Fraudsters and Charlatans (9 page)

Her fame was such that she was popularly linked to one of the great romantic figures of the age, Napoleon, then exiled to St Helena. It was widely rumoured that her ship, having been driven off course, approached the island and she ‘conceived an ardent desire of seeing the man with whose future fortunes she was persuaded she was mysteriously connected'.
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She was reported to have sprung into a rowing boat, cut it free with a large clasp knife, and rowed ashore, where her extensive knowledge of Asian languages and politics convinced everyone that she was no impostor, while she so raised the flagging sprits of Napoleon that he wanted to marry her. What Mary was actually doing on the way to America was enlivening a tedious voyage by unashamedly recounting her adventures as Caraboo to anyone who would listen.

By the time the ship arrived, the English newspapers and Mary's fame had preceded her, and the wharf was crowded with people eager to see Caraboo. A position as cook had been arranged for her, but she declined and succumbed instead to the offers of a showman who promised to put her on the stage. The Moravian ladies and the ship's captain begged her not to take this course, without effect. The American newspapers carried stories of her beauty and accomplishments, claiming that she would exhibit herself in the same dress she wore for the hoax. In the midst of all this enthusiasm, however, there was some hostility and anti-English prejudice. Given Mary's undoubted skills as a performer, she should have been a success, but her new patron failed to make the most of her true talents. Her debut, as part of a concert, involved no more than being conducted on stage as Caraboo and writing a letter in her feigned language. The audience was unimpressed, and a second performance was cancelled. By November her dream of fame was over.

What Mary did in the next seven years is unknown. She returned to England around 1824, setting herself up in a booth in New Bond Street London, exhibiting herself as Caraboo for a shilling a visit. When this failed, she tried the same thing in Bristol, but with similar result. She had been forgotten. She married a Robert Baker, ten years her senior, who was a dealer in leeches, a respectable trade that provided a comfortable income. Their daughter, Mary Ann, was born in about 1829, and when her husband died Mary continued the business. In later life she was ashamed of the Caraboo episode and refused to discuss it.

The Tolzey Bank foundered in 1819, and Samuel Worrall was declared bankrupt. He was obliged to resign as Town Clerk and died two years later, a forgotten man, whose passing did not merit an obituary in the Bristol newspapers even though he had served the city for thirty-two years. Elizabeth Worrall moved to Bristol, where she died in 1842. Whether she and Mary ever met again is not known. Dr Wilkinson managed to rise above the Caraboo debacle, and remained a well-respected man. He died in 1850, aged 87.

In 1864 Mary was living in Bedminster with her daughter, who was now carrying on the trade in leeches. Aged 75, Mary had been suffering from breathlessness and her doctor diagnosed asthma. Rebellious to the last, on being told her condition was incurable, she ‘resolved to do without medical attendance'.
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On Christmas Eve she went to bed as usual. The following morning, her daughter, unable to wake her, administered sherry, then sent for a doctor. By the time he arrived Princess Caraboo was no more.

THREE

The Viscount of Canada

I
n July 1831 the citizens of the United Kingdom were offered an exciting investment opportunity. The Lord Proprietor of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Canada, recently confirmed as heir to the 1st Earl of Stirling, announced that he was offering valuable tracts of unoccupied land for sale. There was an immediate and enthusiastic response. The only drawback, as investors were soon to discover, was that the British government did not recognise either the title of the seller or his ownership of the lands.

This was the latest act in a saga that had begun in 1621 when King James I granted the courtier poet Sir William Alexander the whole of the territory of Nova Scotia, with the object of encouraging colonisation. In 1624 Sir William was further empowered to divide the land into 16,000-acre tracts, which he could sell, granting each purchaser the rank of baronet. Charles I renewed the grant and in 1628 extended it to include the province of Canada. Sir William made valiant efforts to establish colonies there, but with limited success; in fact his industry placed him in considerable debt. Meanwhile, French claims to the lands had erupted into war. In 1631 a settlement was reached, in which the Crown, despite its prior agreement with Sir William, returned Nova Scotia to the French. Sir William was to be paid £10,000 for the cost of evacuating the Scottish settlers, but the money never appeared. He eventually sold his rights in Canada to a Monsieur de la Tour, a member of the small French colony there.

