This is one of my favourite “madhouse” abduction stories – partly because it has a swift and happy dénoument, but also because the victim is someone who we today might think is atypical. The plot was undertaken against an elderly, wealthy vicar – a figure of authority and great respectability; but in fact, such gents were disproportionately likely to be the target of such conspiracies, especially when they were so headstrong as to wish to marry, or to make/remake a will. At such moments, relatives could become rattled – suspecting that large inheritances were about to be diverted.

This is how the front page of the Illustrated Police News told the story of Reverend Kennard.

Reverend Robert Bruce Kennard, the sixty-year-old rector of Marnhull in Dorset, was a widower, with eight grown-up children. He had been intending to marry one Miss Pritchard, but she had fallen through the ice at Christmas 1879 while skating on the River Stour. He later fell in love with the German governess of a wealthy family, forty-year-old Miss Bade.

On 13 September 1881 the reverend arrived at the Castle Hotel in Woodford, in Essex, one day ahead of his marriage to Miss Bade. When three gentlemen turned up in a carriage at the hotel, they told him that they were there to take him to Woodford parish church to check the details of the next day’s ceremony; but after a short time in the carriage, he realised he was being driven into London instead. He called to the men, who told him to shut up if he valued his life. He shouted and threw his hat out of the carriage in order to alert passers-by but no one responded.

The carriage arrived at a lodging house at 41 Hunter Street, near King’s Cross, and Reverend Kennard was locked in a room, given a meal, and told that a doctor would come along the next morning to certify him insane.

The next day, the bride stood at the altar, the reception party was waiting in the Castle Hotel, but the vicar did not arrive. No one could understand the reliable old gent’s non-appearance. Miss Bade fainted in church with the shock of it all.

The conspirators should have checked the reverend’s pockets, for he had a great deal of cash on him; and the next morning, he offered a considerable sum to the man who had been ordered to keep watch over him before the doctors arrived to certify him. The cash was accepted, and Reverend Kennard walked out of the front door, into a hansom cab, and then by Great Eastern Railway to Woodford.

The reunited couple walked up the aisle the next day, and went on to honeymoon at Windsor.

The likely perpetrator of the plot was kept under surveillance by the police; but they were unable to take action unless the vicar was willing to come back to London to make a formal charge against this person. This, Kennard was unwilling to do – perhaps preferring to let the fact that the attempt had been so widely publicised was punishment enough, and that a new attempt would be highly unlikely. Or perhaps it was Christian charity.