The romance of the case attracted a great crowd to Bow Street when the notorious swindler was brought up for examination by Sir Richard Ford on the 6th of December, and the investigation appears to have been difficult and tedious, for he appeared before the magistrate each Monday morning during the next three weeks. On one of these occasions his attire is described as “respectable, though he was quite _en déshabillé_,” his dress being a black coat and waistcoat, fustian breeches, and boots, while his hair was worn tied behind without powder, and he was permitted to appear unfettered by irons. Among other requests he asked for a private room at Tothill Fields Prison, as he objected to herd with common pickpockets, and he desired also to be sent as soon as possible to Newgate. Although his wishes were not granted, the solicitor for his bankruptcy made him an allowance of a guinea a week. Most pathetic was the loyalty of the wife and benefactress whom he had used so cruelly. The poor woman, who was the mother of two children, travelled from Devonshire--a journey occupying a couple of days and a night--to spend Christmas Day in prison with her unfaithful husband. Numerous celebrities visited the court during the examination of the impostor. Amongst those who were noticed more than once was the Duke of Cumberland, drawn possibly by a fellow-feeling for the culprit, and Monk Lewis, on the look-out for fresh melodrama. At last all the charges against him were proved to the hilt--his offence against the law of bankruptcy, his repeated frauds on the Post Office, the two bills of exchange forged at Keswick. Still, although the iniquities of his past were fully revealed, and although a shoal of unpaid debts, fraudulently contracted, stood against his name, one circumstance alone was responsible for the great popular interest, and aroused also universal abhorrence. John Hadfield had been damned to everlasting fame as the seducer of Mary of Buttermere. The extent of his baseness was disclosed in the course of the proceedings at Bow Street. It was found that the poor girl was destined to become the mother of his child, and that he was in debt to her father for a sum of £180. Indeed, the motive of his mock marriage became apparent, for he had endeavoured to persuade the trusting parents to allow him to sell the little inn on their behalf, and possibly, but for the interference of Justice Hardinge, he might have succeeded. Mary refused to prosecute him for bigamy, but she was induced to send a letter to Sir Richard Ford, which was read in court at Hadfield’s fourth examination. “Sir,” she wrote, in the first agony of her cruel disenchantment, “the man whom I had the misfortune to marry, and who has ruined me and my aged and unhappy parents, always told me that he was the Honourable Colonel Hope, the next brother to the Earl of Hopetoun.”