Two influential Dorset families dominate the additions to the seventh edition of Hutchin’s Extra Illustrated.
The first is the Fox-Strangways family, who are the Earls of Ilchester. Among the many portraits of family members there is a picture of a young Charles James Fox, a politician who was the arch rival of Pitt the Younger, with his cousin Susannah Fox-Strangways and Lady Sarah Lenox. Whilst he was a school boy at Eton, Charles composed a prize-winning Latin verse about a pigeon he found to deliver love letters to Susan, the object of his affections at the time. It is this verse that inspired the painting in which Susan is clutching the pigeon.
Sadly for Charles, Susan eloped with the Irish actor William O’Brien causing a great scandal in high society – according to Horace Walpole she’d have done better running off with a footman. The couple were forced to move to America to escape the uproar, but were eventually forgiven and moved back to Stinsford House where they spent the rest of their lives. They are buried together in Stinsford Churchyard.
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William Morton Pitt also features in this volume. William was the son of John Pitt and inherited his estate at Encombe. He was a magistrate, prison reformer, Sunday school promoter and philanthropist. As mentioned in the previous blog in this series he set up a hat making factory in the new Dorchester Gaol. He also set up a factory for cordage and sailcloth in Purbeck in an attempt to keep people employed and keep them aware from the lure of smuggling. The factory ran at a loss and eventually closed.
William had his own financial troubles ending up bankrupt after a mixture of reckless benevolence and negligence. He managed to recover from this, spending the later part of his life at Kingston Maurward house, near Dorchester. The obituary that was published in The Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1836 stated,
‘Essentially a public man, throughout a long and laborious life, Mr. Pitt had the rare success of obtaining the good will of, and giving satisfaction to, all classes and parties.’
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The other influential Dorset family that features in this edition is the Russell Family of Swyre, who are the Dukes of Bedford. There is a picture of John Russell, the first Earl of Bedford. John came to the attention of King Henry VII after escorting Philip, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Joan, daughter of the King of Spain, to his court after they had been shipwrecked off Weymouth in 1506. He later went on to serve Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I as Lord Privy Seal and was the Lord Lieutenant of Dorset, Devon, Cornwall and Somerset.
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Alongside these aristocratic families are two physicians.
The first is Francis Glisson, who was born around 1597 and raised in Rampisham. Glisson was professor of physic at Cambridge and a member of the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge. He wrote one of the first books on Ricketts and gave his name to ‘Glisson’s capsule’, the fibrous tissue that encases the liver. He also disproved the ‘balloonist theory’ that muscles inflated and contracted by filing with liquid or air. He did this by submerging his arm in water and observing that the water level did not rise when he contracted his muscles and therefore their volume did not increase.
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The second doctor is Thomas Sydenham, who was baptised in Wynford Eagle on the 10th September 1624. He is known as ‘the English Hippocrates’ and the father of English medicine. Sydenham interrupted his studies at Oxford to fight for the parliamentarians in the Civil War, alongside his brother Colonel Thomas Sydenham. He eventually returned to complete his studies, but was never a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and remained a bit of an outsider in the medical community.
Unlike Glisson, who focused on the study of anatomy, Sydenham disliked the practice of dissecting bodies, partly because of his Puritan beliefs. He stressed the importance of bedside practice and observation. He treated fever with fresh air and cooling drinks, which proved more effective than the usual practice of sweating fevers out. He also advised his patients to exercise. He told one patient who refused to exercise that the only doctor capable of curing him was in Aberdeen. The patient rode all the way to Scotland to find the doctor didn’t exist, but the fresh air and the exertion had cured him.
Sydenham also introduced the use of opium to medical practice, was the first to use iron in treating iron-deficiency anaemia, and helped popularise quinine in treating malaria.
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The 7th volume of Hutchins does not only contain portraits. There are some beautiful pictures of the coast and countryside.
There are many pictures of Abbotsbury Abbey as well as a portrait of King Canute, who, in 1023 granted lands in Abbotsbury to his ‘servant (whom his acquaintances and friends have been used to call Orc) for his amiable fidelity and willing mind’. Orc and his wife Thol founded the Benedictine Abbey on these lands.
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This picture of the Burning Cliff in Osmington caught our eye. The cliff got its name after a landslip in 1826 triggered a spontaneous Oil-Shale fire, which burnt for several years. The shale in the cliffs is made up of 70% organic material and is easily set alight when fractured. There are reports in local papers of people coming from all across the country to see the flames, including scientists who tried to discover the source of the fire. There were suggestions that the fire might have been caused by a lightning strike and even the idea that they might be a volcano beneath the cliffs.
