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CHAPTER 1
A WANDERER IN ENGLAND
Sarah cuts a recklessly romantic figure. Reckless, because of the disregard for her own safety. Travelling alone on foot was a brave thing to do at a time when the newspapers reported instances of women being robbed on the highway, and in some cases being raped and murdered. Reckless also because of the potential dangers for a young woman knocking on strangers' doors, and the ever-present danger of being caught and punished for her dishonest activities. But, despite (or possibly because of) her dishonesty, there is something romantic about Sarah – a lonesome traveller living on her wits to obtain free board and lodging, money and clothing; travelling by coach or carrier's waggon when she managed to dupe some unwary victim into giving her money, otherwise tramping the rough roads of eighteenth-century England wondering where she would be sleeping that night.
Another female adventuress of the eighteenth century, Charlotte Charke, who lived from hand to mouth as a strolling player, travelled around the country by all manner of means. When she had no money, she had to walk unless she could get a lift for some part of her journey by 'mounting up into a Hay-Cart, or a timely Waggon'. On one occasion, she and a companion, being penniless, set off on foot from Devizes, and 'after a most deplorable, half-starving Journey through intricate Roads and terrible Showers of Rain, in three Days Time, we arrived at Rumsey, having parted from our last Three Halfpence to ride five Miles in a Waggon, to the great Relief of our o'er-tired Legs'.
At the time when Sarah was wandering around England, the country was undergoing what became known as 'turnpike mania'. Between 1690 and 1750, only about 150 turnpike trusts had been created, mainly covering the radial roads from London and sections of the great post roads. Between 1751 and 1772 there was a massive burst of speculative activity. During those twenty-one years a further 389 trusts were added, covering some 11,500 miles of road. This was partly the result of a period of low interest rates, which meant that those with money could get a better rate of return by investing in a turnpike than by lending to the government. It was also due to the increasing number of coach and waggon services, which meant that the old arrangements for maintaining the major highways were becoming increasingly untenable.
The existence of a turnpike trust did not necessarily mean that there was an immediate improvement to the roads under its control. There was a period of construction, and before the great road builders of the early nineteenth century came along, individual surveyors had differing ideas about how best to maintain a highway, with mixed results.
Those highways not covered by turnpike trusts were still subject to sixteenth-century legislation. The Highways Act of 1555 placed the burden of the upkeep of the highways on individual parishes. Each parish had to appoint two surveyors of the highways and each householder had to work under the supervision of the surveyors for eight hours a day for four days a year (or pay someone else to do the work), repairing and maintaining those highways within the parish boundaries that ran to market towns. Roads that did not lead directly to market towns were not covered by the act. An act of 1562 extended the period of labour to six days a year, and the better-off inhabitants were obliged to provide carts and draught animals. This system was known as 'statute labour'.
Statute labour was deeply unpopular and of limited effectiveness; parishioners had no interest in maintaining a road from which they received no benefit. A correspondent to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1767 complained that:
Teams and labourers coming out for statute work, are generally idle, careless, and under no commands [...] They make a holiday of it, lounge about, and trifle away their time. As they are in no danger of being turned out of their work, they stand in no awe of the surveyor.
During the course of her adventures Sarah travelled great distances. Each journey took her over some roads that had been turnpiked and others that were still maintained by the local parish. In general, the roads were bumpy, rutted and full of potholes. When the potholes grew too deep, it was the practice to throw large stones or rocks in them. In dry weather, the roads became dusty and every time a horse or a coach went by, it raised a great cloud of choking dust. In wet weather the roads became sticky, treacherous swamps, and in the winter they were impassable for wheeled vehicles and slow, filthy and tedious for horse riders and pedestrians.
Before the hedge building that followed the various Enclosure Acts, the minor roads of England were often no more than well-trodden paths across open fields where it was easy for the unwary traveller to get lost. The writer Arthur Young, who travelled all over England at about the same time as Sarah, described one road as 'going over a common with roads pointing nine ways at once, but no direction-post'. The major roads were furrowed with deep ruts caused by the wheels of heavy carriers' waggons, and these ruts were full of water in wet weather. On one journey, Arthur Young complained that he was 'near being swallowed up in a slough'. On the turnpike between Preston and Wigan, Young measured ruts in the road that were 4ft deep.
In 1727 Jonathan Swift remarked 'in how few hours, with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown to him as the Antipodes'. By the time Sarah was travelling across England, little had changed. The accents and dialect words spoken by a person in one part of the country would still have been scarcely intelligible to a person living in another. When Sarah met people in her travels who had rarely ventured beyond their parish boundaries, she probably had difficulty trying to make out what they were saying, and what those local words meant.
