Both Bigamy and Perjury?

Page from the Law Times Report about the Robinson vs. Neale 1865 court case.

Back in Belfast, in the Linen Hall Library, the indefatigable Reginald Blackwood was curious enough about the descendants of the Hadzors and Wests to follow up the lines not just of the Dills but also Maria West and Richard Wombwell. Oddly enough, he turned up a slightly different story about the first marriage of Charles Robinson. The story presented in the court of Judge Malins suggested that Charles Robinson could find no trace of his first wife, Mary Weston, after his return from imprisonment in France and thereafter acted on the presumption of her death. However in Blackwood's notes, he records that when Charles Robinson returned from France, he discovered that Mary Weston, his first wife, had become the mother of ‘three dark children’, at which point he left her and ‘never heard from her again.’ 

This really is not quite the way the story was presented in Judge Malin's courtroom. If Blackwood is correct however, it would appear that not only was there a legitimate case for bigamy, but a further charge that might have been levelled for perjury. 

Harriett Wombwell and her husband had taken no chances though, and undergone a 'second' marriage ceremony in 1864, some forty years after their first. 

Since all of these events must have been conducted in the public eye, so to speak, it does make one wonder what kind of impact and trauma was visited on the wider families of all concerned, given the values of the society of the day.