William Russell

VIOTTI’S division of violin-playing into two great classes—good playing and bad playing—is applicable to Bank-note making. We shall now cover a few pages with a faint outline of the various arts, stratagems, and contrivances employed in concocting bad Bank-notes. The picture cannot be drawn with very distinct or strong markings. The tableaux from which it is copied, are so intertwisted and complicated with clever, slippery, ingenious scoundrelism, that a finished chart of it would be worse than morally displeasing—it would be tedious.

All arts require time and experience for their development. When anything great is to be done, first attempts are nearly always failures. The first Bank-note forgery was no exception to this rule, and its story has a spice of romance in it. The affair has never been circumstantially told; but some research enables us to detail it:—

In the month of August, 1757, a gentleman living in the neighborhood of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, named Bliss, advertised for a clerk. There were, as was usual at that time, many applicants; but the successful one was a young man of twenty-six, named Richard William Vaughan. His manners were so winning and his demeanor so much that of a gentleman, (he belonged indeed to a good county family in Staffordshire, and had been a student at Pembroke Hall, Oxford,) that Mr. Bliss at once engaged him. Nor had he occasion, during the time the new clerk served him, to repent the step. Vaughan was so diligent, intelligent, and steady, that not even when it transpired that he was, commercially speaking, “under a cloud,” did his master lessen confidence in him. Some inquiry into his antecedents showed that he had, while at College, been extravagant—that his friends had removed him thence—set him up in Stafford as a wholesale linen-draper, with a branch establishment in Aldersgate Street, London—that he had failed, and that there was some difficulty about his certificate. But so well did he excuse his early failings and account for his misfortunes, that his employer did not check the regard he felt growing towards him. Their intercourse was not merely that of master and servant. Vaughan was a frequent guest at Bliss’s table; by-and-by a daily visitor to his wife, and—to his ward.

Miss Bliss was a young lady of some attractions, not the smallest of which was a hansome fortune. Young Vaughan made the most of his opportunities. He was well-looking, well-informed, dressed well, and evidently made love well, for he won the young lady’s heart. The guardian was not flinty-hearted, and acted like a sensible man of the world. “It was not,” he said, on a subsequent and painful occasion, “till I learned from the servants and observed by the girl’s behavior, that she greatly approved Richard Vaughan, that I consented; but on condition that he should make it appear that he could maintain her. I had no doubt of his character as a servant, and I knew his family were respectable. His brother is an eminent attorney.” Vaughan boasted that his mother (his father was dead) was willing to re-instate him in business with a thousand pounds—five hundred of which was to be settled upon Miss Bliss for her separate use.

So far all went on prosperously. Providing Richard Vaughan could attain a position satisfactory to the Blisses, the marriage was to take place on the Easter Monday following, which, the Calendar tells us, happened early in April, 1758. With this understanding, he left Mr. Bliss’s service, to push his fortune.

Months passed on, and Vaughan appears to have made no way in the world. He had not even obtained his bankrupt’s certificate. His visits to his affianced were frequent, and his protestations passionate; but he had effected nothing substantial towards a happy union. Miss Bliss’s guardian grew impatient; and, although there is no evidence to prove that the young lady’s affection for Vaughan was otherwise than deep and sincere, yet even she began to lose confidence in him. His excuses were evidently evasive, and not always true. The time fixed for the wedding was fast approaching; and Vaughan saw that something must be done to restore the young lady’s confidence.

About three weeks before the appointed Easter Tuesday, Vaughan went to his mistress in high spirits. All was right—his certificate was to be granted in a day or two—his family had come forward with the money, and he was to continue the Aldersgate business he had previously carried on as a branch of the Stafford trade. The capital he had waited so long for, was at length forthcoming. In fact, here were two hundred and forty pounds of the five hundred he was to settle on his beloved. Vaughan then produced twelve twenty-pound notes; Miss Bliss could scarcely believe her eyes. She examined them. The paper, she remarked, seemed thicker than usual. “Oh,” said Bliss, “all Bank bills are not alike.” The girl was naturally much pleased. She would hasten to apprise Mistress Bliss of the good news.

Not for the world! So far from letting any living soul know he had placed so much money in her hands, Vaughan exacted an oath of secresy from her, and sealed the notes up in a parcel with his own seal—making her swear that she would on no account open it till after their marriage.

Some days after, that is, “on the twenty-second of March,” (1758) we are describing the scene in Mr. Bliss’s own words—“I was sitting with my wife by the fireside. The prisoner and the girl were sitting in the same room—which was a small one—and although they whispered, I could distinguish that Vaughan was very urgent to have something returned which he had previously given to her. She refused, and Vaughan went away in an angry mood. I then studied the girl’s face, and saw that it expressed much dissatisfaction. Presently a tear broke out. I then spoke, and insisted on knowing the dispute. She refused to tell, and I told her that until she did, I would not see her. The next day I asked the same question of Vaughan—he hesitated. ‘Oh’ I said, ‘I dare say it is some ten or twelve pound matter—something to buy a wedding bauble with.’ He answered that it was much more than that—it was near three hundred pounds! ‘But why all this secrecy?’ I said; and he answered that it was not proper for people to know that he had so much money till his certificate was signed. I then asked him to what intent he had left the notes with the young lady? He said, as I had of late suspected him, he designed to give her a proof of his affection and truth. I said, ‘You have demanded them in such a way that it must be construed as an abatement of your affection towards her.’” Vaughan was again exceedingly urgent in asking back the packet; but Bliss remembering his many evasions, and supposing that this was a trick, declined advising his niece to restore the parcel without proper consideration. The very next day it was discovered that the notes were counterfeits.

