At seven o’clock on the evening of the 15th of January, 1804, Lockhart Gordon consulted his watch, expressing surprise that the carriage had not yet arrived. That very day, the two brothers had concerted the journey. At the house of Elizabeth Westcraft, who lodged Lockhart and his brother Lauden, instructions had been given for a post-chaise to stand waiting at that precise hour at the end of Bolton Street. Yet, in the house where Mrs Lee was dining in their company, not a word of this conveyance had been breathed to her.
The repast had commenced towards five o’clock. Before sitting down to table, Lauden had pressed his sentiments upon her—advances she claimed she had already entreated him to abandon. She maintained that she had laid before them the utter impossibility of their designs, begging that the subject be changed. Dinner ended, Lockhart announced that the chaise must be at hand. Mrs Lee enquired what chaise he meant. The trial that followed would not resolve the dispute between the brothers and this lady regarding her consent. It was to turn upon an entirely different question: where, precisely, had the alleged force been exerted?
Mrs Lee was born in 1774, the natural daughter of Lord Le Despencer, who died in 1781. According to Mr Counsel Mills, his lordship’s will had bequeathed a considerable fortune to her and her brother; following her marriage at Haddington, contracted before she attained her majority, her husband had been arrested by order of the Court of Chancery. In 1796, the court settled the disposition of the estate, assigning her an annual income. Having separated from her husband after but a few months of cohabitation, she lived in seclusion in a house in Bolton Row, receiving very little company.
The Gordon brothers had known her as a child, when she attended their mother’s school in Kensington. Lauden, returning from the West Indies in 1803, renewed acquaintance in late December through the agency of his apothecary. Lockhart, already established in London, had not seen her since his return. In the letters addressed to her by Lauden, Mrs Lee claimed to have requested mere friendship. His own epistle breathed an ardent passion; that of Lockhart, whose hand she could not swear to, pledged to support his brother even at the peril of his life.
On the 12th of January, she invited the two brothers to call upon her the following Sunday. They arrived on the 15th at the appointed hour. Their conversation prior to dinner returned to the letters and to the impediments she had formerly urged. At table, the discourse turned upon general matters. Westcraft, for her part, had duly dispatched the chaise to the appointed spot, at the hour she had been directed.
Lockhart having mentioned the carriage, Mrs Lee quitted the room in great agitation. Her maid, Mary Davidson, heard her say she feared they meant to take her away. The maid replied that they could not carry her out of her own house. Davidson subsequently testified that she saw the gentlemen forcing her mistress down the stairs. When the servant rushed forward to intervene, Lockhart levelled a pistol at her, threatening to blow her brains out if she did not remain quiet. She ran into the street crying murder, thieves, and fire, proclaiming that her mistress was being carried off.
The footman, William Martin, had been dispatched by Lockhart to fetch a hackney coach. When he returned, Mrs Lee had already vanished. He gave chase to the post-chaise, but soon lost sight of it. The two postilions were called to the stand. The first deposed that he took up a lady and two gentlemen at Bolton Row, who bade him drive fast, threatening to shoot him if he did not make haste. At Uxbridge, the travellers took another chaise; Lockhart bestowed half a guinea upon him, a sum far more handsome than the customary fee. Yet, when questioned regarding Mrs Lee’s demeanour, the postilion swore he saw no violence whatever: she laughed as she entered the carriage, and nothing seemed out of the common course. The second postilion likewise declared he had perceived no restraint.
Mrs Lee’s own testimony then occupied a substantial portion of the proceedings. She affirmed that she had repeatedly declared to the brothers the bounds she intended to preserve. She denied having ever consented to their departure, stating that at Uxbridge she had demanded a chaise to return home, but was told it was impossible. She could not distinctly recall every passage of the journey; she maintained that she had been greatly distracted and, in certain places, scarce sensible of what occurred. Her evidence, however, contained admissions capable of sustaining the defence: it was she who had first consented to receive Lauden and had invited Lockhart to accompany him; she had formerly lived upon terms of familiarity with them, and she acknowledged having exchanged kisses with Lauden at the moment of their leave-taking.
Mr Abbott, for the defence, cross-examined her touching a camphor bag suspended about her neck, which he termed an “amulet against pleasure.” Mrs Lee admitted having flung it from the chaise window, but explained that she wore it merely as a sedative, to compose her nerves. She could not recollect precisely upon which stretch of road she had cast it out. She likewise conceded having declared, as she threw it away, that she had no further need of it and gave herself up to pleasure. Yet she added that she subsequently renewed her protests. The token and those words were turned to account by the defence; her narrative, however, retained the terror she maintained she had endured throughout.
At Tetsworth, the travellers halted at an inn. Mrs Lee affirmed she was then under the dread that Lockhart might endanger her life, and that a bloody fray might ensue. In the morning, she had no change of linen. She remembered that Lauden came to her chamber and admitted having passed the night with him, yet insisted that the circumstances did not argue a free consent. She accused Lockhart of having determined her departure from her house, citing his words when he bade Lauden not to linger there, but to bring her out. The two postilions who had driven them, for their part, had observed no coercion throughout the journey.
The jury were not called upon to weigh the truth of every recollection. The learned judge brought the trial to a close because the Crown had failed to establish that any force had been employed within the county of Oxford. The violence alleged at Bolton Row in London, and the journey by chaise, fell not within the jurisdiction of the court wherein the prisoners were indicted. The tribunal could not therefore proceed with the indictment, and both men were acquitted. The judge, nevertheless, severely reprimanded their conduct, particularly that of Lockhart, an ordained clergyman of the Church of England. Lockhart was discharged; Lauden remained in custody under a civil detainer for debt.
The acquittal did not bring the conflicting testimonies into harmony. Davidson spoke of the levelled pistol and outward violence; the postilions saw neither the one nor the other upon the highway. Mrs Lee depicted her mounting dread alongside a resolution that wavered with the passing hours; she acknowledged acts of intimacy while denying that they amounted to a consent to be carried off. The law’s enquiry halted upon a county boundary, before these divergent accounts could be weighed. What received judgment that day was the limit of a court’s authority, not a full and definitive answer to the dark question raised around that dinner table.