At some stage during the course of her travels in 1765, Sarah called on Robert Hudson, a lawyer, at his home in the small market town of Brough in Westmorland, on the road from London to Carlisle. Sarah introduced herself as Viscountess Lady Wilbrihammon. It seems that Robert and his family were so honoured to have such a distinguished visitor that they entertained her as their guest for several days. She told them that she was an acquaintance of Lord Albemarle and would be able to procure a lieutenancy in the army for Robert's son-in-law (Lord Albemarle, the great-grandson of Charles II, was lieutenant-general of the 3 Regiment of Dragoons).
In the eighteenth century, commissions in the armed forces and offices in government were effectively private property, given as patronage and offered for sale. Most commissions in the army were obtained by purchase, and could be re-sold. As far as civil appointments were concerned, the offices were in the gift of the Crown or prime ministers and others acting on behalf of the Crown. Once an office had been granted, usually in return for political favours, it could be sold or bequeathed to heirs when the office holder died. All the offices provided an income for the office holder, either through fees – as in the case of the keepers of the London jails, who purchased their offices in the expectation of making a profit from charging fees from the prisoners – or from a share of revenues, as in the case of tax collectors. Where the office was too onerous, or where the office holder had managed to obtain several appointments, he could pay a deputy to do the work at a fraction of the remuneration he was receiving. Many of the offices were simply sinecures to which no significant duties were attached.
The sale of offices was so established that it even featured in newspaper advertisements. An advertiser in The Times was selling 'A Genteel Place under Government' that did 'not require much attendance', which came with a salary of £100 a year. Another advertisement offered between 1,000 and 2,500 guineas to 'any Lady or Gentleman who will establish the Advertiser in a permanent Place of adequate Salary in any of the Public Offices under government'.
These arrangements gave scope for imposters like Sarah to pretend to be in a position to be able to appoint a person to a lucrative post, or arrange for such appointment to be made in return for cash. In 1773 a person calling herself the Honourable Elizabeth Harriet Grieve appeared at the Public Office in Bow Street and was committed to Newgate to await her trial for defrauding a number of people by pretending to obtain various government posts for them.
Mrs Grieve appeared to be in a position to have those places at her disposal. She said she was the first cousin to the prime minister, Lord North; second cousin to the Duke of Grafton; and closely related to Lady Fitzroy. She added verisimilitude to those claims by bribing Lord North's servants to let her park her coach outside his door for hours at a time. Even more convincing was the common sight of the coach belonging to the up-and-coming politician, Charles James Fox, outside her own door. She had befriended Fox, who was financially desperate as a result of incurring gambling debts; she told him that a Miss Phipps, an heiress with a fortune of £90,000 from the West Indies, was anxious to meet him, and 'was very desirous of a matrimonial connection'.
Mrs Grieve told Fox that a marriage could easily be arranged, but not yet, as Miss Phipps was still on her way from the Caribbean. Just as they were about to meet, their meeting was further delayed by Miss Phipps catching smallpox. Then there was yet another delay because Mrs Grieve told Fox that Miss Phipps preferred men with light-coloured hair, so he must powder his eyebrows. When the story of Fox and the imaginary heiress broke, it gave rise to two satirical poems: 'Female Artifice; or, Charles F-x Outwitted', published in February 1774; and 'An Heroic and Elegiac Epistle from Mrs Grieve in Newgate, to Mr C- F-', which was printed in the March 1774 issue of the Westminster Magazine.
It turned out that Mrs Grieve's victims included the following:
William Kidwell, who paid her £30 on pretence of obtaining for him the appointment of Clerk of the Dry Stores in the Victualling Office; William Kent of Streatley in Berkshire, who charged her with defrauding him of £30 in cash and a conditional bond for £230 on pretence of procuring the office of a Coast Waiter. Kent left his business in Berkshire and moved his wife and three children to London in anticipation of starting his new career; Elizabeth Cooper, who charged her with defrauding her husband of £62 on a similar pretence 'in Consequence of which he died of a broken Heart'.
Another of her victims was a Mr Greenleaf, a Quaker of Ipswich, who said he gave her £50 and a bond for £1,350 which was to be the consideration money for being appointed as a Commissioner of the Stamp Duties. According to the newspapers: 'The Impudence of this Woman was astonishing. She gave as a Reason why she did not procure him the Place, that he had three Bastards by his Servant Girl, and had been expelled [from] the Meeting-House to which he belonged.'
At her trial on 27 October 1774, Mrs Grieve was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to be transported for seven years. At eight o'clock in the morning, on 29 November 1774, she walked from Newgate to Blackfriars Bridge with her fellow convicts, including a Miss Roach, who was transported for receiving a watch from the highwayman Sixteen String Jack. She was put on board a lighter to travel down to Blackwall as the start of her journey across the Atlantic. She sailed to America on the Thornton convict ship, a vessel we will encounter later in this story.
