Telling Tales (5 page)

William Henry was brought up by Samuel Ireland, a socially and intellectually ambitious man from East London who may or may not have been his real father, and Samuel’s ‘housekeeper’ Mrs Freeman, who may well have been his mother. Raised to believe his birth mother had died, the naturally weedy and shy William fought a constant battle for attention at home. At school, his main aim was to avoid the attentions of his masters, so impossible did he find it to excel or even keep up in any of his classes. Also sharing the family house at Norfolk Street, just off the Strand, were Mrs Freeman’s two delightful and intelligent daughters; and if they weren’t enough to take attention away from poor William, at the centre of it all was Samuel’s beloved collection of books and antiquities which he protected and nurtured with the single-minded obsession of a new mother. He made a living by selling books of engravings and historical relics to the aristocrats and intellectuals whose company he craved, and the house had become something of a museum by the time the likes of Boswell came to view the priceless Shakespeare papers he claimed to own. Mrs Freeman herself was an occasional writer of satire, the girls were keen artists, and most evenings the family would sit amongst Samuel’s treasures disporting and bettering themselves by reading aloud from Shakespeare.

William himself did not seem to have inherited any of the talents of his family, his only passion being to sit in his bedroom making pretend suits of armour. However, the family had connections in the Drury Lane Theatre and it was here that William seemed most at home, revelling in the make-believe world of the back-stage scene-builders and costume designers, and even getting the odd walk-on part in a play. But most of the time he found himself centre of attention for all the wrong reasons: rarely able to get his family’s attention, never the recipient of anyone’s praise and always wondering about the true nature of his parentage, he must have cut a forlorn figure as he sloped around the city on errands for his father. When he was eventually allowed to leave school he was apprenticed to a law firm in one of the nearby Inns of Court, a job he hated. He had already read about Chatterton (who had the same job and also lacked paternal love) and, he wrote in his confession years later, was already wondering what other similarities there might be between them.

At nineteen years old, William was plugging away at his dreary job and coming home to a family who had little time for him. Yet outside this little world, as he must have known from his father’s doings, England and Europe were in the grip of an obsession with literary and historical relics which would ultimately enable him to make his mark. The fall of the great French families in the Revolution meant the international market in
objets d’art
was suddenly flooded with the flotsam of their grand existences. Collectors were going wild for paintings, furniture and books with impressive pedigrees and grand connections. At the same time, as a reaction to this, some ingenious Englishmen were trying to create a market in home-grown arts and artefacts which celebrated the landscape, history and culture of their own land. Samuel Ireland, engraver, artist and inveterate collector was one such man, and the success of his collections of sketches of places such as the Avon valley were what enabled him to buy the house in Norfolk Street.

The chief obsession of the day, however, was Shakespeare. The emerging cult of bardolatory was sweeping the land, thanks largely to the irrepressible actor-manager David Garrick. In 1769 this famous Shakespeare-lover had staged an exuberant jubilee celebration at his hero’s birthplace in the Midlands. Statues were erected, encomia were written, celebrities were invited to attend balls in remembrance of the playwright and, as an offshoot of this grand affair, a crooked industry sprang up selling spurious bits of tat to tourists. The Irelands themselves were duped by one such tradesman when they made a trip to Stratford and came away with a chair said to have been sat in by Shakespeare as he wooed his wife.

Unsurprisingly, then, the one thing that William’s father lusted after but could never get his hands on was something written in Shakespeare’s hand. A whole play would be too much to hope for, of course, but even a single signature or scribbled note, he was fond of saying, would be worth exchanging his whole library for. His son was listening. And some time between the family holiday to Stratford in 1793 and the autumn of 1794, he came up with a perfect way to win the respect of the bardolatrous Samuel.

