Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 1944 by Peter Davies Ltd.

  This new edition published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  University of Hertfordshire Press

  College Lane

  Hatfield

  Hertfordshire

  AL10 9AB

  UK

  © Copyright by the Executors of the Estate of Magdalen Perceval Maxwell 1944

  © Copyright introduction and critical notes by Rowland Hughes 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-909291-34-8

  Design by Arthouse Publishing Solutions Ltd

  Printed in Great Britain by Charlesworth Press, Wakefield

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Finis?

  Part I

  THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

  1 Lady Skelton at Home

  2 The Reticence of Miss Isabella Skelton

  3 Lady Sophia Met Her Match

  Part II

  THE STORY OF BARBARA SKELTON

  1 The Wedding

  2 Midday at Maryiot Cells

  3 Midnight on Watling Street

  4 First Kill

  5 The Lady and the Steward

  6 At the Sign of the Golden Glove

  7 Dark Designments

  8 The Knot is Broken

  9 The Heavy Hill

  10 Summer’s Date

  11 Lovers’ Meeting

  12 Cover Her Face…

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN IT WAS first published in 1944, Magdalen King-Hall’s historical novel Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton was an immediate bestseller. The novel is set in the late seventeenth century, and tells the story of Barbara Skelton, a beautiful, aristocratic young woman who, to escape the tedium of married life, disguises herself as man, takes to the road as a highway robber, and carries on an adulterous affair with a fellow criminal. King-Hall’s book was reprinted twice in little over a year, and the rights were almost immediately purchased (for the sum of £5,000) by Gainsborough Studios, one of the most successful British film studios of the 1940s. By the early spring of 1945, a film adaptation was in production. Directed by Leslie Arliss, and starring Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Patricia Roc, The Wicked Lady premiered at the Gaumont cinema, on Haymarket in London, on 19 November 1945. Despite a fairly dismissive critical reception, it went on to become the highest grossing movie of 1946 at the British box office.

  The film nearly suffered disaster at its very first public showing, however. The première, a charity event, had been promoted for weeks in the press. It was the first glamorous, star-studded movie première to take place in London since the end of the war, and it was due to be attended by Queen Mary, the widow of George V and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II. On the morning of the screening, the first reviews were published, many of which suggested that the lurid content of the film was far too shocking for the Queen Dowager to see. Marlborough House requested a private screening from the studio, and an equerry was despatched to watch the film before deciding whether it was suitable for Royal eyes. After an anxious couple of hours, the equerry emerged and agreed to allow Queen Mary’s attendance, and Lockwood later recalled that they spent the film watching her from behind, trying to gauge whether she was offended or not.1 She wasn’t, but despite that, The Wicked Lady retained its salacious reputation, to the extent that the devoutly Methodist J. Arthur Rank, owner of the Rank Organisation which distributed Gainsborough films in the UK, refused to sanction a sequel to the film, despite its massive commercial success, because he found its depiction of criminal behaviour and extramarital sex too disturbing. However, the film is now regarded as the quintessential example of the period costume melodrama in which Gainsborough specialised during the 1940s, and which proved immensely popular with cinema audiences, particularly women. As such, although critical opinion of its cinematic merits still varies, its status as a classic of British cinema is assured.

  The story of Barbara Skelton is a fictional re-imagining of the legend of Katherine Ferrers, a long established piece of folklore from the English county of Hertfordshire. Born in the mid-seventeenth century, Ferrers was a scion of a respectable and wealthy family and heir to a considerable estate. According to legend, having married young and being poorly treated by her husband, Katherine supposedly donned men’s clothing and became a highwaywoman (in some versions of the story, she did so in the company of a low-born lover). While committing one of her crimes, she was shot and, having ridden home, died of her wound on the steps of her family home in the village of Markyate. The narrative does not end there; for it is claimed that Katherine’s restless spirit proceeded to haunt her house and neighbourhood for several centuries. It is impossible to tell how long the story has been circulating orally – in textual form, it dates back only to the nineteenth century – but the tale of Katherine Ferrers is still relatively well-known in Hertfordshire to this day. Indeed, a pub by the name of The Wicked Lady stands at the end of Ferrers Lane, on the edge of Nomansland Common, near the village of Wheathampstead, reputedly the scene of many of her crimes.

  Although both legend and film have endured, King-Hall’s novel has almost disappeared from memory, despite the fact that it belonged to the same significant cultural and historical moment as the film and clearly spoke with equal power to a predominantly female audience just emerging from the Second World War. This critical edition of the novel aims to recover King-Hall’s work from its relative obscurity and introduce a modern audience to a hugely enjoyable novel that is sometimes startling in its progressive attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and which, when understood in relation to its genre and its historical context, tells us much about the hopes, fears and anxieties of a generation living through a period of profound transformation. Many modern retellings of the legend (in newspapers, tourist brochures, and on the internet), feature details which are lifted wholesale from the novel and the film, so that the line between history, tradition and fiction has become increasingly blurred. The story of the Wicked Lady is an interesting example of how folk tradition can continue to evolve once it has been appropriated by other media, and even draw new energy from this appropriation. To understand how this has happened, this introduction will focus on the women at the narrative’s heart: the historical Katherine Ferrers, around whom the legend grew; the author, Magdalen King-Hall, a popular and talented novelist whose work is now little read; and the fictional Barbara Skelton, King-Hall’s re-imagining of Ferrers.

