Canning, ELIZABETH, the heroine of a remarkably obscure story, was born in 1734. Already she had been in domestic service for some years and borne a good character, when about nine o'clock on the night of New-year's Day, 1753, she disappeared on her way home from a visit to an uncle and aunt's house. Neither the loudest hue and cry nor prayers in the churches had done anything to solve the mystery, when late at night (29th January), four weeks after her disappearance, the girl knocked at her mother's door, hungry and half clad. She said she had been seized by two men and carried by force to a house on the Hertfordshire road, where she had been ill used by an old woman, and starved in an upper room, to compel her to an immoral life. She identified Susannah Wells and an old gypsy named Mary Squires as her persecutors, and these were accordingly arrested, and they passed in the first stage before the novelist Henry
Fielding, then a Bow Street magistrate, who afterwards published a paper on the case; next they were tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced, in spite of an alibi for Squires sworn by three witnesses, Squires to be hanged, Wells to be burned in the hand. The lord mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, felt unsatisfied with the verdict, and made further investigations, which resulted in so strong an accumulation of fresh evidence to fortify Squires's alibi, that a free pardon was granted her by the crown. The case now became the excitement of the town, and opinions were fiercely divided between the 'Canningites' and 'Gypsies,' so that the heroine of this miserable story became in Churchill's phrase, 'with Gascoyne's help, a six months' feast.' On the 29th April 1754 she was put on trial at the Old Bailey for perjury, and after an eight days' trial, in which the jury seem to have been completely puzzled between the thirty-eight witnesses who swore that Squires had been seen in Dorsetshire, and the twenty-seven who swore to her having been in Middlesex, was found guilty, and sentenced to transportation for seven years. She was sent to New England, and died in Connecticut in 1773. See Paget's Paradoxes and Puzzles (1874).