Historical Mysteries | Page 9

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operations. Mr. Davy's reply was a quibble.
His closing speech merely took up the old line: Elizabeth was absent to
conceal 'a misfortune'; her cunning mother was her accomplice. There
was no proof of Elizabeth's unchastity; nay, she had an excellent
character, 'but there is a time, gentlemen, when people begin to be
wicked.' If engaged for the other side Mr. Davy would have placed his
'Nemo repente fuit turpissimus'--no person of unblemished character
wades straight into 'innocent blood,' to use his own phrase.
The Recorder summed up against Elizabeth. He steadily assumed that
Nash was always right, and the neighbours always wrong, as to the
girl's original story. He said nothing of Bennet; the tanner's dog had
done for Bennet. He said that, if the Enfield witnesses were right, the
Dorset witnesses were wilfully perjured. He did not add that, if the
Dorset witnesses were right, the Enfield testifiers were perjured.
The jury brought in a verdict of 'Guilty of perjury, but not wilful and
corrupt.' This was an acquittal, but, the Recorder refusing the verdict,
they did what they were desired to do, and sentence was passed. Two
jurors made affidavit that they never intended a conviction. The whole
point had turned, in the minds of the jury, on a discrepancy as to when
Elizabeth finished the water in the broken pitcher--on Wednesday,
January 27, or on Friday, January 29. Both accounts could not be true.
Here, then, was 'perjury,' thought the jury, but not 'wilful and corrupt,'
not purposeful. But the jury had learned that 'the court was impatient;'
they had already brought Elizabeth in guilty of perjury, by which they
meant guilty of a casual discrepancy not unnatural in a person hovering
between life and death. They thought that they could not go back on
their 'Guilty,' and so they went all the way to 'corrupt and wilful
perjury'--murder by false oath--and consistently added 'an earnest
recommendation to mercy'!
By a majority of one out of seventeen judges, Elizabeth was banished
for seven years to New England. She was accused in the Press of being
an 'enthusiast,' but the Rev. William Reyner, who attended her in prison,
publicly proclaimed her a good Churchwoman and a good girl (June 7,
1754). Elizabeth (June 24) stuck to her guns in a manifesto--she had

not once 'knowingly deviated from the truth.'
Mr. Davy had promised the jury that when Elizabeth was once
condemned all would come out--the whole secret. But though the most
careful attempts were made to discover her whereabouts from January
1 to January 29, 1753, nothing was ever found out--a fact most easily
explained by the hypothesis that she was where she said she was, at
Mother Wells's.
As to Elizabeth's later fortunes, accounts differ, but she quite certainly
married, in Connecticut, a Mr. Treat, a respectable yeoman, said to
have been opulent. She died in Connecticut in June 1773, leaving a
family.
In my opinion Elizabeth Canning was a victim of the common sense of
the eighteenth century. She told a very strange tale, and common-sense
holds that what is strange cannot be true. Yet something strange had
undeniably occurred. It was very strange if Elizabeth on the night of
January 1, retired to become a mother, of which there was no
appearance, while of an amour even gossip could not furnish a hint. It
was very strange if, having thus retired, she was robbed, starved,
stripped and brought to death's door, bleeding and broken down. It was
very strange that no vestige of evidence as to her real place of
concealment could ever be discovered. It was amazingly strange that a
girl, previously and afterwards of golden character, should in a moment
aim by perjury at 'innocent blood.' But the eighteenth century, as
represented by Mr. Davy, Mr. Willes, the barrister who fabled in court,
and the Recorder, found none of these things one half so strange as
Elizabeth Canning's story. Mr. Henry Fielding, who had some
knowledge of human nature, was of the same opinion as the present
candid inquirer. 'In this case,' writes the author of Tom Jones, 'one of
the most simple girls I ever saw, if she be a wicked one, hath been too
hard for me. I am firmly persuaded that Elizabeth Canning is a poor,
honest, simple, innocent girl.'
Moi aussi, but--I would not have condemned the gipsy!
* * * * *

In this case the most perplexing thing of all is to be found in the
conflicting unpublished affidavits sworn in March 1753, when
memories as to the whereabouts of the gipsies were fresh. They form a
great mass of papers in State Papers Domestic, at the Record Office. I
owe to Mr. Courtney Kenny my knowledge of the two unpublished
letters of Fielding to the Duke of