At Carlisle, the men waiting outside the inn were dressed as constables. Ellen Turner believed they were lying in wait for her father; in truth, they were mere actors in a staged performance designed to drive her into a marriage she had never sought. She was fifteen years old. From Liverpool, where she was at school, the Wakefield brothers had hurried her toward the Scottish border, persuading her that her father’s fortune and personal liberty depended entirely upon her assent.
Published in 1860, the chapter in the Pitaval places a single question at its core: did a union solemnised at Gretna Green remain valid if the young woman had consented to it only after being systematically deceived?
Ellen was the only daughter and sole heiress of William Turner, the master of Shrigley Park in Cheshire. In February 1826, having newly turned fifteen, she was boarding at the academy kept by the Misses Daulby in Liverpool. Her father had recently weathered severe commercial embarrassments; the financial panic of 1825 had shaken many mercantile houses to their foundations. Ellen had heard her family speak of these misfortunes. It was this genuine memory that the abductors were to turn against her.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield had informed himself of the girl’s circumstances and expectations. According to the account, he resolved to draw her away from the school on the pretext of her mother’s illness and make her his wife. A French servant, Thévenot, was dispatched to the school bearing a letter written in the name of a physician, Dr Ainsworth. It stated that Mrs Turner had been stricken by a paralytic seizure and wished to see her daughter without delay. To forestall inconvenient questions, the missive added that no chaperon should accompany her, and that the true gravity of her mother’s state was to be concealed from Ellen.
The letter even prescribed the precise answers the servant was to give. He claimed to have been engaged only recently for the family’s new household, and assured the schoolmistresses that a medical gentleman would meet Ellen at Manchester. The Misses Daulby were aware that a removal of the household was indeed in progress; the falsehood thus fitted comfortably into the frame of ordinary domestic life. They allowed their pupil to depart. The schoolmistress knew that the girl was acquainted neither with the postilion nor the carriage; the house’s confidence rested almost entirely upon the letter.
At Manchester, no physician awaited Ellen. Edward Gibbon Wakefield presented himself as a friend arrived to assist her. He revealed that her mother’s illness had been a mere ruse, only to announce that her father’s commercial house was on the brink of total ruin. William Wakefield, his brother, arrived to corroborate the tale. Both men possessed sufficient knowledge of the family’s affairs to lend their narrative an air of truth. They spoke of collapsing banks, of sheriffs’ officers pursuing Turner, and of an uncle prepared to advance an immense sum if Ellen would consent to marry Edward. The figures cited vary across the recorded depositions: the chapter mentions forty thousand pounds in the young lady’s testimony, and sixty thousand in an earlier account. These sums should not be mistaken for verified bank liabilities.
Ellen protested at first that she had undertaken the journey solely to be at her mother’s side. Wakefield replied that the marriage would shield the family estate, and that her father was even then in Carlisle, hiding from the bailiffs. William added that he had seen Turner with the family attorney in a small back room of the inn. The men stationed outside the door, he explained, were police officers in plain clothes. With every stage of the journey, the imaginary net drew tighter about her: her father could not venture out, the creditors were closing in, and a swift decision seemed the only means of saving her home.
The travellers pressed on through Kendal to Carlisle. The printed dates do not entirely reconcile the sequence of events with the newspaper notices cited; the present narrative maintains the recorded order without assigning an unyielding date to each stage. At Carlisle, Ellen was not permitted to see her father. William assured her that he remained locked in a rear apartment of the inn, imploring her to accept Edward. She yielded at last, as she later testified in court, because she believed her refusal would consign her father to utter ruin. Her consent was not the deliberate assent that the defence would later seek to discern in the outward gestures of the ceremony; it was the product of a fabricated narrative of affliction, debt, and impending catastrophe.
The party crossed the border and reached Gretna Green. The blacksmith David Laing solemnised the union according to the summary custom of the place, in the presence of witnesses. Later examined at the trial, he described a ceremony that appeared to him entirely regular: he asked the young pair whether they took each other as husband and wife, joined their hands, and wished them joy. He admitted he was neither priest nor minister. His testimony did not resolve the difficulty; it merely displaced it. The question was not simply whether the spoken words and outward formalities had satisfied Scottish custom, but under what circumstances Ellen had been brought to utter them.
