I am delighted to welcome a new guest to All Things Georgian, Elaine Thornton who trained as a linguist, has lived and worked in Germany, Russia and Cyprus. She has had a varied career, as an army officer, project manager, and development officer.
Her first book, a biography of the German-Jewish opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, Giacomo Meyerbeer and his Family: Between Two Worlds, was published by Vallentine Mitchell in 2021.
She is currently researching the life of Sir Henry Bate Dudley and is going to tell us more about a certain crim. con that he was front and centre of. It was a case that doesn’t make for a pleasant read – You have been warned!
In 1788 the Reverend Henry Bate Dudley, known as the ‘Fighting Parson’, found himself facing a charge of adultery, or ‘criminal conversation’. A clergyman, journalist, dramatist and duellist, Bate Dudley had been ordained in the Church of England, but had soon realised that his talents and temperament were better suited to the rough and tumble of the flourishing Georgian newspaper industry. He had been editor of the Morning Post from 1772 to 1780, when he had founded his own newspaper, the Morning Herald.
A modern history of journalism, the Encyclopaedia of the British Press, describes Bate Dudley as ‘undoubtedly, the star of his day’. The Georgian writer and wit Horace Walpole was less flattering, calling him ‘the worst of all the scandalous libellers’. Bate Dudley’s newspapers specialised in high-class scandal and ‘celebrity’ gossip, and at the time of Walpole’s comment, in 1780, he had been convicted of libelling the 3rd Duke of Richmond, by accusing him of treason. He was subsequently sentenced to a year in the King’s Bench prison.
The charge of adultery against Bate Dudley concerned the wife of a Mr Edward Dodwell. Mrs Dodwell’s first name was never revealed publicly, but documents held in Lambeth Palace archives, relating to a later application by her husband for a legal separation, identify her as Frances Dodwell, née Jennings. Edward Dodwell was demanding £3,000 in damages from Bate Dudley for ‘alienating his wife’s affections’ (adultery was treated as a case of trespass on another man’s property, as a wife was considered a ‘chattel’ in law).
The Dodwell’s and Bate Dudley’s lived near each other in the Chelmsford area. The chief witness for the prosecution, Mrs Dodwell’s servant Elizabeth Serjeant, claimed that in September 1780, Mrs Dodwell had gone to Southend for a holiday without her husband. Bate Dudley had followed her there and had visited her frequently in her lodgings. One night, Serjeant claimed, she had opened her mistress’s door at two in the morning and had seen ‘Mr Bate and Mrs Dodwell on the floor in an act of adultery’.
Mrs Serjeant added that the affair had continued after Mrs Dodwell’s return to Chelmsford, citing an instance in February 1782, when Mrs Dodwell had returned from a carriage ride with Bate Dudley, and Mrs Serjeant, ‘having seen certain parts of Mrs Dodwell’s linen, was enabled to judge of her conduct that night’.
Bate Dudley submitted a plea of ‘not guilty in two ways’. In the first place, he claimed that he was innocent of the charge. The second part of the plea was related to the legal time limit on prosecutions for adultery. A charge could not be upheld if the alleged offence had taken place more than six years prior to the commencement of the action and Bate Dudley’s second plea was that he was not guilty ‘within six years’. Bate Dudley’s defence counsel, James Mingay, referred to October 1781 as the relevant date, so this would presumably exclude the evidence dating from 1780.
Mingay opened the defence by revealing that Edward Dodwell had a very strange hobby. He was passionately interested in the dissection of dead bodies, which he carried out in the couple’s home. A visitor to the Dodwells’ house testified that
‘Mr. Dodwell had a room near his bedchamber, which was called a dissecting room, where he [the visitor] once saw an arm half dissected.’
According to the defence, Dodwell did not bother to clean himself up before making advances to his wife, but ‘approached her with his hands covered with all the nauseous filthiness of such pursuits … while his hungry hounds were quarrelling over the flesh he had been slicing’.
The prosecution’s response to these revelations was the perfectly reasonable one that, even if Dodwell had
‘a laboratory wherein he dissected dead bodies … this surely could hardly give any other person a right to commit adultery with his wife’.
Bate Dudley’s next line of defence was that Mr Dodwell had positively encouraged his wife to take lovers. After she had had an affair with a baronet, Dodwell had sent his wife abroad, where she lived ‘in open adultery’ with a British army officer. On her return to England, he had installed her in lodgings in London, where he visited her for sex ‘as if she had been his kept girl’. Dodwell later introduced her to a retired military man, a General Desaguliers, whose mistress she became.
In defence counsel’s view, Dodwell had been ‘an accessory to the prostitution of his own wife’ and was in no position to accuse Bate Dudley of alienating Mrs Dodwell’s affections by breaking up a happy marriage. Dodwell himself unwittingly contributed to this defence, by suggesting that Bate Dudley was only one of many: ‘I have stuck the fork in the dung-hill, up came Mr. Bate, and it is his chance, and I cannot help it.’
Bate Dudley’s final submission was a knock-out blow. He produced a witness to testify that he had actually been confined in the King’s Bench prison, undergoing his sentence for libelling the Duke of Richmond, in February 1782, when Elizabeth Serjeant claimed to have seen him consorting with Mrs Dodwell in Chelmsford. The King’s Bench books were brought to the court to verify the fact. The prosecution’s star witness had lost all credibility, and the jury took twelve minutes to find in favour of the defendant.
‘The Fighting Parson’ had triumphed in court, but was he really innocent? His wife, Mary, seems to have had her suspicions. One day in 1781, she had arrived at her husband’s room in the King’s Bench prison – where, characteristically, he was holding a musical party for his friends – and had met Frances Dodwell, who was just leaving, on the stairs. The unexpected encounter had resulted in a lively quarrel between the two women, and a temporary coolness between Mary and her husband.
Legal opinions on the case differed. A year after the King’s Bench trial jury had found Bate Dudley not guilty, the ecclesiastical Court of Arches granted Edward Dodwell’s application for a separation – based on his wife’s adultery with Henry Bate Dudley. Two years after that judgement, the Court of Doctors’ Commons, after several days considering the evidence for a divorce, ‘finally dismissed the suit of Edward Dodwell Esquire against his Lady’.
Sources:
Anon, Adultery Trial, in the Court of King’s Bench … between Edward Dodwell, Esquire, Plaintiff, and the Rev. Henry Bate Dudley, Defendant, for Crim. Con., H. D. Symonds, 1789
Dennis Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the British Press 1422-1992, Macmillan, 1992
Lambeth Palace Library and Archive, Arches D611
Lloyd’s Evening Post
Town and Country Magazine, 1788, supplement
Horace Walpole, Last Journals, Bodley Head, 1910
All Things Georgian 
This was thrilling and fascinating! So many questions!
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Thanks Debbie. It just goes to show that fact is often stranger than fiction.
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