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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In Bram Stoker's 'True Crime: The Famous Imposters and Con Artists', the author delves into the world of deception and deceit, unraveling the intricate web of famous imposters and con artists throughout history. Written in a gripping and suspenseful style, Stoker's narrative keeps readers on the edge of their seats as they uncover the true stories behind these infamous criminals. Drawing on his expertise in writing gothic novels, Stoker's book brings a chilling and intriguing perspective to the world of true crime literature, setting it apart from other works in the genre. With meticulous research and attention to detail, Stoker paints a vivid picture of the lives and crimes of these master manipulators, leaving readers both fascinated and wary. Bram Stoker, known for his iconic novel 'Dracula', showcases his versatility as a writer in 'True Crime: The Famous Imposters and Con Artists'. His fascination with the darker aspects of human nature shines through in this book, as he delves deep into the minds of these cunning criminals. Stoker's background in theater and literature provides a unique lens through which he examines the psychology and motivations of these imposters, adding a layer of complexity to the narrative. I highly recommend 'True Crime: The Famous Imposters and Con Artists' to readers who enjoy true crime stories with a twist. Stoker's masterful storytelling and fresh perspective on the genre make this book a must-read for anyone intrigued by the minds of criminals and the art of deception. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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True Crime: The Famous Imposters and Con Artists
Published by
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Table of Contents
Introduction
True Crime: The Famous Imposters and Con Artists brings together Bram Stoker’s late-career inquiry into deception, identity, and the public appetite for marvels. Originally issued in 1910 as Famous Impostors, the work appears here in its complete, author-organized sequence: a preface followed by sections on pretenders, magicians and mediums, legendary wanderers, financial adventurers, witchcraft and clairvoyance, celebrated claimants, gender disguise, notorious hoaxes, a diplomatic enigma, and the Bisley Boy tradition. The collection is not a novel but a suite of linked nonfiction studies. Read as a whole, it sketches a panorama of credulity and calculation from antiquity to the modern press, staged with Stoker’s characteristic narrative control.
These writings are essays and historical sketches rather than stories or plays. Stoker assembles case summaries, anecdotal vignettes, and brief references to chronicles, legal proceedings, pamphlets, and newspapers, shaping them into compact narratives. The method is expository and comparative: each section isolates a species of imposture, then places individual examples against the broader habits of an era. The resulting book belongs with popular history and true-crime reportage while straying, at times, into folklore studies. It is animated by the author’s instinct for incident and climax, yet it refuses outright melodrama, preferring the steady accumulation of detail, context, and motive to establish its points.
Throughout, Stoker treats imposture as both a social performance and a problem of evidence. His prose favors clear staging, sharp scene-setting, and a steady alternation between source testimony and commentary, a pattern recognizable from his broader oeuvre. He had long experience as a theatre manager, and the sense of public spectacle—of audiences swayed by rhetoric, costume, and repetition—pervades these pages. At the same time, he writes as a tabulator of facts, testing plausibility and recording contradictions without foreclosing debate. The balance between skepticism and fascination keeps the studies brisk yet judicious, acknowledging the ingenuity of deceivers and the vulnerability of institutions they exploit.
The preface establishes the governing attitude: curiosity disciplined by restraint. Stoker announces the categories he will examine and frames imposture as a recurring feature of civic and private life. He alerts readers to the pitfalls of certainty when records are partial, motives mixed, and rumor persistent. The preface also signals the breadth of materials to come, from courtroom transcripts and diplomatic gossip to broadsides and travel lore. Without advancing a single theory to cover every case, it proposes a practical question that guides the volume: by what signs do communities decide who is who, and how do those tests fail or succeed?
Under Pretenders, Stoker surveys political claimants and masked heirs, instances in which the stakes of identity rise to matters of sovereignty and succession. He considers how unrest, distance, and poor communication create openings for persuasive narratives to flourish, and how legitimacy is negotiated when bodies, documents, and memories clash. These episodes reveal the crossroads of law and story: a claimant must present a life that fits a vacancy, while officials must defend a past that can be made to seem uncertain. The cases are treated as lessons in collective psychology as much as in individual audacity, tracing the allure of restoration.
In Practitioners of Magic, the book turns to conjurors, wonder-workers, and stage adepts whose art occupies the gray zone between entertainment and exploitation. Stoker distinguishes the honest craft of illusion from the pretensions of those who sell marvels as revelation, noting how dexterity, apparatus, and a controlled environment can simulate the impossible. He is attentive to the audience’s role—expectation, suggestion, and the contagious wish to believe—and to the circulation of methods through demonstration and exposure. The essay neither denounces nor lionizes; it records the mechanics of astonishment and the thin membrane separating theatrical effects from claims of supernatural power.
The Wandering Jew traces the transformations of a durable legend that periodically intersects with the rhetoric of imposture. Stoker follows the figure’s reported appearances, the uses made of the tale by moralists and pamphleteers, and the way a circulating story can attach itself to passing strangers who happen to fit a type. The chapter treats this not as solved mystery, but as an index of how narrative migrates, gathers particulars, and returns as testimony. In doing so it shows how folklore supplies ready-made identities that can be adopted, projected, or misrecognized, especially when readers bring expectations to encounters with the unfamiliar.
