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Returning from Dudley through Walsall to Bescot Bridge, the rail pursues its course through a mining country to Bilston and Wolverhampton. On the road we pass in sight of the Birmingham canal, one of the finest works of the kind in the kingdom. An enormous sum was spent in improving the navigation, in order to prove that any railway was unnecessary.
Three instances of exposure of imposture were most notable, those of Grace Sowerbutts, the boy at Leicester, and the "Boy of Bilston." The first of these has already been sufficiently discussed in connection with the Lancashire trials. The second had nothing remarkable about it.
It is some satisfaction that the judges were disgraced. The boy of Bilston was, if Webster may be believed, the most famous, if not the most successful, fraud of all. The case was heralded over the entire realm and thousands came to see. The story is almost an exact duplicate of earlier narratives of possession.
The miners at Bilston, at least such of them as put money in the savings bank, were accustomed to deposit it in other names than their own. Nor were they without reason.
Be that as it may, the privy council decided to take cognizance of an affair that was already the talk of the realm. Secretaries Coke and Windebank sent instructions to Henry Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester and successor to that Morton who had exposed the boy of Bilston, to examine seven of the condemned witches and to make a report.
In Wolverhampton, Willenhall, Bilston, Sedgeley, Wednesfield, Darlaston, Dudley, Walsall, Wednesbury, etc., there are, therefore, fewer factories, but chiefly single forges, where the small masters work alone, or with one or more apprentices, who serve them until reaching the twenty-first year.
If, however, they were both alive, and in sound health of mind and body, they could, I fancy, help us but little, as Bilston tells me neither the Dalstons nor Grainger had ever entered the church till the morning of the wedding; and they soon afterwards removed to Cumberland, so that it is scarcely possible either parson or clerk could prove that Violet Dalston was married to Sir Harry Compton.
"I have read on this day of its publication the seventh part of the Apologia, and the touching allusion in it to the devotedness of the Catholic clergy to the poor in seasons of pestilence reminds me that when the cholera raged so dreadfully at Bilston, and the two priests of the town were no longer equal to the number of cases to which they were hurried day and night, I asked you to lend me two fathers to supply the place of other priests whom I wished to send as a further aid.
We shall never forget, some five-and-twenty years ago, passing near Bilston on a summer's holiday, and seeing a great red, pied bull foaming, and roaring, and marching round a ring in which he was chained, while a crowd of men, each with a demoniacal-looking bulldog in his arms, and a number of ragged women, with their hair about their ears, some of them also carrying bull-dog pups, yelled about the baited bull.
I am sorry to say I do not know any boys about here; but Mabel Withers, the daughter of my neighbor and friend the clergyman of Bilston, the village just outside the lodge, has a pony, and is a capital rider, and I am sure she will show you over the country.
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