We know that Sarah was in London towards the end of 1765. It may be that Robert Hudson paid for her to travel to London, ostensibly to obtain the lieutenancy, possibly by the stagecoach that left the White Lion at Kendal. The coach took two nights and three days to complete the journey from Kendal and cost £3 7s for an inside seat. Adding the cost of refreshments and other expenses on the road, the overall cost of the trip to London would not have been far short of £5.
It was not uncommon for women to travel alone by stagecoach. Parson Woodforde sometimes found that one of his fellow passengers was an unaccompanied woman. In order to travel great distances at the usual speed of between 5 and 7 miles an hour in summer – slower in winter – the coaches had to leave their inns in the early hours of the morning and not arrive at their destination until late at night. Travelling by coach forced passengers to socialise with each other; four strangers who were thrust together in the confines of a coach for up to 18 hours at a time, with breaks to share meals at roadside inns, generally found it easier to talk to each other than to endure awkward silences. When Sarah travelled by coach, she was probably able to pick up information from her new-found travelling companions about the wealth, political views and religious leanings of individuals in a particular district and other gossip that might point her in the direction of a potential new target.
As can be seen from the cost of the trip from Kendal to London, travelling by coach was not cheap. One way of saving money journeying by coach was to travel half-price as an outside passenger. Until much after Sarah's time when seats were fitted on the roofs of coaches, travelling as an outside passenger was not for the faint-hearted. You either had the choice of sitting on the curved roof of the coach with only a handle to hold on to as the coach bounced over the uneven roads, or travelling in the basket at the back of the coach, sharing the space with loose and heavy iron-nailed and sharp-cornered luggage as the coach hurtled downhill. Whichever option was taken, there was no protection from the weather.
A much safer way of travelling cheaply was to travel by waggon. This is a method that Sarah may have used for some of her journeys. As well as carrying goods, the covered waggons usually had planks or benches for passengers. The waggons were large carts covered by a canvas hood, pulled by up to eight strong horses. Waggons had the advantage that the passenger fares worked out at about only a penny a mile and were less attractive to highwaymen than coaches or chaises because of the imagined poverty of the passengers. However, the waggons usually travelled at walking pace and covered no more than 30 miles a day.
London
The London Sarah knew in the 1760s was a filthy, stinking, noisy, dangerous city that covered the 5 miles east to west from Limehouse to Hyde Park Corner and about 2½ miles north to south from Shoreditch to the last buildings in Blackman Street, Southwark. Into that space was crammed a population estimated at around 750,000 (at a time when the next largest town in England, Bristol, had a population of about 50,000).
As her coach drew near to London, Sarah would almost certainly have smelled London before she saw it, surrounded as it was by a chain of smoking brick kilns, pig farms, rubbish heaps and laystalls.
The laystalls were great mounds of human waste mixed with cartloads of animal dung and other filth that had been shovelled off the streets. Night-soil men, otherwise known as rakers, collected the shit in buckets from the bog-houses of buildings with gardens and from the cesspits in the basements of buildings without gardens. They emptied their buckets into carts and drove to the outskirts of town to dump their load.
The (very) minor poet, Charles Jenner, feigning frustration in his search for pastoral bliss in the countryside surrounding London, wrote:
Alas for me! What prospects can I find To raise poetic ardour in my mind?
Where'er around I cast my wand'ring eyes,
Long burning rows of fetid bricks arise,
And nauseous dunghills swell in mould'ring heaps,
While the fat sow beneath their covert sleeps.
The smells of the brick kilns, the hogs and the laystalls that circled the town were supplemented by the smells of London itself. The stink of sea-coal smoke combined with the other city smells and the stench of the Thames, which was an open sewer, meant that when the wind was in the right direction, people could smell London from several miles away.
The French travel writer Pierre-Jean Grosley was also in London when Sarah was there in 1765. He said there was a constant fog covering London that was caused by smoke from:
The sea-coals made use of in kitchens, apartments, and even the halls of grand houses; and by coals burnt in glass-houses, in houses where earthenware is manufactured, in blacksmiths and gunsmiths shops, in dyers yards, &c. all which trades and manufactures are established in the very heart of London [...] This smoke, being loaded with terrestrial particles, and rolling in a thick, heavy atmosphere, forms a cloud, which envelops London like a mantle; a cloud which the sun pervades but rarely [...] The vapours, fogs, and rains, with which the atmosphere of London is loaded, drag with them in their fall the heaviest particles of the smoke; this forms black rains, and produces all the ill effects that may justly be expected from it upon the cloaths of those who are exposed to it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Impostress"
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Copyright © 2019 R.J. Clarke.
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