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A Narrative of the Affair between Mr. Creswell, and Miss Sc–pe, address’d to G–v–e Sc–e, Esq. By which may be discover’d the Falsities, Misrepresentations, &c, in a Letter in the General Evening-Post, October 31; signed Lancelot Lee.

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First editions, presenting both sides in a notorious bigamy scandal that inspired at least two fictionalisations – Love and Avarice (1749), and Eliza Haywood’s Dalinda; or, the double Marriage (1749); popular interest in the case assisted the government in passing the Marriage Act in 1754, ostensibly to protect innocent women but largely to secure the transmission of property.

Thomas Estcourt Cresswell (1712–88) ‘began his career as a free merchant trading to India and China, but soon gave this up and about 1732 began to lead a hand-to-mouth existence in England. He planned to marry an heiress, and when in 1742 he became entangled in an affair with his penniless cousin Elizabeth Scrope, he pacified her with a … Fleet marriage. About 1746 [actually 1743/4], his financial difficulties being acute, he contracted a second marriage with Anne Warneford, an heiress whom he believed to be in poor health and unlikely to live more than a year’ (History of Parliament online). He had had two children with Warneford (who actually outlived Cresswell), but after Elizabeth Scrope sued Creswell for an estate in Sidbury that he had promised her, the Cresswell-Warneford marriage was declared void and the two children bastardised. However during the search of Fleet records for the case, a third even earlier marriage was found, negating both later matches.

A periodical and pamphlet war ensued, and the charge against Cresswell was led by Lancelot Lee, a rival suitor of Elizabeth’s. In Cresswell’s Narrative he attempted to defend himself against accusations that included not just bigamy but also violence – and in doing so tarred Scrope with ‘an unmerited Load of Infamy’ (Answer) and laid thickly into Lee. Cresswell was explicit about their sexual relationship but paints Scrope as ‘the instigator, a promiscuous and dangerously provocative woman who insists he arrange a problematic marriage’ (Wilputte). The aggrieved Scrope’s much longer work dismantles the Narrative point by point and quotes heavily from their correspondence. In particularly it points to the difficulty of rescuing a reputation once tarnished: ‘let those Women, of outrageous Virtue, who raise themselves, as they imagine, by triumphing in my Defeat, reflect how soon it may be their own—A Thousand little Accidents may blast the most flourishing, a Thousand trifling Calumnies obscure the brightest, Reputation; against which it may be as impossible for them to guard, as it has been for me …. I was Miss Scrope, with the fairest of Characters, caressed by all my Acquaintance …. I now am Miss Scrope, thought of by too many as represented in the Narrative’.

Sadly for Scrope, Cresswell weathered his infamy without great issue, became an MP, and fathered further illegitimate children. Scrope went on to marry Lancelot Lee in February 1751, but she lived only until December that year.

Provenance:
Harry Lancelot Lee (1759–1821), son of Lancelot Lee by his second wife Ann Elizabeth (née Michel), evidently acquired later for the family interest.

See Wilputte, ‘Haywood’s Tabloid Journalism: Dalinda: or, The Double Marriage and the Cresswell Bigamy Case’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 14:4 (2014).