Marriage according to the Canon Law—The English Law—Peculiars—The Fleet Chapel—Marriage Houses—“The Bishop of Hell”—Ludgate Hill in the Olden Time—Marriages Wholesale—The Parsons of the Fleet—Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act—The Fleet Registers—Keith’s Chapel in May Fair—The Savoy Chapel—The Scots Marriage Law—The Strange Case of Joseph Atkinson—Gretna Green in Romance and Reality—The Priests—Their Clients—A Pair of Lord High Chancellors—Lord Brougham’s Marriage Act—The Decay of the Picturesque.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The marrying in the Fleet is the beginning of eternal woe.” So scribbled (1736) Walter Wyatt, a Fleet Parson, in one of his note-books. He and his likes are long vanished, and his successor the blacksmith priest (in truth he was neither one nor other) of Gretna is also gone; yet their story is no less entertaining than instructive, and here I set it forth.

Some prefatory matter is necessary for the right understanding of what follows. Marriage, whatever else it may or may not be, is a contract of two consenting minds; but at an early age the church put forth the doctrine that it was likewise a sacrament which could be administered by the contracting parties to each other. Pope Innocent III., in 1215, first ordained—so some authorities say—that marriages must be celebrated in church; but it was not yet decreed that other and simpler methods were without effect. According to the canon law, “espousals” were of two kinds: sponsalia per verba de prÆsenti—which was an agreement to marry forthwith; and sponsalia per verba de futuro—which was a contract to wed at a future time. Consummation gave number two the effect of number one, and civilly that effect was the same as of duly celebrated nuptials; inasmuch as the church, while urging the religious ceremony upon the faithful as the sole proper method, admitted the validity of the others—quod non fieri debit id factum valeat (so the maxim ran). The common law adopting this, held that (1) marriage might be celebrated with the full rites of the church; or (2) that the parties might take each other for man and wife; or (3), which obviously followed, that a priest might perform the ceremony outside the church, or without the full ceremonial—with maimed rites, so to speak. Whatever penalties were incurred by following other than the first way the marriage itself held good.

I must here note that in 1844, in the case of The Queen against Millis, the House of Lords seemed to decide that there could not have been a valid marriage in England, even before Lord Hardwicke’s Act, which in 1753 completely changed the law, in the absence of an ordained ecclesiastic. The arguments and the judgment fill the half of one of Clark and Finnelly’s bulky volumes, and never was matter more thoroughly threshed, and winnowed, and garnered. The House was equally divided; and the opinion of the Irish Court of Queen’s Bench, which maintained the necessity of the priest’s presence, was affirmed. The real explanation, I think, is that, though the old canon law and the old common law were as I have stated, yet English folk had got so much into the habit of calling in the Parson that his presence came to be regarded as essential. The parties, even when they disobeyed the church by leaving undone much they were ordered to do, would still have “something religious” about the ceremony. In 1563 the Council of Trent declared such marriages invalid as were not duly celebrated in church; but Elizabeth’s reign was already five years gone, both England and Scotland had broken decisively with the old faith, and the Council’s decrees had no force here.

In England both church and state kept tinkering the Marriage Laws. In 1603 the Convocation for the Province of Canterbury declared that no minister shall solemnise matrimony without banns or licence upon pain of suspension for three years. Also, all marriages were to be in the parish church between eight and twelve in the forenoon. Nothing so far affected the validity of the business; and “clandestine marriages,” as they were called, became frequent. In 1695, an Act of William III. fined the Parson who assisted at such couplings one hundred pounds for the first offence, and for the second suspended him for three years. This enactment was followed almost immediately by another, which mulcted the clergyman who celebrated or permitted any such marriage in his church as well as the bridegroom and the clerk. The main object of this legislation was to prevent the loss of duties payable upon regularly performed marriages; but it strengthened ecclesiastical discipline.

