t the man whom she loved was one whom she never could
marry. In fact, the object of her fondness was Spencer Cowper, who was
already married. She at length wrote to him in language which she never
would have used if her intellect had not been disordered. He, like an
honest man, took no advantage of her unhappy state of mind, and did his
best to avoid her. His prudence mortified her to such a degree that
on one occasion she went into fits. It was necessary, however, that he
should see her, when he came to Hertford at the spring assizes of
1699. For he had been entrusted with some money which was due to her
on mortgage. He called on her for this purpose late one evening, and
delivered a bag of gold to her. She pressed him to be the guest of her
family; but he excused himself and retired. The next morning she was
found dead among the stakes of a mill dam on the stream called
the Priory River. That she had destroyed herself there could be no
reasonable doubt. The coroner's inquest found that she had drowned
herself while in a state of mental derangement. But her family was
unwilling to admit that she had shortened her own life, and looked about
for somebody who might be accused of murdering her. The last person
who could be proved to have been in her company was Spencer Cowper. It
chanced that two attorneys and a scrivener, who had come down from town
to the Hertford assizes, had been overheard, on that unhappy night,
talking over their wine about the charms and flirtations of the handsome
Quaker girl, in the light way in which such subjects are sometimes
discussed even at the circuit tables and mess tables of our more refined
generation. Some wild words, susceptible of a double meaning, were used
about the way in which she had jilted one lover, and the way in which
another lover would punish her for her coquetry. On no better grounds
than these her relations imagined that Spencer Cowper had, with the
assistance of these three retainers of the law, strangled her, and
thrown her corpse into the water. There was absolutely no evidence of
the crime. There was no evidence that any one of the accused had any
motive to commit such a crime; there was no evidence that Spencer Cowper
had any connection with the persons who were said to be his accomplices.
One of those persons, indeed, he had never seen. But no story is
too absurd to be imposed on minds blinded by religious and political
fanaticism. The Quakers and the Tories joined to