and seventeen couples were married in the Fleet and its purlieus and sixty-one in Mayfair Chapel.
Keith, in his later days, made a piteous appeal for charity. In an advertisement to the compassionate he used the following plea:—“By the late Marriage Act the Rev. Mr. Keith from a great degree of affluence is reduced to such a deplorable state of misery as is much better to be conceived than related, having scarce any other thing than bread and water to subsist on. It is to be hoped he will be deemed truly undeserving of such a fate and the public are assured that not foreseeing such an unhappy stroke of fortune as the late Act, he yearly expended almost his whole income (which amounted to several hundred pounds per annum) in relieving not only single distressed persons, but even whole families. Mr. Keith’s present lamentous situation renders him perhaps as great an object of charity himself.”
No record has been preserved of the response made to this appeal or of the amount of assistance, if any, accorded to him. His distress did not, however, prevent him from making a joke of it and Horace Walpole tells in one of his letters of a “bon mot of Keith’s the marriage broker.” “So the Bishops,” he said, “will hinder my marrying. Well, let ’em, but I’ll be revenged; I’ll buy two or three acres of ground and I’ll under bury them all.” At the same time he had the impudence to take high ground in a pamphlet he wrote about this date. “If the present Act in the form it now stands,” he said, “should (which I am sure is impossible) be of any service to my country, I shall then have the satisfaction of having been the occasion of it, because the compilers thereof have done it with a pure design of suppressing my chapel, which makes me the most celebrated man in this kingdom though not the greatest.”
Some of the outrages and infractions of the law due to these irregular Fleet marriages may be specified. An heiress, Mistress Anne Leigh, was decoyed in 1719 from her friends in Buckinghamshire, carried forcibly to the Fleet, married against her consent and barbarously ill-used by the abductors. In 1737 one Richard Leaver, being tried for bigamy, swore that he knew nothing of his first wife to whom he had been married in the Fleet when drunk. Bridegrooms were kept on hand. A man was married four times over under different names and each time paid a fee of no more than five shillings. Couples were tied together without giving more than their Christian names. The certificate was dated as the parties desired, or to please the parents. Sometimes a newly married woman ran across Ludgate Hill in her shift under a popular delusion that her husband would not be responsible for her antenuptial debts. Marriages were kept secret for various reasons; one was that if the woman was a widow she wished to save a jointure allowed her so long as she did not remarry.
It has been said that irregular marriages were resorted to for ceremony and despatch. Members of all classes, high and low, sought the assistance of the Fleet parson—aristocrats, celebrities, roughs and desperadoes, peers and paupers. Among the first were Lord Abergavenny, the Honourable John Bourke, afterward Lord Mayo, Sir Marmaduke Gresham, Lord Montague, afterward Duke of Manchester, the Marquis of Annandale and Henry Fox who became Lord Holland, and of whose marriage Horace Walpole wrote: “The town has been in a great bustle about a private match but which by the ingenuity of the ministry has been made politics. Mr. Fox fell in love with Lady Caroline Lennox (eldest daughter of the Duke of Richmond), asked her, was refused and stole her. His father was a footman, her great-grandfather a king. All the blood royal has been up in arms.”
The marriage act of 1754 was first designed by the Marquis of Bath, but was drawn so badly that the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke revised and carried it against a strong opposition. The new law was evaded by the Rev. John Wilkinson, who claimed to issue licenses on his own authority, and in 1755 married nearly two thousand couples. When the law began to look ugly, he appointed a curate to perform the ceremony and kept out of the way, although he still gave the licenses. Two members of Garrick’s company were thus united, but the great actor prosecuted the curate, who was convicted and sentenced to transportation.
CHAPTER III
FAMOUS DWELLERS IN THE FLEET
Deplorable condition of debtors throughout the country as detailed by Howard—Famous Inmates—The Chevalier Desseasau, the Prussian—Captain Johnson R. N., a professional smuggler employed in naval expeditions—Arrest—Daring escape—Employed as pilot for the Walcheren expedition—His project for rescuing Napoleon from St. Helena—The “no-Popery riots”—The Fleet burned and rebuilt—Royal Commission to inquire into imprisonment for debt—Debtors’ privileges and extravagances—Graphic picture of the Fleet given by Charles Dickens—The Common Side—The death of “the Chancery prisoner”—The closing days of the Fleet—Abolished in 1840.