Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
Read Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton Online
Authors: Rowland Hughes
First published in Great Britain in 1944 by Peter Davies Ltd.
This new edition published in Great Britain in 2016 by
University of Hertfordshire Press
College Lane
Hatfield
Hertfordshire
AL10 9AB
UK
© Copyright by the Executors of the Estate of Magdalen Perceval Maxwell 1944
© Copyright introduction and critical notes by Rowland Hughes 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-909291-34-8
Design by Arthouse Publishing Solutions Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by Charlesworth Press, Wakefield
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
  2 The Reticence of Miss Isabella Skelton
  3 Lady Sophia Met Her Match
Part II
THE STORY OF BARBARA SKELTON
  3 Midnight on Watling Street
  5 The Lady and the Steward
  6 At the Sign of the Golden Glove
W
HEN IT WAS
first published in 1944, Magdalen King-Hall's historical novel
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
was an immediate best-seller. The novel is set in the late seventeenth century, and tells the story of Barbara Skelton, a beautiful, aristocratic young woman who, to escape the tedium of married life, disguises herself as man, takes to the road as a highway robber, and carries on an adulterous affair with a fellow criminal. King-Hall's book was reprinted twice in little over a year, and the rights were almost immediately purchased (for the sum of £5,000) by Gainsborough Studios, one of the most successful British film studios of the 1940s. By the early spring of 1945, a film adaptation was in production. Directed by Leslie Arliss, and starring Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Patricia Roc,
The Wicked Lady
premiered at the Gaumont cinema, on Haymarket in London, on 19 November 1945. Despite a fairly dismissive critical reception, it went on to become the highest grossing movie of 1946 at the British box office.
The film nearly suffered disaster at its very first public showing, however. The première, a charity event, had been promoted for weeks in the press. It was the first glamorous, star-studded movie première to take place in London since the end of the war, and it was due to be attended by Queen Mary, the widow of George V and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II. On the morning of the screening, the first reviews were published, many of which suggested that the lurid content of the film was far too shocking for
the Queen Dowager to see. Marlborough House requested a private screening from the studio, and an equerry was despatched to watch the film before deciding whether it was suitable for Royal eyes. After an anxious couple of hours, the equerry emerged and agreed to allow Queen Mary's attendance, and Lockwood later recalled that they spent the film watching her from behind, trying to gauge whether she was offended or not.
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She wasn't, but despite that,
The Wicked Lady
retained its salacious reputation, to the extent that the devoutly Methodist J. Arthur Rank, owner of the Rank Organisation which distributed Gainsborough films in the UK, refused to sanction a sequel to the film, despite its massive commercial success, because he found its depiction of criminal behaviour and extramarital sex too disturbing. However, the film is now regarded as the quintessential example of the period costume melodrama in which Gainsborough specialised during the 1940s, and which proved immensely popular with cinema audiences, particularly women. As such, although critical opinion of its cinematic merits still varies, its status as a classic of British cinema is assured.
The story of Barbara Skelton is a fictional re-imagining of the legend of Katherine Ferrers, a long established piece of folklore from the English county of Hertfordshire. Born in the mid-seventeenth century, Ferrers was a scion of a respectable and wealthy family and heir to a considerable estate. According to legend, having married young and being poorly treated by her husband, Katherine supposedly donned men's clothing and became a highwaywoman (in some versions of the story, she did so in the company of a
low-born lover). While committing one of her crimes, she was shot and, having ridden home, died of her wound on the steps of her family home in the village of Markyate. The narrative does not end there; for it is claimed that Katherine's restless spirit proceeded to haunt her house and neighbourhood for several centuries. It is impossible to tell how long the story has been circulating orally â in textual form, it dates back only to the nineteenth century â but the tale of Katherine Ferrers is still relatively well-known in Hertfordshire to this day. Indeed, a pub by the name of The Wicked Lady stands at the end of Ferrers Lane, on the edge of Nomansland Common, near the village of Wheathampstead, reputedly the scene of many of her crimes.
Although both legend and film have endured, King-Hall's novel has almost disappeared from memory, despite the fact that it belonged to the same significant cultural and historical moment as the film and clearly spoke with equal power to a predominantly female audience just emerging from the Second World War. This critical edition of the novel aims to recover King-Hall's work from its relative obscurity and introduce a modern audience to a hugely enjoyable novel that is sometimes startling in its progressive attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and which, when understood in relation to its genre and its historical context, tells us much about the hopes, fears and anxieties of a generation living through a period of profound transformation. Many modern retellings of the legend (in newspapers, tourist brochures, and on the internet), feature details which are lifted wholesale from the novel and the film,
so that the line between history, tradition and fiction has become increasingly blurred. The story of the Wicked Lady is an interesting example of how folk tradition can continue to evolve once it has been appropriated by other media, and even draw new energy from this appropriation. To understand how this has happened, this introduction will focus on the women at the narrative's heart: the historical Katherine Ferrers, around whom the legend grew; the author, Magdalen King-Hall, a popular and talented novelist whose work is now little read; and the fictional Barbara Skelton, King-Hall's re-imagining of Ferrers.
Although Katherine Ferrers is supposed to have been shot and killed in the mid-1600s, there is no textual record of any scandalous rumours attached to her name until much later. Henry Chauncy's
Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire
(1700) simply mentions her as the brief owner of the manor of Flamstead; Robert Clutterbuck's
The History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford
(1815â27) similarly makes no mention of the legend. This is not conclusive, of course; the authors of such monumental, serious histories may have had no interest in scandal, gossip or superstition. Given the explosion of print culture in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, and the public taste for lurid tales of crime, the total absence of the legend from the printed record during this period suggests that it is of a more recent genesis, almost certainly nineteenth-century.
Although it is impossible to say how long the story had been in circulation, it was certainly well-established by 1855, when Frank E. Smedley published a narrative poem entitled âMaud Allinghame: A Legend of Hertfordshire'. The author
claims that the poem is âfounded on a story current in the part of Herts where the scene is laid'.
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The poem itself is a piece of doggerel, telling the tale of the eponymous Maud, sole heir to the Allinghame estate, who resists the entreaties of various suitors during the day, and takes to the highway at night. After various adventures, the town council sends to London and hires âbold Jonathan Blaker/The famous thief-taker'; he pursues and shoots Maud, who dies on the steps of Allinghame Hall.
A couple of decades later, in the third volume of his three-volume
History of Hertfordshire
(1870â81), John Edwin Cussans provides a full summary of the legend which, âin the present year, 1878, is religiously believed in by the majority of the inhabitants of Markyate Street', and has remained the basic outline ever since:
It is said that, in the disguise of male attire and mounted on a coal-black horse with white fore-feet, she robbed travellers on the highway, but at length was fatally wounded at No Man's Land when so engaged. She was found lying dead outside a door leading, by a secret staircase, to a chamber where she changed her dress. The doorway was built up, and so remained for certainly a hundred and fifty years.
3
A further detail is added, namely that after a fire in 1840 the owner, Mr Adey, wanted to re-open the doorway but could not get any of the local workmen to do the job for fear of the ghost of the Wicked Lady, having to send to London for labourers instead. Moreover, he mentions that some of the labourers witnessed an apparition of Lady Ferrers dangling
from a tree and âtook [it] upon themselves to saw the branch off, and were greatly surprised that they were not handsomely rewarded by the owner for their zeal'.
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