Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 37

“meritorious officer” and there is one reference to his being killed in service, which he may have been, but not in the main British deployment of the time in the Peninsular Ward in Spain and Portugal as his name does not appear in the list of officers who served there.

Wainewright was not long in the boarding house at Mortlake, but long enough to decide to marry Eliza – an act he was later to describe as “injudicious”. Six weeks or so after she became 21, and old enough to wed without consent, she and Wainewright, who was by now living in Craven Street, off the Strand, were married on November 13, 1817 by the curate at the nearby church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, overlooking what is now Trafalgar Square.

There was a marriage settlement dated the day before the wedding, altering the legacy from his grandfather. Wainewright would continue to draw the interest on the annuities, but after his death, his new wife and any children of the marriage would inherit.

One of the witnesses at the wedding was his cousin Edward Foss who he had recently painted in oils. A few years later he was to forge Foss’s signature, defraud the Bank of England and set himself on the road to perdition.

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

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