Fielding, who examined her, as well as a young woman called Virtue Hall, who appeared subsequently as one of Canning’s witnesses. Fielding seems to have been strongly impressed by her appearance and her story, and his pamphlet (which was contradicted in every particular by his adversary, John Hill) gives a curious and not very edifying picture of the magisterial procedure of the time. In February, Wells and Squires were tried; Squires was sentenced to death, and Wells to imprisonment and burning in the hand. Then, by the exertions of the Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, who doubted the justice of the verdict, Squires was respited and pardoned. Forthwith London was split up into Egyptian and Canningite factions; a hailstorm of pamphlets set in; portraits and caricatures of the principal personages were in all the print shops; and, to use Churchill’s words,
“—Betty Canning was at least, With Gascoyne’s help, a six months feast.”
In April 1754, however, Fate so far prevailed against her that she herself, in turn, was tried for perjury. Thirty-eight witnesses swore that Squires had been in Dorsetshire; twenty-seven that she had been seen in Middlesex. After some hesitation, quite of a piece with the rest of the proceedings, the jury found Canning guilty; and she was transported for seven years. At the end of her sentence she returned to England to receive a legacy of L500, which had been left her by an enthusiastic old lady of Newington-green. [Footnote: So says the Annual Register for 1761, p. 179. But according to later accounts (Gent. Mag. xliii. 413), she never returned, dying in 1773 at Weathersfield in Connecticut.] Her “case” is full of the most inexplicable contradictions; and it occupies in the State Trials some four hundred and twenty closely-printed