John Law presents the career of a financial innovator whose schemes reshaped credit and confidence on a national scale. Stoker outlines the ascent from theorist to administrator, the creation of instruments that promised prosperity, and the climate that enabled speculative enthusiasm to outrun restraint. The emphasis falls less on technical finance than on character, persuasion, and the choreography of trust. By reading markets as theatres of belief, the chapter links monetary phenomena to the book’s larger inquiry: how appearances, numbers, and official assurances can collaborate to produce an illusion that holds until it does not, with consequences far beyond the perpetrator.
In Witchcraft and Clairvoyance, Stoker assembles episodes from European witch trials and accounts of modern spiritualist circles, observing continuities in testimony, procedure, and expectation. He records the material culture of marvels—charms, scripts, cabinets—and the social dynamics that make visions persuasive or damning. The tone is analytic rather than derisive. While noting exposures and contradictions, he also examines the satisfactions people derive from rituals that promise contact with hidden forces or lost companions. The section shows how fear and hope can converge to certify extraordinary claims, and how the effort to regulate such claims becomes a recurring civic drama.
The study of Arthur Orton details the celebrated Tichborne case, in which a butcher from Wapping asserted the identity of a missing baronet to the fascination of Victorian observers. Stoker recounts the advance of the claim through inquiries and trials, the array of witnesses marshaled on each side, and the media attention that made the proceedings a national spectacle. He dwells on the unstable status of memory, the mutability of appearance over time, and the pressures that attach to testimony when class loyalties and political sympathies are implicated. The chapter stands as a meticulous anatomy of recognition under strain.
Women as men gathers instances of cross-gender presentation undertaken for work, mobility, safety, or adventure, registering both ingenuity and the hazards of discovery. Hoaxes, Etc. considers fabrications that succeed by seizing a moment, a medium, or a mood. The Chevalier d’Eon presents a diplomat and soldier whose public life became inseparable from debates about dress and status. The Bisley Boy records a persistent tradition that reimagines a monarch’s youth through rumor. Read together, these sections probe the cultural scripts by which gender, honor, and authority are recognized, and how deft manipulation of those scripts can unsettle certainty.
As a whole, this collection showcases Stoker’s enduring fascinations: the boundary between fact and fabrication, the dramaturgy of public life, and the documentary habits that shape belief. It extends the author’s signature concern with archives and testimony into realms of law, finance, folklore, and the press, demonstrating how narrative frames can determine outcomes. The studies matter not only as curiosities but as inquiries into civic health: they ask what tools a society needs to test claims without cruelty, and how to resist being governed by spectacle alone. In an era still susceptible to performance masquerading as truth, their lessons remain timely.
Author Biography
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was an Irish novelist, theatre administrator, and cultural commentator whose career spanned the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. He achieved lasting renown with Dracula, a novel that fused folklore, modern science, and documentary form to reshape Gothic fiction. Alongside imaginative writing, he cultivated a sustained interest in history, performance, and public credulity—concerns that converge in his nonfiction volume Famous Impostors. Living between eras of rapid technological change and anxious debate about expertise, Stoker used both narrative and research-driven prose to examine how stories gain authority. His work reflects a persistent curiosity about evidence, rumor, spectacle, and belief.
Educated at Trinity College Dublin, Stoker studied mathematics and began his professional life in the Irish civil service. While working in Dublin, he contributed theatre criticism to the Dublin Evening Mail, refining a practical understanding of stagecraft, audience expectation, and the mechanics of reputation. That journalistic work, combined with steady administrative discipline, prepared him for a long tenure in London as business manager of a major theatre. The demands of programming, touring, and publicity trained him to balance documentation with drama. These formative experiences—calculation, record‑keeping, and the dynamics of performance—later informed both the structure of his fiction and the inquiries of Famous Impostors.
Throughout his years in the theatre, Stoker wrote steadily, developing a prose style that combined dramatic pacing with procedural detail. Dracula, issued in the late nineteenth century, employed diaries, letters, ships’ logs, and newspaper clippings to stage a confrontation between superstition and modern method. The novel gradually secured an enduring readership and helped fix the vampire as a central figure in popular culture. Its emphasis on evidence, collaboration, and the circulation of documents anticipated the historical case studies he later assembled. The same habits of collation and scene‑setting that serve the novel’s tension underpin the analytical stance he brought to nonfiction.
Toward the end of his career, Stoker gathered his interests in history, law, and spectacle into Famous Impostors, a compendium that surveys frauds, legends, and celebrated masquerades. Structured by topical sections, it moves from Pretenders and Practitioners of Magic to The Wandering Jew and John Law; considers Witchcraft and Clairvoyance; examines Arthur Orton; reflects on Women as men and Hoaxes, Etc.; and devotes chapters to The Chevalier d’Eon and The Bisley Boy. The collection blends narrative drive with source‑minded caution, inviting readers to weigh testimony, rumor, and printed authority while observing how notoriety travels and how uncertainty hardens into public belief.
In Famous Impostors, Stoker treats imposture as a problem of identity, law, and narration. The chapter on Arthur Orton explores a courtroom saga of recognition and doubt; The Chevalier d’Eon and Women as men consider gender presentation and the social meanings attached to disguise. Pretenders surveys struggles over dynastic legitimacy, while John Law connects financial imagination to collective credulity. Witchcraft and Clairvoyance and Practitioners of Magic situate marvels where performance, belief, and investigation meet. The Wandering Jew traces the reach of a durable legend, and The Bisley Boy registers the political allure of royal rumor. Throughout, Stoker compiles, compares, and refrains from facile verdicts.
