The priest inquired of Robert Fielding whether he would take this woman to be his wedded wife. Mary Wandsworth hesitated; Fielding whispered to her that she must answer, “With all my heart and soul.” She did so. A ring was slipped onto her finger within the confines of a locked chamber, before a procuress and a man attired in a flowing gown, a fur cap, and a long beard. On the morrow, Fielding addressed Wandsworth as his wife. A few weeks later, he married the Duchess of Cleveland.
At the Old Bailey, on the 4th of December 1706, Fielding made no denial of the second marriage. The sole question was whether the first had ever taken place. The Duchess, Barbara Palmer, was renowned and wealthy; yet the court sat neither to judge their disparity in years nor the dignity of her exalted station. It scrutinized a clandestine sequence of stolen visits, epistolary exchanges, and secret rites whose very nature Fielding now contested. If Mary Wandsworth had indeed been his lawful wife prior to his union with the Duchess, the law deemed the second ceremony a felony.
According to Elizabeth Villars, the intrigue originated under the name of another woman entirely. Fielding declared himself enamored of a certain Mrs. Delean and sought by all means to gain access to her person. Having heard that she was mistress of an immense fortune, he engaged Villars to broker an interview. He journeyed to her country residence, paced her gardens, and hoped to be observed. Mrs. Delean sat behind her casement; she did not admit him. Later, Villars conveyed an unauthorized message asserting that the Duchess of Cleveland herself wished to view the grounds. That stratagem likewise miscarried: Mrs. Delean was absent, engaged at the Banstead Downs races.
Fielding, however, persisted in his suit. Believing he had glimpsed the lady at the racecourse, he dispatched a letter to her lodging. Mrs. Delean subsequently testified that she had never set eyes upon Fielding; though her domestics had received the billet, she had expressly commanded that no correspondence be accepted save from her own kin. The chasm between the woman he pursued and the woman he was destined to wed became the very crux of the fraud.
Villars deposed that she ultimately proposed to Mary Wandsworth that she personate Mrs. Delean. Wandsworth consented. Letters and costly gifts passed between her and Fielding, who remained persuaded that he was addressing the wealthy widow. Villars recounted their first interview on the day following the Lord Mayor’s Show: Wandsworth arrived in a mourning coach, listened to songs, took wine, and ate plum cake before taking her leave. At that juncture, the suitor had not the least inkling of the trickery. The imposture thus transmuted an unknown woman into the coveted heiress he was eager to lead to the altar.
On the 9th of November, Fielding resolved to bring the matter to a consummation. Wandsworth came to his lodgings; taking her into his arms, he vowed that nothing on earth could make him happy short of an immediate marriage, whereupon he stepped out to fetch a priest. He turned the key in the chamber door, leaving her alone with Villars. Presently he returned, accompanied by a man whom witnesses described as a foreign ecclesiastic. Prior to the ceremony, Wandsworth asked how she might be assured of his holy orders. The man produced small devotional objects which he presented as tokens of his priesthood. He blessed a vessel of salted water, called for a sprig of rosemary, and solemnized the rite in Latin.
Wandsworth insisted that the question of mutual consent be repeated in English. Fielding answered forthwith that he took her to wife “with all his heart.” She answered at first in a faint voice, then repeated the formula he dictated. A gold ring bore the Latin posy, “Tibi soli”—“To thee alone.” The servants were dismissed during the solemnization, returning thereafter with wine and bed-linen. Villars testified that she saw the newlyweds in the same bed that night and on the ensuing mornings. Fielding soon took to calling Wandsworth his wife and the “Countess of Fielding.”
This was no ordinary intrigue veiled merely by an inequality of birth. Fielding still believed he was espousing Mrs. Delean, whereas the letters, the priest, and the ritual established, in the eyes of the prosecution, a lawful union with Wandsworth. The latter was fully aware that her suitor was mistaken as to her person; she nonetheless suffered the marriage to proceed. Villars recounted that Fielding enjoined secrecy upon her because the lady feared displeasing her father, who held a portion of her estate. Fielding was deceived regarding the identity and fortune of his bride; Wandsworth was fully conscious of the substitution. In a court of law, that deceit would prove insufficient to nullify the solemnity of the rite.
The second union, contracted with Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, was celebrated on the 25th of November, at a time when the prosecution held the marriage with Wandsworth to be binding. Months later, when Wandsworth pressed for maintenance, Fielding discovered that she commanded none of the rumored wealth. Villars deposed that he subsequently summoned her, beat her severely, and threatened to slit her nose unless she retracted her testimony. Villars nonetheless stood firm by her deposition: the witness he sought to silence was the very architect of the personation.
In Fielding’s eyes, Villars was the pillar of the indictment. He denounced her as a perjurer, remarking that she had erred in her recollections, having asserted that Mrs. Delean’s mother cut her hair, whereas it was another woman who did so. He added that Villars was an old acquaintance of Bridewell prison. Yet her account of the ceremony received material corroboration from Bouchier, the servant who had admitted the priest, fetched the water and salt, and subsequently observed the new bed and the ring. A goldsmith confirmed having sold the posy ring with the inscription demanded by Fielding; an ecclesiastical proctor identified the ring exhibited by Wandsworth before the spiritual court. Three tender missives in Fielding’s hand were read aloud before the bench.
Fielding then advanced an alternative defense: had Wandsworth already been married to one Lilly Bradby, she was legally incapable of becoming his wife. A witness affirmed that an entry recording their nuptials was extant in the registers of the Fleet Prison. Yet when the solicitors for the prosecution inspected the register, the entry was nowhere to be found. They testified to having examined the month of October with minute attention, noting a suspicious blank where the entry subsequently appeared. The defense witness alleged that an unknown woman had offered her money to expunge that line; she was, however, unable to identify her with certainty. The very instrument intended to invalidate the first marriage thus fell under grave suspicion of forgery.
The jury found Fielding guilty of bigamy. At the following sessions, he prayed the benefit of clergy; judgment was accordingly stayed, and the Queen graciously remitted the burning of his hand. Concurrently, the Duchess pursued her own libel for nullity before the Arches Court. In May 1707, the ecclesiastical tribunal pronounced her entirely free from the matrimonial bond with Fielding and at liberty to marry whom she pleased. The letters and the posy ring were returned to her upon being entered into the record.
The law thus adjudicated the reality of the first union, yet the archive retains the imposture at its core: Fielding sought to wed an heiress whom he had never seen, and Wandsworth consented to act the part. The cause cannot be reduced to a duped gallant, nor to a pretended bride who fabricated her tale out of whole cloth. The priest, the servants, the billets, and the inscribed band furnished the ceremony with living witnesses and material vestiges; while the contested Fleet register remains an enduring reminder that proof could shift its visage as nimbly as identity itself.