Chudleigh (Elizabeth, Countess of Bristol) The Trial of Elizabeth Duchess Dowager of Kingston for Bigamy, before...the House of Peers, initial imprimatur leaf, slight worming to upper margin, contemporary half calf, spine ruled in gilt with red morocco label, for Charles Bathurst, 1776 § Trial (The) of Elizabeth Canning, Spinster, for Wilful and Corrupt Perjury..., light spotting, contemporary calf, gilt, Thomas Rawlinson...for John Clarke..., [1754], both a little rubbed, folio (2)

⁂ Two celebrated trials of the Georgian era. The self-styled Duchess of Kingston, a coarse and flighty woman, lived a life of scandal, dissipation and social decadence. She was married secretly in 1744 to the Hon. Augustus John Hervey, grandson of the 1st Earl of Bristol, but they were soon separated and had no further contact. Twenty years later she married the Duke of Kingston while still married to Hervey. The Duke died after only a few months leaving his wife the whole of the estate on the condition that she remained a widow. Hervey, meanwhile, wished to remarry, and was anxious to prove his first marriage in order to file for divorce. She was tried by her peers for bigamy and found guilty; she fled to the continent and resumed her scandalous lifestyle in Paris, Rome and St. Petersburg, where she set up a brandy distillery.

The maidservant Elizabeth Canning claimed she had been abducted by gipsies in order to excuse her absence from home. The first trial resulted in the death sentence being passed on the gipsy Mary Squires. The verdict was reviewed, and Canning in her turn was tried for perjury, found guilty, and transported to New England. The examining magistrate in the first trial was the novelist Henry Fielding.