30,000 people tried for bigamy over the past 400 years, major new research shows

Bigamy has been a rare crime during the past 400 years – and offenders have been harshly punished, a major new study shows.

It seems likely that no more than 30,000 individuals have ever been tried for bigamy in England and Wales during this period. Most have been convicted, and possible punishment has varied from execution, branding, whipping, transportation, and imprisonment, through to fines and community service in more recent decades.

Professor Rebecca Probert, from the University of Exeter, has uncovered incredible stories using legal archives, newspapers, census data, parish registers, divorce petitions, and family histories.

Her two new companion books, Double Trouble and Double Lives, look at how the law has evolved since 1604 and the real people behind the cases.

The work overturns most of the assumptions about bigamy in earlier scholarship, showing it was rarer than others have speculated and was never socially acceptable.

Two-thirds of all the bigamy trials ever held in England and Wales took place between just 1900 and 1959, in part due to the dramatic increases during the First and Second World Wars. The annual number of prosecutions peaked in 1943 at just under a thousand.

Professor Probert said: “Bigamy should not be dismissed as a victimless, old-fashioned and comical crime, the stuff of Victorian melodrama and Golden Age murder mysteries. Every case has its own complex mix of desire and deception and heartbreak.

“Of the cases I have analysed, only a very small number of individuals were carrying on a ‘double life’. But any form of bigamy by its very nature involves an element of duplicity.

“There were some bigamists for whom one has to have sympathy, who were abandoned or abused by their first spouse. There were also those who deliberately set out to deceive and exploit a sequence of women, moving on from one relationship to another in a matter of months, weeks, or even days.

“The idea that bigamy wasn’t harshly punished has been based on misreadings of the evidence. One historian has claimed that the 1604 Bigamy Act treated bigamists leniently when in fact it made it punishable by hanging.

“Eighteenth-century bigamists were branded with a red-hot iron, and over a quarter of all those convicted between 1805 and 1836 were sentenced to transportation.

“Prison sentences were also much longer than has been claimed – it’s not until the 1930s that we see sentences of a month or less in the majority of cases.

“And it’s only after the Second World War that you see a fall in the percentage of known bigamists being prosecuted. Before 1945, around 80 per cent of cases known to the police had resulted in a prosecution. But by the late 1970s it was down to just one-tenth.”

One of the most astonishing stories Professor Probert has uncovered is that of Gloucester Gale, who was convicted of five counts of bigamy in 1859 and sentenced to four years’ penal servitude. He had married at least six different women between 1849 and 1858, with three marriages in that year alone, each in a different London church and under a different alias. He had managed to maintain relationships with several of his wives simultaneously, claiming to be a traveller, but had abandoned others soon after the wedding.

Upon his release, Gloucester married once more, again using an alias. In 1871, now calling himself William Morgan, he went through what was at least his tenth wedding ceremony. His latest wife discovered the truth when another showed up at their house. This time, he was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. How he managed to woo so many women is a mystery: according to the press, he was a slightly built man of “a somewhat sinister cast of countenance”, with large sandy whiskers and a small moustache.

In perhaps the most shocking case investigated in Double Lives, a serial bigamist placed lonely hearts adverts to dupe more than a dozen young, working-class women into marrying him before stealing their savings and disappearing. Professor Probert said: “If John Woodgate Kinsella were alive today, he would probably be involved in online romance fraud.”