Thus your correct wedding, then as now, had its tedious preliminaries; but the fashion of the time imposed some other burdens. There was inordinate feasting with music and gifts and altogether much expense and delay. Poor folk could ill afford the business; now and again the rich desired a private ceremony; here and there young people sighed for a runaway match. Also, outside this trim and commonplace century the nation’s life had not that smoothness which seems to us such a matter of course. Passion was stronger and worse disciplined; law, though harsh, was slow and uncertain. How tempting, then, the inducement to needy persons to marry cheaply and without ceremony! Now, London had a number of places of worship called Peculiars, which, as royal chapels, possessions of the Lord Mayor and alderman, or what not, claimed, rightly or wrongly, exemption from the visitation of the ordinary. These were just the places for irregular or clandestine marriages. Peculiars or not, as many as ninety chapels favoured such affairs. Chief among them were the Savoy, the Minories, Mayfair Chapel, and (above all) the Fleet, which—from a very early date to half a century ago—was a famous prison especially for debtors, standing on what is now the east side of Farringdon Street. It had a chapel where marriages were properly solemnised by 1613, and (it may be) earlier; but the records are somewhat scanty. Now, a number of dissolute Parsons were “fleeted” (as the old phrase ran) for one cause or another, and some might live outside the walls but within the rules or liberties of the Fleet, as the ground about the prison was called. These obtained the use of the chapel, where, for a reasonable consideration, they were willing to couple any brace forthwith. What terror had the law for them? Men already in hold for debt laughed at a fine, and suspension was a process slow and like to be ineffectual at the last. The church feebly tried to exercise discipline. On June 4, 1702, the Bishop of London held a visitation in carcere vulgo vocat’ ye Fleet in civitate London. He found one Jeronimus Alley coupling clients at a great rate. ’Twas hinted that Jeronimus was not a Parson at all, and proof of his ordination was demanded; “but Mr. Alley soon afterwards fled from ye said prison and never exhibited his orders.” Another record says that he obtained “some other preferment” (probably he was playing the like game elsewhere).

The legislature, in despair, as it might seem, now struck at more responsible heads. In 1712 a statute (10 Ann. c. 19) imposed the penalty of a hundred pounds on keepers of gaols permitting marriage without banns or licence within their walls. This closed the Fleet Chapel to such nuptials, but private houses did just as well. Broken-down Parsons, bond or free, were soon plentiful as blackberries; and taverns stood at every corner; so at the “Two Fighting Men and Walnut Tree,” at “The Green Canister,” at “The Bull and Garter,” at “The Noah’s Ark,” at “The Horseshoe and Magpie,” at “Jack’s Last Shift,” at “The Shepherd and Goat,” at “The Leg” (to name no more), a room was fitted up in a sort of caricature of a chapel; and here during the ceremony a clock with doubly brazen hands stood ever at one of the canonical hours though without it might be midnight or three in the morning. A Parson, hired at twenty shillings a week, “hit or miss,” as ’twas curiously put, attended. The business was mostly done on Sundays, Thursdays, and Fridays; but ready, ay ready, was the word. The landlord or a servingman played clerk, and what more was wanted?

There were many orders of Fleet Parsons, some not parsons at all. At the top of the tree was the “famous Dr. John Gaynam,” known as the “Bishop of Hell:” he made a large income and in his time coupled legions; and at the bottom were a parcel of fellows who would marry any couple anywhere for anything. The Fleet Parson of standing kept a pocket-book in which he roughly jotted down the particulars of each marriage, transcribing the more essential details to a larger register at home. Certificates, at a varying charge, were made out from these, and the books being thus a source of profit were preserved with a certain care. To falsify such documents was child’s play. Little accidents (as a birth in the midst of the ceremony) were dissembled by inserting the notice of the marriage in some odd corner of a more or less ancient record. This antedating of registers was so common as almost to deprive them of any value as evidence. Worse still, certificates were now and again issued, though there had been no marriage. Sometimes the taverners kept registers of their own, but how to establish a fixed rule?

