Author: Barrell, Maria
Biography:
BARRELL, Maria, formerly WEYLAR, later ADAIR (1745?-1803: Orlando)
She claimed to have been born in the West Indies. She moved to Grenada in 1763 and married Theodore Barrell (1741-1796), the son of a Boston shipbuilder, in 1773. They had two children. Prior to her marriage, she had published Reveries du Coeur (1770) which contained several pieces she had just lifted from magazines. By 1777 they were in America and were accused of loyalist sympathies during the war. In April 1780, she was allowed to leave Boston without permission to return. She never saw him again. He later failed in various enterprises in Grenada, India, and America. She spent time in the Debtors’ Gaol in the 1780s and gave an account of that experience in British Liberty Vindicated (1788) and in a melodramatic and fanciful version highlighting her endangered virtue with her play The Captive (1790). In 1784 she submitted a claim for compensation for over £4000 in London for losses in the American War but this was rejected. She made a further claim in 1790, again unsuccessfully. She then married James Makitterick Adair (1728-1801), a maverick physician with West Indian interests, on 23 Jul. 1791 at Southwark. She almost certainly knew Theodore Barrell was still alive. The marriage was short-lived and Adair remarried the following year in Scotland. In 1800 she may have spent time in St. Martin-in-the-Fields Workhouse and on 12 Apr. 1801 was convicted of passing bad coin for Daffy’s elixir (for her daughter in America) at a medicine watch-house in Fleet Street. She was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and sureties for good behaviour. She was again convicted for passing counterfeit coin in Marylebone in 1803. She was recognised by one of her gaolers as one and the same person (Weylar or Wylie, Barrell, Aird) and, this being a second offence of a capital crime, the sentence was death. However, she received a royal pardon on 14 Sept. 1803, with the sentence commuted to transportation to New South Wales. She died in Newgate awaiting transportation. (Orlando 4 Aug. 2020; ancestry.co.uk 4 Aug 2020; findmypast.co.uk 4 Aug. 2020; Columbian Centinel 13 Aug. 1796; oldbaileyonline.org; Morning Post 11 Jul. 1803) AA
Other Names:
- Maria Weylar