The methods on display echo techniques familiar from his fiction: assembling heterogeneous documents, juxtaposing testimonies, and letting patterns emerge through accumulation. Rather than treat deception as merely sensational, he attends to the channels that authorize it—pamphlets, press accounts, public trials, and anecdote—observing how performance and print magnify one another. His long acquaintance with theatre made him attentive to costume, gesture, and staging, yet his civil‑service habit of record‑minding keeps the prose grounded in dates, names, and references. The result is a study that reads as cultural history as well as storytelling, without claiming finality where the sources remain contested.
In his later years, Stoker continued to publish fiction and commentary while maintaining his engagement with theatrical and literary circles. Famous Impostors stands among his final books and clarifies the breadth of his concerns beyond Gothic romance. He died in London in 1912. His legacy rests not only on the imaginative power of Dracula but also on a persistent analytical impulse: to ask how evidence is assembled, how legends endure, and how performance shapes truth. Those questions keep his work relevant to contemporary discussions of misinformation and identity. As a writer, he remains a bridge between storytelling, scholarship, and the public stage.
Historical Context
Bram Stoker published Famous Impostors in 1910, at the end of a career shaped by late Victorian and Edwardian culture. Born in Dublin in 1847 and long a manager at London’s Lyceum Theatre, Stoker approached history with a showman’s feeling for evidence and spectacle. The collection ranges widely across centuries, from medieval dynastic pretenders to nineteenth-century hoaxes and courtrooms. It appeared amid an expanding mass press, growing literacy, and post-1900 anxieties about identity, bureaucracy, and fraud. Stoker’s choices reflect both antiquarian curiosity and topical concerns: contested inheritances, forged personas, and the public’s appetite for investigative narratives that weigh testimony, documents, and rumor.
British readers in the 1890s–1910s were steeped in sensation journalism and casebook literature. Police professionalization since 1829, the rise of forensic techniques, and the popularity of detective fiction shaped expectations about how truth should be proven. Newspapers serialized trials, and illustrated weeklies spread portraits of suspects worldwide by telegraph. Stoker, already known for Dracula’s dossier-like assembly of diaries and clippings, here collects chronicles, pamphleteering, and court records to reconstruct imposture as a social phenomenon. His chapters move between political crises and parlour illusions, mirroring a culture fascinated by exposure: how to separate honest testimony from contrivance, and historical fact from legend.
In his preface, Stoker frames imposture as a recurring test of institutions as well as individuals. Nineteenth-century Britain had enlarged the documentary state through civil registration from 1837, standard forms, and centralized record offices, yet identity still depended upon witnesses and reputation. New tools complicated matters: anthropometry in the 1890s and the Henry system of fingerprint classification adopted at Scotland Yard in 1901 promised certainty while highlighting gaps in earlier methods. Passport practices were uneven before the First World War, and migration was increasing; the Aliens Act of 1905 marked Britain’s first general immigration law. Against this backdrop, Stoker surveys episodes where records and recognition diverged.
The Pretenders section looks back to eras when dynastic uncertainty made deception plausible. After the Wars of the Roses, Henry VII faced claimants whose stories found audiences across borders. Lambert Simnel, crowned in Dublin in 1487 as a Yorkist prince, was defeated at Stoke Field and later pardoned. Perkin Warbeck, accepted at various courts in the 1490s as Richard of Shrewsbury, drew foreign patronage before capture and execution in 1499. Such careers illustrate how fragile legitimacy could be when genealogy was contested, communications were slow, and propaganda traveled through embassies, merchants, and printed broadsheets.
Elsewhere in Europe, succession struggles bred similarly persuasive figures. Russia’s Time of Troubles produced several False Dmitrys between 1605 and 1612, each claiming to be Ivan the Terrible’s surviving son and leveraging noble factionalism and Polish-Lithuanian support. In the eighteenth century, Jacobite claimants James Francis Edward Stuart and his son Charles Edward Stuart embodied a different kind of pretending, anchored not in false identity but in disputed right. Stoker’s attention to these cases reflects the importance of exiled courts, print polemics, and rumor in shaping political allegiance. Pretenders thrived where confessional divides, foreign sponsorship, and popular hopes converged.
Practitioners of Magic surveys a world where science, stagecraft, and street medicine overlapped. Early modern Europe knew itinerant healers and alchemists, while writers such as Reginald Scot in 1584 exposed conjuring techniques and denounced witch persecutions. By the nineteenth century, professional magicians like Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin advanced theatrical illusion with mechanical ingenuity and controlled staging. Britain’s music halls and theatres cultivated a public alert to trickery yet eager for marvels. Stoker’s long experience in theatrical management supplied an insider’s respect for craft and a skeptical eye for the line between entertainment and fraud, an attitude echoed in the period’s exposés and popular lectures.
The Wandering Jew chapter engages a medieval legend that travelled widely through sermons, chapbooks, and later novels. By the seventeenth century, printed pamphlets reported supposed sightings across Europe; in the nineteenth century, works such as Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew (1844–45) recast the tale for new social debates. The legend often carried anti-Jewish stereotypes alongside meditations on time, suffering, and witness. Victorian folklorists increasingly catalogued such traditions, treating them as cultural artifacts rather than literal reports. Stoker’s inclusion marks the collection’s breadth: imposture here includes the persistent figure whose identity is endlessly asserted, authenticated by repetition more than by evidence.