This occasioned stricter inquiries into Vaughan’s previous career. It turned out that he bore the character in his native place of a dissipated and not very scrupulous person. The intention of his mother to assist him was an entire fabrication, and he had given Miss Bliss the forged notes solely for the purpose of deceiving her on that matter. Meanwhile the forgeries became known to the authorities, and he was arrested. By what means, does not clearly appear. The “Annual Register” says, that one of the engravers gave information; but we find nothing in the newspapers of the time to support that statement; neither was it corroborated at Vaughan’s trial.

When Vaughan was arrested, he thrust a piece of paper into his mouth, and began to chew it violently. It was, however, rescued, and proved to be one of the forged notes; fourteen of them were found on his person, and when his lodgings were searched twenty more were discovered.

Vaughan was tried at the Old Bailey on the seventh of April, before Lord Mansfield. The manner of the forgery was detailed minutely at the trial:—On the first of March, (about a week before he gave the twelve notes to the young lady,) Vaughan called on Mr. John Corbould, an engraver, and gave an order for a promissory note to be engraved with these words:—

“No. ——.

“I promise to pay to ————, or Bearer, —— London ——.”

There was to be a Britannia in the corner. When it was done, Mr. Sneed (for that was the alias Vaughan adopted) came again, but objected to the execution of the work. The Britannia was not good, and the words “I promise” were too near the edge of the plate. Another was in consequence engraved, and on the fourth of March, Vaughan took it away. He immediately repaired to a printer, and had forty-eight impressions taken on thin paper, provided by himself. Meanwhile, he had ordered, on the same morning, of Mr. Charles Fourdrinier, another engraver, a second plate, with what he called “a direction,” in the words, “For the Governor and Company of the Bank of England.” This was done, and about a week later he brought some paper, each sheet “folded up,” said the witness, “very curiously, so that I could not see what was in them. I was going to take the papers from him, but he said he must go upstairs with me, and see them worked off himself. I took him up-stairs; he would not let me have them out of his hands. I took a sponge and wetted them, and put them one by one on the plate in order for printing them. After my boy had done two or three of them, I went down-stairs, and my boy worked the rest off, and the prisoner came down and paid me.”

Here the Court pertinently asked, “What imagination had you when a man thus came to you to print on secret paper, ‘the Governor and Company of the Bank of England?’”

The engraver’s reply was:—“I then did not suspect anything; but I shall take care for the future.” As this was the first Bank-of-England-note forgery that was ever perpetrated, the engraver was held excused.

It may be mentioned, as an evidence of the delicacy of the reporters, that in their account of the trial, Miss Bliss’s name is not mentioned. Her designation is “a young lady.” We subjoin the notes of her evidence:—

“A young lady (sworn). The prisoner delivered me some bills; these are the same (producing twelve counterfeit Bank notes sealed up in a cover, for twenty pounds each;) said they were Bank bills. I said they were thicker paper—he said all bills are not alike. I was to keep them till after we were married. He put them into my hands to show he put confidence in me, and desired me not to show them to anybody; sealed them up with his own seal, and obliged me by an oath not to discover them to anybody, and I did not till he discovered them himself; he was to settle so much in Stock on me.”

Vaughan urged in his defence that his sole object was to deceive his affianced, and that he intended to destroy all the notes after his marriage. But it had been proved that the prisoner had asked one John Ballingar to change first one, and then twenty of the notes; but which that person was unable to do. Besides, had his sole object been to dazzle Miss Bliss with his fictitious wealth, he would most probably have intrusted more, if not all the notes, to her keeping.

He was found guilty, and passed the day that had been fixed for his wedding, as a condemned criminal.

On the 11th May, 1758, Richard William Vaughan was executed at Tyburn. By his side, on the same gallows, there was another forger—William Boodgere, a military officer, who had forged a draught on an army-agent named Calcroft, and expiated the offence with the first forger of Bank-of-England notes.

The gallows may seem hard measure to have meted out to Vaughan, when it is considered that none of his notes were negotiated and no person suffered by his fraud. Not one of the forty-eight notes, except the twelve delivered to Miss Bliss, had been out of his possession; indeed the imitation must have been very clumsily executed, and detection would have instantly followed any attempt to pass the counterfeits. There was no endeavor to copy the style of engraving on a real Bank note. That was left to the engraver; and as each sheet passed through the press twice, the words added at the second printing, “For the Governor and Company of the Bank of England,” could have fallen into their proper place on any one of the sheets, only by a miracle. But what would have made the forgery clear to even a superficial observer, was the singular omission of the second “n” in the word England.[D]

The criticism on Vaughan’s note of a Bank clerk examined on the trial was—“There is some resemblance to be sure; but this note” (that upon which the prisoner was tried) “is numbered thirteen thousand eight hundred and forty, and we never reach so high a number.” Besides, there was no water-mark in the paper. The note, of which a fac-simile appeared in our eighteenth number, and dated so early as 1699, has a regular design in the texture of the paper, showing that the water-mark is as old as the Bank notes themselves.

Vaughan was greatly commiserated. But despite the unskillfulness of the forgery, and the insignificant consequences which followed it, the crime was considered of too dangerous a character not to be marked, from its very novelty, with exemplary punishment. Hanging created at that time no remorse in the public mind, and it was thought necessary to set up Vaughan as a warning to all future Bank-note forgers. The crime was too dangerous not to be marked with the severest penalties. Forgery differs from other crimes not less in the magnitude of the spoil it may obtain and of the injury it inflicts, than in the facilities attending its accomplishment. The common thief finds a limit to his depredations in the bulkiness of his booty, which is generally confined to such property as he can carry about his person; the swindler raises insuperable and defeating obstacles to his frauds if the amount he seeks to obtain is so considerable as to awaken close vigilance or inquiry. To carry their projects to any very profitable extent, these criminals are reduced to the hazardous necessity of acting in concert, and thus infinitely increasing the risks of detection. But the forger need have no accomplice—he is burdened with no bulky and suspicious property—he needs no receiver to assist his contrivances. The skill of his own individual right-hand can command thousands—often with the certainty of not being detected, and oftener with such rapidity as to enable him to baffle the pursuit of justice.

