Ellen Turner and the Founder of New Zealand
Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796 – 1862) was a British politician who played a key role in the colonization of Australasia, and is considered by many to be the founder of New Zealand. Before that, however, Wakefield had earned a footnote in history as the criminal defendant in a scandalous case involving the abduction and marriage of a 15 year old wealthy heiress.
Wakefield had been a diplomatic courier at the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars, before eloping with a 17 year-old wealthy heiress in 1816. It netted him a marriage settlement from her father worth about U$7 million in 2018 dollars. However, his wife died soon after childbirth in 1820, and although now wealthy, Wakefield wanted more money to launch a political career. That quest eventually led him in 1827 to Ellen Turner, the only child of a wealthy textile manufacturer.
However, Ellen was 15, and there was zero chance of her father consenting to the marriage. Undaunted, Wakefield hatched a plot with his brother to elope with Ellen, expecting that her parents would eventually relent and respond as his first wife’s parents had. Accordingly, Wakefield sent a carriage to Ellen’s boarding school in Liverpool, with a message to the headmistress stating that Ellen’s mother was dying, and wished to see her daughter immediately.
Ellen was then taken to a hotel in Manchester, where Wakefield told her that her father’s business empire had collapsed, and that Mr. Turner was now a fugitive, on the run from his creditors. He then convinced Ellen that his banker uncle had agreed to release some funds that would save her father, but only on condition that she wed Wakefield, and that her fugitive father had consented to the marriage.
Ellen agreed, so Wakefield took her across the border to Scotland, whose marriage laws were less strict, and they were married by a blacksmith. Eventually Ellen asked to see her father, and Wakefield promised to make it happen, but the meetings always fell through. Eventually, he convinced her that her father had gone to France, and wanted his daughter and her husband to follow him.
In the meantime, Wakefield had written Ellen’s father, informing him of the wedding. He was disappointed in his expectation that Mr. Turner would react as his first wife’s father. Instead, Ellen’s father, who also happened to be High Sheriff of Cheshire, called in favors from the British Foreign Office, who sent a lawyer and a policeman to France, where they found Turner and Ellen in a Calais hotel. Ellen was returned to her father, and Wakefield and his brother were eventually arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The marriage was eventually annulled by Parliament.