John Law’s career exemplifies how financial innovation can shade into delusion and collective credulity. A Scottish-born speculator and theorist (1671–1729), Law founded the Banque Générale in Paris in 1716 and developed the Mississippi Company into a vehicle for national debt consolidation. In 1719–20, frenzied share speculation created the Mississippi Bubble; when expectations outran revenues and confidence collapsed, fortunes evaporated and Law fled. The episode paralleled Britain’s South Sea Bubble of 1720 and spurred debates on paper credit, monetary policy, and the psychology of markets. Stoker treats Law as an architect of belief, illustrating how monetary systems depend on public trust.
Witchcraft and Clairvoyance juxtaposes early modern prosecutions with nineteenth-century spiritualism. English and Scottish witch trials peaked in the seventeenth century and waned after legal and intellectual shifts; the Witchcraft Act of 1735 reframed witchcraft as fraudulent pretense. From 1848, American mediums such as the Fox sisters popularized spirit rapping, while figures like Daniel Dunglas Home conducted séances across Europe. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, sought controlled investigations of phenomena including telepathy and apparitions, often exposing frauds. Victorian and Edwardian Britain oscillated between credulity and scientific testing, a context that informs Stoker’s cautious catalog of claims and counter-claims.
Arthur Orton, the Tichborne Claimant, brought questions of identity into an industrial age of photography and mass politics. After the disappearance of Sir Roger Tichborne in 1854, a butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia, presented himself in 1866 as the missing heir. Civil proceedings in 1871–72 rejected the claim; a subsequent criminal trial, R. v. Castro (1873–74), convicted him of perjury, and he served a lengthy sentence. Working-class supporters, suspicious of aristocratic privilege, made the case a cause célèbre, with meetings, broadsides, and fundraising. The claim tested the evidentiary value of portraits, accents, and memory amid transoceanic migration and imperfect record-keeping.
Women as men gathers historical instances of female-presenting people adopting male dress to enter restricted occupations or travel safely. Well-documented British cases include Christian Davies, also known as Kit Cavanagh, who served as a soldier around the turn of the eighteenth century, and Hannah Snell, whose military service and 1750 memoir attracted public attention. Maritime and military settings, with loose documentation and mobile communities, made disguise feasible. Stoker’s survey reflects broader debates about gendered roles in law and custom, and the appetite for sensational life stories circulated through chapbooks, newspapers, and the stage, where such biographies were dramatized and sold.
Hoaxes, Etc. maps a print culture that rewarded audacity. In 1726, Mary Toft convinced several surgeons she had given birth to rabbits before exposure embarrassed London’s medical elite. The Cock Lane Ghost of 1762 drew crowds and was investigated by Samuel Johnson, who helped demonstrate fraud. The Berners Street hoax of 1810 overwhelmed a London household with bogus deliveries. Later, the 1869 Cardiff Giant in the United States showed the commercial value of credulity. Newspapers amplified and then debunked such capers, teaching readers both skepticism and relish for spectacle. Stoker situates these episodes within a media economy built on circulation.
The Chevalier d’Eon illustrates how diplomacy, espionage, and public curiosity intertwined with legal status. Born in 1728, d’Eon served France as soldier and diplomat, spending years in London. From the 1770s, d’Eon lived publicly as a woman; London’s betting markets speculated on d’Eon’s sex, and wagers even reached the courts. A 1777 agreement with the French crown required d’Eon to adopt female dress. After death in 1810 in London, a medical examination recorded male anatomy. Stoker’s chapter draws on extensive eighteenth-century documentation, revealing how identity could be policed through clothing, rumor, and the mechanisms of contract and international politics.
The Bisley Boy concerns a local legend from Gloucestershire asserting that a child substitute stood in for Elizabeth I. The story circulated in the nineteenth century and was popularized in the early twentieth, including by Stoker in 1910. Elizabeth I reigned from 1558 to 1603; no contemporary state papers substantiate the replacement tale, and historians generally treat it as folklore. Its endurance points to enduring fascination with Tudor secrecy, succession, and gendered authority. By presenting the legend alongside better-documented impostures, the collection shows how narrative plausibility and cultural desire can sustain stories despite the absence of verifiable evidence.
Throughout the nineteenth century, new communications infrastructures transformed the spread and testing of claims. The electric telegraph, commercial news agencies such as Reuters (founded 1851), and cheap postage accelerated information flows. Photography, from 1839, created new kinds of likeness evidence, while railways and steamships widened the geographic stage on which impostors could act. Forensics professionalized through Bertillon’s anthropometry and, in Britain, systematic fingerprinting by 1901. Yet administrative gaps remained, especially across borders. Stoker’s cases, whether medieval or modern, are reframed by readers in this technological milieu, who judge plausibility through tools and standards unavailable to earlier witnesses and courts.
Changes in education, politics, and law also conditioned how imposture was perceived. The 1870 Elementary Education Act expanded basic schooling in England and Wales, enlarging the audience for newspapers and cheap histories. Successive Reform Acts broadened the electorate, fostering a public sphere in which mass meetings and petitions could influence trials, as in the Tichborne agitation. Libel and evidence rules shaped what could be printed, while Victorian police and magistrates adapted to new categories of commercial and identity fraud. Stoker’s historical range thus reads as a genealogy of trust: how states, markets, and communities test claims in courts and in print.