It was a long time before Vaughan’s rude attempt was improved upon; but in the same year, (1758,) another department of the crime was commenced with perfect success, namely, an ingenious alteration, for fraudulent purposes, of real Bank notes. A few months after Vaughan’s execution, one of the northern mails was stopped and robbed by a highwayman; several Bank notes were comprised in the spoil, and the robber, setting up with these as a gentleman, went boldly to the Hatfield Post-office, ordered a chaise-and-four, rattled away down the road, and changed a note at every change of horses. The robbery was of course soon made known, and the numbers and dates of the stolen notes were advertised as having been stopped at the Bank. To the genius of a highwayman this offered but a small obstacle, and the gentleman-thief changed all the figures “1” he could find, into “4’s.” These notes passed currently enough; but on reaching the Bank, the alteration was detected, and the last holder was refused payment. As that person had given a valuable consideration for the note, he brought an action for the recovery of the amount; and at the trial it was ruled by the Lord Chief Justice, that “any person paying a valuable consideration for a Bank note, payable to bearer, in a fair course of business, has an understood-right to receive the money of the Bank.”

It took a quarter of a century to bring the art of forging Bank notes to perfection. In 1779, this was nearly attained by an ingenious gentleman named Mathison, a watch-maker, from the matrimonial village of Gretna Green. Having learnt the arts of engraving and of simulating signatures, he tried his hand at the notes of the Darlington Bank; but, with the confidence of skill, was not cautious in passing them, was suspected and absconded to Edinburgh. Scorning to let his talent be wasted, he favored the Scottish public with many spurious Royal Bank-of-Scotland notes, and regularly forged his way by their aid to London. At the end of February he took handsome lodgings in the Strand, opposite Arundel Street. His industry was remarkable; for, by the 12th of March, he had planned and polished rough pieces of copper, engraved them, forged the water-mark, printed, and negotiated several impressions. His plan was to travel and to purchase articles in shops. He bought a pair of shoe-buckles at Coventry with a forged note, which was eventually detected at the Bank of England. He had got so bold that he paid such frequent visits in Threadneedle Street that the Bank clerks became familiar with his person. He was continually changing notes of one for another denomination. These were his originals, which he procured to make spurious copies of. One day seven thousand pounds came in from the Stamp Office. There was a dispute about one of the notes. Mathison, who was present, though at some distance, declared, oracularly, that the note was a good one. How could he know so well? A dawn of suspicion arose in the minds of the clerks; one trail led into another, and Mathison was finally apprehended. So well were his notes forged, that, on the trial, an experienced Bank clerk declared he could not tell whether the note handed him to examine, was forged or not. Mathison offered to reveal his secret of forging the water-mark, if mercy were shown to him; this was refused, and he suffered the penalty of his crime.

Mathison was a genius in his criminal way, but a greater than he appeared in 1786. In that year perfection seemed to have been reached. So considerable was the circulation of spurious paper-money that it appeared as if some unknown power had set up a bank of its own. Notes were issued from it, and readily passed current, in hundreds and thousands. They were not to be distinguished from the genuine paper of Threadneedle Street. Indeed, when one was presented there, in due course, so complete were all its parts, so masterly the engraving, so correct the signatures, so skillful the water-mark, that it was promptly paid, and only discovered to be a forgery when it reached a particular department. From that period forged paper continued to be presented, especially at the time of lottery-drawing. Consultations were held with the police. Plans were laid to help detection. Every effort was made to trace the forger. Clarke, the best detective of his day, went like a sluth-hound, on the track; for in those days the expressive word “blood-money” was known. Up to a certain point there was little difficulty; but beyond that, consummate art defied the ingenuity of the officer. In whatever way the notes came, the train of discovery always paused at the lottery-offices. Advertisements offering large rewards were circulated; but the unknown forger baffled detection.

While this base paper was in full currency, there appeared an advertisement in the Daily Advertiser for a servant. The successful applicant was a young man, in the employment of a musical-instrument maker, who, some time after, was called upon by a coachman, and informed that the advertiser was waiting in a coach to see him. The young man was desired to enter the conveyance, where he beheld a person with something of the appearance of a foreigner, sixty or seventy years old, apparently troubled with the gout. A camlet surtout was buttoned round his mouth, a large patch was placed over his left eye, and nearly every part of his face was concealed. He affected much infirmity. He had a faint hectic cough; and invariably presented the patched side to the view of the servant. After some conversation—in the course of which he represented himself as guardian to a young nobleman of great fortune—the interview concluded with the engagement of the applicant, and the new servant was directed to call on Mr. Brank, at 29 Titchfield Street, Oxford Street. At this interview Brank inveighed against his whimsical ward for his love of speculating in lottery tickets, and told the servant that his principal duty would be to purchase them. After one or two meetings, at each of which Brank kept his face muffled, he handed a forty and twenty pound Bank note; told the servant to be very careful not to lose them, and directed him to buy lottery-tickets at separate offices. The young man fulfilled his instructions, and at the moment he was returning, was suddenly called by his employer from the other side of the street, congratulated on his rapidity, and then told to go to various other offices in the neighborhood of the Royal Exchange, and to purchase more shares. Four hundred pounds in Bank-of-England notes were handed him, and the wishes of the mysterious Mr. Brank were satisfactorily effected. These scenes were continually enacted. Notes to a large amount were thus circulated, lottery tickets purchased, and Mr. Brank—always in a coach, with his face studiously concealed—was ever ready on the spot to receive them. The surprise of the servant was somewhat excited; but had he known that from the period he left his master to purchase the tickets, one female figure accompanied all his movements, that, when he entered the offices, it waited at the door, peered cautiously in at the window, hovered round him like a second shadow, watched him carefully, and never left him until once more he was in the company of his employer—that surprise would have been greatly increased.[E] Again and again were these extraordinary scenes rehearsed. At last the Bank obtained a clue, and the servant was taken into custody. The directors imagined that they had secured the actor of so many parts, that the flood of forged notes which had inundated that establishment would at length be dammed up at his source. Their hopes proved fallacious, and it was found that “Old Patch” (as the mysterious forger was, from the servant’s description, nick-named,) had been sufficiently clever to baffle the Bank directors. The house in Titchfield street was searched; but Mr. Brank had deserted it, and not a trace of a single implement of forgery was to be seen.

