Posted by Krista J. Kesselring, 14 July 2025.

How might one abduct a woman on a busy street in broad daylight? Arresting her ‘under colour of law’ offers one option.

Or so Haagen Swendson thought. In 1702, he set his sights on the 18-year-old Pleasant Rawlins. More particularly, he wanted the estate she was due to inherit from her deceased father and grandfather, goods and chattels valued at £2000 and land with an annual income of £20. Initially, he tried to woo Rawlins into the marriage that would allow him ownership or control of her wealth. His confederate, Sarah Baynton, rented rooms in the same house in Westminster where Rawlins lodged along with her companion, Sabina Busby, the widowed sister of her guardian. Baynton pretended to be a wealthy woman herself, in from the country pursuing a lawsuit at Westminster, and frequently talked up the man she presented as her brother (or brother-in-law). When his charm offensive did not suffice, they opted for more ‘legal’ means.[1]

Swendson and Baynton contrived a false arrest to get Rawlins into their power. On the morning of 6 November, Baynton offered a lift in her hired coach to take Rawlins and Busby to their usual Friday chapel service in Oxendon Street. As per the plan, three bailiffs stopped the coach en route to arrest Rawlins, for a debt she did not owe. One of the bailiffs, John Wakeman, later testified against his companions in court. According to him, senior bailiff John Hartwell told him to show up that morning to help serve a writ. Wakeman, Hartwell, and the third bailiff, John Spurr, stopped the coach when it reached Dartmouth Street. Spurr held the horses, Wakeman guarded one side, and Hartwell clambered into the vehicle where he ‘gave the Word of Arrest’ while grabbing Rawlins by the waist. Co-conspirator Sarah Baynton played her part, angrily demanding to know of the bailiffs what they wanted. Hartwell called her ‘Mrs Pert’ and said that if she stopped behaving so ‘saucily’ things would go better for them all. Knowing themselves to have done nothing wrong, Rawlins and Busby assumed the bailiffs had come for Baynton and moved to step outside. At that point, Hartwell ordered them to sit and the coach to drive on: he clarified that he had indeed come for them. When some bystanders seemed about to intervene, Hartwell put them off, shouting that the fracas was an arrest of ‘cheats and trading-women that owed people money’.   

The bailiffs brought the women to the Star and Garter Tavern in Drury Lane. Baynton left, ostensibly to find her companions’ friends to bail them out. Busby held Rawlins and swore she would live and die with her. But the bailiffs forcibly separated them, saying they would be taken to different gaols as Rawlins was arrested on a warrant from one court and Busby on a warrant from another. As two of the bailiffs dragged a sobbing Rawlins away, Busby screamed ‘murder, murder’ out the windows until the third man hauled her back. When Busby insisted that the arrest must be a mistake, the bailiff waved a writ in front of her, saying it had her name on it; he admitted later, though, that he could not read the Latin text and that it named only Rawlins. Neighbours did come to see what was wrong but offered no help upon being told that Busby was just a woman resisting arrest. Eventually, a boy in the tavern offered to go to Busby’s friends, two of whom later showed up and offered bail. At that point, she said, the bailiff was ‘impudent and shuffl’d about awhile’, but finally let her go.

But Busby had not been the real target, of course. Meanwhile, with help from Wakeman, bailiff Hartwell had taken Rawlins to his home in Wych Street, where he kept a small lockup. On the short journey Hartwell loudly called his captive a ‘jade and slut and bid her pay her debts’. He barked: ‘Put on your mask, you jade, for we will have no mob to rescue you’. The last chances for any real help for Rawlins disappeared as people went about their own business upon hearing that ‘she was a cheat and was arrested’.

‘Help’ of another sort soon appeared. Sarah Baynton contrived to find Rawlins at Hartwell’s home and called through the window to say that she could locate none of Rawlins’s own friends but would go get her brother to provide bail. Waiting nearby at the Five Bells, Swendson appeared with alacrity. He brought with him one Holt, keeper of the Mitre Tavern—and the man who seems to have procured the writ for the arrest in the first place. They moved the group on to the Vine Tavern in Holborn, saying they’d get a meal, have a drink, and sort out the bail. Rawlins took this next journey willingly, expecting imminent relief. But once there, bailiff Hartwell claimed that he could not take bail from Swendsen as he was a man unknown to him. Baynton observed that under the law, if Rawlins was married, the action against her became her husband’s responsibility. Rawlins either had to marry her brother or go to Newgate prison to be ruined, she insisted. Conveniently, Swendsen already had waiting a marriage license and the chaplain and the clerk of the Fleet, people notorious for being willing to marry almost all comers. A marriage was hastily performed and the new bride was carted off to a house on Red Lion Street to have the marriage consummated by force—all, Rawlins later swore, against her will. Any words of consent she offered at the wedding or in the hours while still in Swendson’s control were wrested from her through fear and force. By noon the next day her friends rescued her. Charges were soon filed against the groom and such of his confederates as could be captured.

