Anthony William Johnson Deane (or Dean) was born in 1800 in Great Torrington, Devon, the only son of the Reverend William Deane and Elizabeth Johnson (a niece of the painter Joshua Reynolds). His father died on 11 May 1818.
Sarah Elizabeth (Eliza) Stables, was one of eight children of Lorenzo Stables, a solicitor of Grosvenor Square, London.
The Deane and Stables families were acquainted with each other. In the summer of 1819 Eliza and two of her sisters were on a visit to friends who lived near the Deane family home. Anthony, a student at Oxford, returned to his family in Devon for the Long Vacation, and the inevitable happened. They fell in love.
Anthony returned to Oxford but by November he had left and was secretly living in lodgings acquired by Mrs. Stables in Maddox Street, near Hanover Square, London. Banns for the marriage between Anthony and Eliza were read at St Pancras at the end of November and again in early December. Mr and Mrs Stables were deeply complicit in the plan to get the couple married. Mrs. Deane knew nothing of her son’s impending nuptials.
However, Dr. Moore, the clergyman at St Pancras, sensed that the marriage was clandestine, declined to continue to publish banns, and alerted the authorities. Mrs. Deane, now alert to the relationship and desperate to stop it, applied for a bill to have her son made a ward of the Court of Chancery, but the couple soon after eloped to Gretna Green and were married there. The Court of Chancery, unsure whether the Scottish marriage was legal, referred the case to the Master. He was confused by the fact that, unlike most of the clandestine marriage cases he came across, the young man was deemed to be the victim.
The Chancery case dragged on through the courts and was reported in detail in the papers. Eventually, Lord Eldon pronounced that, on advice, the marriage was legal but that Eliza, a footman and a maid-servant were guilty of contempt of court. He suspected that Mr. and Mrs. Stables and two of their sons had behaved improperly but there was not enough evidence against them.
Lord Eldon, the grandson of a Newcastle coal worker, who had himself eloped in 1772 when he was plain John Scott. He was later reconciled with the family of his wife, Bessie Surtees.
Anthony Deane and Eliza Stables married in Great Torrington in March 1821. They went on to have at least five children. The 1851 census records Anthony living in Okehampton, Devon with his much younger wife Barbara, Eliza having died in the intervening years. Anthony died in 1853.
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