All that could be obtained was some little knowledge of “Old Patch’s” proceedings. It appeared that he carried on his paper-coining entirely by himself. His only confidant was his mistress. He was his own engraver. He even made his own ink. He manufactured his own paper. With a private press he worked his own notes, and counterfeited the signatures of the cashiers, completely. But these discoveries had no effect, for it became evident that Mr. Patch had set up a press elsewhere. Although his secret continued as impenetrable, his notes became as plentiful as ever. Five years of unbounded prosperity ought to have satisfied him—but it did not. Success seemed to pall him. His genius was of that insatiable order which demands new excitements, and a constant succession of new flights. The following paragraph from a newspaper of 1786, relates to the same individual:—

“On the 17th of December, ten pounds was paid into the Bank, for which the clerk, as usual, gave a ticket to receive a Bank note of equal value. This ticket ought to have been carried immediately to the cashier, instead of which the bearer took it home, and curiously added an 0 to the original sum, and returning, presented it so altered to the cashier, for which he received a note of one hundred pounds. In the evening, the clerks found a deficiency in the accounts, and on examining the tickets of the day, not only that but two others were discovered to have been obtained in the same manner. In one, the figure 1 was altered to 4, and in another to 5, by which the artist received, upon the whole, nearly one thousand pounds.”

To that princely felony, Old Patch, as will be seen in the sequel, added smaller misdemeanors which one would think were far beneath his notice, except to convince himself and his mistress of the unbounded facility of his genius for fraud.

At that period the affluent public were saddled with a tax on plate, and many experiments were made to evade it. Among others one was invented by a Mr. Charles Price, a stock-jobber and lottery-office keeper, which, for a time, puzzled the tax-gatherer. Mr. Charles Price lived in great style, gave splendid dinners, and did everything on the grandest scale. Yet Mr. Charles Price had no plate! The authorities could not find so much as a silver tooth-pick on his magnificent premises. In truth, what he was too cunning to possess, he borrowed. For one of his sumptuous entertainments, he hired the plate of a silversmith in Cornhill, and left the value in bank notes as security for its safe return. One of these notes having proved a forgery, was traced to Mr. Charles Price; and Mr. Charles Price was not to be found at that particular juncture. Although this excited no surprise—for he was often an absentee from his office for short periods—yet, in due course and as a formal matter of business, an officer was sent to find him, and to ask his explanation regarding the false notes. After tracing a man whom he had a strong notion was Mr. Charles Price, through countless lodgings and innumerable disguises, the officer (to use his own expression) “nabbed” Mr. Charles Price. But, as Mr. Clark observed, his prisoner and his prisoner’s lady were even then “too many” for him; for although he lost not a moment in trying to secure the forging implements, after he had discovered that Mr. Charles Price, and Mr. Brank, and Old Patch, were all concentrated in the person of his prisoner, he found the lady had destroyed every trace of evidence. Not a vestige of the forging factory was left; not the point of a graver, nor a single spot of ink, nor a shred of silver paper, nor a scrap of anybody’s handwriting, was to be met with. Despite, however, this paucity of evidence to convict him, Mr. Charles Price had not the courage to face a jury, and eventually he saved the judicature and the Tyburn executive much trouble and expense, by hanging himself in Bridewell.

The success of Mr. Charles Price has never been surpassed, and even after the darkest era in the history of Bank forgeries—which dates from the suspension of cash payments, in February, 1797, and which will be treated of in the succeeding chapter—“Old Patch” was still remembered as the CÆsar of Forgers.

CHAPTER II.

IN the history of crime, as in all other histories, there is one great epoch by which minor dates are arranged and defined. In a list of remarkable events, one remarkable event more remarkable than the last, is the standard around which all smaller circumstances are grouped. Whatever happens in Mohammedan annals, is set down as having occurred so many years after the flight of the Prophet; in the records of London commerce a great fraud or a great failure is mentioned as having come to light so many months after the flight of Rowland Stephenson. Sporting men date from remarkable struggles for the Derby prize, and refer to 1840, as “Bloomsbury’s year.” The highwayman of old dated from Dick Turpin’s last appearance on the fatal stage at Tyburn turnpike. In like manner, the standard epoch in the annals of Bank-Note Forgery, is the year 1797, when (on the 25th of February) one-pound notes were put into circulation instead of golden guineas; or, to use the City idiom, ‘cash payments were suspended.’

At that time the Bank-of-England note was no better in appearance—had not improved as a work of art—since the days of Vaughan, Mathison, and Old Patch; it was just as easily imitated, and the chances of the successful circulation of counterfeits were increased a thousand-fold.