Not all the “marriage houses,” as they were called, were taverns. They were often distinguished by some touching device: as a pair of clasping hands with the legend “Marriages Performed Within.” A feature of the system was the plyer or barker, who, dressed in ragged and rusty black, touted for Parson or publican, or it might be for self, vaunting himself the while clerk and register to the Fleet. “These ministers of wickedness” (thus, in 1735, a correspondent of The Grub Street Journal) “ply about Ludgate Hill, pulling and forcing the people to some peddling alehouse or a brandy-shop to be married, even on a Sunday stopping them as they go to church, and almost tearing their clothes off their backs.” If you drove Fleetwards with matrimony in your eye, why, then you were fair game:—

Yet the great bulk of Fleet marriages were in their own way orderly and respectable. Poor people found them shortest and cheapest. Now and again there are glimpses of rich or high-born couples: as, in 1744, the Hon. H. Fox with Georgina Caroline, eldest daughter of Charles, second Duke of Richmond, of which union Charles James was issue. One odd species was a parish wedding: the churchwardens thought it an ingenious device to bribe some blind or halting youth, the burden of a neighbouring parish, to marry a female pauper chargeable to them; for, being a wife she immediately acquired her husband’s settlement, and they were rid of her. In one case they gave forty shillings and paid the expense of a Fleet marriage; the rag, tag, and bobtail attended in great numbers and a mighty racket was the result. According to the law then and long after, a woman by marrying transferred the burden of her debts to her husband. So some desperate spinsters hied them Fleetwards to dish their creditors; plyer or Parson soon fished up a man; and though, under different aliases, he were already wived like the Turk, what mattered it? The wife had her “lines,” and how to prove the thing a sham? Husbands, again, had a reasonable horror of their wives’ antenuptial obligations. An old superstition, widely prevalent in England, was that if you took nothing by your bride you escaped liability. Obviously, then, the thing to do was to marry her in what Winifred Jenkins calls “her birthday soot,” or thereabouts. So “the woman ran across Ludgate Hill in a shift,” for thus was her state of destitution made patent to all beholders.

When the royal fleet came in, the crews, “panged” full of gold and glory, made straight for the taverns of Ratcliffe Highway, and of them, there footing it with their Polls and Molls, some one asked, “Why not get married?” Why not, indeed? Coaches are fetched; the party make off to the Fleet; plyers, Parsons, and publicans, all welcome them with open arms; the knots are tied in less than no time; there is punch with the officiating cleric; the unblushing fair are crammed into the coaches; Jack, his pocket lighter, his brain heavier, climbs up on the box or holds on behind; the populace acclaims the procession with old shoes, dead cats, and whatever Fleet Ditch filth comes handy; and so back to their native Radcliffe, to spend their honeymoon in “fiddling, piping, jigging, eating,” and to end the bout with a divorce even less ceremonious than their nuptials. “It is a common thing,” reports a tavern-keeper of that sea-boys’ paradise, “when a fleet comes in to have two or three hundred marriages in a week’s time among the sailors.”

The work was mostly done cheap: the Parson took what he could get, and every one concerned must have his little bit. Thus, “the turnkey had a shilling, Boyce (the acting clerk) had a shilling, the plyer had a shilling, and the Parson had three and sixpence”—the total amounting to six shillings and sixpence. This was a fair average, though now and again the big-wigs netted large sums.