After a halt at Carlisle, the Wakefields hastened to London and thence to Calais. The chronicler describes an exhausting race against time. Edward caused announcements of the marriage and of their departure for Paris to appear in the press before the Turner family even knew Ellen had left the school; her kinsmen first learned of the abduction from the public prints. Grimsditch, the family solicitor, accompanied by her uncles Robert Turner and Critchley and a police officer, crossed the Channel armed with warrants. At Calais, Grimsditch demanded the surrender of the girl. Edward Wakefield maintained that under Scots law she was lawfully his wife; he did not attempt to justify the fraud by which the union had been obtained.
Restored to her uncles, Ellen declared that she would never live with Wakefield again, protesting that she had been cruelly betrayed. Edward allowed her to depart. In a letter addressed to his brother, read at the trial, he admitted that upon learning the true state of affairs, she had insisted on leaving him. He wrote that he had foreseen her reaction and had offered no resistance. While this correspondence reveals his cold calculation, it remains the statement of the accused as preserved by the compiler, rather than an independent official record.
The family instituted criminal proceedings. The prosecution was complicated by Wakefield’s assertion of the marriage’s validity: if Ellen were his lawful wife, could she be heard in evidence against him? The court ruled that her testimony was admissible in matters touching her personal liberty and the injury done to her person. The account in the Pitaval then distinguishes two separate legal questions, which have often been confounded in later retellings. The first concerned the defendants’ criminal liability for conspiracy, fraud, and abduction. The second concerned the civil validity of the union under Scots law. A conviction in an English criminal court could not, of itself, dissolve a marriage held to be valid under the law of Scotland.
Ellen recounted the journey and the representations that had been made to her. She confirmed that she had consented to the marriage in the firm belief that her father desired it and that his fortune would thereby be preserved. Counsel for the defence compelled her to admit that she had accepted a ring, dined with Wakefield, and signed her name as his wife. Post-house witnesses were produced who described a young lady laughing, playing draughts, and appearing in high spirits. The prosecuting counsel dismissed the weight of these recollections: travelling inside a carriage, surrounded by alarming reports, and cut off from all access to her family, a young girl’s smile could hardly prove she was master of the truth.
The presiding judge reminded the jury that the gravamen of the charge lay in the original deceit practised upon Ellen at Manchester. Her subsequent conduct might throw light upon her state of mind, but it could not retrospectively alter the fraudulent contrivance that had drawn her from her school. The leading counsel for the prosecution, Serjeant Cross, alleged that Frances Davies, who had become Frances Wakefield, the stepmother of the defendants, had actively abetted the scheme. The evidence adduced against her was circumstantial: she had introduced the brothers to the Turner connection, advanced funds, supplied a bank note used to purchase the carriage, and maintained a correspondence with them. The defence urged the tenuous nature of these facts, attributing them to ordinary family ties. The jury found her guilty, but the prosecutors did not press for judgment; the chronicle records no sentence pronounced upon her.
Against Edward and William Wakefield, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. The court sentenced each brother to three years’ imprisonment. The servant Thévenot, indicted alongside them, vanishes from the resolution recorded in the chapter; his judicial fate is left unstated. This omission must be respected: it would be improper to invent either a conviction or an acquittal on his behalf.
The conviction of the brothers did not instantly release Ellen from the bonds of matrimony. According to the chronicler, the union remained legally recognised until an Act of Parliament, passed in the following year, declared it null and void. The criminal law had punished the deceit; an act of the legislature was required to sever the civil status created by it. Ellen subsequently married a gentleman named Leigh; the chapter records that she died young, leaving an infant daughter. Edward Wakefield, upon completing his sentence, turned his energies toward the colonisation of New Zealand—a circumstance the chronicler presents as an endeavour to atone for the errors of his youth, though without demonstrating what such rehabilitation could mean to the victim of his crime.
The 1860 volume converts the affair into an argument against the Scottish practice of marriage by simple consent. Its tone is retrospective and distinctly polemical, employing an individual case to illuminate a broader debate on legal reform. The original criminal depositions and formal court minutes were not consulted for this retelling. The minor chronological discrepancies of the chapter, its digressions upon national manners, and its summaries of the testimony must remain attributed to that nineteenth-century compilation. What its narrative demonstrates with the utmost clarity is the machinery of psychological coercion: a carefully phrased letter, authentic details drawn from the financial crisis of 1825, and a daughter’s dread of abandoning her father to his fate. The chronicle concludes with a judicial sentence, but the abiding question it bequeaths is not whether a ritual word was spoken at Gretna Green. It is whether any consent can truly be called free when every circumstance surrounding it has been forged.