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The Birtwhistles of Craven and Galloway
had only been publicly married in 1805, they had been secretly married before his birth. It had been necessary to keep the first marriage secret because his father had been promised a substantial legacy by his sister- in- law, Mrs Thomas Birtwhistle, provided he remained unmarried. The Leeds Mercury recorded the court case in considerable detail, including salacious circumstantial evidence which the judge allowed the defence lawyers to put forward, and which must have influenced the jury - that Mrs Thomas Birtwhistle and Mary Purdie, John’s mother, had both been Alexander’s mistresses at the time of John’s birth - that Mary Purdie’s illicit affair with Alexander had been at the house of a Mrs McGeogh where there was a bed or in some green fields at Gatehouse - that the marriage had not been consummated in a bed, but in an office at the cotton factory - that Mary Purdie had entertained an Irish butcher when Alexander had been absent from a farmhouse where she had lived with Alexander as his mistress - that is was unlikely that Alexander, a gentleman, would have wished to marry an illiterate seamstress, the sister of his factory overseer. When in Galloway the Vardills had lived at Alexander’s residence in Gatehouse High Street, opposite the two room tenement where Mary Purdie had lived with her father. Alexander clearly made no attempt to conceal his affair with Mary Purdie, having his first child by her when the Vardills were in Galloway, and we can only assume that the defence evidence was provided to her lawyers by Agnes Vardill herself. Both in York in 1825 and at the Kings Bench in London in 1826 the juries found for Agnes Vardill. The Birtwhistle freehold property at the bottom of Skipton High Street lay between Caroline Square on the north, Birtwhistle Yard on the east, and Queens Court on the west, names which suggest that the Birtwhistle family and their Skipton neighbours supported Queen Caroline’s cause in her attempt to attend the coronation from which she had been excluded by her husband in 1820. It is probably no coincidence that Henry Brougham, who had risen to prominence on the northern circuit as a result of championing Queen Caroline in 1820, was chosen by the Vardills as one of their two defence lawyers in 1825 and 1826. Brougham was however to play a highly controversial role in the case when he later entered the House of Lords as Lord Chancellor, claiming that he had previously been mistaken; the question should not have been whether John Birtwhistle’s parents were married at the time of his birth, but whether English or Scottish law should have been used in determining the outcome. Since John Birtwhistle had been born in Scotland, the case should have been heard under Scottish law; Brougham now supported the plaintiff, and wished the House of Lords to review the case. No judgement was arrived at by their lordships in 1830, or in 1835, but Brougham’s dogged persistence eventually led to John Birtwhistle winning his case in 1841. That the outcome of Birtwhistle vs Vardill was not a major blow to Anna’s finances may be judged from the casual tone of a letter to Mary and Caroline Denman on the subject in 1841. She first thanked the two sisters for remembering her daughter’s birthday, and only then briefly refers to the lawsuit..…Ten thousand thanks dear Fairies for your remembrance of the 22^nd. Agnes will tell you how we have suffered by influenza which still keeps Sarah in bed. Maud sent us a mistletoe. I have written to HCR the dutiful thanks claimed by his attention to our lawyers dull business and good wishes he should have had at Xmas has he not been among poets and philosophers at Rydal. (Sarah and Maud were daughters of the Skipton corn miller, and the Rydal poet was William Wordsworth).
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