During this visit to town Mary Blandy states that Cranstoun proposed a secret marriage “according to the usage of the Church of England”—­apparently with the view of testing the relative strength of the nuptial knot as tied by their respective Churches.  Mary, with hereditary caution, refused to make the experiment unless an opinion of counsel were first obtained, and Cranstoun undertook to submit the point to Mr. Murray, the Solicitor-General for Scotland.  Whatever view, if any, that learned authority expressed regarding so remarkable an expedient, Mary heard no more of the matter; but in Cranstoun’s Account the marriage is said to have taken place at her own request, “lest he should prove ungrateful to her after so material an intimacy.”  How “material” in fact was the intimacy between them at this time we can only conjecture.

Mrs. Blandy seems to have made the most of her visit to the metropolis, for, according to her daughter, she had contracted debts amounting to forty pounds, and as she “durst not” inform Mr. Blandy, she borrowed that sum from her obliging future son-in-law.  By what means the captain, in the then state of his finances, came by the money Mary fails to explain.  Being thus, in a pecuniary sense, once more afloat, the ladies, taking grateful leave of Cranstoun, went home to Henley.

We hear nothing further of their doings until some six months after their return, when on Thursday, 28th September 1749, Mrs. Blandy became seriously ill.  Mr. Norton, the Henley apothecary who attended the family, was sent for, and her brother, the Rev. John Stevens, of Fawley, who, “with other country gentlemen meeting to bowl at the Bell Inn,” chanced then to be in the town, was also summoned.  It was at first hoped that the old lady would rally as on the former occasion but she gradually grew worse, notwithstanding the attentions of the eminent Dr. Addington, brought from Reading to consult upon the case.  Her husband, her daughter, and her two brothers were with her until the end, which came on Saturday, 30th September.  To the last the dying woman clung to her belief in the good faith of her noble captain:  “Mary has set her heart upon Cranstoun; when I am gone, let no one set you against the match,” were her last words to her husband.  He replied that they must wait till the “unhappy affair in Scotland” was decided.  The complaint of which Mrs. Blandy died was, as appears, intestinal inflammation, but, as we shall see later, her daughter was popularly believed to have poisoned her.  However wicked Mary Blandy may have been, she well knew that by her mother’s death she and Cranstoun lost their best friend.  An old acquaintance and neighbour of Mrs. Blandy, one Mrs. Mounteney, of whom we shall hear again, came upon a visit to the bereaved family.  Mrs. Blandy, on her deathbed, had commended this lady to her husband, in case he should “discover an inclination to marry her”—­she already was Mary’s godmother; but Mrs. Mounteney was destined to play another part in the subsequent drama.