The popularity of Gretna Green elopements dated from the passing of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1754, by which it was declared that “Any person solemnising matrimony in any other place than a church or public chapel, without banns, or other license, shall, on conviction, be adjudged guilty of felony, and be transported for fourteen years, and all such marriages shall be void.”

This measure was expressly designed to put an end to the long-continued and growing scandals of the so-called “Fleet marriages,” which had first attracted attention in 1674. The Fleet marriages, performed by the chaplains of the Fleet Prison, in London, led to many abuses. Made on the spur of the moment, between the prisoners there, incarcerated for debt or other misdemeanours, and the visitors permitted free access under the lax discipline of that time, the most fearful alliances were perpetrated by wholesale. Drunken prisoners, dissolute women, and parsons who richly deserved being unfrocked were the actors in these scenes, almost exactly matched by the similar clandestine marriages performed on application, at all hours of day or night, by the chaplains of the Savoy, and by the clerical owners of proprietary chapels in Mayfair.

These marriage-merchants earned amazing incomes, the still-existing records of a Fleet parson’s fees in 1748 showing that in the month of October alone he received no less than £69 12s. 9d. for his services. At the Fleet, on March 25th, 1754, the day before Lord Hardwicke’s Act became law, there was a grand winding-up of the business, when 217 marriages were celebrated.

The penalty provided by the Act was not, under the existing circumstances, too severe; for, in view of the evils wrought by those practices, it was necessary to provide the greatest discouragement possible to this traffic. Much more then than now, a marriage, once performed, was irrevocable. Divorce courts, for redress of matrimonial injuries, were unknown, and the drunken and the reckless who had taken part so lightly in a Fleet marriage were held to their bargain for life.

But the Act, beneficent though it was, did not pass without great opposition, and even when it became law, its operation was confined to England; with the result that the only difficulty in the way of a clandestine marriage that should be sufficiently legal was that of making a journey out of England; whether across the English Channel to Calais, or into the Isle of Man, or across the Border into Scotland, was immaterial. The Isle of Man was for a brief period a favourite place, but the House of Keys, the legislature of that isle, in 1757 passed an Act forbidding marriages other than by banns or special license, with a penalty identical with that provided by the English Act for clergymen who should infringe it; while any layman performing any such ceremony was very roughly dealt with: the penalties in his case being—

1. To be pilloried.

2. To lose his ears.

3. To be imprisoned until the Governor saw fit to release him, on payment of a fine not exceeding £50.

After the passing of this Act we hear little or nothing of clandestine marriages being celebrated in the Isle of Man.

The Channel Islands, and particularly Guernsey, were then occasionally favoured, but the difficulties of access prevented them ever becoming popular with the love-lorn, who very generally, while prepared to suffer many things, drew the line at sea-sickness.

The Border, in fact, was destined to be, above all others, the place to which eloping couples sped. “When Britain first at Heaven’s command, arose from out the azure main,” she was sealed to a high destiny; and when the Border was set between the kingdoms of England and Scotland, it seems, at different times and periods, to have been provided for the express purpose of affording a refuge and a living for moss-troopers, cattle-lifters, and the generally lawless people of the frontiers. It was thus quite in keeping with old Border history that, when brute force went out and legal enormities took its place, it should be the refuge of eloping lovers, of whom a very large proportion were fortune-hunting scamps running away with silly, sentimental schoolgirls.

The flight into Scotland afforded exceptional facilities, for marrying across the Border has ever been (and still is) the simplest of affairs; the chief difficulty being still, as Lord Eldon long ago observed, to find out what does not constitute a marriage in Scotland. My lord himself spoke as doubly an expert, for he was not only the great legal authority of his time, but himself had been married across the Border. Indeed, Lord Deas was of opinion that mere consent, even in the absence of witnesses, constituted lawful wedlock, just as in those primitive days when the man only went to the woman’s home and took her to his own. Pope Innocent III., who does not appear to have been so innocent as his name would imply, in 1198 put an end to this simple plan.

Preposterous although it may seem, the difficulty in Scotland is, not to get married, but how not. The mere verbal acknowledgments exchanged, “This is my wife,” “This is my husband,” are all-sufficient, and equally binding as the most formal marriage-license ever issued by a bishop to his “dearly beloved”; and even words spoken in jest, without any wish or desire that they should be seriously considered, are binding. It is not to be supposed that novelists have remained ignorant of these quaint customs, and indeed Gretna Green in particular, and the Scottish marriage-laws in general, give point to Wilkie Collins’s “Man and Wife,” Mrs. Henry Wood’s “Elster’s Folly,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Little Minister,” among other novels.

Bound intimately up with these affairs, and thought to have originated these singularly loose methods, was the old Scottish custom of “hand-fasting,” still practised in the opening years of the nineteenth century, but with the increase of education, and still more the growth of comfort, then fast dying out. These barbaric customs, resembling in degree some old Welsh observances, mattered little to a peasantry sunk in ignorance, but with the growth of wage-earning and of property, and the consequent sense of responsibility, they could by no possibility survive. “Hand-fasting” was the selection, on approval, of a wife or husband, who would live together for one year on trial. If mutually satisfactory at the close of the year, they became man and wife for good and all; if not, they parted, and were free to choose again. Children, if there were any, were the charge of the non-content partner.

The Border must have seemed a Heaven-provided resort to couples bent on evading Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, but, strangely enough, the sufficient virtue of the first step across the dividing-line was not at first generally recognised, and fleeting lovers were originally not content until they had come, post haste, to Edinburgh, where, in the Canongate, they found a crowd of blackguardly scoundrels idling about in greasy and tattered Geneva gowns and pretending to be clergymen, who did their business for them at any prices the circumstances seemed to warrant, from a shilling and a glass of whiskey, up to five guineas. Thus were the runaway Lord George Lennox and Lady Louisa Ker, daughter of the Earl of Ancrum, married, in 1759.

