The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 2/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841Pelham, Camden
History
The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 2/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841
Pelham, Camden
Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England)
Scarlett for
the defence. After a trial which occupied the whole day, and in the
course of which the circumstances which we have already detailed were
proved in evidence, the jury returned a verdict of Guilty against all
three defendants. The most remarkable part of the case was the
examination of David Laing, the blacksmith at Gretna. His evidence
simply amounted to proof, that the Messrs. Wakefield and Miss Turner had
come to Gretna, being apparently agreeable to the match, and that he
joined their hands, and heard their acknowledgment in the usual form.
The young lady, he said, presented him with a twenty-shilling note, and
afterwards "embraced her husband very agreeably." The fellow, in his
examination, declared that he had formerly been a merchant (that is, a
Scotch pedlar), and that he had been forty-five years employed in
joining hands at Gretna Green. He had 30_l._ or 40_l._ for this job. In
appearance the old man had been made to assume an air of respectability.
Some one had dressed him in a black coat, and a velvet waistcoat and
breeches of the same colour; the shape of his hat being that commonly
known as the "clerical cock." He seemed a vulgar fellow, though not
without shrewdness, and that air of familiarity which he might be
supposed to have acquired by the freedom necessarily permitted by
persons of a superior rank in life, to one who was conscious that he had
the power of performing for them clandestinely a most important
ceremony. On his entering the witness-box, he leaned forward towards the
counsel with a ludicrous expression of gravity on his face, accompanying
every answer with a knitting of his wrinkled brow, and a significant
nodding of his head, which gave peculiar force to the quaintness of
phraseology which he assumed, and occasionally convulsed the court with
laughter.
On the following day, Messrs. E. G. and W. Wakefield submitted to a
verdict of Guilty on the second indictment; and upon the two findings
the male defendants were committed to Lancaster Castle, there to remain
until the ensuing term, when they were to be brought up for judgment in
the Court of King's Bench.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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