As a collection, Famous Impostors functions as commentary on the periods it treats and on Stoker’s own. It juxtaposes dynastic crises with parlour tricks, financial manias with folklore, inviting readers to consider how persuasion works across institutions. Later scholarship has refined many particulars, confirming some episodes and classifying others, such as the Bisley Boy, as legend. The Folklore Society, founded in 1878, and twentieth-century historical methods supplied stricter source criticism than many earlier compilers. Modern readers encounter the book as part of the prehistory of true crime and debunking, a document of how the early twentieth century organized and judged notorious deceptions.
Synopsis (Selection)
Preface
Stoker outlines his inquiry into imposture, fraud, and the human appetite for deception, setting a skeptical yet fascinated tone. He frames the chapters as case studies drawn from history and rumor, using them to probe evidence, credulity, and the social theaters where identity is performed. Recurring motifs—masks, testimony, and the thin line between entertainment and exploitation—are signaled as the collection’s guiding concerns.
Impostors and Gendered Disguise (Pretenders; Women as men; The Chevalier d’Eon; Arthur Orton; The Bisley Boy)
Through Pretenders and specific dossiers on Arthur Orton, the Chevalier d’Eon, Women as men, and The Bisley Boy, the book surveys identity frauds that hinge on status, lineage, and gender presentation. Stoker juxtaposes courtroom claims, public rumor, and biographical detail to show how performance, paperwork, and collective desire can enthrone a false claimant or sustain a legend without conclusive proof. The tone blends investigative curiosity with moral caution, emphasizing how gendered disguise and contested names expose the instability of authority and the audience’s complicity.
Magic, Witchcraft, and Clairvoyance (Practitioners of Magic; Witchcraft and Clairvoyance)
In Practitioners of Magic and Witchcraft and Clairvoyance, Stoker distinguishes theatrical illusion from supernatural pretension, charting the tricks, testimonies, and persecutions that attend both. He highlights the psychology of belief—how hope, fear, and spectacle make witnesses unreliable and institutions harsh or credulous by turns. The inquiry is lucid and skeptical, concerned less with marvels than with method, harm, and the cultural need that keeps such practices alive.
Legends and Perennial Figures (The Wandering Jew)
The Wandering Jew is treated as a traveling myth that periodically intersects with imposture, offering a ready-made identity for charlatans and a moral parable for audiences. Stoker traces variations and sightings to show how a legend’s endurance shapes expectations and lends borrowed authority to claimants. The tone is folkloric and analytical, attentive to the boundary where inherited story slips into opportunistic deception.
Public Hoaxes and Financial Speculation (Hoaxes, Etc.; John Law)
Hoaxes, Etc. catalogs media stunts and public deceits, while John Law presents a grander case in which financial innovation and persuasion escalated into mass credulity. Stoker examines the mechanisms—print, rumor, and technical jargon—by which confidence is manufactured and the crowd persuades itself. The mood is brisk and cautionary, treating hoax and bubble alike as spectacles that thrive on speed, novelty, and the trust we place in appearances.
True Crime: The Famous Imposters and Con Artists
Preface
The subject of imposture is always an interesting one, and impostors in one shape or another are likely to flourish as long as human nature remains what it is, and society shows itself ready to be gulled. The histories of famous cases of imposture in this book have been grouped together to show that the art has been practised in many forms — impersonators, pretenders, swindlers, and humbugs of all kinds; those who have masqueraded in order to acquire wealth, position, or fame, and those who have done so merely for the love of the art. So numerous are instances, indeed, that the book cannot profess to exhaust a theme which might easily fill a dozen volumes; its purpose is simply to collect and record a number of the best known instances. The author, nevertheless, whose largest experience has lain in the field of fiction, has aimed at dealing with his material as with the material for a novel, except that all the facts given are real and authentic. He has made no attempt to treat the subject ethically; yet from a study of these impostors, the objects they had in view, the means they adopted, the risks they ran, and the punishments which attended exposure, any reader can draw his own conclusions.
Impostors of royalty are placed first on account of the fascinating glamour of the throne which has allured so many to the attempt. Perkin Warbeck began a life of royal imposture at the age of seventeen and yet got an army round him and dared to make war on Harry Hotspur before ending his short and stormy life on the gallows. With a crown for stake, it is not surprising that men have been found willing to run even such risks as those taken by the impostors of Sebastian of Portugal and Louis XVII of France. That imposture, even if unsuccessful, may be very difficult to detect, is shown in the cases of Princess Olive and Cagliostro, and in those of Hannah Snell, Mary East, and the many women who in military and naval, as well as in civil, life assumed and maintained even in the din of battle the simulation of men.
One of the most extraordinary and notorious impostures ever known was that of Arthur Orton, the Tichborne Claimant, whose ultimate exposure necessitated the employment, at great public expense of time and money, of the best judicial and forensic wits in a legal process of unprecedented length.
The belief in witches, though not extinct in our country even today, affords examples of the converse of imposture, for in the majority of cases it was the superstitions of society which attributed powers of evil to innocent persons whose subsequent mock-trials and butchery made a public holiday for their so-called judges.