A Fleet marriage was as valid as another; but in trials for bigamy the rub was: Had there been any marriage at all? Some accused would strenuously maintain the negative. In 1737 Richard Leaver was indicted at the Old Bailey for this offence; and “I know nothing about the wedding,” was his ingenuous plea. “I was fuddled overnight and next morning I found myself a-bed with a strange woman and ‘Who are you? How came you here?’ says I. ‘O, my dear,’ says she, ‘we were marry’d last night at the Fleet.’” More wonderful still was the story told by one Dangerfield, charged the preceding year for marrying whilst Arabella Fast, his first wife, was still alive. Arabella and he, so he asserted, had plotted to blackmail a Parson with whom the lady entertained relations all too fond. At ten at night he burst in upon them as had been arranged. “‘Hey’ (says I), ‘how came you a-bed with my spouse?’ ‘Sir,’ (says he), ‘I only lay with her to keep my back warm.’” The explanation lacked probability, and “in the morning” the erring divine acknowledged his mistake:—“I must make you a present if you can produce a certificate” (he suspected something wrong, you see). Dangerfield was gravelled. Not so the resourceful Arabella. “‘For a crown I can get a certificate from the Fleet,’ she whispered; and ‘I gave her a crown, and in half an hour she brings me a certificate.’” The jury acquitted Dangerfield.

The clergyman said to have officiated in both cases was the “famous Dr. Gaynam” (so a witness described him), the aforesaid “Bishop of Hell.” How could he recollect an individual face, he asked, for had he not married his thousands? But it must be right if it was in his books: he never altered or falsified his register. “It was as fair a register as any church in England can produce. I showed it last night to the foreman of the jury, and my Lord Mayor’s clerk at the London punch-house” (a noted Fleet tavern): so Gaynam swore at Robert Hussey’s trial for bigamy in 1733. A familiar figure was the “Bishop” in Fleet taverns and Old Bailey witness-box. At Dangerfield’s trial neither counsel nor judge was very complimentary to him; but he was moved not a whit; he was used to other than verbal attacks, and some years before this he was soundly cudgelled at a wedding—in a dispute about his fees, no doubt. “A very lusty, jolly man,” in full canonicals, a trifle bespattered from that Fleet Ditch on whose banks he had spent many a scandalous year, his florid person verging on over-ripeness, even decay, for he vanishes four years later. Was he not ashamed of himself? sneered counsel. Whereupon “he (bowing) video meliora, deteriora sequor.” Don’t you see the reverend rogue complacently mouthing his tag? He “flourished” ’twixt 1709 and 1740. On the fly-leaf of one of his pocket-books he wrote:

The personal application was obvious; but alas for fame! Even in Mr. Leslie Stephen’s mighty dictionary his record is to seek.

Time would fail to trace the unholy succession of Fleet Parsons. There was Edward Ashwell (1734-1743), “a most notorious rogue and impostor.” There was Peter Symson (1731-1754), who officiated at the “Old Red Hand and Mitre,” headed his certificates G.R., and bounced after this fashion:—“Marriages performed by authority by the Reverend Mr. Symson, educated at the University of Cambridge, and late Chaplain to the Earl of Rothes. N.B.—Without imposition.” Then there was James Landow (1737-1743), late Chaplain to His Majesty’s ship Falkland, who advertised “Marriage with a licence, certificate, and a crown stamp at a guinea, at the New Chapel, next door to the China Shop, near Fleet Bridge, London.” Of an earlier race was Mr. Robert Elborrow (1698-1702): “a very ancient man and is master of ye chapple” (he seems to have been really “the Parson of the Fleet”). His chief offence was leaving everything to his none too scrupulous clerk, Bassett. There is some mention also of the Reverend Mr. Nehemiah Rogers, a prisoner, “but goes at large to his living in Essex and all places else.” Probably they were glad to get rid of him for “he has struck and boxed ye bridegroom in ye Chapple and damned like any com’on souldier.” Mulli praeterea, quos fama obscura recondit. How to fix the identity of the “tall black clergyman” who, hard by “The Cock” in Fleet Market, pressed his services on loving couples? Was he one with the “tall Clergyman who plies about the Fleet Gate for Weddings,” and who in 1734 was convicted “of swearing forty-two Oaths and ordered to pay £4 2s.”?

