Fraudsters and Charlatans (13 page)

He also commented on a point the prosecution had not raised, that it appeared to him that the seals on the packet of letters sent to Eugene corresponded exactly with the supposedly much older seal on the back of the map of Canada. The facts of the case, he concluded, showed that the whole thing was done for the ultimate benefit of the prisoner, and so he believed that the jury could conclude that Alexander had full knowledge of the forgeries.

The jury retired at 11 a.m. and were absent five hours. They unanimously found that both the excerpt and the documents on the map were forgeries, but it was not proven that Alexander forged them or uttered them knowing them to be forged. They unanimously found it not proven that the documents in the packet sent to Eugene Alexander were forged.

The announcement of the verdict was received with a burst of stamping and shouting from the gallery, which was cleared by order of the judges. Alexander fainted into the arms of Colonel D'Aguilar, and had to be carried out of the court into an adjoining room. When he had recovered enough to depart, he was greeted by a huge ovation from the crowds waiting outside.

Despite Robertson's fondly expressed hopes, Alexander, who went to live first in Paris and then in Brussels, did not move on to more attainable projects. He continued to call himself the Earl of Stirling and pursued his case with the same energy and anger as before. He appealed against the official dismissal of his proofs, but any hold he may once have had upon reality had long gone when he accused the government of having employed ‘rogues . . . intriguers and spies', who, assuming ‘every variety of character, got admission into my house and society',
⁴⁶
and claimed that agents had been secretly sent abroad to find archive copies of the proofs of his pedigree and rights, that registers were either taken away or had leaves torn out, and that his family tombstones had been destroyed.

Mlle Lenormand continued to practise her profession, depite her ebbing fame. A visitor in these later years braved the damp courtyard off the Rue de Tournon, its dim uneven staircase with slimy walls, finding her apartments ‘of somber and faded aspect, bearing evidence of past grandeur'. She sat in a high-backed leather chair, shrouded in deep shadow, but when his eyes grew used to the gloom he saw ‘a person of short stature and of immense bulk . . . Her face was round and fat, yet full of meaning . . . I shall never forget the impression conveyed by that deep voice as she spoke, in low, whispering words, rapid and monotonous, the decrees of fate which stood revealed in the painted pictures she fingered with such marvellous dexterity.'
⁴⁷
After her death in 1843, it was rumoured that she had left an immense fortune to her nephew, but her 1911 biographer Alfred Marquiset states that she left 120,000 francs (about £300,000 today).

In 1845 Alexander was still writing to Lord Chief Justice Denman complaining of ‘the system of persecution and violence of which I am a victim'
⁴⁸
and ‘the hostility of the government',
⁴⁹
which he attributed to their not having all the facts, and asserting that the map and the writing on it were all genuine. He denied that he had founded his case on the excerpt, stating that once its authenticity had been questioned he had withdrawn it. He added that he had a list of all the people who were correspondents of Mlle Lenormand, hinting that they were English, Scottish and Irish people of high rank. If this was a subtle attempt at blackmail, it produced no response.

He appealed to the House of Lords, but the legal process finally halted in 1846 when proceedings were officially shelved. He then moved to the United States and settled at 11th Street, Washington, where he continued the battle. Every so often the case was resurrected and briefly filled the newspapers. An American supporter, John Hayes of Washington, wrote in 1853 claiming that the map of Canada and its inscriptions were genuine. He believed that Delisle had added the title ‘Premier Géographe' at a later date, and that while the document was in official hands Lord Stirling's enemies had made alterations to the writing to make it look like a forgery. Alexander died in Washington on 4 May 1854 aged 76. His former confidante and adversary Thomas Banks died the following September in Greenwich.

Two of Alexander's five sons continued to pursue their father's interests. On 11 February 1864 his eldest son, Alexander William Francis Alexander, established himself as heir to his father and revived the proceedings. The case was eventually heard by the House of Lords, who delivered judgment on 3 April 1868, in which it was declared that the evidence rested solely on forged documents.

On 15 April 1872 the second son, Charles Louis Alexander, made a claim to Congress on behalf of his brother as Earl of Stirling, in which, among other points, he claimed that the original map of Canada and its writings had been genuine but that it had been stolen and a copy substituted. Needless to say, he failed.