Sir William remained in favour, however. In 1635 he was granted most of New England and the whole of Long Island, and by then had amassed several titles: Earl of Stirling, Lord Alexander of Tullybody, Viscount of Canada and Earl of Dovan. Despite this impressive accumulation of honours, when he died in 1640 he was insolvent, and his Scottish holdings disappeared into the pockets of his creditors. Subsequent wars and treaties extinguished whatever rights Sir William had once had overseas, and the titles passed to his heirs; but with the death of his great-grandson, the 5th Earl of Stirling, in 1739, the peerage became extinct.

In 1759 an American, William Alexander, laid claim to the Stirling peerage on the grounds that he was descended from an uncle of the 1st Earl, but on 10 March 1762 the Lords Committee of Privileges ruled that he had failed to establish his claim. He returned to America and later became a general in the US Army, dying in 1783 without male issue.

The most persistent and ingenious claimant to the earldom was Alexander Humphrys. Born on 21 June 1783, he was the son of William Humphrys, a Birmingham merchant with substantial trading interests on the Continent. ‘Nobody in Birmingham lived better,' said a family friend. ‘They kept their carriage and a pair of fine grey horses, and had half a dozen of servants at least.'
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From 1794 the family resided in a substantial country house called the Larches, and employed a solicitor, Josiah Corrie, to collect their rents. The wars in Europe were disastrous for trade, but following the Treaty of Amiens, peace between England and France enabled William and Alexander to go to Paris in 1802 to try to recover some business debts. They were still there on the outbreak of fresh hostilities in May 1803, and both were interned at Verdun. William died in 1807, but Alexander was obliged to remain in France until the peace of 1814, although he was permitted to live in Paris. His inheritance consisted mostly of bad debts, and he squandered much of the remainder in useless litigation to recover his fortunes. In 1812 he married Fortunata Bartoletti, a Neapolitan lady, and was introduced to her friend and confidante, Mademoiselle Marie Lenormand, one of the most notorious and successful fortune-tellers in France.

Born in 1772, Mlle Lenormand had shown an early talent for cartomancy and palmistry. The terror and uncertainty of the revolutionary period led to a great boom in the fortune-telling trade, and Mlle Lenormand, who was particularly in demand, included such notables as Marat and Robespierre among her clientele. During the First Empire she continued to prosper, and her most illustrious client was the Empress Josephine, much to the displeasure of Napoleon, who twice had ‘the Sorceress', as she was known, imprisoned. After Napoleon's exile Mlle Lenormand set up a fashionable salon in the Rue de Tournon, and was the rage of Paris. It is tempting to suppose that the success and longevity of her career was a result of careful observation and a tendency to tell people what they wanted to hear: ‘there was a cunning restlessness in her bright blue eye, which . . . lost no [
sic
] one peculiarity of the “consultant”; turning the blush of timidity, the stern gaze of defiance, or the smile of incredulity, equally to her own profit'.
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When Alexander Humphrys first consulted Mlle Lenormand his family fortunes were in a state of decline. Nevertheless, she had good news for him. It would take time, and he would experience many reverses, but eventually he would achieve high rank and great wealth.

