I turn to the registers wherein the doings of the Fleet Parsons are more or less carefully recorded. In 1783 most of those still extant had got into the hands of Mr. Benjamin Panton. “They weighed more than a ton”; were purchased by the Government for £260 6s. 6d., and to-day you may inspect them at Somerset House. There are between two and three hundred large registers and a thousand or more pocket-books (temp. 1674-1753). Not merely are the records of marriages curious in themselves, but also they are often accompanied by curious comments from the Parson, clerk, taverner, or whoever kept the book. The oddest collection is in a volume of date 1727-1754. The writer used Greek characters, though his words are English, and is as frank as Pepys, and every bit as curious. Here are a few samples from the lot: “Had a noise for four hours about the money” was to be expected where there were no fixed rates; but “stole my clouthes-brush,” and “left a pott of 4 penny to pay,” and “ran away with the scertifycate and left a pint of wine to pay for,” were surely cases of exceptional roguery. Curious couples presented themselves:—“Her eyes very black and he beat about ye face very much.” Again, the bridegroom was a boy of eighteen, the bride sixty-five, “brought in a coach by four thumping ladies” (the original is briefer and coarser) “out of Drury Lane as guests”; and yet the Parson had “one shilling only.” He fared even worse at times. Once he married a couple, money down, “for half a guinea,” after which “it was extorted out of my pocket, and for fear of my life delivered.” Even a Fleet Parson had his notion of propriety. “Behav’d very indecent and rude to all,” is one entry; and “N.B. behavd rogueshly. Broke the Coachman’s Glass,” is another. Once his reverence, “having a mistrust of some Irish roguery,” though the party seemed of better rank than usual, asked indiscreet questions. The leader turned on him with the true swagger of your brutal Georgian bully. “What was that to me? G—— dem me, if I did not immediately marry them he would use me ill; in short, apprehending it to be a conspiracy, I found myself obliged to marry them in terrorem.” Again, he had better luck on another occasion: “handsomely entertained,” he records; and of a bride of June 11, 1727, “the said Rachel, the prettiest woman I ever saw.” (You fancy the smirk wherewith he scrawled that single record of the long vanished beauty!) He is less complimentary to other clients. His “appeard a rogue” and “two most notorious thieves” had sure procured him a broken pate had his patrons known! How gleefully and shamelessly he chronicles his bits of sharp practice! “Took them from Brown who was going into the next door with them,” was after all merely business; but what follows is not. In 1729 he married Susannah Hewitt to Abraham Wells, a butcher. The thing turned out ill; and in 1736 she came back, and suggested annulment by the simple expedient of destroying the record; when “I made her believe I did so, for which I had a half a guinea.” Nor was there much honour among the crew of thieves. “Total three and sixpence, but honest Wigmore kept all the money so farewell him,” is an entry by the keeper of a marriage house, whom a notorious Fleet Parson had dished. Another is by a substitute for the same divine:—“Wigmore being sent for but was drunk, so I was a stopgap.” I confess to a sneaking fondness for those entertaining rascals, but enough of their pranks.
Of the other places where irregular marriages were celebrated two demand some notice. One was Keith’s Chapel in Mayfair, “a very bishopric of revenue” to that notorious “marriage broker” the Reverend Alexander Keith. His charge was a guinea, and, being strictly inclusive, covered “the Licence on a Crown Stamp, Minister’s and Clerk’s fees, together with the certificate.” No wonder he did a roaring trade! Keith seemed a nobler quarry than the common Fleet Parson, and the ecclesiastical authorities pursued him in their courts. In October 1742, he was excommunicated: with matchless impudence he retorted by excommunicating his persecutors from the Bishop downwards. Next year they stuck him in the Fleet; but, through Parsons as reckless as himself, he continued to “run” his chapel. In 1749 he made his wife’s death an occasion for advertisement: the public was informed that the corpse, being embalmed, was removed “to an apothecary’s in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there until Mr. Keith can attend her funeral.” Then follows an account of the chapel. One authority states that six thousand marriages were celebrated there within twelve months; but this seems incredible. That sixty-one couples were united the day before Lord Hardwicke’s Act became law is like enough. Here took place, in 1752, the famous marriage of the fourth Duke of Hamilton to the youngest of the “beautiful Miss Gunnings,” “with a ring of the bed curtain half an hour after twelve at night,” as Horace Walpole tells. And here, in September 1748, at a like uncanny hour, “handsome Tracy was united to the butterman’s daughter in Craven Street.” Lord Hardwicke’s Act was elegantly described as “an unhappy stroke of fortune” by our enterprising divine. At first he threatened another form of competition:—“I’ll buy two or three acres of ground and by God I’ll under-bury them all.” But in the end he had to own himself ruined. He had scarce anything, he moaned, but bread and water, although he had been wont to expend “almost his whole Income (which amounted yearly to several Hundred Pounds per Annum) in relieving not only single distressed Persons, but even whole Families of wretched Objects of Compassion.” The world neither believed nor pitied; and he died in the Fleet on December 17, 1758.