Just before Swendsen’s own arrest, he told an acquaintance that he was doing very well indeed: ‘he had married a Fortune’. But his own fortunes quickly changed. He and Baynton and two of the bailiffs were charged under the 1487 Abduction Act, which held it to be a capital felony to seize and force a woman of substance into marriage against her will. As a Dane, Swendson had a mixed jury of foreigners and Englishmen; a compatriot on the panel initially refused to find him guilty, arguing that Swendson himself had used no force against Rawlins before the marriage, that Rawlins had expressed words of consent, and that Baynton seemed the likelier mastermind. The juror came around, though, upon the judges’ insistence that the violence of the taking away constituted the offence and that Swendson’s signature on the marriage license, procured in advance and with a false age for Rawlins, indicated his complicity in the whole endeavour. The later law report on the case noted as its key principle that a woman’s ‘subsequent consent, while under restraint, cannot be looked upon but [as] an effect of the continuing force’.^[2] The jury found both Swendson and Baynton guilty. The latter secured a reprieve because of her pregnancy, but Swendson hanged for his part in the crime.

The bailiffs made out rather better. Hartwell earned no points with Chief Justice John Holt when he explained his roughness in separating the women by saying ‘It is usual for officers to do with prisoners as they please.’ But rather than send the two bailiffs to the gallows, the jurors decided to allow that they might not have known of the larger plot to which their arrests contributed. At the trial’s end, Holt told Hartwell that ‘You have had a very merciful jury, let it be a warning to you for the future.’

The dangers, rights, and wrongs of arrests were much on Holt’s mind in the coming years.[3] The street rescue Hakewell feared had not happened, but others did and sometimes with deadly results. In Holt’s summation of the 1707 case against John Mawgridge for killing William Cope, lieutenant of the queen’s Tower guard, he examined what did and did not count as provocation sufficient to reduce a charge of capital murder to non-capital manslaughter. Among the cases he referenced was the 1666 decision that saved Hopkin Huggett from the gallows after he inadvertently killed a press-master when trying to rescue a man who had been improperly taken without warrant. The judges had divided in Huggett’s case but ultimately decided that seeing someone else forcibly and injuriously deprived of their liberty was sufficiently provocative to reduce a murder charge to a verdict of manslaughter: ‘for when the liberty of one subject is invaded, it affects all the rest; it is a provocation to all people, as being of ill example and pernicious consequence’.[4]

Holt returned to the subject of arrests in an influential decision in 1709 that saved Jeremiah Tooley from the gallows. Constable Samuel Bray arrested Anne Dickins upon suspicion that she was a ‘disorderly woman’ when he saw her standing about in Covent Garden; Tooley and two of his companions intervened; in an ensuing melee, Tooley struck constable John Dent a fatal blow.[5] Since decisions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the courts had generally held that killing an agent of the law was murder, no matter how unplanned the attack or unclear the legality of the arrest, had he identified himself (even simply by saying that he was arresting someone in the king’s name).[6] In this case, though, the judges divided. Holt, with the majority, observed that constable Bray was acting outside his precinct and without warrant, and had arrested Dickins without good cause, only upon suspicion of lewd dealing. ‘It is a hard case if the liberty of the subject shall depend on the good opinion of the constable’, Holt observed. ‘If a man is oppressed by an officer of justice, under a mere pretence of an authority, that is a provocation to all the people of England’. One judge argued that as the constable had shown his staff of office and identified himself as acting in the queen’s name, his killing should be deemed a capital crime no matter the other circumstances; but Holt opined that ‘I never knew the constable’s staff had so much efficacy, when the constable himself had no authority and when he was in the wrong’. As Tooley killed the constable while trying to rescue Dickins from an unjust arrest, his charge should be lessened from murder to manslaughter. To the judges who thought it ‘dangerous to allow such a power to the mob’, Holt and the majority argued that they were allowing no such thing, merely a mitigation of the punishment. They all agreed that an unjust arrest was an invasion of the liberties of the subject. He continued: ‘I would fain know, when a man is concerned for the laws of the land, and for Magna Charta, whether that is not a provocation?’

