Today in History: Abduction

On this day (March 7) in 1827, thirty-year-old Edward Gibbon Wakefield abducted 15-year-old Ellen Turner and married her in a bid to obtain a fortune from her wealthy parents. This was not the first time Wakefield had employed such a scheme. Ten years earlier he had eloped with 17-year-old Scottish heiress, Eliza Pattle, and convinced her mother to give the young couple 70,000 pounds to avoid a scandal. When Eliza died giving birth to her third child four years later, he began looking for another opportunity to enrich himself.

He found it in young Ellen Turner, who was released to him from her bordering school on the basis of a forged note. He then convinced her that her father had gone bankrupt and had fled England to avoid his creditors. He further convinced her that her father could still be saved if she would marry him because the bankers had agreed to transfer some of her father’s estate to Ellen’s husband. The poor girl was convinced to slip across the border to Scotland with him and marry him. The new couple then made their way to France, always “about to meet up” with her father.

In the meantime, Wakefield contacted Ellen’s parents and told them that their daughter was now married, but the girl’s father chose not to try and avoid a scandal. Instead he went to the Foreign Secretary for help and pursued Wakefield with the police to France. Wakefield claimed that as the girl was married to him, her father could not take her away from him, but the French authorities disagreed. Wakefield, his brother and his stepmother were tried, found guilty, and sentenced to three years in prison.

Wakefield went on to become a politician in New Zealand with an interest in prison reform. After Ellen’s marriage to Wakefield was annulled by Act of Parliament, she was married to a wealthy neighbor at the age of seventeen. She died two years later giving birth to her daughter.