A marriage that was really an abduction, and, as such, became a matter of extraordinary notoriety, to match the amazing audacity of the man who perpetrated it, was that of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Ellen Turner, in 1826. The form of marriage was performed at Gretna Hall, on March 8th. Wakefield was at the time a widower, aged thirty. He had been educated at Westminster School, and by the influence of his first wife’s family had been given an appointment at the British Legation in Turin. This he resigned, and was living on his wits in Paris when he chanced to hear of Miss Turner, a beautiful girl sixteen years of age, and heiress to a great fortune. She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant—afterwards M.P. for Blackburn, 1832-41—living at Pott Shrigley, in Cheshire, and was at the time at a boarding-school in Liverpool. Wakefield invented an ingenious and plausible story for marrying the girl and so securing her money. Coming to England, he called at the school in Liverpool with a letter purporting to be in her father’s handwriting, stating that he was ill and she was to return home in company with the bearer of the letter. No suspicions were awakened, and the girl was allowed to depart with him. During the journey by post-chaise, Wakefield, who seems to have been a scoundrel of wonderful address, told her that her father’s illness was really assumed, and that he was then, a ruined man, flying from his creditors to Scotland. They were to meet him at Carlisle and cross the Border together. At Carlisle, of course, no father was to be found, and Wakefield then declared that affairs were so serious that only a marriage with himself would save her parent from the horrors of a debtors’ prison. If she married him, he would at once advance her father £60,000. The story seemed of the crudest and most unconvincing kind, but it imposed upon Ellen Turner, and she agreed, in order to save her father, to marry Wakefield at Gretna. The day following the marriage, Wakefield hurried her with him across England, and to Calais. From that strategic point he proposed to communicate with the girl’s father, and come to terms, but Wakefield very soon found himself arrested by the French police and sent over to England, to stand his trial at the Lancaster Assizes, for abduction, Mr. Turner in the meanwhile claiming his daughter. Wakefield and a brother who had aided him were awarded the very light sentence of three years’ imprisonment apiece. In the following month the marriage was annulled by a special Act of Parliament. A curious point was raised during the trial, Serjeant Cross, for the prosecution, stating that “Had the offence been committed on English ground, the defendants would in the course of the law have been condemned to an ignominious death.”