Up to 1793 no notes had been issued even for sums so small as five pounds. Consequently all the Bank paper then in use, passed through the hands and under the eyes of the affluent and educated, who could more readily distinguish the false from the true. Hence, during the fourteen years which preceded the non-golden and small-note era, there were only three capital convictions for the crime. When, however, the Bank-of-England notes became “common and popular,” a prodigious quantity—to complete the quotation—was also made “base,” and many persons were hanged for concocting them.

To a vast number of the humbler orders, Bank Notes were a rarity and a “sight.” Many had never seen such a thing before they were called upon to take one or two-pound notes in exchange for small merchandise, or their own labor. How were they to judge? How were they to tell a good from a spurious note?—especially when it happened that the officers of the Bank themselves, were occasionally mistaken, so complete and perfect were the imitations then afloat. There cannot be much doubt that where one graphic rascal was found out, ten escaped. They snapped their fingers at the executioner, and went on enjoying their beef-steaks and porter—their winter treats to the play—their summer excursions to the suburban tea-gardens—their fashionable lounges at Tunbridge Wells, Bath, Margate, and Ramsgate—doing business with wonderful unconcern, and “face” all along their journeys. These usually expensive, but to them profitable enjoyments, were continually coming to light at the trials of the lesser rogues who undertook the issue department; for, from the ease with which close imitation was effected, the manufacture was more readily completed than the uttering. The fraternity and sisterhood of utterers played many parts, and were banded in strict compact with the forgers. Some were turned loose into fairs and markets, in all sorts of appropriate disguises. Farmers, who could hardly distinguish a field of standing wheat from a field of barley—butchers, who never wielded more deadly weapons than two-prong forks—country boys, with cockney accents, bought gingerbread, and treated their so-called sweethearts with ribbons and muslins, all by the interchange of false “flimseys.” The better-mannered disguised themselves as ladies and gentlemen, paid their losings at cards or hazard, or their tavern bills, their milliners, and coachmakers, in motley money, composed of part real and part base bank paper. Some went about in the cloak of the Samaritan, and generously subscribed to charities wherever they saw a chance of changing a bad “five” for three or four good “ones.” Ladies of sweet disposition went about doing good among the poor—personally inquired into distress, relieved it by sending out a daughter or a son to a neighboring shop for change, and left five shillings for present necessities, walking off with fifteen. So openly—in spite of the gallows—was forgery carried on, that whoever chose to turn utterer found no difficulty in getting a stock-in-trade to commence with. Indeed, in the days of highwaymen, no traveling-gentleman’s pocket or valise was considered properly furnished without a few forged notes wherewith to satisfy the demands of the members of the “High Toby.” This offence against the laws of the road, however, soon became too common, and wayfarers who were stopped and rifled, had to pledge their sacred words of honor that their notes were the genuine promises of Abraham Newland, and that their watches were not of the factory of Mr. Pinchbeck.

With temptations so strong, it is no wonder that the forgers’ trade flourished, with only an occasional check from the strong arm of the law. It followed, therefore, that from the issue of small notes in February, 1797, to the end of 1817—twenty years—there were no fewer than eight hundred and seventy prosecutions connected with Bank-Note Forgery, in which there were only one hundred and sixty acquittals, and upwards of three hundred executions! 1818 was the culminating point of the crime. In the first three months there were no fewer than one hundred and twenty-eight prosecutions by the Bank; and by the end of that year, two-and-thirty individuals had been hanged for Note Forgery. So far from this appalling series of examples having any effect in checking the progress of the crime, it is proved that at, and after that very time, base notes were poured into the Bank at the rate of a hundred a day!

The enormous number of undetected forgeries afloat, may be estimated by the fact, that from the 1st of January, 1812, to the 10th April, 1818, one hundred and thirty-one thousand three hundred and thirty-one pieces of paper were ornamented by the Bank officers with the word “Forged”—upwards of one hundred and seven thousand of them were one-pound counterfeits.

Intrinsically, it would appear from an Hibernian view of the case, then, that bad notes were nearly as good, (except not merely having been manufactured at the Bank,) as good ones. So thoroughly and completely did some of them resemble the authorized engraving of the Bank, that it was next to impossible to distinguish the false from the true. Countless instances, showing rather the skill of the forger than the want of vigilance in Bank officials, could be brought forward. Respectable persons were constantly taken into custody on a charge of uttering forgeries, imprisoned for days and then liberated. A close scrutiny proving that the accusations were made upon genuine paper. In September, 1818 Mr A. Burnett, of Portsmouth, had the satisfaction of having a note which had passed through his hands, returned to him from the Bank of England, with the base mark upon it. Satisfied of its genuineness, he re-inclosed it to the cashier, and demanded its payment. By return of post he received the following letter:—

A more extraordinary case is on record:—A note was traced to the possession of a tradesman, which had been pronounced by the Bank Inspectors to have been forged. The man would not give it up, and was taken before a magistrate, charged with “having a note in his possession, well knowing it to be forged.” He was committed to prison on evidence of the Bank Inspector, but was afterwards released on bail to appear when called on. He was not called on; and, at the expiration of twelve months, (having kept the note all that time,) he brought an action against the Bank for false imprisonment. On the trial the note was proved to be genuine! and the plaintiff was awarded damages of one hundred pounds.

It is a fact sufficiently dreadful that three hundred and thirty human lives should have been sacrificed in twenty-one years; but when we relate a circumstance which admits the merest probability that some—even one—of those lives may have been sacrificed in innocence of the offence for which they suffered, the consideration becomes appalling.

