The Case of Mary Squires

Back in 2014 I wrote about Elizabeth Canning, a young Englishwoman whose brief disappearance in 1753 became a sensation in the courts and the press.

Eventually Canning was convicted of perjury and transported to Connecticut. A couple of years after arriving in America, she married, had children, and led an apparently normal life for a colonial housewife until dying in 1773. One of her sons served in the Continental Army.

Lancaster University’s EPOCH history website just published James Peate’s article about Mary Squires, a woman Canning falsely accused of keeping her confined.

Peate writes:

According to Canning, Squires ‘took her by the hand, and asked me if I chose to go their way’, an insinuation that she become a prostitute, offering her fine clothes if she agreed. Unhappy with her answer, Squires slashed Canning’s petticoats and confined her in a loft with only a quarter loaf of bread, until twenty-seven days later when she was able to jump from an upstairs window and escape.

Because assault was a civil matter, the case was instead pursued as one of theft of the petticoats Squires had slashed, which being the value of ten shillings meant that if found guilty Squires would face execution. Despite bringing forth a witness who testified to Mary being elsewhere during the alleged kidnapping, she was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. . . .

The trial’s judge, Lord Mayor of London Sir Crisp Gascoyne, had been unhappy with how the trial had proceeded. He was upset that Canning’s supporters had prevented witnesses for the defence from appearing and he was unconvinced by Canning’s testimony. His investigation found that the primary witness for the prosecution, Virtue Hall, had only agreed to testify under the threat of arrest from Henry Fielding – writer of Tom Jones and by 1753 a magistrate. This revelation aided Gascoyne’s investigation in obtaining a pardon for Squires . . .

Yet despite Squires’ acquittal, the case brought forth a wave of antiziganism in a media storm of newspaper stories, satirical prints, and pamphlets that were printed on the case.

“Antiziganism”? That’s hostility to Romani or gypsies, like Squires. The press often referred to her as “the Gypsy” rather than by name. Prints caricatured her features and portrayed her performing magic and telling fortunes, never part of the court case. Supporters of Canning called for a revival of capital punishment for vagrants, an anti-traveler law that England had instituted centuries earlier. (Eventually, in 1783, the government repealed that largely unenforced law.)

According to British newspapers, Mary Squires died in early 1762 in Surrey; “There were near one hundred lights, and forty of the Gypsy sort were mourners.” The parish recorded her name as “Mary Moore, stranger.”