  Although Katherine Ferrers is supposed to have been shot and killed in the mid-1600s, there is no textual record of any scandalous rumours attached to her name until much later. Henry Chauncy’s Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire (1700) simply mentions her as the brief owner of the manor of Flamstead; Robert Clutterbuck’s The History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford (1815–27) similarly makes no mention of the legend. This is not conclusive, of course; the authors of such monumental, serious histories may have had no interest in scandal, gossip or superstition. Given the explosion of print culture in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, and the public taste for lurid tales of crime, the total absence of the legend from the printe
d record during this period suggests that it is of a more recent genesis, almost certainly nineteenth-century.

  Although it is impossible to say how long the story had been in circulation, it was certainly well-established by 1855, when Frank E. Smedley published a narrative poem entitled ‘Maud Allinghame: A Legend of Hertfordshire’. The author claims that the poem is ‘founded on a story current in the part of Herts where the scene is laid’.2 The poem itself is a piece of doggerel, telling the tale of the eponymous Maud, sole heir to the Allinghame estate, who resists the entreaties of various suitors during the day, and takes to the highway at night. After various adventures, the town council sends to London and hires ‘bold Jonathan Blaker/The famous thief-taker’; he pursues and shoots Maud, who dies on the steps of Allinghame Hall.

  A couple of decades later, in the third volume of his three-volume History of Hertfordshire (1870–81), John Edwin Cussans provides a full summary of the legend which, ‘in the present year, 1878, is religiously believed in by the majority of the inhabitants of Markyate Street’, and has remained the basic outline ever since:

  It is said that, in the disguise of male attire and mounted on a coal-black horse with white fore-feet, she robbed travellers on the highway, but at length was fatally wounded at No Man’s Land when so engaged. She was found lying dead outside a door leading, by a secret staircase, to a chamber where she changed her dress. The doorway was built up, and so remained for certainly a hundred and fifty years.3

  A further detail is added, namely that after a fire in 1840 the owner, Mr Adey, wanted to re-open the doorway but could not get any of the local workmen to do the job for fear of the ghost of the Wicked Lady, having to send to London for labourers instead. Moreover, he mentions that some of the labourers witnessed an apparition of Lady Ferrers dangling from a tree and ‘took [it] upon themselves to saw the branch off, and were greatly surprised that they were not handsomely rewarded by the owner for their zeal’.4

  What exactly do we know about the real Katherine Ferrers, the young woman whom folklore has associated with the figure of the Wicked Lady? Drawing on the work of assiduous local amateur historians, we can be fairly certain of the bare outlines of her life, and unfortunately those details are not easily reconciled with the legend itself.5 Katherine was born in the village of Bayford in Hertfordshire, on 4 May 1634, the daughter of Knighton Ferrers and his wife Katherine (nee Walters). The Ferrers family were of distinguished lineage, and had been substantial landowners in Hertfordshire since the reign of King Henry VIII (1509–47), who had awarded the manors of Flamstead, Markyate, Ponsborne and Bayford, amongst other properties in the county, to Katherine’s great-great-grandfather George Ferrers (c.1500–79), as a reward for his loyal service. These had remained in the Ferrers family for more than a century. When Katherine was only six years of age, in April 1640, her father died. Five months later, her grandfather, John Ferrers, also died and the young Katherine became the sole heir to the considerable Ferrers fortune. Her mother quickly remarried Sir Simon Fanshawe, of Ware in Hertfordshire, and it is clearly no coincidence that this marriage took place on 21 September 1640, a mere four days after her grandfather’s death and four days before he had even been buried. By marrying the elder Katherine, Fanshawe gained indirect control of her daughter’s newly acquired wealth; when Katherine senior died in Oxford in February 1642, the young heiress was made a ward of court, on payment of a sum of £1200 by the Fanshawe family, and she was left in their care.

  For the next six years, while the Civil War raged around the country, she lived with her stepfather’s sister, Alice Bedell, in Hamerton, Huntingdonshire (now part of Cambridgeshire). In April 1648, when not quite fourteen years old, she was married to Thomas Fanshawe, the fifteenor sixteen-year-old nephew of her stepfather, in what looks very much like a marriage of convenience. The Fanshawes were Royalists, and their staunch support of King Charles I in the English Civil War had cost them much, leaving them in desperate financial straits. Following the passage of the Sequestration Act in 1643, Parliament had the power to confiscate the income and property from the estates of known Royalists and place them under the control of local commissioners, and Ware Park, the Fanshawes’ home, had suffered this fate. According to John Barber, by 1650 its contents and furniture had largely been stripped out and sold to fund Parliament, and even when Thomas Fanshawe Sr (Simon’s brother) successfully petitioned to have the estate returned, the family were on the point of financial ruin. It had become both a necessity and an inevitability that the Ferrers family estates would be sacrificed to restore the Fanshawe family fortunes.

