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Historic Love and Marriages From Hell

Khalid Elhassan September 22, 2020 31 min

Jerry Lee Lewis - Myra Gale Brown — Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride, back home after a disastrous overseas trip. The Commercial Appeal

28. New Zealand’s Founder and His Criminal Love

Bust of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Wikimedia

Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796 – 1862) was a British politician who played a key role in the colonization of Australasia. He 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 fifteen-year-old.

Wakefield had been a diplomatic courier at the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars. Then he seduced a seventeen-year-old wealthy heiress in 1816, and got her to fall in love and elope with him. That netted him a marriage settlement from her father worth about U$8 million in 2020 dollars. However, his wife died soon after childbirth in 1820, and although now wealthy, Wakefield wanted more money to launch a political career – seems there was never a time when politicians were not obsessed with campaign finances. That quest eventually led him in 1827 to Ellen Turner, the only child of a wealthy textile manufacturer.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.