Trial of Mary Blandy

by Unknown

INTRODUCTION

In the earlier half of the eighteenth century there lived in the pleasant town of Henley-upon-Thames, in Oxfordshire, one Francis Blandy, gentleman, attorney-at-law. His wife, née Mary Stevens, sister to Mr. Serjeant Stevens of Culham Court, Henley, and of Doctors' Commons, a lady described as "an emblem of chastity and virtue; graceful in person, in mind elevated," had, it was thought, transmitted these amiable qualities to the only child of the marriage, a daughter Mary, baptised in the parish church of Henley on 15th July, 1720. Mr. Blandy, as a man of old family and a busy and prosperous practitioner, had become a person of some importance in the county. His professional skill was much appreciated by a large circle of clients, he acted as steward for most of the neighbouring gentry, and he had held efficiently for many years the office of town-clerk.

But above the public respect which his performance of these varied duties had secured him, Mr. Blandy prized his reputation as a man of wealth. The legend had grown with his practice and kept pace with his social advancement. The Blandys' door was open to all; their table, "whether filled with company or not, was every day plenteously supplied"; and a profuse if somewhat ostentatious hospitality was the "note" of the house, a comfortable mansion on the London road, close to Henley Bridge. Burn, in his History of Henley, describes it as "an old-fashioned house near the White Hart, represented in the view of the town facing the title-page" of his volume, and "now [1861] rebuilt." The White Hart still survives in Hart Street, with its courtyard and gallery, where of yore the town's folk were wont to watch the bear-baiting; one of those fine old country inns which one naturally associates with Pickwickian adventure.

In such surroundings the little Mary, idolised by her parents and spoiled by their disinterested guests, passed her girlhood. She is said to have been a clever, intelligent child, and of ways so winning as to "rapture" all with whom she came in contact. She was educated at home by her mother, who "instructed her in the principles of religion and piety, according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England." To what extent she benefited by the good dame's teaching will appear later, but at any rate she was fond of reading—a taste sufficiently remarkable in a girl of her day. At fourteen, we learn, she was mistress of those accomplishments which others of like station and opportunities rarely achieve until they are twenty, "if at all"; but her biographers, while exhausting their superlatives on her moral beauties, are significantly silent regarding her physical attractions. Like many a contemporary "toast," she had suffered the indignity of the smallpox; yet her figure was fine, and her brilliant black eyes and abundant hair redeemed a face otherwise rather ordinary. When to such mental gifts and charm of manner was added the prospect of a dower of ten thousand pounds—such was the figure at which public opinion put it, and her father did not deny that gossip for once spoke true—little wonder that Mary was considered a "catch" as well by the "smarts" of the place as by the military gentlemen who at that time were the high ornaments of Henley society.

Mr. Blandy, business-like in all things, wanted full value for his money; as none of Mary's local conquests appeared to promise him an adequate return, he reluctantly quitted the pen and, with his wife and daughter, spent a season at Bath, then the great market-place of matrimonial bargains. "As for Bath," Thackeray writes of this period, "all history went and bathed and drank there. George II. and his Queen, Prince Frederick and his Court, scarce a character one can mention of the early last century but was seen in that famous Pump Room, where Beau Nash presided, and his picture hung between the busts of Newton and Pope." Here was famous company indeed for an ambitious little country attorney to rub shoulders with in his hunt for a son-in-law. It is claimed for Miss Blandy by one of her biographers that her vivacity, wit, and good nature were such as to win for her an immediate social success; and she entered into all the gaieties of the season with a heart unburdened by the "business" which her father sought to combine with pleasures so expensive. She is even said to have had the honour of dancing with the Prince of Wales. Meanwhile, the old gentleman, appearing "genteel in dress" and keeping a plentiful table, lay in wait for such eligible visitors as should enter his parlour.

The first to do so with matrimonial intent was a thriving young apothecary, but Mr. Blandy quickly made it plain that Mary and her £10,000 were not to be had by any drug-compounding knave who might make sheep's eyes at her, and the apothecary returned to his gallipots for healing of his bruised affections. His place was taken by Mr. H——, a gentleman grateful to the young lady and personally desirable, but of means too limited to satisfy her parents' views, a fact conveyed by them to the wooer "in a friendly and elegant manner," which must have gone far to assuage his disappointment. The next suitor for "this blooming virgin," as her biographer names her, had the recommendation of being a soldier. Mr. T——, too, found favour with the damsel. His fine address was much appreciated by her mamma, who, being a devotee of fashion, heartily espoused his cause; but again the course of true love was barred by the question of settlements as broached by the old lawyer, and the man of war "retired with some resentment." There was, however, no lack of candidates for Mary's hand and dower. Captain D—— at once stepped into the breach and gallantly laid siege to the fair fortress. At last, it seemed Cupid's troublesome business was done; the captain's suit was agreeable to all parties, and the couple became engaged. Mary's walks with her lover in the fields of Henley gave her, we read, such exquisite delight that she frequently thought herself in heaven. But, alas, the stern summons of duty broke in upon her temporary Eden: the captain was ordered abroad with his regiment on active service, and the unlucky girl could but sit at home with her parents and patiently abide the issue.