The long-continued doubt as to the true sex of the Chevalier D’Eon shows how a belief, no matter how groundless, may persist. Many cases of recent years may also be called in witness as to the initial credulity of the public, and to show how obstinacy maintains a belief so begun. The Humbert case — too fresh in the public memory to demand treatment here — the Lemoine case, and the long roll of other fraudulent efforts to turn the credulity of others to private gain, show how wide-spread is the criminal net, and how daring and persevering are its manipulators.
The portion of the book which deals with the tradition of the “Bisley Boy” has had, as it demanded, more full and detailed treatment than any other one subject in the volume. Needless to say, the author was at first glance inclined to put the whole story aside as almost unworthy of serious attention, or as one of those fanciful matters which imagination has elaborated out of the records of the past. The work which he had undertaken had, however, to be done, and almost from the very start of earnest enquiry it became manifest that here was a subject which could not be altogether put aside or made light of. There were too many circumstances — matters of exact record, striking in themselves and full of some strange mystery, all pointing to a conclusion which one almost feared to grasp as a possibility — to allow the question to be relegated to the region of accepted myth. A little preliminary work amongst books and maps seemed to indicate that so far from the matter, vague and inchoate as it was, being chimerical, it was one for the most patient examination. It looked, indeed, as if those concerned in making public the local tradition, which had been buried or kept in hiding somewhere for three centuries, were on the verge of a discovery of more than national importance. Accordingly, the author, with the aid of some friends at Bisley and its neighbourhood, went over the ground, and, using his eyes and ears, came to his own conclusions. Further study being thus necessitated, the subject seemed to open out in a natural way. One after another the initial difficulties appeared to find their own solutions and to vanish; a more searching investigation of the time and circumstances showed that there was little if any difficulty in the way of the story being true in essence if not in detail. Then, as point after point arising from others already examined, assisted the story, probability began to take the place of possibility; until the whole gradually took shape as a chain, link resting in the strength of link and forming a cohesive whole. That this story impugns the identity — and more than the identity — of Queen Elizabeth, one of the most famous and glorious rulers whom the world has seen, and hints at an explanation of circumstances in the life of that monarch which have long puzzled historians, will entitle it to the most serious consideration. In short, if it be true, its investigation will tend to disclose the greatest imposture known to history; and to this end no honest means should be neglected.
B. S.
1. Pretenders
A. Perkin Warbeck
RICHARD III literally carved his way to the throne of England. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that he waded to it through blood. Amongst those who suffered for his unscrupulous ambition were George Duke of Clarence, his own elder brother, Edward Prince of Wales, who on the death of Edward IV was the natural successor to the English throne, and the brother of the latter, Richard Duke of York. The two last mentioned were the princes murdered in the Tower by their malignant uncle. These three murders placed Richard Duke of Gloucester on the throne, but at a cost of blood as well as of lesser considerations which it is hard to estimate. Richard III left behind him a legacy of evil consequences which was far-reaching. Henry VII, who succeeded him, had naturally no easy task in steering through the many family complications resulting from the long-continued “Wars of the Roses”; but Richard’s villany had created a new series of complications on a more ignoble, if less criminal, base. When Ambition, which deals in murder on a wholesale scale, is striving its best to reap the results aimed at, it is at least annoying to have the road to success littered with the debris of lesser and seemingly unnecessary crimes. Fraud is socially a lesser evil than murder; and after all — humanly speaking — much more easily got rid of. Thrones and even dynasties were in the melting pot between the reigns of Edward III and Henry VII; so there were quite sufficient doubts and perplexities to satisfy the energies of any aspirant to royal honours — however militant he might be. Henry VII’s time was so far unpropitious that he was the natural butt of all the shafts of unscrupulous adventure. The first of these came in the person of Lambert Simnel, the son of a baker, who in 1486 set himself up as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick — then a prisoner in the Tower — son of the murdered Duke of Clarence. It was manifestly a Yorkist plot, as he was supported by Margaret Duchess Dowager of Burgundy (sister of Edward IV) and others. With the assistance of the Lord–Deputy (the Earl of Kildare) he was crowned in Dublin as King Edward VI. The pretensions of Simnel were overthrown by the exhibition of the real Duke of Warwick, taken from prison for the purpose. The attempt would have been almost comic but that the effects were tragic. Simnel’s span of notoriety was only a year, the close of which was attended with heavy slaughter of his friends and mercenaries. He himself faded into the obscurity of the minor life of the King’s household to which he was contemptuously relegated. In fact the whole significance of the plot was that it was the first of a series of frauds consequent on the changes of political parties, and served as a baton d’essai for the more serious imposture of Perkin Warbeck some five years afterwards. It must, however, be borne in mind that Simnel was a pretender on his own account and not in any way a “pacemaker” for the later criminal; he was in the nature of an unconscious forerunner, but without any ostensible connection. Simnel went his way, leaving, in the words of the kingly murderer his uncle, the world free for his successor in fraud “to bustle in.”
The battle of Stoke, near Newark — the battle which saw the end of the hopes of Simnel and his upholders — was fought on 16 June, 1487. Five years afterwards Perkin Warbeck made his appearance in Cork as Richard Plantagenet Duke of York. The following facts regarding him and his life previous to 1492 may help to place the reader in a position to understand other events and to find causes through the natural gateway of effects.