Arrests were—and remain—fraught affairs, dangerous for officers and for the people being taken into custody. What constitutes a lawful arrest and how law enforcement officials are to identify themselves now vary across common law jurisdictions. In some, the lenience for resisting unlawful arrest so loftily described by Holt and his fellows in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is now largely set aside, based on arguments of a sort that dissenting judges had advanced even then.[7] In Hopkin Huggett’s case back in 1666, Chief Justice Kelyng had thought it ‘of dangerous consequence to give any encouragement to private men to take upon themselves to be the assertors of other men’s liberties … especially in a nation where good laws are for the punishment of all such injuries, and one great end of law is to right men by peaceable means’.[8] Law could limit permissible or excusable violence to resist an arrest, if a person under arrest could count on errors being fixed through due process provisions. Of course, even with remedies and procedural safeguards, problems arise. But without them, imposters, vigilantes, and even duly authorized officers bent on harm can far too readily find ways to abuse the arrest process—something that Pleasant Rawlins might well have found distressingly familiar.

Images:

Cover image: detail from ‘Lovelace Abducting Clarissa Harlowe’, by Edouard Louis Debufe, 1867, via Wikimedia Commons.

Map detail from John Rocque’s A Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, and Borough of Southwark (1746), via Wikimedia Commons.

Detail from a 1780 caricature of a press gang, via Wikimedia Commons.

Detail from James Gillray, ‘The Liberty of the Subject’ (1779), via Wikimedia Commons.

Detail from Robert Dighton’s satirical print, ‘A Fleet of Transports under Convoy’ (1761), British Museum 1935,0522.1.196, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Notes:

[1] The narrative is summarized from the account that appeared in the very earliest edition of the the State Trials: [Thomas Salmon, ed.,] A Compleat Collection of State-Tryals, 4 vols. (London, 1719), 4. 581-612. All quotations are from this source unless otherwise indicated. A similar but shorter account appeared in a precursor publication: An Exact Abridgment of All the Tryals…Relating to High Treasons, Piracies, &c. (London, 1703), 325-39. The case also prompted a formal law report [87 English Reports 1122, R v Swanson (1702)] as well as commentary in the popular press, some quite sympathetic to Swendson, e.g.: Anon., The full tryals examination and conviction, of Hagon Swanson, and Sarah Benton his pretended sister at the Queens-Bench Bar Westminster, on Wednesday the 25th of November, 1702 (London, 1702); Anon., The last dying words and confession of Haagen Swendsen, who was convicted and executed for stealing Mrs. Rawlins an heiress, deliver’d by him to Mr. Hainks, minister of the Queens Bench, and Mr. Ursin a Danish minister. Written with his own hand, and desir’d they might be printed (London, 1702); and Anon., The Condemn’d Bridegroom, or, The Sorrowful Lamentation of Mr. Hogan Swanson, who was arraigned at Westminster for Stealing Pleasant Rawlings (London, 1702). This episode is discussed as context for and a possible influence on Samuel Richardson’s treatment of rape and abduction in Joan Schwarz, ‘Eighteenth-Century Abduction Law and Clarissa’, in Clarissa and Her Readers, ed. Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland (AMS Press, 1999), 269-308.

[2] 87 English Reports 1122, R v Swanson (1702).

[3] For the history of arrests in these years, when no clear line existed between official and unofficial uses of force and when standards of identification were loose, see esp. Jonah Miller, Gender and Policing in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2023), ch. 4. Lucy Clarke is also working on the ‘performativity’ of early modern arrests; see, e.g., her blog posts on the subject.

[4] Regina v Mawgridge (1707), 84 English Reports 1107, at 1115; also 90 English Reports 1167. This is the summation in which Holt infamously opined that a husband who killed a man he saw in the act of adultery with his wife might be found guilty only of manslaughter, as ‘adultery is the highest invasion of property’. For Hopkin Huggett (1666), see 84 English Reports 1082; for a discussion of its significance for provocation defences, see Jeremy Horder, Provocation and Responsibility (Clarendon Press, 1992), 33-5. For killings of and by officers, see also Miller, Gender and Policing, 95-102.

[5] Quotations from ‘The Case of the Reforming Constables’ (1709), 90 English Reports 1167, at 1169, 1170. For the Tooley decision, see also 88 English Reports 1015 and 92 English Reports 349.  Drawing on previously unused manuscript sources, Miller gives this case extended treatment in Gender and Policing, 99-101, 159-61.

[6] Esp. Yong’s Case (1586), 76 English Reports 984 and Mackalley’s Case (1611), 77 English Reports 824. See K.J. Kesselring, Making Murder Public: Homicide in Early Modern England, 1480-1680 (Oxford University Press, 2019), 28-9.

[7] For the modern U.S., see, e.g., Paul G. Chevigny, ‘The Right to Resist an Unlawful Arrest’, Yale Law Journal 78.2 (1969), 1128-50.

[8] 84 English Reports 1083.