  Katherine conveyed the title of her properties to her new husband on their marriage, in accordance with the common-law doctrine of coverture, whereby a married woman could not own property herself, and indeed had few, if any, legal rights of her own. One by one these properties were sold. Markyate Cell, the supposed base of her operations as a highwaywoman, and the scene of her death in the legend, was sold by 1657 to one Thomas Coppin, who had actually been a tenant in the property even earlier, certainly by 1655. It seems certain that Thomas and Katherine were not resident in Markyate at the time of her death in 1660, and possibly may never have lived there at all. As Colin Field points out, ‘[o]wnership did not imply occupation’. ‘Had the Ferrers family lived at Markyate,’ Field suggests, ‘there would be entries in the Caddington registers to prove it. There are none, apart from three very early entries in 1558, 1576, and 1580’.6 From 1610 onwards, the house seems to have been rented by a family called Norton, and then by the Coppins; the Ferrers themselves resided at Bayford, just south of the county town of Hertford in east Hertfordshire, where Katherine was born, like her father before her, and where both her father and grandfather were buried.

  Death and burial records indicate that Katherine Fanshawe died in 1660, and was buried at Ware on 13 June. An account in the memoirs of her aunt, Lady Ann Fanshawe, suggests that her death may have occurred in London, in childbirth, rather than from a bullet-wound suffered during a failed highway robbery. Lady Ann was in London for the triumphal re-entry of King Charles II on the occasion of his restoration to the throne, on 29 May 1660. She notes that ‘My niece Fanshawe lay then in the Strand, where I stood to see the King’s entry with his brother, surely the most pompous show that ever was; for the hearts of all men in this Kingdom moved at his will.’ Although, as Field notes, the phrase ‘my niece Fanshawe’ does not unambiguously apply to Katherine, it probably does; and it seems highly likely that Thomas Fanshawe would have been in London for the restoration of his monarch, given that he had been a staunch supporter of the exiled King, and would have expected and desired to be rewarded for that loyalty. Lady Ann makes this self-interest apparent when she continues, ‘The next day I went with other ladies of the family to congratulate his Majesty’s happy arrival, who received me with great grace, and promised me future favours to my husband and self.’7 Again, Field argues persuasively that ‘it would be incredible for Catherine not to have been there’.8 If she were there, as self-interest would seem to dictate, and if ‘my niece Fanshawe’ really does refer to Katherine, then the phrase ‘lay then in the Strand’ might seem to indicate that she was pregnant, as the phrase ‘lying in’ was commonly used to describe the period immediately before and after a woman gave birth. Both Barber and Field note that Thomas Fanshawe had taken part in Booth’s Uprising, a Royalist conspiracy to overthrow the Protectorate which had taken place in 1659. On the failure of the uprising, Fanshawe was imprisoned between September 1659 and February 1660, so if Katherine was pregnant, and had been with Thomas shortly before his arrest, then she might have been nearly full-term. If she had not been with Thomas the previous autumn, then she could have been no further along than four months. Even so, it seems likely that Katherine was in London for the Restoration at the very end of May 1660, and possibly was pregnant. By 13 June, she was being interred in the family tomb in Ware. It seems highly improbable that in the intervening time she left London for Markyate, w
here she had never lived, took to the highway, and was shot and killed. Death from complications resulting from childbirth or a miscarriage is the more likely explanation.

  Despite the lack of evidence to support the truth of the legend, it was certainly widely believed and reproduced from the late nineteenth century onwards. It was Cussans’s version of the story, to all intents and purposes, which was retold by Christina Hole in her book Haunted England (1940), and as the title of her book implies, Hole was most interested in the supernatural elements of the tale. She recounts the story of ‘Mr Adye’ (sic) and his reluctant workmen, before bringing the legend up to date:

  The discovery of her secret room had no effect upon Lady Ferrers’ spirit, for she continued to wander for many years afterwards, the last record of her appearance being early in the present century, when she was seen by a number of people at a parish tea.9

  Although brief, Hole’s account in turn provided Magdalen King-Hall with the idea for her fictionalisation of the legend, as she acknowledges in the ‘Author’s Note’ at the beginning of the novel.

  Before discussing the novel in detail, it is worth pausing to place it in the context of King-Hall’s life and career.10

  Magdalen King-Hall was born on 22 July 1904 in Chelsea, the youngest daughter of Admiral Sir George King-Hall, and his wife Olga (née Ker).11 The family had a distinguished naval history, dating back to the late eighteenth century. She spent her early years in London, before moving to Australia from 1911–13, where her father was appointed naval commander-in-chief of the Australia station. The family then returned to Britain upon the Admiral’s retirement, and settled in Hove, near Brighton. Having relied on governesses for a rather informal education until this point, King-Hall was sent to boarding school at Downe House in Berkshire, and then to St Leonards school, near St Andrews in Scotland. She spent some time in Switzerland and France, learning to speak French fluently, before returning to live in Hove. It was here, between 1923 and 1924, that she wrote her first novel, though her father bought a house on Tite Street in Chelsea, and the family moved back to London shortly before its publication in 1925.