Some Distinguished Victims of the ScaffoldBleackley, Horace
History
Some Distinguished Victims of the Scaffold
Bleackley, Horace
Criminals -- Great Britain; Executions and executioners; Trials -- Great Britain
About the end of the third week in August the member of Parliament,
whose passion, we are told, was a rod and fly, left Grassmere, and, for
the sake of the char-fishing, took up his quarters at the little inn at
Buttermere. So pleased was he with the district, that he contemplated
the purchase of an estate, and Mr Skelton, a neighbouring landowner,
went with him to inspect a property near Loweswater. During his sojourn
at the Char Inn he paid frequent visits to Keswick to meet his friend
John Crump. Although wishing, for the sake of quiet and seclusion,
to travel incognito, Colonel Hope seems to have been a gregarious
person, and could not help extending the number of his acquaintances.
At the ‘Queen’s Head’ Keswick, where his Liverpool friend was in the
habit of stopping, he came across a kindred spirit in Colonel Nathaniel
Montgomery Moore, who had represented the town of Strabane in the
recently extinct Irish Parliament.
Since the two had much in common, a close intimacy ensued; but there
was another reason for Colonel Hope’s friendly advances. A pretty young
lady of fortune, to whom Mr Moore was guardian, was one of his party,
and the new acquaintance began to pay her the most evident attention.
Colonel Hope, in fact, always had been remarkable for his insinuating
behaviour in the society of women, and since his arrival in the Lake
District he had been concerned in an affair of gallantry with at least
two local maidens far beneath him in station. However, this was a
pardonable weakness, for the Prince himself, and his brothers of York
and Clarence, did not disdain to stoop to conquer. But on the present
occasion the gay Colonel apparently had fallen in love, and when,
before very long, he asked the lady to be his wife, he was accepted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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