"Alas! the record of her page will tell
That one thus madden'd, lov'd, and guilty fell.
Who hath not heard of Blandy's fatal fame,
Deplor'd her fate, and sorrow'd o'er her shame?"
Thus the author of Henley: A Poem (Hickman & Stapledon, 1827); and, indeed, the frequent references to the case in the "literary remains" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bear witness to the justice of that poetic observation.
The inimitable Letters of Horace Walpole contain, as might be expected, more than one mention of this cause célèbre. Writing on 23rd March, 1752, to Horace Mann, he says, "There are two wretched women that just now are as much talked of [as the two Miss Gunnings], a Miss Jefferies and a Miss Blandy; the one condemned for murdering her uncle, the other her father. Both their stories have horrid circumstances; the first having been debauched by her uncle; the other had so tender a parent, that his whole concern while he was expiring, and knew her for his murderess, was to save her life. It is shocking to think what shambles this country is grown! Seventeen were executed this morning, after having murdered the turnkey on Friday night, and almost forced open Newgate. One is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going to battle." And again, on 13th May, "Miss Blandy died with a coolness of courage that is astonishing, and denying the fact, which has made a kind of party in her favour; as if a woman who would not stick at parricide would scruple a lie! We have made a law for immediate execution on conviction of murder: it will appear extraordinary to me if it has any effect; for I can't help believing that the terrible part of death must be the preparation for it." The "law" regarding summary executions to which Walpole refers is the Act already mentioned. To Henry Seymour Conway, on 23rd June, he writes, "Since the two Misses [Blandy and Jefferies] were hanged, and the two Misses [the beautiful Gunnings] were married, there is nothing at all talked of." On 28th August he writes to George Montague, "I have since been with Mr. Conway at Park Place, where I saw the individual Mr. Cooper, a banker, and lord of the manor of Henley, who had those two extraordinary forfeitures from the executions of the Misses Blandy and Jefferies, two fields from the former, and a malthouse from the latter. I had scarce credited the story, and was pleased to hear it confirmed by the very person: though it was not quite so remarkable as it was reported, for both forfeitures were in the same manor." This circumstance is noted in the Annual Register for 1768, in connection with the death of Mr. Cooper, at the age of eighty. From the following references it would appear that the empty old house in Hart Street had acquired a sinister reputation. On 8th November Walpole writes to Conway, "Have the Coopers seen Miss Blandy's ghost, or have they made Mr. Cranston poison a dozen or two more private gentlewomen?"—the allusion being to the deaths of Mrs. Blandy and Mrs. Pocock; and again, on 4th August, 1753, to John Chute. "The town of Henley has been extremely disturbed with an engagement between the ghosts of Miss Blandy and her father, which continued so violent, that some bold persons, to prevent further bloodshed broke in, and found it was two jackasses which had got into the kitchen."
Walpole barely exaggerates the wholesale legal butcheries by which the streets of London were then disgraced. "Many cartloads of our fellow-creatures are once in six weeks carried to slaughter," says Henry Fielding, in his Enquiry (1751); and well has Mr. Whibley described the period as "Newgate's golden age." As for Tyburn Tree, we read in its Annals, for example, "1752. July 13. Eleven executed at Tyburn."
We can only glance at one or two further instances of the diffusion of "Blandy's fatal fame." None of the varied forms of the Newgate Calendar—that criminous Who's Who?—fails to accord her suitable if inaccurate notice. With other letter-writers of the time than the genial Horace the case forms a topical subject. James Granger reports to a reverend correspondent that "the principal subject of conversation in these parts is the tragical affair transacted at Henley.... It is supposed, as there is no direct and absolute proof that she was guilty, and her friends are rich and have great interest, that she will escape punishment." To Mrs. Delany, writing the day after the execution, the popular heroine "appeared very guilty by her trial," but we learn that Lady Huntingdon had written a letter to Miss Blandy after her conviction. On 22nd April, 1752, Miss Talbot writes to Mrs. Carter, who thought Mary had been "too severely judged," that "her hardiness in guilt" was shocking to think of. "Let me tell you one fact that young Goosetree, the lawyer, told to the Bishop of Gloucester," she writes, with reference to Miss Blandy's repeated statement that she never believed her father a rich man. "This Goosetree visited her in jail as an old acquaintance. She expressed to him great amazement at her father's being no richer, and said she had no notion but he must have been worth £10,000. Mr. Goosetree prudently told her the less she said about that the better, and she never said it afterwards, but the contrary." Miss Talbot adds that certain letters in Lord Macclesfield's hands "falsify others of her affirmations." By 5th May, 1753, Mrs. Delany writes, "We are now very full of talk about Eliza Canning."
As time goes on the tragedy of Henley, though gradually becoming a tradition, is still susceptible of current allusion. John Wilkes, writing from Bath to his daughter on 3rd January, 1779, regarding a lady of their acquaintance who proposed to keep house for a certain doctor, remarks "that he is sure it could not have lasted long, for she would have poisoned him, as Miss Blandy did her father, and forged a will in her own favour"; but Tate Wilkinson, in his Memoirs, observes, "Elizabeth Canning, Mary Squires, the gipsy, and Miss Blandy were such universal topics in 1752 that you would have supposed it the business of mankind to talk only of them; yet now, in 1790, ask a young man of twenty-five or thirty a question relative to these extraordinary personages, and he will be puzzled to answer, and will say, 'What mean you by enquiring? I do not understand you,'" So quickly had the "smarts" of the new generation forgotten the "fair Blandy" of their fathers' toasts. To make an end of such quotations, which might indefinitely be multiplied, we shall only refer the reader to Lady Russell's Three Generations of Fascinating Women (London: 1901), for good reading passim, and with special reference to her account of the interest taken in the case by Lady Ailesbury of Park Place, who "was related to the instigator of the crime," and, believing in Mary's innocence, used all her influence to obtain a pardon. To Mr. Horace Bleackley's brilliant study of the case we have already in the Preface referred.
It may, in closing, be worth while to remind the student of such matters that the year with which we have had so much concern was in other respects an important one in the annals of crime. On 14th May, 1752, the "Red Fox," Glenure, fell by an assassin's bullet in the wood of Lettermore, which fact resulted in the hanging of a guiltless gentleman and, in after years, more happily inspired an immortal tale; while on 1st January, 1753, occurred the disappearance of Elizabeth Canning, that bewildering damsel whose mission it was to baffle her contemporaries and to set at nought the skill of subsequent inquirers.
Well, we have learned all that history and tradition has to tell us about Mary Blandy; but what do we really know of that sombre soul that sinned and suffered and passed to its appointed place so long ago? A few "facts," some "circumstances"—which, if we may believe the dictum of Mr. Baron Legge, cannot lie; and yet she remains for us dark and inscrutable as in her portrait, where she sits calmly in her cell, preparing her false Account for the misleading of future generations. Like her French "parallel," Marie-Madeleine de Brinvilliers, like that other Madeleine of Scottish fame, she leaves us but a catalogue of ambiguous acts; her secret is still her own. If only she had been the creature of some great novelist's fancy, how intimately should we then have known all that is hidden from us now; imagine her made visible for us through the exquisite medium of Mr. Henry James's incomparable art—the subtle individual threads all cunningly combined, the pattern wondrously wrought, the colours delicately and exactly shaded, until, in the rich texture of the finished tapestry, the figure of the woman as she lived stood perfectly revealed.