To Jehan Werbecque (or Osbeck as he was called in Perkin’s “confession”), Controller of the town of Tournay in Picardy, and his wife, nee Katherine de Faro, was born in 1474, a son christened Pierrequin and later known as Perkin Warbeck. The Low Countries in the fifteenth century were essentially manufacturing and commercial, and, as all countries were at that period of necessity military, growing” youths were thus in touch at many points with commerce, industry and war. Jehan Werbecque’s family was of the better middle class, as witness his own position and employment; and so his son spent the earlier years of his life amid scenes and conditions conducive to ambitious dreams. He had an uncle John Stalyn of Ghent. A maternal aunt was married to Peter Flamme, Receiver of Tournay and also Dean of the Guild of Schelde Boatmen. A cousin, John Steinbeck, was an official of Antwerp.
In the fifteenth century Flanders was an important region in the manufacturing and commercial worlds. It was the centre of the cloth industry; and the coming and going of the material for the clothing of the world made prosperous the shipmen not only of its own waters but those of others. The ships of the pre-Tudor navy were small affairs and of light draught suitable for river traffic, and be sure that the Schelde with its facility of access to the then British port of Calais, to Lille, to Brussels, to Bruges, to Tournai, Ghent, and Antwerp, was often itself a highway to the scenes of Continental and British wars.
About 1483 or 1484, on account of the Flemish War, Pierrequin left Tournay, proceeding to Antwerp, and to Middleburg, where he took service with a merchant, John Strewe, he being then a young boy of ten or twelve. His next move was to Portugal, whither he went with the wife of Sir Edward Brampton, an adherent of the House of York. A good deal of his early life is told in his own confession made whilst he was a prisoner in the Tower about 1497.
In Portugal he was for a year in the service of a Knight named Peter Vacz de Cogna, who, according to a statement in his confession, had only one eye. In the Confession he also states in a general way that with de Cogna he visited other countries. After this he was with a Breton merchant, Pregent Meno, of whom he states incidentally: “he made me learn English.” Pierrequin Werbecque must have been a precocious boy — if all his statements are true — for when he went to Ireland in 1491 with Pregent Meno he was only seventeen years of age, and there had been already crowded into his life a fair amount of the equipment for enterprise in the shape of experience, travel, languages, and so forth.
It is likely that, to some extent at all events, the imposture of Werbecque, or Warbeck, was forced on him in the first instance, and was not a free act on his own part. His suitability to the part he was about to play was not altogether his own doing. Nay, it is more than possible that his very blood aided in the deception. Edward IV is described as a handsome debonair young man, and Perkin Warbeck it is alleged, bore a marked likeness to him. Horace Walpole indeed in his Historic Doubts builds a good deal on this in his acceptance of his kingship. Edward was notoriously a man of evil life in the way of affairs of passion, and at all times the way of ill-doing has been made easy for a king. Any student of the period and of the race of Plantagenet may easily accept it as fact that the trend of likelihood if not of evidence is that Perkin Warbeck was a natural son of Edward IV. Three hundred years later the infamous British Royal Marriage Act made such difficulties or inconveniences as beset a king in the position of Edward IV unnecessary: but in the fifteenth century the usual way out of such messes was ultimately by the sword. Horace Walpole, who was a clever and learned man, was satisfied that the person who was known as Perkin Warbeck was in reality that Richard Duke of York who was supposed to have been murdered in the Tower in 1483 by Sir James Tyrrell, in furtherance of the ambitious schemes of his uncle. At any rate the people in Cork in 1491 insisted on receiving Perkin as of the House of York — at first as a son of the murdered Duke of Clarence. Warbeck took oath to the contrary before the Mayor of Cork; whereupon the populace averred that he was a natural son of Richard III. This, too, having been denied by the newcomer, it was stated that he was the son of the murdered Duke of York.
It cannot be denied that the Irish people were in this matter as unstable as they were swift in their judgments, so that their actions are really not of much account. Five years before they had received the adventurer Lambert Simnel as their king, and he had been crowned at Dublin. In any case the allegations of Warbeck’s supporters did not march with established facts of gynecology. The murdered Duke of York was born in 1472, and, as not twenty years elapsed between this period and Warbeck’s appearance in Ireland, there was not time in the ordinary process of nature, for father and son to have arrived at such a quality of manhood that the latter was able to appear as full grown. Even allowing for an unusual swiftness of growth common sense evidently rebelled at this, and in 1492 Perkin Warbeck was received in his final semblance of the Duke of York, himself younger son of Edward IV. Many things were possible at a period when the difficulties of voyage and travel made even small distances insuperable. At the end of the fifteenth century Ireland was still so far removed from England that even Warbeck’s Irish successes, emphasised though they were by the Earls of Desmond and Kildare and a numerous body of supporters, were unknown in England till considerably later. This is not strange if one will consider that not until centuries later was there a regular postal system, and that nearly two centuries later the Lord Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale, who was a firm believer in witchcraft, would have condemned such a thing as telegraphy as an invention of the Devil.