In 1753 Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (26 Geo. II. cap. 3) put a sudden stop to the doings of those worthies. Save in the case of Jews and Quakers, all marriages were void unless preceded by banns or licence and celebrated according to the rites of the Church of England in a church or chapel of that communion. The Priest who assisted at an irregular or clandestine marriage was guilty of a felony punishable by fourteen years’ transportation. The Bill was violently opposed; and, according to Horace Walpole, was crammed down the throats of both Houses; but its policy, its effects, as well as later modifications of the marriage law, are not for discussion here.

I turn to the registers wherein the doings of the Fleet Parsons are more or less carefully recorded. In 1783 most of those still extant had got into the hands of Mr. Benjamin Panton. “They weighed more than a ton”; were purchased by the Government for £260 6s. 6d., and to-day you may inspect them at Somerset House. There are between two and three hundred large registers and a thousand or more pocket-books (temp. 1674-1753). Not merely are the records of marriages curious in themselves, but also they are often accompanied by curious comments from the Parson, clerk, taverner, or whoever kept the book. The oddest collection is in a volume of date 1727-1754. The writer used Greek characters, though his words are English, and is as frank as Pepys, and every bit as curious. Here are a few samples from the lot: “Had a noise for four hours about the money” was to be expected where there were no fixed rates; but “stole my clouthes-brush,” and “left a pott of 4 penny to pay,” and “ran away with the scertifycate and left a pint of wine to pay for,” were surely cases of exceptional roguery. Curious couples presented themselves:—“Her eyes very black and he beat about ye face very much.” Again, the bridegroom was a boy of eighteen, the bride sixty-five, “brought in a coach by four thumping ladies” (the original is briefer and coarser) “out of Drury Lane as guests”; and yet the Parson had “one shilling only.” He fared even worse at times. Once he married a couple, money down, “for half a guinea,” after which “it was extorted out of my pocket, and for fear of my life delivered.” Even a Fleet Parson had his notion of propriety. “Behav’d very indecent and rude to all,” is one entry; and “N.B. behav^d rogueshly. Broke the Coachman’s Glass,” is another. Once his reverence, “having a mistrust of some Irish roguery,” though the party seemed of better rank than usual, asked indiscreet questions. The leader turned on him with the true swagger of your brutal Georgian bully. “What was that to me? G—— dem me, if I did not immediately marry them he would use me ill; in short, apprehending it to be a conspiracy, I found myself obliged to marry them in terrorem.” Again, he had better luck on another occasion: “handsomely entertained,” he records; and of a bride of June 11, 1727, “the said Rachel, the prettiest woman I ever saw.” (You fancy the smirk wherewith he scrawled that single record of the long vanished beauty!) He is less complimentary to other clients. His “appear^d a rogue” and “two most notorious thieves” had sure procured him a broken pate had his patrons known! How gleefully and shamelessly he chronicles his bits of sharp practice! “Took them from Brown who was going into the next door with them,” was after all merely business; but what follows is not. In 1729 he married Susannah Hewitt to Abraham Wells, a butcher. The thing turned out ill; and in 1736 she came back, and suggested annulment by the simple expedient of destroying the record; when “I made her believe I did so, for which I had a half a guinea.” Nor was there much honour among the crew of thieves. “Total three and sixpence, but honest Wigmore kept all the money so farewell him,” is an entry by the keeper of a marriage house, whom a notorious Fleet Parson had dished. Another is by a substitute for the same divine:—“Wigmore being sent for but was drunk, so I was a stopgap.” I confess to a sneaking fondness for those entertaining rascals, but enough of their pranks.