William had sense enough to begin with a dry run. From one of the many local booksellers near his house he bought an old book of prayers, written by a member of Lincoln’s Inn, which bore the stamp of Queen Elizabeth. By faking a note from the author to the queen, he would be able to say it was a rare presentation copy rather than merely one which had been bought for the royal library. He did so, trying his best to imitate the spidery handwriting of the sixteenth century, and took the results to a bookbinder in New Inn Passage for approval. To this man, a Mr Laurie, he quipped that he was planning to play a trick on his father and wanted to know if his creation looked authentic enough to pass muster. Laurie and his assistant agreed that it did, but recommended he rewrite it using a special ink preparation, well known to scribes of the day, which would make it look more genuinely aged. The solution was sold to him in a vial and he was instructed to hold the written sheet up to the fire to make the antique-looking writing come up a satisfyingly dark mottled brown. He did as he was told, and his father was fooled and delighted.

William swiftly followed this with another mini-hoax, a forged letter pertaining to a bust of Cromwell. Typically of his lack of thoroughness, he had not bothered to find out that the correspondent claiming to be giving this fine portrait-sculpture to Cromwell was in fact one of the man’s arch rivals and so very unlikely to be wishing him anything but ill luck. Fortunately, Ireland Senior was also oblivious to the fact and accepted the new addition to his collection with glee.

Now the stage was set for William’s hoaxing operation to launch in earnest. He stocked up on old paper by buying the unused end-pages of folios from a bookseller in St Martin’s Lane. He bought a collection of antique seals and doctored them according to his limited knowledge of Elizabethan heraldry. He even tore a piece of cloth from a wall-hanging in the House of Lords, when he visited to hear the king speak, and pulled it apart to make the string with which he had heard old documents were customarily tied together. Finally, he laid in a good supply of the magic ink from the man in New Inn Passage and set about practising the signature he had seen in facsimile in his father’s copy of Dr Johnson’s
Shakespeare
. Then he went back to Norfolk Street and told an astonished Samuel that he had found the bard’s signature on a mortgage deed.

At that moment, after nearly twenty years of effective parental abandonment, William had the full and rapt attention of his father. Overjoyed with his son’s discovery, Samuel immediately wanted more. He begged to know where the boy had found this incredible relic and William, thinking on his feet, began to spin the unlikely tale of Mr H.

Mr H, who wished to remain anonymous, had, he said, encountered William by chance one day when he was on an errand and discovered that the boy had an interest in antiquities. He happened to mention that he had a chest full of old papers at his grand house across town and, having little interest in such things, invited William to come and rifle through it and take away anything that caught his eye.

Blinded by ambition to the absurdity of this story, Samuel implored his son to return to Mr H’s house and bring him back more treasures, even hinting at the specific sort of things it would be most pleasing to have him unearth. Fuelled by his father’s enthusiasm, William threw himself into a frenzy of activity which must have been something of a shock to the system for such an idle youth. Happily, his employer was rarely in his chambers, so he kept his forging materials in a locked cabinet there and continued his work undisturbed.

The next Shakespeare document he produced was a receipt pertaining to the business of the Globe Theatre. Claiming to be a rare promissory note from the bard to his colleague John Hemynge, it contained both a mistake in the year the theatre was built and a misspelling of Stratford. This was passed off as a mere sign that, in Shakespeare’s time, orthography was less standard, and scribes were more careless. William appeared to be on a roll. Another note regarding a play performed before the Earl of Leicester was dated after Leicester’s death and also misspelled his name, but, astonishingly, no one seemed to mind. William even created a letter claiming to be from Shakespeare to an ancestor of the Irelands (also called, coincidentally, William) thanking him for saving him from drowning.

Of course Samuel, not wishing to compromise his carefully built reputation as a serious book-collector, sought to have all these papers authenticated. Poor William had to sit by half-terrified and half-amused as the city’s foremost handwriting, bookselling and heraldry experts scrutinized everything from seal to letter-formation. The fact that these great men would sit in what William now realized was a bogus Shakespeare courting chair only served to increase the sense of superiority the young hoaxer felt when they all deemed the documents bona fide.

