Historian, tour guide and author Martyn Taylor looks into whether Bury St Edmunds barrister Capel Lofft was a champion of lost causes or full of self-importance

We might refer to him today as a champion of lost causes, but was the reality totally different, the furthering of his own self-importance?

Capel Lofft (1751-1824) was born in London in 1751 of fairly well-off parents, being educated at Eton College and Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Training as a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn, he was called to the bar as a barrister in 1775 – quite a young age for such a career.

As an aside to his legal ambitions he dabbled in astronomy as well as writing political and law treatises. The latter he used as a platform to try and instigate parliamentary reforms. He also engaged in voluminous correspondence with prominent authors, such as Charles Lamb, almost to the point of annoyance.

Capel was often referred to as looking like a ‘country bumpkin’ – ill-mannered at times, with a slovenly mode of dress and with a feeble voice which did him no favours as a public speaker, especially during his days as a Reform Party supporter. Saying this, his patronage extended to Robert Bloomfield, 1766-1823, the celebrated ‘Suffolk Poet’, a self-educated labourer who was born in Honington, not far from the family seat at Stanton Hall.

It was his interest with local affairs that would eventually bring about his downfall as a magistrate and barrister. His ‘interference ‘ in the judicial process of what normally would have been a ‘cut and dried’ criminal case would eventually have major repercussions for him.

The cause célèbre case concerned a young 22 year-old servant girl Sarah Lloyd, who was employed by a Mrs Syer in Hadleigh.

In October 1799 Sarah, who was besotted by her lover Joseph Clark, was persuaded by him to open a locked door to her employer’s home, they then proceeded to burglarise the property, finally setting fire to the building to cover their tracks.

Fortunately Mrs Syer was not at home, with neighbours extinguishing the fire. The fact a door had been opened from inside led to Sarah’s and Clark’s arrest, the classic ‘inside job’.

At the Suffolk Assizes in April 1800, Sarah Lloyd was found guilty of stealing goods to the value of £40 and sentenced to death. Clark was acquitted, why is not known, perhaps a case of misogyny, but according to his death-bed confession in 1835, he admitted it was all down to him.

In normal circumstances her sentence of death might have been commuted, but this was an extraordinary case that she was found guilty in. It was most likely that the bond of trust between employer and servant had been breached, something the establishment could not condone. Added to which Sarah Lloyd was probably not of average intelligence, being described in contemporary reports as ‘deluded’ or simple and child-like.

Horrified at the death sentence, Lofft took up her case. He managed to persuade William Pearson, the Sheriff of Ipswich, to grant a stay of execution and appealed to have the sentence quashed.

The Times declared that Lloyd’s crime was of ‘unequalled atrociousness’ and the Duke of Portland, the Home Secretary, refused the petition.

Lofft accompanied Sarah Lloyd to the scaffold in Bury St Edmunds. It was raining and he gave her an umbrella and helped her to hold it over her head.

Lofft was distraught after the execution had taken place, apparently making frantic attempts to revive her. Sir Nash Grose, the judge in her original trial, was furious, describing Lofft’s conduct as ‘improper interference’. This, along with the fact that he had made a speech that explicitly attacked the Tory government, led to him being struck off the magistrates’ list and vilified by his associates.

A plaque, though now in a poor condition, to the memory of Sarah Lloyd is on the Charnel House in the Great Churchyard here in Bury.

Her epitaph reads: Reader, pause at this humble stone, the fall of unguarded youth, by the allurements of vice and the treacherous snares of seduction SARAH LLOYD on April 23 1800 in the 22 year of her age suffer’d a just but ignominious death for admitting her abandoned seducer into the dwelling house of her mistress in the night of 3 Oct. 1799 and becoming the instrument in his hands of the crimes of robbery and housebreaking. These were her last words: May my example be A WARNING to thousands.

Sarah’s mother reputably hanged herself on hearing the death of Sarah, which took place on Thingoe Hill, the youthful Bury gaoler John Orridge in attendance.

The deaths of Lofft's father and uncle in 1811 left Capel with a large property and family estate at Troston, Troston Hall being described as ‘a charming Elizabethan house of red-brick with two gables, twisted chimneys and clipped yew hedges’.

As a somewhat misguided supporter of the belief that Napoleon should not be exiled to St Helena following Waterloo in 1815, he once again demonstrated bad judgement.

By now he was on his second marriage and moved abroad a year later for his daughter’s education. He ended his life in self-imposed exile in Italy dying at Montcalieri, near Turin, in 1824 and was buried in the protestant church of St Germain, in Piedmont.