Of the other places where irregular marriages were celebrated two demand some notice. One was Keith’s Chapel in Mayfair, “a very bishopric of revenue” to that notorious “marriage broker” the Reverend Alexander Keith. His charge was a guinea, and, being strictly inclusive, covered “the Licence on a Crown Stamp, Minister’s and Clerk’s fees, together with the certificate.” No wonder he did a roaring trade! Keith seemed a nobler quarry than the common Fleet Parson, and the ecclesiastical authorities pursued him in their courts. In October 1742, he was excommunicated: with matchless impudence he retorted by excommunicating his persecutors from the Bishop downwards. Next year they stuck him in the Fleet; but, through Parsons as reckless as himself, he continued to “run” his chapel. In 1749 he made his wife’s death an occasion for advertisement: the public was informed that the corpse, being embalmed, was removed “to an apothecary’s in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there until Mr. Keith can attend her funeral.” Then follows an account of the chapel. One authority states that six thousand marriages were celebrated there within twelve months; but this seems incredible. That sixty-one couples were united the day before Lord Hardwicke’s Act became law is like enough. Here took place, in 1752, the famous marriage of the fourth Duke of Hamilton to the youngest of the “beautiful Miss Gunnings,” “with a ring of the bed curtain half an hour after twelve at night,” as Horace Walpole tells. And here, in September 1748, at a like uncanny hour, “handsome Tracy was united to the butterman’s daughter in Craven Street.” Lord Hardwicke’s Act was elegantly described as “an unhappy stroke of fortune” by our enterprising divine. At first he threatened another form of competition:—“I’ll buy two or three acres of ground and by God I’ll under-bury them all.” But in the end he had to own himself ruined. He had scarce anything, he moaned, but bread and water, although he had been wont to expend “almost his whole Income (which amounted yearly to several Hundred Pounds per Annum) in relieving not only single distressed Persons, but even whole Families of wretched Objects of Compassion.” The world neither believed nor pitied; and he died in the Fleet on December 17, 1758.Last of all comes the Savoy. There, The Public Advertiser of January 2, 1754, announced, marriages were performed “with the utmost privacy, decency, and regularity, the expense not more than one guinea, the five shilling stamp included. There are five private ways by land to this chapel, and two by water.” The Reverend John Williamson, “His Majesty’s Chaplain of the Savoy,” asserted that as such he could grant licences; and despite the Act he went on coupling. In 1755 he married the enormous number of one thousand one hundred and ninety; half the brides being visibly in an interesting condition. The authorities, having warned him time and again to no purpose, at last commenced proceedings. But he evaded arrest by skipping over roofs and vanishing through back doors, in a manner inexplicable to us to-day; and went on issuing licences, while his curate, Mr. Grierson, did the actual work at the altar. Grierson, however, was seized and transported for fourteen years: then his chief surrendered (1756), stood his trial, and received a like sentence; the irregular marriages both had performed being declared of no effect.

What now were the amorous to do? Well, there were divers makeshifts. Thus, at Southampton (temp. 1750), a boat was held ever ready to sail for Guernsey with any couple able and willing to pay five pounds. Ireland did not impress itself on the lovers’ imagination: it may be that the thought of that gruesome middle passage “froze the genial current of their souls.” But there was a North as well as a South Britain; and—what was more to the purpose—the Scots marriage law was all that heart could wish. Marriage (it held) is a contract into which two parties not too young and not too “sib” might enter at any time, all that was necessary being that each party clearly and in good faith expressed consent. Neither writing nor witnesses, however important for proof, were essential to a valid union. Not that the Scots law, civil or ecclesiastical, favoured this happy despatch; but the very punishment it imposed only tied the knot tighter. Couples of set purpose confessed their vows, got a small fine inflicted, and there was legal evidence of their union! Ecclesiastical discipline was strict enough to prevent regularly instituted Scots ministers from assisting at such affairs. But any man would do (for, after all, he was but a witness), and the first across the Border as well as or better than another. Now, by a well-known principle of international law, the lex loci contractus governs such contracts: the marriage being valid in Scotland where it took place, was also recognised as valid in England where its celebration would have been a criminal offence! This was curiously illustrated early in the century by the case of Joseph Atkinson. The Border, I must explain, had all along been given to irregular marriages, and different localities in Scotland were used as best suited the parties. Lamberton Toll Bar, N.B., lay four miles north of Berwick-on-Tweed; and here our Atkinson did a thriving business in the coupling line. One fine day he had gone to Berwick when a couple sought his service at the toll-house. A quaint fiction presumes that everybody knows the law; but here it turned out that nobody did, for the bride and groom instead of uniting themselves before the first comer rushed off to Berwick, and were there wedded by Lamberton. And not only was the affair a nullity; but the unfortunate coupler was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for offending against the English marriage laws.