Last of all comes the Savoy. There, The Public Advertiser of January 2, 1754, announced, marriages were performed “with the utmost privacy, decency, and regularity, the expense not more than one guinea, the five shilling stamp included. There are five private ways by land to this chapel, and two by water.” The Reverend John Williamson, “His Majesty’s Chaplain of the Savoy,” asserted that as such he could grant licences; and despite the Act he went on coupling. In 1755 he married the enormous number of one thousand one hundred and ninety; half the brides being visibly in an interesting condition. The authorities, having warned him time and again to no purpose, at last commenced proceedings. But he evaded arrest by skipping over roofs and vanishing through back doors, in a manner inexplicable to us to-day; and went on issuing licences, while his curate, Mr. Grierson, did the actual work at the altar. Grierson, however, was seized and transported for fourteen years: then his chief surrendered (1756), stood his trial, and received a like sentence; the irregular marriages both had performed being declared of no effect.
What now were the amorous to do? Well, there were divers makeshifts. Thus, at Southampton (temp. 1750), a boat was held ever ready to sail for Guernsey with any couple able and willing to pay five pounds. Ireland did not impress itself on the lovers’ imagination: it may be that the thought of that gruesome middle passage “froze the genial current of their souls.” But there was a North as well as a South Britain; and—what was more to the purpose—the Scots marriage law was all that heart could wish. Marriage (it held) is a contract into which two parties not too young and not too “sib” might enter at any time, all that was necessary being that each party clearly and in good faith expressed consent. Neither writing nor witnesses, however important for proof, were essential to a valid union. Not that the Scots law, civil or ecclesiastical, favoured this happy despatch; but the very punishment it imposed only tied the knot tighter. Couples of set purpose confessed their vows, got a small fine inflicted, and there was legal evidence of their union! Ecclesiastical discipline was strict enough to prevent regularly instituted Scots ministers from assisting at such affairs. But any man would do (for, after all, he was but a witness), and the first across the Border as well as or better than another. Now, by a well-known principle of international law, the lex loci contractus governs such contracts: the marriage being valid in Scotland where it took place, was also recognised as valid in England where its celebration would have been a criminal offence! This was curiously illustrated early in the century by the case of Joseph Atkinson. The Border, I must explain, had all along been given to irregular marriages, and different localities in Scotland were used as best suited the parties. Lamberton Toll Bar, N.B., lay four miles north of Berwick-on-Tweed; and here our Atkinson did a thriving business in the coupling line. One fine day he had gone to Berwick when a couple sought his service at the toll-house. A quaint fiction presumes that everybody knows the law; but here it turned out that nobody did, for the bride and groom instead of uniting themselves before the first comer rushed off to Berwick, and were there wedded by Lamberton. And not only was the affair a nullity; but the unfortunate coupler was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for offending against the English marriage laws.
Most of them, however, that went North on marriage bent, took the Carlisle road. A few miles beyond that city the little river Sark divides the two countries. Just over the bridge is the toll-house: a footpath to the right takes you to Springfield. Till about 1826 the North road lay through this village; then, however, the way was changed, and ran by Gretna Green, which is nine and a half miles from Carlisle. These two places, together with the toll-house, are all in Gretna parish; but of course the best known is Gretna Green: “the resort” (wrote Pennant) “of all amorous couples whose union the prudence of parents or guardians prohibits.” The place acquired a world-wide fame: that English plays and novels should abound in references to it, as they had done to the Fleet, was only natural; but one of George Sand’s heroes elopes thither with a banker’s daughter, and even Victor Hugo hymns it in melodious verse, albeit his pronunciation is a little peculiar:
La mousse des près exhale
Avril, qui chante drin, drin,
Et met une succursale
De Cythère à Gretna Green.
And how to explain the fact that people hurried from the remotest parts of Scotland as well as from England, though any square yard of soil “frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat’s” had served their purpose just as well? The parishioners, indeed, sought not the service of their self-appointed priest; but is there not an ancient saying as to the prophet’s lack of honour among his own people?