Sir Edward left no surviving issue, a circumstance which gave rise to almost endless contentions between the kinsmen of his name and their cousins—the Gerards. Lawsuit followed lawsuit; long and rancorous were the proceedings in the “Great Cheshire Will Case,” as it was called; and the fierce struggle, which began in one century with forgery, followed by seduction and divorce, was ended in the next, when the husbands of the two ladies who claimed to be heiresses were slain by each other in a murderous duel in Hyde Park. Immediately after the death of Sir Edward Fitton, Penelope, Anne, Jane, and Frances, his four sisters—married respectively to Sir Charles Gerard, Knight; Sir John Brereton, Knight; Thomas Minshull, Esquire; and Henry Mainwaring, Esquire—entered upon possession of the estates; but, after long litigation, they were ejected by William Fitton, son of Alexander, second surviving son of Sir Edward Fitton, Treasurer of Ireland, who claimed under a deed alleged to have been executed by Sir Edward, settling the estates upon himself, with remainder in succession to his sons, Edward and Alexander, the latter of whom succeeded him in the possession, and he obtained three verdicts in his favour. One of the sisters of Sir Edward Fitton—Penelope—had married Sir Charles Gerard, of Halsall, in Lancashire, and by him had a son, Sir Charles Gerard, created Lord Brandon in 1645, and Earl of Macclesfield in 1679. Lord Brandon was one of the notable gallants at the profligate Court of Charles II. He held the office of Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and was also Captain of the Guards—the latter a commission which he relinquished for a douceur of £12,000 when the King wanted to bestow the dignity upon his illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. He kept up a large establishment in London, surrounded by trim gardens, the remembrance of which is perpetuated in the names of the streets that now occupy the site—Gerard Street and Macclesfield Street, in Soho. His wife, a French lady, brought herself into disfavour at Court through indulging in the feminine propensity of allowing her tongue to wag too freely in disparagement of the notorious courtesan, Lady Castlemaine, as we learn from an entry in “Pepys’s Diary”:—
1662–3. Creed told me how, for some words of my Lady Gerard’s against my Lady Castlemaine to the Queene, the King did the other day apprehend her in going out to a dance with her at a ball, when she desired it as the ladies do, and is since forbid attending the Queen by the King; which is much talked of, my lord her husband being a great favourite.
On the restoration of the King, nineteen years after the death of Sir Edward Fitton, and thirty after the entail had been confirmed, as alleged by a deed-poll, Lord Gerard produced a will which would be looked for in vain in the Ecclesiastical Court at Chester, purporting to have been made in his favour by his mother’s brother, Sir Edward Fitton. Hot, fierce, and anxious was the litigation that followed, and in 1663 a small volume was printed at the Hague, entitled, “A True Narrative of the Proceedings in the several Suits-in-law that have been between the Right Honourable Charles, Lord Brandon, and Alexander Fitton, Esqr., published for general satisfaction, by a Lover of Truth.” Fitton pleaded the deed-poll, but Gerard brought forward one Abraham Grainger, then confined in the Gate House, who made oath that he had forged the name of Sir Edward to the deed under a threat of mortal violence, whereupon the Court of Chancery directed a trial to determine whether the deed-poll was genuine or not. The forgery was admitted by Grainger, and corroborated by other witnesses, who deposed that they had heard Fitton confess that Grainger had forged a deed for him, for which he had paid him £40. The judgment of the Court was given in favour of Gerard, and the deed declared to be a forgery.
The strangest part of the story remains. Grainger, impelled either by remorse or the desire to escape a heavy penalty by acknowledging the smaller offence, made a written confession setting forth that he had perjured himself when he swore that he had forged the name of Sir Edward, and had been compelled to do so by the threats of Lord Gerard. Pepys, who had a strong dislike to Lord Gerard, refers to the circumstance in his “Diary”:—
My cosen, Roger Pepys, he says, showed me Grainger’s written confession of his being forced by imprisonment, &c., by my Lord Gerard, most barbarously to confess his forging of a deed in behalf of Fitton, in the great case between him and my Lord Gerard; which business is under examination, and is the foulest against my Lord Gerard that ever anything in the world was, and will, all do believe, ruine him; and I shall be glad of it.