Most of them, however, that went North on marriage bent, took the Carlisle road. A few miles beyond that city the little river Sark divides the two countries. Just over the bridge is the toll-house: a footpath to the right takes you to Springfield. Till about 1826 the North road lay through this village; then, however, the way was changed, and ran by Gretna Green, which is nine and a half miles from Carlisle. These two places, together with the toll-house, are all in Gretna parish; but of course the best known is Gretna Green: “the resort” (wrote Pennant) “of all amorous couples whose union the prudence of parents or guardians prohibits.” The place acquired a world-wide fame: that English plays and novels should abound in references to it, as they had done to the Fleet, was only natural; but one of George Sand’s heroes elopes thither with a banker’s daughter, and even Victor Hugo hymns it in melodious verse, albeit his pronunciation is a little peculiar:

And how to explain the fact that people hurried from the remotest parts of Scotland as well as from England, though any square yard of soil “frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat’s” had served their purpose just as well? The parishioners, indeed, sought not the service of their self-appointed priest; but is there not an ancient saying as to the prophet’s lack of honour among his own people?

Now, if you travelled North in proper style, in a chaise and four, with post-boys and so forth, you went to the “King’s Head” at Springfield, or, after the change of road, more probably to Gretna Hall; but your exact halting-place was determined at Carlisle. The postillions there, being in league with one or other of the Gretna innkeepers, took you willy-nilly to one or the other hostelry. Were you poor and tramped it, you were glad to get the knot tied at the toll-house. Most of the business fell into a few hands. Indeed, the landlords of the various inns instead of performing the rite themselves usually sent for a so-called priest. A certificate after this sort was given to the wedded couple:—“Kingdom of Scotland, County of Dumfries, Parish of Gretna: these are to certify to all whom it may concern that (here followed the names) by me, both being present and having declared to me that they are single persons, have now been married after the manner of the law of Scotland.” This the parties and their witnesses subscribed.

I shall not attempt to trace the obscure succession of Gretna Green priests. Joseph Paisley, who died in 1811, aged eighty-four, was, it seems, the original blacksmith; but he was no son of Tubal Cain, though he had been fisher, smuggler, tobacconist. He united man with woman even as the smith welds iron with iron—thus the learned explain his title. After Paisley, and connected with him by marriage, there was Robert Elliott, and several people of the name of Laing. In some rather amusing memoirs Elliott assures us that between 1811 and 1839 he performed three thousand eight hundred and seventy-two marriages; also that his best year was 1825, when he did one hundred and ninety-eight, and his worst 1839, when he did but forty-two. At the toll-bar there was a different line, whose most picturesque figure was Gordon, the old soldier. Gordon officiated in full regimentals, a large cocked hat on his head and a sword by his side. Here, too, Beattie reigned for some years before 1843. His occupation went to his head, for latterly he had a craze for marrying, so that he would creep up behind any chance couple and begin to mumble the magic words that made them one. The law has ever terrors for the unlettered, and the rustic bachelor fled at Beattie’s approach, as if he had been the pest. The “priests” sometimes used a mangled form of the Church of England service: which irreverence was probably intended as a delicate compliment to the nationality of most of their clients. The fees were uncertain. When the trembling parties stood hand in hand in inn or toll-bar, whilst the hoofs of pursuing post-horses thundered ever nearer, ever louder, or it might be that irate father or guardian battered at the door, it was no time to bargain. The “priest” saw his chance; and now and again he pouched as much as a hundred pounds.