Before long, William was using his phoney papers to paint the great man in colours which he thought would especially please his father. Unbelievably boldly, these included a lengthy profession of Shakespeare’s Protestant faith, written in his own hand, which was designed to put paid once and for all to rumours of his Catholicism. Then came a love-letter to Anne Hathaway, complete with lock of hair and romantic verses. In his later
Confession
, William would admit he composed these things ‘just as the thoughts arose in [his] head’ and, as for the actual writing, a spidery scrawl with weird orthography and nothing recognizably Shakespearean, he merely used as many ‘
double-yous
and
esses
as possible’.

How could so many people have been fooled? How could even Boswell be blind to the truth? To a large extent the lack of special forensic techniques must be to blame, and also the paucity of examples of Shakespeare’s real writing. But in the main, as with all successful literary hoaxes, it was simply because people wanted it so much to be true. Like the perpetrators of the Sophocles hoax and the Hitler Diaries, William Henry had tapped into a vein of cultural enthusiasm so rich that it obscured the rational minds of any number of intelligent men.

If the imaginations of the victims were willing, so was that of William himself, albeit to a different, more private end. He was never so unhinged as to trick himself into believing his output was real, but as he began to see that his actions might actually be discrediting his father rather than helping him, he began to enter into a most bizarre correspondence with him – writing as Mr H.

Samuel had wanted to apply in writing to Mr H to ask him about the provenance of the papers, and William encouraged him to do so. In his replies he used his imagined relationship with the son to tell the father how much he liked and admired the boy, and how clever and soulful he thought he was. In one letter, which reads very much like a schoolboy’s madeup games note, he even opined that he thought Samuel ought to stop making William powder his wig, because it was unnecessary and expensive. In this imagined voice, over a series of increasingly emotional letters, he says to his father all the things he could not say in real life. This is about as far from hoaxing for financial gain as you can get.

Still using the story of Mr H, still responding to the excitable desires of Samuel who was now becoming quite famous in London for his burgeoning collection of Shakespeare papers, William set about the
coup de grâce
that would ultimately bring the whole edifice of his deception crashing down around him: the creation of an entire new Shakespeare play.

The story of Vortigern and Rowena is one Shakespeare might well have told. It can be found in Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, one of his favourite sources, and tells a
Lear
-ish,
Macbeth
-ish tale of an ancient British king who would give away half his crown. But in Ireland’s clumsy hands it is about as un-Shakespearean as it is possible to imagine. At the very worst, it reads like a silly pastiche, or so thought the various dissenters, growing in number and led by the renowned Shakespeare critic Malone, who were beginning to question the papers’ authenticity. And so thought the cast and audience at Drury Lane when, amazingly, in April 1796, Samuel persuaded his contacts in the theatre to put on a performance of it.

By this time, even before the night of the ill-fated play (which surely rates as one of the most disastrous events in English theatre), William knew he was in too deep. Journalists were writing unforgiving editorials about the Shakespeare papers, cruel satires on William’s crazy spelling abounded in magazines and more and more experts were joining Malone in opposing the Irelands’ version of events. Despite the initial support of the Prince of Wales, Pitt the Younger, Edmund Burke and Boswell, William was making too many mistakes for his hoax to last for long. He had just produced an ‘original’ text of
King Lear
. Its spelling was a sight to behold (‘Unfriended, new adopted’ becoming ‘Unnefreynnededde newee adoppetedde’) but even if that did nothing to alert any remaining doubters, the fact that he prefaced the text with an address to ‘mye gentle Readerres’ ought to have rung alarm bells with anyone conversant enough with Shakespeare to know that he had viewers, not readers.

Malone, referring to the mythical chest in which William claimed Mr H kept the papers, said that after the imaginary chest in which Chatterton had ‘found’ his poems, he ‘did not expect to have heard again, for some time at least, of such a repository for ancient manuscripts’. A satirical poem was written about Ireland, positioning him alongside Macpherson, Chatterton and Lauder as one of the famous ‘four forgers’ of the day. And when the cartoonist James Gillray illustrated the verse with an unkind caricature, the Irelands’ fate never to be taken seriously was surely sealed.