Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (2 page)

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.
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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'.
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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.'
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Again, Field argues persuasively that ‘it would be incredible for Catherine not to have been there'.
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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, where 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.
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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.
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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).
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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.

This novel,
The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion, 1764–5
, made an astonishing and unexpected impact, and would remain King-Hall's most successful work until
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
two decades later. It is a playful but convincing recreation of the intimate diary of a young Anglo-Irish woman called Cleone Knox, purportedly written during her travels around various European countries in the mid-eighteenth century. The prefatory material to the diaries claimed that they had been
discovered and edited by Knox's descendent, the equally fictional Mr Alexander Blacker-Kerr. King-Hall's publisher, Thornton Butterworth, was responsible for the book's careful marketing and publicity. King-Hall's name was not attached to the book, so that it appeared, at first glance at least, to be a genuine diary. It was taken as such by a number of reviewers, including Lord Darling in
The Sunday Times
, who hailed it as an important literary discovery. After these enthusiastic pre-publication reviews appeared in the autumn of 1925, the canny Butterworth postponed its release while more copies were printed, and when it finally went on sale in December it became a bestseller. Experts in eighteenth-century literature quickly questioned its provenance, however, and over the next six months speculation turned to the true authorship of this literary ‘hoax'. On 24 June 1926, a headline on the front page of
The Daily Express
declared it the ‘Cleverest Hoax of the Century', while the front page of
The New York Times
read: ‘Girl Tricks the World with Literary Hoax, Intended as a Joke'. King-Hall – who had never intended any such deception when she wrote the book, and had relied only on her own general knowledge, and what she could glean from Hove Public Library – found herself propelled into a brief period of literary celebrity.

King-Hall capitalised in a modest manner upon this small degree of fame, working as a journalist during the next few years, and producing several more novels which did not garner the same degree of attention. In 1929, she married Patrick Perceval Maxwell, actually a distant cousin, who was working for the Sudan Cotton Plantation
Syndicate. For the next three years, King-Hall spent winters in the Sudan and (wives being forbidden from remaining during the hot season) split her summers between London and Ireland, where her husband's family lived. When not in the Sudan, she continued to write, both novels and journalism, and when a family inheritance allowed Patrick to quit his job, they returned to live in Chelsea. Her first son, Richard, had been born in 1930; her second son was born seven years later, and a daughter three years after that. In 1938, the family moved again, this time to County Down in Northern Ireland, to run a farm close to the Perceval Maxwell family home. It was here, after producing only three modestly successful novels during the 1930s, that King-Hall entered her most prolific period of authorship, and that she wrote
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
– the novel for which she is most often remembered today.

During the 1940s, packages of books would regularly arrive at their Irish home from the London Library, which supplemented her own library to form the basis of her research. According to her son, Richard, her method of composition was remarkably relaxed: she did not insist on scholarly isolation, instead writing longhand, in pencil, while sitting in the company of her family, if they were at home. However, the children were looked after by an Austrian nanny, and later sent away to boarding school, so she did have time to herself to devote to writing.

In 1953, the family relocated again, to County Waterford in Ireland, where King-Hall continued to write quite prolifically. In the late 1950s, however, she began to manifest signs of Parkinson's Disease, and the last of her twenty
books (seventeen novels and three non-fiction works) was published in 1962. Following the death of her husband Patrick in 1968, Magdalen King-Hall spent the final three years of her life living with her son Richard's family in King's Langley, Hertfordshire, and she died in Hemel Hempstead hospital on 1 January 1971.

King-Hall's works were always historical novels, though there was ostensibly little consistency or pattern to her choice of subject matter – unlike her friend and contemporary Margaret Irwin, for example, best known for her
Young Bess
trilogy of novels about Queen Elizabeth I. Like Irwin, however, her attention was inevitably caught by stories of women – the character of Barbara Skelton has a forerunner, for instance, in her novel
Lady Sarah
(1939), which fictionalises the life of the notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat, Lady Sarah Lennox. King-Hall was inspired partly by locations with which she was familiar – several of her novels have an Irish setting – but more commonly she would read widely in history and folklore and keep her eyes peeled for interesting stories which she might embroider into fiction. At the time she wrote
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
, King-Hall had no direct knowledge or association with Hertfordshire, though she would end her life there. Indeed, she transplants her protagonist's home from Markyate in Hertfordshire to the fictional Maiden Worthy in Buckinghamshire, just across the border.