Each house had its record of famous marriages. There was the story of how Lord Westmoreland sought the hand of the heiress of Child, the banker, and was repulsed with “Your blood, my Lord, is good, but money is better.” My Lord and the young lady were speedily galloping towards the border, while Mr. Child “breathed hot and instant on their trace.” He had caught them too, but his leader was shot down or his carriage disabled by some trick (the legends vary), and he was too late after all. He made the best of it, of course, and in due time Lady Sophia Fane, daughter of the marriage, inherited grandpa’s fortune and his bank at Temple Bar. Odder still was the marriage, in 1826, of Edward Gibbon Wakefield to Ellen Turner. It was brought about by an extraordinary fraud, and a week after the far from happy couple were run to earth at Calais by the bride’s relatives. They “quoted William and Mary upon me till I was tired of their Majesties’ names,” was Wakefield’s mournful excuse for submitting to a separation. He was afterwards tried for abduction, found guilty, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment; while a special Act of Parliament (7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 66) declared the marriage null and void. Wakefield ended strangely as a political economist. Is not his “theory of colonisation” writ large in all the text books? A pair of Lord High Chancellors must conclude our list. In November 1772, John Scott, afterwards Lord Eldon, was married at Blackshiels, in East Lothian, to Bessie Surtees, the bridegroom being but twenty-one. Though the Rev. Mr. Buchanan, minister of an Episcopal congregation at Haddington, officiated, it was a runaway match and an irregular marriage. Lord Erskine, about October 1818, was wedded at the “King’s Head,” Springfield, to Miss Mary Buck (said to have been his housekeeper). He was about seventy, and, one fears, in his dotage. A number of extravagant legends still linger as to the ceremony. He was dressed in woman’s clothes, and played strange pranks. He and his intended spouse had with them in the coach a brace of merry-begots (as our fathers called them), over whom he threw his cloak during the ceremony in order to make them his heirs. It is still a vulgar belief in the North that if the parents of children born out of wedlock are married, the offspring, to be legitimised, must be held under their mother’s girdle through the nuptial rites. Now, by the law of Scotland, such a marriage produces the effect noted; but the presence or absence of the children is void of legal consequence. As far as is known, Erskine had one son called Hampden, born December 5, 1821, and no other by Mary Buck. It is worth noting that Robert Burns, on his road to Carlisle in 1787, fell in by the way “with a girl and her married sister”; and “the girl, after some overtures of gallantry on my side, sees me a little cut with the bottle, and offers to take me in for a Gretna Green affair.” Burns was already wed, Scots fashion, to Jean Armour. And the thing did not come off, so that bigamy is not to be reckoned among the poet’s sins.

They were rather sordid affairs in the end, those Gretna Green marriages. So, at least, the Reverend James Roddick, minister of the parish, writing of the place in 1834 in the New Statistical Account, would have us believe. There were three or four hundred marriages annually: “the parties are chiefly from the sister kingdom and from the lowest rank of the population.” A number came from Carlisle at fair-time, got married, spent a few days together, and then divorced themselves. Competition had brought down the priest’s fee to half-a-crown, and every tippling-house had its own official. Nay, the very roadman on the highway that joined the kingdoms pressed his services on all and sundry! And then the railway came to Gretna, and you had the spectacle of “priests” touting on the platform. Alas for those shores of old Romance! In 1856, Lord Brougham’s Act (19 & 20 Vict. cap. 96), made well-nigh as summary an end of Gretna as Lord Hardwicke’s had of the Fleet unions. It provided that at least one of the parties to an irregular Scots marriage must be domiciled in Scotland, or have resided there during the twenty-one days immediately preceding the espousals; else were they altogether void. What an enemy your modern law-giver is to the picturesque! And what an entertaining place this world must once have been!