The news of the marriage travelled further than the husband had anticipated. He had counted upon the charm of his person, the credit of his name, and the eager readiness of a provincial circle to welcome an eminent gentleman; he had calculated less soundly what must happen when the gazettes announced that the Beauty of Buttermere had just wedded a member of the aristocracy whose family knew perfectly well where he was to be found.
The true Alexander Augustus Hope was in Vienna.
The man who had just married Mary Robinson was named John Hatfield.
A Man Preceded by His Name
He had arrived in the district with the deportment and outward trappings that so often spare a man the necessity of offering proof. He was believed to be allied to an illustrious family, a Member of Parliament, possessed in fine of that species of fortune into whose particulars it is unseemly to inquire. He knew well how to turn these assumptions to his profit without correcting them, and, whenever it became needful to borrow, to secure credit, or to account for a transient lack of funds, the name performed a considerable share of the labour.
Hatfield had already lived several lives. He had inhabited luxury, contracted debts, suffered imprisonment, obtained relief, and begun anew elsewhere; women had discharged his obligations or accepted his pledges, only to remain behind with the consequences when he himself had struck out upon a fresh path. The reader acquainted with this past may marvel that he could still find believers. Those who received him enjoyed no such vantage: to every new place, the man entered for the first time.
At Buttermere, Mary Robinson served in her father’s inn. Travellers’ journals had celebrated her beauty; men journeyed thither to behold the lakes, the mountains, and this young woman whom visitors allowed themselves to scrutinize with a freedom at which they would undoubtedly have taken offense had anyone used it toward their own daughters.
Hatfield understood what such renown might add to his own.
At the Inn
Let us imagine a parlour where damp garments are shaken out before tea is ordered, a window opening upon a prospect that draws travellers from afar, and Mary busied with serving while people speak of her as though her very presence did not compel her to hear. The gentleman distinguishes himself from the rest by addressing her directly; he seems to restore her to the station of a person in the midst of a curiosity that treats her as a spectacle.
He returns. People grow accustomed to his countenance, his manners, the very notion of finding him there. His assumed quality affords him the privilege of being singular; that which, in a penniless stranger, would have awakened suspicion becomes in him the easy liberty of a grand seigneur.
We know not the words with which he won Mary. It suffices to consider what was offered to her belief: an attention that appeared deliberate and choice, a horizon vast enough to reach beyond the inn, and the sentiment, perhaps, of being at last regarded otherwise than by travellers who had come merely to verify a description.
The marriage was solemnized at Lorton on the second of October, 1802. An alliance of such nature could not remain private. The tidings took to the press, and the name Hatfield had borrowed began to travel without him.
The Name Returns to Its Family
The Hope family made it known that the genuine gentleman was residing in Vienna. From that hour, the precautions with which Hatfield had hedged his character turned against him: the more widely the name was known, the easier it became to contradict it.
A magistrate, George Hardinge, who was acquainted with Hope, desired to meet the person presented under that style. Hatfield could not maintain his story entirely unaltered; he affirmed indeed that his name was Hope, but disputed that he was the parliamentarian with whom he was being identified. It was a narrow retreat. It was intended to preserve a portion of the persona while abandoning that which had become too readily verifiable.
The stratagem did not suffice. A warrant was issued. Hatfield, placed under guard, treated the affair at first as a ludicrous mistake; he possessed long experience of those moments when sheer composure can make even those who have full warrant to detain you waver. He succeeded in effecting his escape.
For Mary, this flight bore no resemblance to former departures. It was no longer a question of awaiting a husband’s return: she had now to discover what manner of man had truly quitted her roof. The conversations that had lately congratulated her altered their tone. People brought her intelligence, suppositions, old histories; everyone, it seemed, now possessed some fragment of the existence she ought to have known before giving him her hand.
The Man of Carlisle
Hatfield was retaken in Wales. At Carlisle, in August 1803, he had to answer to three indictments for forgery. The public interest turned readily upon the deceptive marriage, but the trial had its own formal charges; it was not merely for having usurped the place of a spouse that he was to be condemned.
He pleaded not guilty. The evidence was sustained against him, and he was hanged that same year. The career of imposture came to an end at last under a name he could no longer shed by stepping into a post-chaise.
The old chronicles dwell upon his composure. They are fond of these details of the final hour, as though a man’s manner of dying could yet alter what he had done to the living. Mary had no need to learn with what firmness he had conducted himself at the end. She had already known all too well the assurance with which he had begun.
A public subscription was raised to relieve her and her family. Public curiosity sought, on this occasion, to make some reparation; through its gazettes, it had likewise contributed to unmasking the man. One must grant it these two aspects, since the very impulse that had turned the wedding into a public spectacle had prevented the imposture from enduring under the cover of obscurity.
After the Fine Name
Mary later remarried, taking a farmer for her husband. This circumstance, which biographers are wont to relegate to their concluding lines, merits our pause: it signifies that a woman continued to live long after the tale from which the world refused to release her.
Pamphlets, verses, and plays were written upon the Beauty of Buttermere and her counterfeit suitor. She had not solicited all these versions of herself. Perhaps she still encountered travellers who fancied they were pleasing her by declaring that they knew her history; it would have required vast delicacy on their part to understand that they knew, in truth, only that single chapter to which they perpetually returned.
The true Hope had recovered his name. Hatfield had lost his own. For Mary there remained a task less dazzling than the denouement of an assize: to build days that no longer belonged to that man.