Thus, although even so early as 1753, the year before the Marriage Act became law, a “Gretna Green wedding” was performed by Joseph Paisley, the first “Gretna Priest,” it was not until 1771 that the marrying at Gretna Green grew such a recognised institution that registers began to be kept.

Gretna stands to all the world for runaway matches, but although by far the most popular place, it was by no means the only one. Any spot on the long lonely seventy miles of Border served the same purpose, and Lamberton Toll, north of Berwick, and Coldstream were not without their advantages, especially from Newcastle-on-Tyne, to which they lay quite handy. The future Earl of Eldon, who ran away as a lad with his Bessie Surtees, got married at Lamberton or at Coldstream.

On this West Coast, however, on the “new” road to Gretna, the actual crossing of the Border is at the passage of the little river Sark, half a mile before you come to that more famous hamlet. Although Gretna is pre-eminently famed, and Springfield, just short of it, comes second in popular estimation, a very good case might be made out for giving Sark Bar prominence in this strange history.

It is nothing but an old toll-house on the north, or Scottish side of the river. But there’s the rub. It is the first spot on Scottish soil, and much virtue accordingly attached to it. The name of Gretna obscured those of all other places in the minds of strangers, but those on the spot, together with every post-boy between Carlisle and the Border, knew better; and those runaways who were so hard-pressed that the extra half-mile on to Springfield or Gretna meant all the difference between success and failure had cause to bless Sark Toll Bar, or Alison’s Bank Bar, as it is sometimes called. This was an inimical spot to parents and guardians, and a sad disillusion to all pursuers. Here fathers, hot on the heels of fugitives, were commonly foiled in the very cynthia of the minute. At the moment of triumphantly thinking they would, in that further half-mile, overtake their prey, Simon Beattie, the toll-keeper, was spiriting the fluttering young things into his innocent-looking whitewashed toll-house, and in the presence of the necessary two witnesses, including the grinning post-boy, was asking them the simple questions that sufficed: “Were they single?” and “Did they wish to become man and wife?” It was all over by the time the foaming enemy was cursing and kicking outside the barred and bolted door; and when Beattie unbolted it and introduced the newly-wed, there was nothing to do but try and look pleasant, or perhaps in extreme cases give young hopeful a horse-whipping; which, after all, was scarce politic.

Simon Beattie, between four o’clock on a Saturday morning and the Sunday evening following, in November 1842, married no fewer than forty-five couples at Sark Toll Bar, and his successor, John Murray, in one night performed the same office for sixty-one. No wonder Murray thought it possible to amass a fortune here. He reared the “Sark Bar” inn close by, on the English side of the Sark, but he had not finished it when Lord Brougham’s Act, of 1856, ruining all these fugitive proceedings, came into operation; and there was an end of his hopes.

But it was evidently in existence in 1852, for it is referred to in an article in Household Words of that year, written by Blanchard Jerrold, who describes how he left Carlisle by train and came to Gretna station, where he alighted and found a couple who alighted at the same time being “addressed eagerly by one or two men of common appearance. Are these individuals making offers for the conveyance of the couple’s luggage? The station-master looks on at the warm conference with a sardonic grin; and with a quick twitch of the head, draws the attention of the guard to the interesting group. The train goes forward, and the conference breaks up. One of the men conducts the lady and gentleman to a little red-brick hotel close by; and the others retire discontentedly. I inquire about this rivalry, and am informed that it is a clerical contest. The little red-brick hotel is the property of Mr. Murray, who also inhabits the famous toll-bar which is on the Scotch bank of the stream. Thus this sagacious toll-keeper pounces upon the couples at the station; removes them to his ‘Gretna Hotel,’ and then drives them down a narrow lane, and over the bridge to the toll-bar, where he marries them. In this way it appears Murray has contrived to monopolise five-sixths of the trade matrimonial. It is to be observed, however, that there is a Gretna station, and a Gretna Green station, and that the latter is the point which deposits happy couples opposite Gretna Hall.”

Competition was evidently most extraordinarily keen for it to have gone the length of inducing a Border marriage-monger to build an hotel on the English side of the Sark, and for his agents and others to have wrangled and disputed for business on a railway platform, like so many cab-touts. The romance of Gretna obviously departed, leaving only the sordid dregs, when the Glasgow and South-Western Railway was made, 1848-50, and linked up with Carlisle and the whole of England.

Painters and engravers found the romance of Gretna greatly to their minds, and numerous pictures exist of scenes upon the road, and at Gretna itself. Two of the most striking are those by C. B. Newhouse, showing “A False Alarm on the Road: ’Tis only the Mail,” and “One Mile from Gretna: The Governor in sight, with a Screw loose.” In the first we see the love-lorn ones, halted in front of a wayside inn, the post-boys running out with fresh horses, while with a rush the Royal Mail suddenly dashes by. They think for the moment they are overtaken, but sink back with the heartfelt ejaculation, “’Tis only the Mail.” In the second picture we have the post-boys whipping and spurring on the frantic horses, and the prospective bridegroom standing up in the chaise, holding out a further inducement to speed, in the shape of a bag which, by the size of it, would appear to contain a modest competency for life. On the summit of a distant hill the governor’s chaise appears to have met with an accident, and the chase is virtually over.

The “Deaf Postilion,” pictured by George Cruikshank, seems to have been a real person, and the incident he illustrates to have really happened. He was stone-deaf, and when furiously driving an anxious couple towards the goal of their hopes, failed to notice that, in the lurching and plunging of the chaise, the springs had broken, leaving the body behind, while he hastened on, blissfully unconscious of the disaster, with the fore-carriage.