Some time after the frequency of the crime had in other respects subsided, there was a sort of bloody assize at Haverfordwest, in Wales; several prisoners were tried for forging and uttering, and thirteen were convicted—chiefly on the evidence of Mr. Christmas, a Bank Inspector, who swore positively, in one case, that the document named in the indictment, “was not an impression from a Bank-of-England plate—was not printed on the paper with the ink or water-mark of the Bank—neither was it in the handwriting of the signing clerk.” Upon this testimony the prisoner, together with twelve participators in similar crimes, were condemned to be hanged!

The morning after the trial, Mr. Christmas was leaving his lodging, when an acquaintance stepped up and asked him, as a friend, to give his opinion on a note he had that morning received. It was a bright day; Mr. Christmas put on his spectacles, and carefully scrutinized the document in a business-like and leisurely manner. He pronounced it to be forged. The gentleman, a little chagrined, brought it away with him to town. It is not a little singular that he happened to know Mr. Burnett, of Portsmouth, whom he accidentally met, and to whom he showed the note. Mr. Burnett was evidently a capital judge of bank paper. He said nothing, but slipping his hand into one pocket, handed to the astonished gentleman full change, and put the note into another. “It cannot be a good note,” exclaimed the latter, “for my friend Christmas told me at Haverfordwest that it is a forgery!” But as Mr. Burnett had backed his opinion to the amount of twenty shillings, he declined to retract it; and lost no time in writing to Mr. Henry Hase (Abraham Newland’s successor) to test its accuracy.

It was lucky that he did so; for this little circumstance saved thirteen lives!

Mr. Christmas’s co-inspectors at the Bank of England actually reversed his non-official judgment that the note was a forgery. It was officially pronounced to be a good note; yet upon the evidence of Mr. Christmas as regards other notes, the thirteen human beings at Haverfordwest were trembling at the foot of the gallows. It was promptly and cogently argued that as Mr. Christmas’s judgment had failed him in the deliberate examination of one note, it might also err as to others, and the convicts were respited.

The converse of this sort of mistake often happened. Bad notes were pronounced to be genuine by the Bank. Early in January, 1818, a well-dressed woman entered the shop of Mr. James Hammond, of 40 Bishopsgate Street Without, and having purchased three pounds worth of goods, tendered in payment a ten-pound note. There was something hesitating and odd in her manner; and, although Mr. Hammond could see nothing the matter with the note, yet he was ungallant enough to suspect—from the uncomfortable demeanor of his customer—that all was not right. He hoped she was not in a hurry, for he had no change; he must send to a neighbor for it. He immediately dispatched his shopman to the most affluent of all his neighbors—to her of Threadneedle Street. The delay occasioned the lady to remark, “I suppose he is gone to the Bank!” Mr. Hammond having answered in the affirmative, engaged his customer in conversation, and they freely discussed the current topics of the day; till the young man returned with ten one pound Bank-of-England Notes. Mr. Hammond felt a little remorse at having suspected his patroness, who departed with the purchases with the utmost dispatch. She had not been gone half an hour before two gentlemen rushed into the shop in a state of grievous chagrin; one was the Bank clerk who had changed the note. He begged Mr. Hammond would be good enough to give him another for it. “Why?” asked the puzzled shopkeeper. “Why, sir,” replied the distressed clerk, “it is forged!” Of course his request was not complied with. The clerk declared that his dismissal was highly probable; but Mr. Hammond was inexorable.

The arguments in favor of death-punishments never fail so signally as when brought to the test of the scaffold and its effect on Bank forgeries. When these were most numerous, although from twenty to thirty persons were put to death in one year, the gallows was never deprived of an equal share of prey during the next. As long as simulated notes could be passed with ease, and detected with difficulty, the Old Bailey had no terrors for clever engravers and dexterous imitators of the hieroglyphic autographs of the Bank-of-England signers.

At length public alarm at the prevalence of forgeries, and the difficulty of knowing them as such, arose to the height of demanding some sort of relief. In 1819 a committee was appointed by the Government to inquire into the best means of prevention. One hundred and eighty projects were submitted. They mostly consisted of intricate designs such as rendered great expense necessary to imitate. But none were adopted for the obvious reason that ever so indifferent and easily executed imitation of an elaborate note is quite sufficient to deceive an uneducated eye, as had been abundantly proved in the instance of the Irish “black note.” The Bank had not been indifferent or idle on the subject, for it had spent some hundred thousand pounds in projects for inimitable notes. At last—not long before the Commission was appointed—they were on the eve of adopting an ingenious and costly mechanism for printing a note so precisely alike on both sides as to appear as one impression, when one of the Bank printers imitated it exactly by the simple contrivance of two plates and a hinge. This may serve as a sample of the other one hundred and seventy-nine projects.

Neither the gallows nor expensive and elaborate works of art having been found effectual in preventing forgery, the true expedient for at least lessening the crime was adopted in 1821:—the issue of small notes was wholly discontinued, and sovereigns were brought into circulation. The forger’s trade was nearly annihilated. Criminal returns inform us that during the nine years after the resumption of gold currency the number of convictions for offences having reference to the Bank-of-England notes were less than one hundred, and the executions only eight. This clinches the argument against the efficacy of the gallows. In 1830 death-punishments were repealed for all minor offences, and, although the cases of Bank-Note Forgeries slightly increased for a time, yet there is no reason to suppose that they are greater now than they were between 1821 and 1830.

At present, Bank-paper forgeries are not numerous. One of the latest was that of the twenty-pound note, of which about sixty specimens found their way into the Bank. It was well executed in Belgium by foreigners, and the impressions were passed among the Change-agents in various towns in France and the Netherlands. The speculation did not succeed; for the notes got into, and were detected at the Bank, a little too soon to profit the schemers much.