In 1814 Alexander returned to England with his family, and both he and Fortunata remained in touch with Mlle Lenormand by letter. He settled in Worcester and took the post of assistant master at Netherton House School, but was well aware that this was not the way to make his fortune. The key to wealth, he believed, was already within him – a legend from his past, which had lain dormant and unrealised. His mother Hannah was the daughter of Reverend John Alexander of Londonderry, a minister of the Presbyterian church in Plunkett Street, Dublin, until his death in 1743. The Reverend's antecedents have never been confirmed, but he could have been the John Alexander, son of James, who was baptised in 1686 in Raphoe, near Londonderry,
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while the chronicler of the Alexanders, the Reverend Charles Rogers, later stated that Hannah was descended from a Paisley branch of the family. Perhaps it was the coincidence of surname that led Hannah to tell her children that they had noble blood in their veins. Her father, she said, was a descendant of the 1st Earl of Stirling and, had he been inclined, might have made a claim not only to the title but to the substantial Stirling properties. Her husband often used to call Hannah ‘the Countess', although whether this was an acknowledgement of her position or a term of indulgent affection was never revealed. Unlike her son, Hannah only hinted at great things, never trying to prove them. Both her brothers and her sister had died young without issue, so after her death in 1814, Alexander Humphrys was his mother's sole heir. He asked Josiah Corrie to act for him in making a claim to the earldom of Stirling on the basis that Hannah was the direct descendant of John Alexander, the fourth son of the 1st Earl. This son was known as John of Gartmore, since he had married Agnes Graham, the heiress of the Gartmore estate. He had left Scotland to settle in Ireland, where he died in 1666. Of this part of the family tree there was no doubt, but the remaining connections were less certain. Alexander claimed that John of Gartmore had a son, John of Antrim, who was born in Scotland and who accompanied his father to Ireland. John of Antrim was said to have married a Mary Hamilton in 1682, and died in 1712. According to Alexander, it was his son, born on 30 September 1686, who became the Reverend John, father of Hannah. There was no evidence that John of Antrim had ever existed, but to Alexander this was a minor difficulty. There was, however, another more serious obstacle to his claim. The earldom of Stirling had been granted to Sir William and his male heirs only. Even if Hannah was his direct descendant, then the title could not pass to her son. Alexander's trump card was his claim that there was a Royal Charter, or novodamus, dated 7 December 1639, under which Charles I had granted permission for the peerage to pass through the female line if there was no male heir. No one had ever heard of such a charter, let alone seen it, but this did not deter Alexander, since it was known that some official records of that period were missing, rumoured to have been lost at sea. Furthermore, Alexander could blame the disappearance of any family papers in support of his theory on the American claimant. He was also unconcerned about the fact that the 1st Earl had died bankrupt. The original grant of Charles I had made over huge tracts of land to the Earl in perpetuity, and he was happy to ignore everything that had happened since. Should he be successful in his claim, he would gain enormous wealth, including possession of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Canada (which was then a separate province), parts of Wisconsin, Maine and Massachusetts, and a 300-mile-wide stretch of land reaching from the head waters of Lake Superior to California, with all the associated mines, woodlands and fisheries.

Mr Corrie, on finding that his client had no documents to prove his claim, declined to assist him. Alexander next attempted to enlist the aid of noble and powerful families, the very people to whose ranks he aspired, but to his great surprise found them hostile to his efforts. Another man might have given up the idea as an impossible fantasy, but Alexander Humphrys possessed extraordinary tenacity and determination, and was by now in the grip of an obsession that would dominate the rest of his life. From the outset he demonstrated an unshakeable confidence in the outcome of his claim, wildly exaggerated the importance of the evidence he used to maintain it and remained firmly blinkered against the weaknesses of his arguments. He considered any opposition as proof of an evil conspiracy of powerful men determined to deny him his inheritance. It would not have been surprising if a man so utterly convinced of his being right, but without material to prove this was so, had resorted to manufacturing the material he needed, deluding himself that he was only reconstructing papers that had once existed but had been stolen by his enemies.

In 1819 someone with the initials FD wrote to the
Gentleman's Magazine
asking for information about the Alexander family, and in particular wanting to know which descendants of the fourth, fifth and sixth sons were still alive in 1739, if there were any pedigrees of the family after that date, and if it was possible to examine the papers of successive claimants. In April the same correspondent asked about the descent of the Reverend John Alexander, who was described as the nearest male heir to the earldom. The identity of FD is unknown, but may have been Alexander or an agent employed by him. The enquiry seems to have been unsuccessful.