ROMANTIC FEATURES OF THE BREADALBANE CASE.

Evening Star, Volume III, Issue 777, 1 November 1865, Page 2

ROMANTIC FEATURES OF THE BREADALBANE CASE.

The Edinburgh, correspondent of the Daily Telegraph -writes :—The story of the cause is not iinroinantic, being that of an elopement with another man's wife, and its sequel. The grandfather of Campbell of Crlenfalloeh, by, name James Campbell, in the year 1870 was a lieutenant in the 40th Foot, and stationed at Bristol with a recruiting party. Chipping-Sodbury is ten miles from Bristol. There was a grocer and apothecary in Chipping-Sodbury whose name ■was Christopher Ludlow, and whose wife's name was Eliza Maria Blanchard. They had been four or five years married, but had only one child. Eliza Maria disappeared one morning, leaving her little boy asleep in bed, and it soon became whispered about that she had eloped with Lieutenant Campbell. She, the good-look-ing wife of a respectable Englishman, had gone off with this strange Scotch officer, who had such difficulty in paying his debts, who was so little of a beauty,?and so frightfully marked with srnall-pox. Christopher Ludlow took his wife's elopement very much to heart. To break off all the old associations he sailed for America, but he lost his health there, and died on his way home to England in January. 1784. His wife had gone out to America also with Campbell, as his wife, in 1782, about the time that the articles of peace were sent out, and the two were there together for a year and a-half, apparently passing among the military folks as man and wife. In a letter to the War Office after his death, in 1806, claiming a pension as his widow, which she got, she says that she \tas married to him in Edinburgh the year before they went to America, by Mr M'Gregor, the Gaelic minister, but that the minister and Ensign Wilson, the witnesses to their marriage, Were both dead. She sometimes used to say that she had lost her marriage lines in America. No marriage ceremony is proved. But it is proved that the pair had three children born in England, all registered as legitimate, and that after 1793, till his deaib in 1806, they lived together chiefly in Scotlaad, and were received as hus» bandandwife, anj were in repute married persons. Campbell sold out of the 40th Regiment in 1785, and was afterwards an officer in the Breadalbane Fencibles and tip Cambrian Rangers. After the later was in 1802, he resided permanently in Scotlind. He first took refuge as a debtor in the Sanatuary at Holyrood, and had afterwards a housij in College Street, which ia significantly described in the '' Edinburgh Directory" of 1805 as " Campbell's furnished lodgings, 15 College Street." He died on the 24th October, 1806, in Jame's Court, Lawnrnarket. During all his days, and especially during the latter part of them,!he appears to have been in great pecuniary difficulties, and his whereabouts has been chiefly traced by "homings," and other proceedings against him for debt. There is no doubt that his connection with Eliza Maria Blanchard was during the first two or three years of it adulterous, and that being so, the qurstion is Avhether the legal presumption in favor of marriage after a long lapse of time, and evidence of marriageiarising from habit and repute, do not sufficiently establish marriage, and induce the conclusioii that at some time after Eliza Maria Blanchard was free to marry, they did not accept of each other as husband and. wife. They certainly lived as such, in so far as they could, from the time of the elopementLord Barcaple has held the presumption of law to be in favor of marriage at some time or other, the particular time beihg of no consequence, as James Campbell being a domiciled Scotsman, his children could be legitimated per stebsequens ■matrimoniiim. I daresay there is quite sufficient room for a different opinion, and if the House of Lords should arrive at that conclusion, -Campbell of Boreland will succeed, he being the lineal descendant of the only brother of the Said James Campbell who has left heirs.