The reputation for
accuracy of the Gurney shorthand system invented by my 5x great grandfather
Thomas Gurney was won in the law courts of the eighteenth century. I wonder
sometimes what Thomas would have made of the fact that the system which he
developed in order to record Baptist sermons proved itself in the reporting of
sensational court hearings, which Thomas’s children Joseph and Martha then
published to pander to the public’s lust for lurid detail.
Joseph Gurney (1744-1815)
Between 1772 and
1786 they published over twenty accounts of the more scandalous trials of the
day. The fullness and accuracy of their transcriptions won them a good name for
difficult work, and the family firm began to be engaged either by interested
private organisations or by the government to record proceedings in parliamentary
enquiries and committees. In time this led to the family firm’s appointment as
official shorthand writers to the Houses of Parliament.
One of the first
such trials to be recorded by Joseph Gurney was that of Frederick Calvert, 6th
Baron Baltimore (1731-1771). His formal title was “The Right Honourable The
Lord Baltimore,” but there was absolutely nothing to honour in this despicable
man.
Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron Baltimore
(1731-1771)
Educated at
Eton, Calvert inherited the proprietorship and governorship of the colony of
Maryland at the age of twenty, on the death of his father. The Barons Baltimore
had owned Maryland since the time of Frederick’s great great grandfather Caecillius
Calvert. He, the 2nd Baron, named the settlement of Baltimore in the
colony after the family’s manor in Ireland. Frederick County in the state is
named after the 6th Baron, who took no other interest in the colony
at all. To him it was just a source of income to fund his extravagant, rakish
lifestyle in Europe.
He had as little
regard for women as he did for his responsibilities in America. His marriage was
a failure, and his wife of five years died in 1758 from injuries sustained when
she “fell” from an open carriage in which her husband was also travelling. Foul
play was suspected but not proved.
In
Constantinople, James Boswell recorded, Calvert “lived luxuriously and inflamed
his blood … and was constantly taking medicines …he is living a strange, wild,
life, useless to his country, except when raised to a delirium, and must soon
destroy his constitution.” He was thrown out of Constantinople on suspicion of
keeping a private harem, and on his return he built one in part of his London
home. He kept a string of mistresses, one of whom later wrote Memoirs of the Seraglio of the Bashaw of
Merryland, by a Discarded Sultana. In it she claimed that he was as
ineffective in bed as he was in Maryland. But he left a trail of illegitimate
children, none of whom he supported.
Sarah Woodcock Forcibly Introduced to Lord Baltimore –
a contemporary engraving of Frederick Calvert’s crime
The event that
brought him to court in 1768, and to the shorthand skills of Joseph Gurney, was
the alleged abduction and rape of a London milliner called Sarah Woodcock. Like
many rapists, his defence was that she had consented; and the jury agreed that
she had not tried hard enough to escape. Calvert was acquitted; but his
reputation in England was destroyed and he left for Europe, never to return.
His arrival in
Vienna is recorded: “In 1769 my Lord was travelling with eight women, a
physician, and two negroes, which he called his corregidores, who were
entrusted with the discipline of his little seraglio. When the chief of police
requested him to declare which of the eight ladies was his wife, he replied
that he was an Englishman, and that when he was called upon to give an account
of his sexual arrangements, if he could not settle the matter with his fists,
it was his practice to set out instantly on his travels again.” He died of a
fever in Naples two years after that, aged 39, mourned by few. The Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine reported:
His
Lordship had injured his character in his life by seduction, so that the
populace paid no regard to his memory when dead, but plundered the room where
his body lay the moment it was removed.
The TRIAL of FREDERICK CALVERT, Esq., Baron of
Baltimore, in the Kingdom of Ireland FOR a Rape on the Body of Sarah Woodcock, AND OF Eliz. Griffinburg, & Ann Harvey, Otherwise Darby, as ACCESSARIES Before the Fact, for Procuring, Aiding and Abetting Him in Committing the Said
Rape
(an Edinburgh publication of a transcription of the
trial)
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