The Will of Maria West

Maria West's will remained for a long time remained one of the more puzzling documents to emerge out of this research, not least because before discovering her origins and background, the complexity and detail in the arrangements she made seemed so out-of-tune with what was then known about her from the 1841 census which simply records her as a widowed stablekeeper of Stoke Newington, Middlesex 

Maria was however, as it turned out, the grand-daughter of Dr. Seneca Hadzor of County Down on one side, and on the other, a descendant of the Anglo-Irish West family with a father who was a member of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons. She counted amongst her forebears and relatives distinguished medical practitioners, army officers and businessmen.

Codicil to the will of Maria Wombwell. Note the bequests to John Webster of the Red Lion, George Wombwell, and her daughters Harriett Wombwell (Robinson) and Sophia Wombwell (Wallace, spelled here 'Wallis'). The complete will has been added to the archive section of this Blog. Maria was living in Lordship Road, Stoke Newington at this time.

And yet, there she was, in 1798, a woman we may take it of no little education and knowledge, embarking on an illicit relationship with a man of English farming stock, who was when she met him, to put it very simply – a complete nobody. 

We must conclude therefore that Richard Wombwell was a man of no little charm and persistence. Given though the marriage and inheritance laws of the day, in succumbing to their passions, Richard and Maria  managed to immeasurably complicate not only their own lives but those of the next generation as well.

Perhaps, as the nineteenth century approached, Maria West had found herself in a position in her early thirties where she felt she had little left to lose. How she might have landed herself in this quandary is, as we have already noted, anybody's guess.