Production of a Female Pen Anna Larpent's Account of the Duchess of Kingston's Bigamy Trial of 1776

On 15 April 1776 the House of Lords convened as a jury in Westminster Hall to try the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy. The hall was transformed into a theater-in-the-round for the four thousand spectators, making the five-day trial a notorious event of that London season. The diarist Anna Larpent, then an unmarried girl of eighteen, was among the crowd. She wrote thirty-eight pages recording her informed observations with immediacy and in vibrant detail. Recently rediscovered at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, her manuscript is reproduced here in its entirety. The text is introduced and transcribed by Matthew J. Kinservik and illustrated with works from the Lewis Walpole Library. Long before Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis gave his library to Yale, he revived Horace Walpole's short-lived series, Miscellaneous Antiquities, or, A Collection of Curious Papers. Walpole had published two numbers in 1772, and in 1927 Lewis resumed the series with Number III through XVI, the last appearing in 1940, before he was called to Washington for wartime service in the OSS. Now, with this account of the Duchess of Kingston's trial, the Lewis Walpole Library re-launches Miscellaneous Antiquities to continue a happy tradition.Larpent, Anna Margaretta is the author of 'Production of a Female Pen Anna Larpent's Account of the Duchess of Kingston's Bigamy Trial of 1776', published 2004 under ISBN 9780845731543 and ISBN 0845731548.