The most considerable frauds now perpetrated are not forgeries; but are done upon the plan of the highwayman mentioned in our first chapter. In order to give currency to stolen or lost notes which have been stopped at the Bank, (lists of which are supplied to every banker in the country,) the numbers and dates are fraudulently altered. Some years since, a gentleman, who had been receiving a large sum of money at the Bank, was robbed of it in an omnibus. The notes gradually came in, but all were altered. The last was one for five hundred pounds, dated the 12th March, 1846, and numbered 32109. On the Monday (3rd June) after the last “Derby Day,” amid the twenty-five thousand pieces of paper that were examined by the Bank Inspectors, there was one note for five hundred pounds, dated 12th March, 1848, and numbered 32409. At that note an inspector suddenly arrested his rapid examination of the pile of which it was one. He scrutinized it for a minute, and pronounced it “altered.” On the next day, that same note, with a perfect one for five hundred pounds, is shown to us with an intimation of the fact. We look at every letter—we trace every line—follow every flourish; we hold both up to the light—we undulate our visuals with the waves of the water-mark. We confess that we cannot pronounce decisively, but we have an opinion derived from a slight “goutiness” in the fine stroke of the figure 4 that No. 32409 is the forgery! so indeed it was. Yet the Bank Inspector had picked it out from the hundred genuine notes as instantaneously—pounced upon it as rapidly as if it had been printed with green ink upon card-board.

This, then, O gentlemen forgers and sporting-note alterers, is the kind of odds which is against you. A minute investigation of the note assured us of your exceeding skill and ingenuity; but it also convinced us of the superiority of the detective ordeal which you have to blind and to pass. In this instance you had followed the highwayman’s plan, and had put with great cunning, the additional marks to the 1 in 32109 to make it into a 4. To hide the scraping out of the top or serif of the figure 1—to make the angle from which to draw the fine line of the 4—you had artfully inserted with a pen the figures “£16 16,” as if that sum had been received from a person bearing a name that you had written above. You had with extraordinary neatness cut out the “6” from 1846, and filled up the hole with an 8, abstracted from some note of lesser value. You had fitted it with remarkable precision—only you had not got the 8 quite upright enough to pass the shrewd glance of the Bank Inspector.

We have seen a one-pound note made up of refuse pieces of a hundred other Bank notes, and pasted on a piece of paper, (like a note that had been accidentally torn,) so as to present an entire and passable whole.

To alter with a pen a 1 into a 4 is an easy task—to cut out the numeral from the date in one note and insert it into another needs only a tyro in paper-cutting; but to change the special number by which each note is distinguished, is a feat only second in impossibility to trumping every court-card of every suit six times running in a rubber of whist. Yet we have seen a note so cleverly altered by this expedient, that it was actually paid by the Bank cashiers. If the reader will take a Bank note out of his purse, and examine its “number,” he will at once appreciate the combination of chances required to find, on any other note, any other figure that shall displace any one of the numerals so as to avoid detections. The “number” of every Bank note is printed twice on one line—first, on the words “I promise,” secondly, on the words, “or bearer.” Sometimes the figures cover the whole of those words—sometimes they only partly obscure them. No. 99066 now lies before us. Suppose we wished to substitute the “0” of another note for the first “9” of the one now under our eye; we see that the “9” covers a little bit of the “P,” and intersects in three places the “r,” in “Promise.” Now, to give this alteration the smallest chance, we must look through hundreds of other notes till we find an “0” which not only covers a part of the “P” and intersects the “r” in three places, but in precisely the same places as the “9” on our note does; else the strokes of those letters would not meet when the “0” was let in, and instant detection would ensue. But even then the job would only be half done. The second initial “9” stands upon the “or” in “or bearer,” and we should have to investigate several hundred more notes, to find an “0” that intersected that little word exactly in the same manner, and then let it in with such mathematical nicety, that not the hundredth part of a hair’s breath of the transferred paper should fail to range with the rest of the letters and figures on the altered note; to say nothing of hiding the joins in the paper. This is the triumph of ambi-dexterity; it is a species of patch-work far beyond the most sublime achievements of “Old Patch” himself.”

Time has proved that the steady perseverance of the Bank—despite the most furious clamor—in gradually improving their original note and thus preserving those most essential qualities, simplicity and uniformity—has been a better preventive to forgery than any one of the hundreds of plans, pictures, complications, chemicals, and colors, which have been forced upon the Directors’ notice. Whole-note forgery is nearly extinct. The lives of Eminent Forgers need only wait for a single addendum; for only one man is left who can claim superiority over Mathison, and he was, unfortunately for the Bank of England, born a little too late, to trip up his heels, or those of the late Mr. Charles Price. He can do everything with a note that the patchers, and alterers, and simulators can do, and a great deal more. Flimsy as a Bank note is to a proverb, he can split it into three perfect continuous, flat, and even leaves. He has forged more than one design sent into the Bank as an infallible preventive to forgery. You may, if you like, lend him a hundred-pound note; he will undertake to discharge every trace of ink from it, and return it to you perfectly uninjured and a perfect blank. We are not quite sure that if you were to burn a Bank note and hand him the black cinders, that he would not bleach it, and join it, and conjure it back again into a very good-looking, payable piece of currency. But we are sure of the truth of the following story, which we have from our friend the transcendent forger referred to, and who is no other than the chief of the Engraving and Engineering department of the Bank of England:—

Some years ago—in the days of the thirty-shilling notes—a certain Irishman saved up the sum of eighty-seven pounds ten, in notes of the Bank of Ireland. As a sure means of securing this valuable property, he put it in the foot of an old stocking, and buried it in his garden, where Bank-note paper couldn’t fail to keep dry, and to come out, when wanted, in the best preservation.

After leaving his treasure in this excellent place of deposit for some months, it occurred to the depositor to take a look at it, and see how it was getting on. He found the stocking-foot apparently full of the fragments of mildewed and broken mushrooms. No other shadow of a shade of eighty-seven pounds ten.