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Finally, we were intrigued by the pictures of Elizabeth Canning and Mary Squires. These two women were in the centre of a court case that gripped London in 1753 and is still a mystery today.
According to her own account of events Elizabeth Canning, an 18-year-old maidservant from Canning in London, was attacked near Bedlam Hospital on the 1st January 1753, by two men who robbed her and knocked her unconscious. They then took her to a house where an old woman robbed her of her clothes and shut her in the attic with only a loaf of bread and some water. She was locked there for four weeks until she managed to escape and fled home to her mother, clad in rags, emaciated and with a blood-soaked rag tied around her head.
She thought that she had been held on the Hertford road and said that she recalled hearing the name ‘Wills or Wells’. On this evidence it was concluded that she had been held at ‘Mother’ Wells house at Enfield Wash, which was 10 miles away.
Canning, who was so ill her supporters feared that she might die, was taken to the house where they found Mrs Wells and an old woman, sometimes described as a gypsy, called Mary Squires. Canning identified the house as the place where she had been kept, although it didn’t match the description that she had given earlier, and Mary Squires as the woman who had robbed her of her clothes. Mary Squires’ sons were suspected of being the robbers. Susannah Wells and Mary Squires were arrested.
The trial attracted a great deal of interest and pamphlets telling the story of the abduction were sold throughout London. Money was donated to help Canning and she acquired a large group of followers, who became known as ‘Canningites’.
In the 18th century assault was seen as a matter between two parties, which was tried as a civil case at the parties’ own expense and in most cases judges preferred to reconcile the parties rather than have a trial. For this reason Mary Squires was not tried for the assault or imprisonment, but for the theft of Canning’s clothing, which was valued at 10 shillings making this a capital crime.
A large group of Canning’s supporters gathered at the trial and cheered as she entered to give her testimony. They also made things very difficult for the defence, intimidating and turning away those they recognised as defence witnesses. Three men who did get through were John Gibbons and William Clark from Abbotsbury and Thomas Greville from Coombe in Wiltshire. They had been found by Mary’s son George.
Character testimonies were extremely important in trials in the 1700’s and the more important the person the more weight their testimony was usually given. John Gibbons and his neighbour William Clark swore the Mary Squires was in Abbotsbury from the first to the ninth of January of that year and visited their house selling handkerchiefs and fabrics. Coombe testified that she had stayed over night at his house on the night of the 14th January. This evidence was countered by a witness who swore he had seen her in the area near the house at the same period.
The evidence of the three men enraged the Canningites and they were beaten and kicked as they left the court. Despite their testimony, Squires was found guilty and sentenced to hang. The judge, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, was very unhappy with the verdict. He had found Canning’s story very unconvincing, due to details such as her survival for four weeks on just a loaf of bread and a jug of water. He was also very angry about the behaviour of Canning’s supporters and thought it unlikely that three men would travel all the way from Dorset and Wiltshire to give false testimony.
He began an investigation in an attempt to overturn the verdict. A further 15 men from Abbotsbury gave evidence that Squires was in Dorset at the beginning of the year and six others walked 20 miles to sign an affidavit corroborating their neighbours’ evidence.
More pamphlets were printed on both sides of the argument, but eventually Mary Squires was pardoned and Elizabeth Canning was charged with perjury. Canning’s trial lasted from first to the eighth of May, an unusually long time for the period. At first the jury returned a verdict of “Guilty of perjury, but not wilful and corrupt“, but the judge would not accept this partial verdict. After another twenty minutes deliberation Elizabeth Canning was found “Guilty of Wilful and Corrupt Perjury” and sentenced to a months imprisonment and seven years transportation.
She sailed for America in August 1754. Her supporters had arranged for her to be taken into the home of the Reverend Elisha Williams where she was not treated as a servant, but as a member of the family. She eventually married and had a family in America and died in 1773. Throughout her life she maintained the truth of her account of events.
The story remained fascinating to the people of Georgian England, with arguments put forward on both sides. Even today the case remains a mystery; was Elizabeth Canning telling the truth and if not then where did she go for those four weeks in January 1753?
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This blog is part of our monthly series on the 12 extra-illustrated volumes of “Hutchins’ History and Antiquities of Dorset.”
Part one: An introduction to the history and antiquities of Dorset.
Part two: The Pitt family, a piano player, and a plague of caterpillars.
Part three: Coastline, Castles and Catastrophe
Part four: A Phenomenon, Fake News and a Philanthropist
Part five: Antiquities, Adventurers, and an Actress
Part six: A Gaol, a Guide and a Man of Great Girth