The anticipations of the gossiping diarist were not, however, realised. The confession, being unsupported by evidence, was discredited, and Fitton, who was adjudged to be the real offender, was fined £500 and committed to the King’s Bench.
Alexander Fitton, who was thus dispossessed of the property, lingered in prison until the accession of James II., when, having embraced the Romish faith, he was released from confinement and taken into favour by the King, who made him Chancellor of Ireland, and subsequently conferred upon him the honour of knighthood and created him Lord Gawsworth. He sat in the Irish Parliament of 1689, where he appears to have been actively employed in passing Acts of forfeiture of Protestant property, and attainder of Protestant personages. On the abdication of James he accompanied him into exile, where he remained, and, dying, left descendants who, it is to be feared, benefited little from the tutelar dignities his sovereign had conferred upon him.
The whimsical finesse of the law, which wrested from Alexander Fitton the lands owned for so many generations by his progenitors and bestowed them upon the Gerards, though it added wealth, did not convey peace or contentment to the successful litigants. Their history during the brief period they owned the Gawsworth estates partakes much of the character of a romance in real life, but it is one that is by no means pleasant to contemplate. Charles Gerard, on whom the barony of Brandon and the earldom of Macclesfield had been successively conferred, died in January, 1693–4, when the titles and estates devolved upon his eldest son, who bore the same baptismal name. Charles, the second earl, was the husband of the lady who, by her adulterous connection with Richard Savage, Earl Rivers, and as the heroine of the famous law case that followed upon the birth of the celebrated but unfortunate poet, Richard Savage, acquired an unenviable notoriety even in that age, when profligacy formed such a prominent characteristic of society.
The Countess of Macclesfield, under the name of Madame Smith, and wearing a mask, was delivered of a male child in Fox Court, near Brook Street, Holborn, by Mrs. Wright, a midwife, on Saturday, the 16th January, 1697–8. The earl denied the paternity, and satisfactorily proved the impossibility of his being the father of the son borne by his countess; who, on her side, narrated a stratagem she had devised, whereby the disputed paternity could not be denied. The stratagem was not unknown in the licentious comedies of the time, but no credit was given to it in this case; and thus the honour of Gerard was saved from being tainted by the bastard of Savage. A divorce was granted in 1698; but the law deemed the earl to be accountable, through his own profligacy, for the malpractices of his wife, and decreed that he should repay the portion he had received with her in marriage. With this amount she married Colonel Brett, the friend of Colley Cibber, by whom she had a daughter, Ann Brett, the impudent mistress of George I., her illegitimate offspring by Lord Rivers—Richard Savage, whom she disowned—being educated at the cost of her mother, Lady Mason. It has been alleged that Savage was an impostor, and this opinion was held by Boswell, the biographer of Dr. Johnson, who says: “In order to induce a belief that the Earl Rivers, on account of a criminal connection with whom Lady Macclesfield is said to have been divorced from her husband by Act of Parliament, had a peculiar anxiety about the child which she bore to him, it is alleged that his lordship gave him his own name, and had it duly recorded in the register of St Andrew’s, Holborn. I have,” he adds, “carefully inspected that register, and I cannot find it.” That Boswell should have failed in the discovery is explained by a reference to “The Earl of Macclesfield’s Case,” presented to the House of Lords in 1697–8, from which it appears that the child was registered by the name of Richard, the son of John Smith, and christened on Monday, January 18th, in Fox Court, and this statement is confirmed by the following entry in the register of St. Andrew’s, Holborn:—
Jany., 1696–7. Richard, son of John Smith and Mary, in Fox Court, in Gray’s Inn Lane, baptized the 18th.