Solway Moss is marked on the maps with the conventional crossed swords that indicate a battle. It was not an epoch-making battle that was fought here, November 24th, 1542, but it was one of the most complete of English victories, and the story of it is compact of a peculiar terror. The Scots had crossed the Border in force, and were proceeding on their usual lines of fire and pillage, to the assault of Carlisle, when they were met at Arthuret by an army under Sir Thomas Wharton, the stout Warden of the West Marches. The English onset disorganised the invaders, who fled in the gathering darkness. Ten thousand fugitives lost their way, and found themselves with the flowing tide upon the fatal Solway Sands. Some flung away their arms and struggled through, thousands were drowned, and many surrendered to women. Meanwhile, the main body, pursued by the English, wandered in the other direction across the Esk and plunged into the bog of Solway Moss, and were swallowed up, slain, or taken prisoners. “Never,” says Froude, “in all the wars between England and Scotland, had there been a defeat more complete, more sudden, or more disgraceful.” James the Fifth of Scotland died on December 14th, heartbroken at the disaster. It was a complete English revenge for the defeat they had suffered at the Sark, hard by, in 1449, nearly a hundred years before.
THE ROAD PAST SOLWAY MOSS.
Turner therefore does right in so romantically treating the subject, and I am merely a pictorial reporter, setting down only what I see. But at any rate, while Turner might dissuade the pilgrim, with his storm overhead and his fathomless bog beneath, whence apparently some wretches are just escaping with their lives, you see by the modern sketch that there is at least a hard high road running by.
Having come now to the Sark, and across it into the long street of Springfield, and by the same token into Scotland, it is necessary to tell at length the story of “Gretna Green” marriages. It could scarce be told in more forbidding surroundings, for Springfield is one long street of gaunt, unrelieved commonplace, and neither the once notorious “Queen’s Head” inn on the right, nor the “Maxwell Arms” on the left, helps to relieve it in the least degree. But the devil’s in it if love can’t throw a rosy tinge over even such a scene, and doubtless Springfield looked entrancing to some.
XXVII
The popularity of Gretna Green elopements dated from the passing of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1754, by which it was declared that “Any person solemnising matrimony in any other place than a church or public chapel, without banns, or other license, shall, on conviction, be adjudged guilty of felony, and be transported for fourteen years, and all such marriages shall be void.”
FLEET MARRIAGES
This measure was expressly designed to put an end to the long-continued and growing scandals of the so-called “Fleet marriages,” which had first attracted attention in 1674. The Fleet marriages, performed by the chaplains of the Fleet Prison, in London, led to many abuses. Made on the spur of the moment, between the prisoners there, incarcerated for debt or other misdemeanours, and the visitors permitted free access under the lax discipline of that time, the most fearful alliances were perpetrated by wholesale. Drunken prisoners, dissolute women, and parsons who richly deserved being unfrocked were the actors in these scenes, almost exactly matched by the similar clandestine marriages performed on application, at all hours of day or night, by the chaplains of the Savoy, and by the clerical owners of proprietary chapels in Mayfair.
These marriage-merchants earned amazing incomes, the still-existing records of a Fleet parson’s fees in 1748 showing that in the month of October alone he received no less than £69 12s. 9d. for his services. At the Fleet, on March 25th, 1754, the day before Lord Hardwicke’s Act became law, there was a grand winding-up of the business, when 217 marriages were celebrated.