FOUR

The Sting

O
n 18 May 1840 Andrew O'Reilly, Paris correspondent of
The Times
, wrote an article whose consequences were far wider that he could have imagined. Then aged 57, O'Reilly had served the paper for many years, acting as a hub of foreign news, assembling information from continental newspapers, editing stories and passing them on to
The Times
offices in Printing House Square. He also organised the dispatch of documents by fast courier and cross-channel steamer. On this occasion, O'Reilly recognised a story that had recently appeared in Belgian and French newspapers as a substantial scoop; and so before composing his dispatch he spent some days investigating the details and obtaining supporting evidence. Entitled ‘Extraordinary and Extensive Forgery and Swindling Conspiracy on the Continent', the piece appeared in
The Times
of 26 May, and, sensational as it was, the headline was no exaggeration.

The principal instrument of the fraud was the circular letter of credit, the forerunner of the modern-day travellers' cheque, devised some seventy years earlier to assist gentlemen travelling on the Continent. The purchaser deposited a sum of money with a bank in London, whereupon he was provided with an engraved document that enabled him to visit specified continental banks to draw on his funds while abroad. Each letter of credit was stamped with the initials of the issuing bank and signed by a senior partner. There were blank spaces left for the number of the letter, the name of the bearer and the amount of credit, which could be from £100 to £10,000. As money was drawn, so it was noted on the letter until the full amount had been issued. Most banks wrote to their foreign counterparts to advise them of any letters of credit they had issued, but one bank was an exception, Messrs Glyn, Hallifax, Mills and Co. The letters issued by Glyn's included, usefully, a list of the principal towns in Europe, beginning with Abbeville and ending with Zante, and for each one gave the names of the banks where money could be drawn. These banks, asked to provide money on a letter of credit from Glyn's, would have no written advice with which to verify the document and would therefore have to rely on the banker's experience to decide if the letter appeared genuine and his judgement as to whether the bearer looked honest.

The mastermind behind the plan to swindle continental banks using forged letters of credit was Auguste Harold, Marquis de Bourbel, a rogue who left a trail of misery and scandal wherever he went. He claimed to come from a family ‘old as the rocks of Provence',
¹
and indeed the de Bourbels of Montpinçon in Normandy had first been ennobled in the year 936. Born on 30 January 1804,
²
as a young man he was employed in a junior post by Monsieur Hyde de Neuville, the French ambassador to Portugal. The date and circumstances of his departure from that post are unknown, but it was sudden, and at de Neuville's particular request. He was later attached to the French embassy at Copenhagen, and from there went to Paris, where he became a member of the Secret Police. Known as a gambler, duellist and roué, he was handsome and well mannered, with a plausible and insinuating charm. In 1841 he was described as having ‘light hair, fine stature, wears a great coat of kid skin, his complexion pale, and of agreeable physiognomy'.
³
He was at home in the very best society, with a wide knowledge of both the fashionable world and its leading figures; he spoke four European languages fluently and was an amusing raconteur. He was also known for his good taste in the arts, was a skilled painter in oils and, more dangerously, a caricaturist, while he ‘rode, danced, fenced and wielded the broadsword with uncommon dexterity'.
⁴
Not lacking in physical courage, early in his career he fought a duel with a M. Haidé, said to be a Greek gentleman, whom he fatally wounded.

On 28 March 1828 at the British embassy chapel in Paris, de Bourbel married 21-year-old Constance Cecilia Bulkely, a lady of fortune from a respectable Berkshire family; soon afterwards, however, his scandalous behaviour made even Paris too hot to hold him. He sold the family seat at Montpinçon and spent the next two years in England. In the 1830s he moved his family (there were now two or three children) to Florence, where he ‘entered very generally into the dissipations and intrigues of Florence, and was universally looked upon as a specious, agreeable, but thoroughly
mauvais sujet
'
⁵
– in other words, an unprincipled reprobate.