In the midst of his despair, the man had the sense not to disturb the ashes of his property. He took the stocking-foot in his hand, posted off to the Bank in Dublin, entered it one morning as soon as it was opened, and, staring at the clerk with a most extraordinary absence of all expression in his face, said,

“Ah, look at that, sir! Can ye do anything for me?”

“What do you call this?” said the clerk.

“Eighty-siven pound ten, praise the Lord, as I’m a sinner! Ohone! There was a twenty as was paid to me by Mr. Phalim O’Dowd, sir, and a ten as was changed by Pat Rielly, and a five as was owen by Tim; and, Ted Connor, ses he to ould Phillips——”

“Well!—never mind old Phillips. You have done it, my friend!”

“Oh, Lord, sir, and it’s done it I have, most com-plate! Oh, good luck to you, sir; can you do nothing for me?”

“I don’t know what’s to be done with such a mess as this. Tell me, first of all, what you put in the stocking, you unfortunate blunderer?”

“Oh yes, sir, and tell you true as if it was the last word I had to spake entirely, and the Lord be good to you, and Ted Conner ses he to ould Phillips, regarden the five as was owen by Tim, and not includen of the ten which was changed by Pat Rielly——”

“You didn’t put Pat Rielly or ould Phillips into the stocking did you?”

“Is it Pat or ould Phillips as was ever the valy of eighty-sivin pound ten, lost and gone, and includen the five as was owen by Tim, and Ted Connor——”

“Then tell me what you did put in the stocking, and let me take it down. And then hold your tongue, if you can, and go your way, and come back to-morrow.”

The particulars of the notes were taken, without any reference to ould Phillips, who could not, however, by any means be kept out of the story; and the man departed.

When he was gone, the stocking-foot was shown to the then Chief Engraver of the notes, who said, that if anybody could settle the business, his son could. And he proposed that the particulars of the notes should not be communicated to his son, who was then employed in his department of the Bank, but should be put away under lock and key; and that if his son’s ingenuity should enable him to discover from these ashes what notes had really been put in the stocking, and the two lists should tally, the man should be paid the lost amount. To this prudent proposal the Bank of Ireland readily assented, being extremely anxious that the man should not be a loser, but, of course, deeming it essential to be protected from imposition.

The son readily undertook the delicate commission proposed to him. He detached the fragments from the stocking with the utmost care, on the fine point of a pen-knife—laid the whole gently in a basin of warm water, and presently saw them, to his delight, begin to unfold and expand like flowers. By and by, he began to “teaze them” with very light touches of the ends of a camel’s-hair pencil, and so, by little and little, and by the most delicate use of the warm water, the camel’s-hair pencil, and the pen-knife, got the various morsels separate before him, and began to piece them together. The first piece laid down was faintly recognizable by a practiced eye as a bit of the left-hand bottom corner of a twenty-pound note; then came a bit of a five—then of a ten—then more bits of a twenty—then more bits of a five and ten—then, another left-hand bottom corner of a twenty—so there were two twenties!—and so on, until, to the admiration and astonishment of the whole Bank, he noted down the exact amount deposited in the stocking, and the exact notes of which it had been composed. Upon this—as he wished to see and divert himself with the man on his return—he provided himself with a bundle of corresponding new, clean, rustling notes, and awaited his arrival.

He came exactly as before, with the same blank staring face, and the same inquiry, “Can you do anything for me, sir!”

“Well,” said our friend, “I don’t know. Maybe I can do something. But I have taken a great deal of pains, and lost a great deal of time, and I want to know what you mean to give me!”

“Is it give, sir? Thin, is there anything I wouldn’t give for my eighty-sivin pound tin, sir; and it’s murdered I am by ould Phillips.”

“Never mind him; there were two twenties, were there not?”

“Oh, holy mother, sir, there was! Two most illigant twenties! and Ted Conner—and Phalim—which Rielly——”

He faltered, and stopped as our friend, with much ostentatious rustling of the crisp paper, produced a new twenty, and then the other twenty, and then a ten, and then a five, and so forth. Meanwhile, the man occasionally murmuring an exclamation of surprise or a protestation of gratitude, but gradually becoming vague and remote in the latter as the notes reappeared, looked on, staring, evidently inclined to believe that they were the real lost notes, reproduced in that state by some chemical process. At last they were all told out, and in his pocket, and he still stood staring and muttering, “Oh, holy mother, only to think of it! Sir, it’s bound to you forever, that I am!”—but more vaguely and remotely now than ever.

“Well,” said our friend, “what do you propose to give me for this?”

After staring and rubbing his chin for some time longer, he replied with the unexpected question—

“Do you like bacon?”

“Very much,” said our friend.

“Then it’s a side as I’ll bring your honor to-morrow morning, and a bucket of new milk—and ould Phillips——”

“Come,” said our friend, glancing at a notable shillelah the man had under his arm, “let me undeceive you. I don’t want anything of you, and I am very glad you have got your money back. But I suppose you’d stand by me, now, if I wanted a boy to help me in a little skirmish?”

They were standing by a window on the top storey of the Bank, commanding a court-yard, where a sentry was on duty. To our friend’s amazement, the man dashed out of the room without speaking one word, suddenly appeared in the court-yard, performed a war-dance round this astonished soldier—who was a modest young recruit—made the shillelah flutter, like a wooden butterly, round his musket, round his bayonet, round his head, round his body, round his arms, inside and outside his legs, advanced and retired, rattled it all around him like a firework, looked up at the window, cried out with a high leap in the air, “Whooroo! Thry me!”—vanished—and never was beheld at the Bank again from that time forth.