The RUBIDGEs of England, South Africa and Canada were involved in English litigation in the 1870s to lay claim to the estate of Maria Mangin BROWN who died intestate in 1871 leaving a fortune of over £200,000. The MANGIN story , however, goes back to 1803 when Maria's father, a wealthy merchant and Consul-General for Genoa, died intestate at his home in Sun Court, Cornhill and left a large fortune! The case was widely reported in the Times newspaper from which it is possible to derive some sense of the case. One claimant for Anthony Mangin's estate of £60,000 was his daughter Maria who had married in 1792 an American Aquila BROWN, a merchant from Baltimore. The other party was an Italian family named CROVETTO or CREVETTO who claimed that Maria's parents were never married and that she could not claim the estate on grounds of her illegitimacy. The CROVETTOs claimed kinship with Anthony Mangin through his sister's second marriage. A number of people who knew the Mangins gave evidence at the hearing in the Court of Common Pleas on 19th December 1811. One witness was an Eleanor Rubidge who was the wife of a commission traveller. This Eleanor was Eleanor Lark PAYNE wife of Robert RUBIDGE. Eleanor's evidence was that she was related to Anthony Mangin's wife on her mother's side. She was in fact Maria's second cousin. | A further witness describes the wife as Sarah KENT. This should read Sarah KEMP as Eleanor's mother, Eleanor Lark KEMP was the first cousin of Sarah KEMP. The allegation was that Sarah KEMP was a 'light' woman who had never married Anthony Mangin. Evidence was produced to show Sarah Mangin had at least two children by other men, before and after her marriage to Anthony Mangin, and that she left Mangin to take up with an old flame and went to live in America with him leaving Maria and her sister Elizabeth with their father. In the event, the judgement was granted for the plaintiff after evidence of Anthony Mangin's fatherhood of Maria was produced. It took Maria eight years of litigation to succeed to her father's estate and another twenty before she obtained the money from her father's partners. She had, thus, spent 28 years in litigation so what followed is truly incredible. |
