Theodosia Ivie

[1] Famed for her “wit, beauty and cunning in law above all others,” her claims to own land stretching from Wapping to Ratcliff[note 1] led to a constant stream of litigation which ran for almost 75 years.

[4]It was prime land next to central London and the River Thames, but such was the rapid development in the area[5] that hamlets expanded, and boundaries significantly drifted over time, and hence disputes occurred.

[6] In neighbouring Shadwell, where the projector Thomas Neale[7] had transformed the area by making investments, Ivie claimed his entire development fell within her ancestral inheritance and succeeded in taking the land from him.

[10] There was also a witness produced who claimed to have personally observed Lady Ivie working on the forgeries, scribing the initial, ornate opening letters on the deeds.

[note 4] At the conclusion of the trial, after Lady Ivie lost Shadwell and faced criminal charges, she took flight, escaping to the Whitefriars liberty where she was beyond the reach of the law.

[2] Her accomplice Stephen Knowles, who inadvertently incriminated himself during the opening minutes of the trial, likewise fled, though in his case to the Liberty of the Mint in Southwark.

[2] Eventually, Lady Ivie (though not Knowles) came out of the liberty and she immediately set about pacifying her anxious creditors and tenants by publishing a document clarifying her land holding titles.

[11] The verdict of the trial was a surprise, in one sense, because her deeds were obviously false, but she was found not guilty because it was impossible to bring the crime home to her personally.

This was no easy task when the lease had been endorsed by Sir John Bramston the Elder – former Lord Chief Justice of England,[15] who happened to be Lady Ivie’s great-uncle and protector of her family.

[16] The second trial was held two years later in 1679 where not only was Johnson was found guilty again, but he was also struck off the attorneys' roll, fined 45 marks and forced to enter into sureties against his future good behaviour.

This is quite a compelling argument when it is considered that the person Johnson was liaising with and who gave him a confession that he had been forging for Ivie was her very own accomplice Thomas Duffett.

The Dictionary of National Biography entry for Thomas Duffett calls him a “dramatist … who unfortunately took to play-writing … as literature, his productions are beneath criticism”.

[20] Lady Ivie was the direct descendant of Thomas Stepkyn[21] and Macheline c. 1510-67 – German immigrants who settled at the Wapping Marshes in lower Whitechapel.

Stepkyn was the King’s beer maker[22] and had a lucrative role supplying the Navy from his home/business at the Hermitage (or Swansnest)[23] just east of the Tower of London.

[31] Eventually, the estranged husband, Sir Thomas Ivie, submitted an appeal to the highest authority in the land, the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and begged him to overturn his wife’s alimony award.

She was called “The Catholic Patroness of alchemy”[37] and owned a bezoar, a stone thought to have magical healing properties, including being an antidote to poison.

[38] In addition to land and property acquisitions, Ivie dabbled in a range of business ventures including paper-making and salvaging shipwrecks for treasure.

There are reasons for believing that Thomas Duffett made reference to the Ivies in at least one of the early plays he wrote: The Amorous Old Woman: or, tis well if it takes concerns an heiress having a stump (wooden leg).

In a similar vein, a comedy written in 1676 by Thomas Rawlins called Tom Essence, or, The Modish Wife seems to parody our principal characters.

[41] In "A Neighbour’s Landmark", an M. R. James short story published 17 March 1924 in the magazine The Eton Chronicle,[42] the ghost of Lady Ivie is depicted wandering eternally back and forth over land she stole from some orphaned children.

The loss of Shadwell (and the credit such an acquisition had briefly brought), her absence in a liberty for so long and the serious nature of the charges against her had unnerved her many creditors.

[39] It made no difference that the trial verdict was ‘not guilty’ because her opponents now gained momentum against her and began to overwhelm her with litigation and challenges to all her land titles.