Among Mr. Blandy's grand acquaintances was General Lord Mark Kerr, uncle of Lady Jane Douglas, the famous heroine of the great Douglas Cause. His lordship had taken at Henley a place named "The Paradise," probably through the agency of the obsequious attorney, whose family appear to have had the entrée to that patrician abode. Dining with her parents at Lord Mark's house in the summer of 1746, Mary Blandy encountered her fate. That fate from the first bore but a sinister aspect. Among the guests was one Captain the Hon. William Henry Cranstoun, a soldier and a Scot, whose appearance, according to a diurnal writer, was unprepossessing. "In his person he is remarkably ordinary, his stature is low, his face freckled and pitted with the smallpox, his eyes small and weak, his eyebrows sandy, and his shape no ways genteel; his legs are clumsy, and he has nothing in the least elegant in his manner." The moral attributes of this ugly little fellow were only less attractive than his physical imperfections. "He has a turn for gallantry, but Nature has denied him the proper gifts; he is fond of play, but his cunning always renders him suspected." He was at this time thirty-two years of age, and, as the phrase goes, a man of pleasure, but his militant prowess had hitherto been more conspicuous in the courts of Venus than in the field of Mars. The man was typical of his day and generation: should you desire his closer acquaintance you will find a lively sketch of him in Joseph Andrews, under the name of Beau Didapper.

If Mary was the Eve of this Henley "Paradise," the captain clearly possessed many characteristics of the serpent. As First-Lieutenant of Sir Andrew Agnew's regiment of marines, he had been "out"—on the wrong side, for a Scot—in the '45, and the butcher Cumberland having finally killed the cause at Culloden on 16th April, this warrior was now in Henley beating up recruits to fill the vacancies in the Hanoverian lines caused by the valour of the "rebels." Such a figure was a commonplace of the time, and Mr. Blandy would not have looked twice at him but for the fact that it appeared Lord Mark was his grand-uncle. The old lawyer, following up this aristocratic scent, found to his surprise and joy that the little lieutenant, with his courtesy style of captain, was no less a person than the fifth son of a Scots peer, William, fifth Lord Cranstoun, and his wife, Lady Jane Kerr, eldest daughter of William, second Marquis of Lothian. True, he learned the noble union had been blessed with seven sons and five daughters; my Lord Cranstoun had died in 1727, and his eldest son, James, reigned in his stead. The captain, a very much "younger" son, probably had little more than his pay and a fine assortment of debts; still, one cannot have everything. The rights of absent Captain D—— were forgotten, now that there was a chance to marry his daughter to a man who called the daughter of an Earl grandmother, and could claim kinship with half the aristocracy of Scotland; and Mr. Blandy frowned as he called to mind the presumption of the Bath apothecary.

How far matters went at this time we do not know, for Cranstoun left Henley in the autumn and did not revisit "The Paradise" till the following summer. Meanwhile Captain D—— returned from abroad, but unaccountably failed to communicate with the girl he had the year before so reluctantly left behind him. Mary's uncles, "desirous of renewing a courtship which they thought would turn much to the honour and benefit of their niece," intervened; but Captain D——, though "polite and candid," declined to renew his pretensions, and the affair fell through. Whether or not he had heard anything of the Cranstoun business does not appear.

According to Miss Blandy's Own Account, it was not until their second meeting at Lord Mark Kerr's in the summer of 1747 that the patrician but unattractive Cranstoun declared his passion. She also states that in doing so he referred to an illicit entanglement with a Scottish lady, falsely claiming to be his wedded wife, and that she (Mary) accepted him provisionally, "till the invalidity of the pretended marriage appeared to the whole world." But here, as we shall presently see, the fair authoress rather antedates the fact. Next day Cranstoun, formally proposing to the old folks for their daughter's hand, was received by them literally with open arms, henceforth to be treated as a son; and when, after a six weeks' visit to Bath in company with his gouty kinsman, the captain returned to Henley, it was as the guest of his future father-in-law, of whose "pious fraud" in the matter of the £10,000 dowry; despite his shrewdness, he was unaware. Though the sycophantic attorney would probably as lief have housed a monkey of lineage so distinguished, old Mrs. Blandy seems really to have adored the foxy little captain for his beaux yeux. Doubtless he fooled the dame to the top of her bent. For a time things went pleasantly enough in the old house by the bridge. The town-clerk boasted of his noble quarry, the mother enjoyed for the first time the company and conversation of a man of fashion, and Mary renewed amid the Henley meadows those paradisiacal experiences which formerly she had shared with faithless Captain D——. But once more her happiness received an unexpected check. Lord Mark Kerr, a soldier and a gentleman, becoming aware of the footing upon which his graceless grand-nephew was enjoying the Blandys' hospitality, wrote to the attorney the amazing news that his daughter's lover already had a wife and child living in Scotland.