In 1838, when his unfortunate wife was in the last month of another pregnancy, he abandoned her to run away with a young woman who has been described as either his wife's maid or an opera dancer. Mme de Bourbel did not recover from the shock and died in childbirth on 9 April 1838. Public outrage at de Bourbel's behaviour forced him to remove his family to the Villa Micali, near Leghorn. There he was frequently visited by an acquaintance who was probably no less a villain than himself.

William Cunninghame-Graham, sometimes known as Wicked William, was born on 16 August 1775, the son of the poet and politician Robert Cunninghame-Graham of Gartmore. His father had taken great care over his education, but young Graham, though talented, was a sad disappointment. During 1792 and 1793, when Graham was at university in Glasgow, his father was obliged to write to him frequently, complaining about his idleness, extravagance and inattention to his studies. After completing his education at Neuchâtel, Graham entered politics and became Member of Parliament for Dumbarton, and Lieutenant-Colonel of that county's militia.

In 1798 Graham married Anna Dickson, who bore him two daughters, but in 1816, after Anna's death, he married Janet Bogle (née Hunter), the widow of Allan Bogle, a Glasgow merchant who had traded with the West Indies, by whom she had a son, Allan George Bogle. On 16 March 1818 she gave birth to another son, Alexander Spiers Graham, who took after his father in his fondness for a life of idleness, to which he added two other vices, debauchery and drink. Both sons would eventually be involved in their father's plan.

Like de Bourbel, William Cunninghame-Graham had an interest in the fine arts and was an excellent mathematician, but his main talents were mechanical, and he was especially adept at wood turning and the construction of tools and machines. He had invented and constructed a tracing machine probably similar to the pantograph, a device invented in the seventeenth century to make copies of fine art engravings. The movement of a pencil at the bottom of the machine caused another pencil at the top to move in the same way, and could either reproduce an exact copy of the original pencil marks, or, by adjustments, create larger or smaller copies.

By nature Graham was ‘cool, crafty, designing and thoroughly unprincipled'.
⁶
A dedicated gambler, after squandering his inheritance (he lost the family seat of Finlaystone in a card game) he was obliged to flee Scotland in 1828 to avoid his creditors. By 1833 he was living in Florence, where he first became acquainted with the Marquis de Bourbel.

Despite the difference in age, de Bourbel and Graham had much in common and as time passed spent increasing amounts of time in each other's company. De Bourbel was also a keen gambler and made use of Graham's mathematical talents in calculating odds, seemingly undeterred by the Scot's disastrous record in that field. By the end of 1838 the frequent absence of Graham from society and his preoccupied air when in company excited no little comment among his acquaintances. Unsuspected by friends and family, the two now virtually inseparable men had been devising a complex and daring plot which, if successful, would make them immensely rich. De Bourbel had been looking for a large coup to make his fortune, and being a man of imagination it had occurred to him that his organisational abilities, Graham's mechanical talents and the connections of his son Allan George Bogle, partner in a prosperous Florence banking business with Messrs Kerrich and MacCarthy, provided the perfect combination. The plan was to forge letters of credit, those of Glyn's being the obvious choice. They were simpler to produce than a banknote, but even so presented a number of challenges. First of all there was the engraving and printing of the document itself, a process that could take several weeks and which would be regarded with suspicion by anyone employed in the undertaking. Secondly, they had to make a facsimile of the signature of the banker that would fool those who were familiar with it. Thirdly, they needed to manufacture a stamp bearing the initials of the firm, ‘G. H. M. and Co.', and, finally, Glyn's letters used a distinctive, unusually thick paper unobtainable on the Continent. It was a complex operation that would hardly be worth attempting unless the reward was very great. Even if they overcame all the difficulties and produced a perfect forgery, a letter of credit of substantial value could excite suspicion, and once the money had been drawn, it would be a matter of days before details of the payments were transmitted from the European banks to Glyn's in England and checked against customers' accounts. De Bourbel considered the difficulties and had a masterstroke of inspiration. The key to success was to forge a large number of letters of credit in relatively modest sums, and employ a team of agents working for commission who would go to banks in different countries and present the forgeries at the same time. Their work done, they would then depart, using false passports, to America, India, Algiers or Egypt, and would be long gone by the time the fraud was discovered. De Bourbel calculated that the gang could make £1 million (some £65 million today), most of which would go into his own pocket.