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.”

Four Decades of “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector”

I’ve been discussing the historical background behind Lillian de la Torre’s mystery short story, “The Great Seal of England.”

In 1943 De la Torre was in her forties and known around Colorado Springs as Lillian McCue, wife of a Colorado College professor. Then she sold that story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

That launched De la Torre’s career as a writer. She was an Ellery Queen favorite for the next four decades. A couple of years after that first sale, she even visited Hollywood to consult on some movies. Eventually she served a year as president of the Mystery Writers of America.

With her “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” stories, Lillian De la Torre invented a new subgenre of whodunnits. Although Melville Davisson Post had written Uncle Abner mysteries set in the ante-bellum past starting in 1911, De le Torre innovated by basing her “detector” and the characters around him on actual historical figures, and crafting her plots around real events.

De la Torre’s first published book was a fictionalized analysis of what happened to Elizabeth Canning in 1753, called Elizabeth Is Missing. She wrote other books in this vein, such as The Heir of Douglas. Though these were originally published as fiction, De la Torre believed she had identified the correct solutions to those historical enigmas, and they’re now presented as “definitive accounts” of the underlying events. (Other authors would differ.)

For her stories about Dr. Johnson, De la Torre had the advantage of James Boswell’s extensive writings about the man. She produced an entertaining pastiche of Boswell’s voice, including not only his language and details but even dialogue structure.

To her credit, De la Torre also recognized the limitations of that narrative approach, as when Johnson’s other and closer biographer, Hester Thrale Piozzi, makes an appearance. “Boswell did not like Mrs. Thrale,” the author noted in an afterword; “he considered her his rival for ‘that great man.’” (Adam Gopnik wrote about Johnson and Thrale for the New Yorker.)

The stories jump around in time to take advantage of different events in George III’s realm. Some involve figures from the American Revolution, such as waxwork artist and spy Patience Wright and scientist and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Mike Grost noted that De la Torre wrote about thefts as often as murders.

In some ways, De la Torre’s stories show the biases of her own time. Dr. Johnson had a servant and heir named Francis Barber (shown above), who had been freed from slavery in Jamaica. De la Torre brought Barber onto the scene in her first published story, but gave him no more life than a piece of furniture. Not until “The Blackamoor Unchain’d” (1974) did he become a full character, and then only for one tale. These days I’m sure authors would see much more potential in Barber’s own life.

There were four collections of De la Torre’s “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” stories, and the Mysterious Press has reissued them in digital form:

• Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector (1946)
• The Detections of Dr Sam Johnson (1960)
• The Return of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector (1985)
• The Exploits of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector (1987)

As of this writing, they’re on sale at a discounted price on the major ebook platforms.

Elizabeth Canning of Connecticut

Elizabeth Canning was a nineteen-year-old houseservant when she disappeared in London in January 1753. She was gone for a month, returning dirty, bleeding, and missing her stays. On recovering, she described being kidnapped by gypsies while coming home from relatives and held captive under pressure to become a prostitute.

The novelist and playwright Henry Fielding investigated Canning’s case in his capacity as a magistrate. In February he accused several individuals of holding Canning captive and stealing her stays; the latter was actually the more serious crime under British law because theft could bring the death penalty.

Crowds mobbed the courthouse during the ensuing trial, reportedly frightening away witnesses ready to testify the defendants were nowhere near the village where Canning said she’d been held. The verdict came in guilty, with one woman sentenced to hang.

One of the judges, with the delightful name of Sir Crisp Gascoyne, found Canning’s story improbable and her supporters dislikable, so he decided to investigate further. He found more witnesses to exonerate the accused and lots of holes in Canning’s testimony. In March, Gascoyne indicted the young woman for perjury. George II remanded the death penalty (there were many more death sentences in Georgian England than actual executions), though the defendants remained in prison.

Over the next several months, Canning lay low, and the British press and bar divided into two camps. Both Gascoyne and Fielding published pamphlets about the case. Some of Canning’s witnesses recanted, others were indicted for perjury. People’s prejudices about class, ethnicity, religion, and gender all came out, and of course the arguments turned personal. The closest analogue in our time is the Tawana Brawley case of 1987-1988.

In the spring of 1754 Canning presented herself at Old Bailey to be tried for perjury. Dozens of witnesses testified on both sides, though no one answered the question of where the defendant had been in January 1753. The court finally decided Canning had lied under oath and sentenced her to a short imprisonment followed by exile. Canning agreed to emigrate to the Connecticut colony as an indentured servant. She continued to have devoted supporters.

Canning arrived in America in late 1754 and took up residence with Elisha Williams in Wethersfield. Williams’s career had included being a town minister, rector of Yale College, both chaplain and colonel of the colony’s regiment, and a lawyer, judge, and political representative. Theologically Williams appears to have been an early “New Light.” Canning didn’t work for him for long, however, because he died in 1755.

In late 1756 Elizabeth married a local man named John Treat, and their first child arrived seven months later. They had three more children before Elizabeth died unexpectedly in 1773. The Connecticut Courant in nearby Hartford noted the passing of “Mrs. Elizabeth Treat,…formerly the famous Elizabeth Canning.”

The couple’s oldest child, Joseph Canning Treat, joined the Continental Army in 1777 and served until 1783. Later he received a pension. Thus, members of the Sons of the American Revolution and Daughters of the American Revolution could be descended from the notorious convict Elizabeth Canning.