In the course of a historical narrative like the present it must be borne in mind (amongst other things) that in the fifteenth century, men ripened more quickly than in the less strenuous and more luxurious atmosphere of our own day. Especially in the Tudor epoch physical gifts counted for far more than is now possible; and as early (and too often sudden) death was the general lot of those in high places, the span of working life was prolonged rather by beginning early than by finishing late. Even up to the time of the Napoleonic Wars, promotion was often won with a rapidity that would seem like an ambitious dream to young soldiers of today. Perkin Warbeck, born in 1474, was nineteen years of age in 1493, at which time the Earl of Kildare spoke of “this French lad,” yet even then he was fighting King Henry VII, the Harry Richmond who had overthrown at Bosworth the great and unscrupulous Richard III. It must also be remembered for a proper understanding of his venture, that Perkin Warbeck was strongly supported and advised with great knowledge and subtlety by some very resolute and influential persons. Amongst these, in addition to his Irish “Cousins” Kildare and Desmond, was Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV, who helped the young adventurer in his plot by “coaching” him up in the part which he was to play, to such an extent that, according to Lord Bacon, he was familiar with the features of his alleged family and relatives and even with the sort of questions likely to be asked in this connection. In fact he was, in theatrical parlance, not only properly equipped but “letter-perfect” in his part[2q]. Contemporary authority gives as an additional cause for this personal knowledge, that the original Jehan de Warbecque was a converted Jew, brought up in England, of whom Edward IV was the godfather. In any case it may in this age be accepted as a fact that there was between Edward IV and Perkin Warbeck so strong a likeness as to suggest a prima facie possibility, if not a probability, of paternity. Other possibilities crowd in to the support of such a guess till it is likely to achieve the dimensions of a belief. Even without any accuracy of historical detail there is quite sufficient presumption to justify guess-work on general lines. It were a comparatively easy task to follow the lead of Walpole and create a new “historic doubt” after his pattern, the argument of which would run thus:
After the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, Edward IV had but little to contend against. His powerful foes were all either dead or so utterly beaten as to be powerless for effective war. The Lancastrian hopes had disappeared with the death of Henry VI in the Tower. Margaret of Anjou (wife of Henry VI) defeated at Tewkesbury, was in prison. Warwick had been slain at Barnet, and so far as fighting was concerned, King Edward had a prolonged holiday. It was these years of peace — when the coming and going of even a king was unrecorded with that precision which marks historical accuracy — that made the period antecedent to Perkin’s birth. Perkin bore an unmistakable likeness to Edward IV. Not merely that resemblance which marks a family or a race but an individual likeness. Moreover the young manhood of the two ran on parallel lines. Edward was born in 1442, and in 1461, before he was nineteen, won the battle of Mortimer’s Cross which, with Towton, placed him on the throne. Perkin Warbeck at seventeen made his bid for royalty. It is hardly necessary to consider what is a manifest error in Perkin’s Confession — that he was only nine years old, not eleven, at the time of the murder of Edward V. Nineteen was young enough in all conscience to begin an intrigue for a crown; but if the Confession is to be accepted as gospel this would make him only seventeen at the time of his going to Ireland — a manifest impossibility. Any statement regarding one’s own birth is manifestly not to be relied on. At best such can only be an assertion minus the possibility of testing whence an error might come. Regarding his parentage, in case it may be alleged that there is no record of the wife of Jehan Warbecque having been in England, it may be allowed to recall a story which Alfred, Lord Tennyson used to say was amongst the hundred best stories. It ran thus:
A noble at the Court of Louis XIV was extremely like the King, who on its being pointed out to him sent for his double and asked him:
“Was your mother ever at Court?”
Bowing low, he replied:
“No, sire; but my father was!”
Of course Perkin Warbeck’s real adventures, in the sense of dangers, began after his claim to be the brother of Edward V was put forward. Henry VII was not slow in taking whatever steps might be necessary to protect his crown; there had been but short shrift for Lambert Simnel, and Perkin Warbeck was a much more dangerous aspirant. When Charles VIII invited him to Paris, after the war with France had broken out, Henry besieged Boulogne and made a treaty under which Perkin Warbeck was dismissed from France. After making an attempt to capture Waterford, the adventurer transferred the scene of his endeavours from Ireland to Scotland which offered him greater possibilities for intrigue on account of the struggles between James IV and Henry VII. James, who finally found it necessary to hasten his departure, seemed to believe really in his pretensions, for he gave him in marriage a kinswoman of his own, Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly — who by the way was remarried no less than three times after Perkin Warbeck’s death. Through the influence of Henry VII, direct or indirect, Perkin had to leave Scotland as he had been previously forced from Burgundy and the Low Countries. Country after country having been closed to him, he made desperate efforts in Cornwall, where he captured St. Michael’s Mount, and in Devon, where he laid siege to Exeter. This however being raised by the Royal forces, he sought sanctuary in Beaulieu in the New Forest where, on promise of his life, he surrendered. He was sent to the Tower and well treated; but on attempting to escape thence a year later, 1499, he was taken. He was hanged at Tyburn in the same year.
Pierrequin Warbecque’s enterprise was in any case a desperate one and bound to end tragically — unless, of course, he could succeed in establishing his (alleged) claim to the throne in law and then in supporting it at great odds. The latter would necessitate his vanquishing two desperate fighting men both of them devoid of fear or scruples. — Richard III and Henry VII. In any case he had the Houses of Lancaster, Plantagenet and Tudor against him and he fought with the rope round his neck.
An Act of Parliament, 1 Richard III, Cap. 15, made at Westminster on the 23 Jan., 1485, precluded all possibility — even if Warbeck should have satisfied the nation of his identity — of a legal claim to the throne, for it forbade any recognition of the offspring of Lady Elizabeth Grey to whom Edward IV was secretly married, in May, 1464, the issue of which marriage were Edward V and his brother, Richard. The act is short and is worth reading, if only for its quaint phraseology.
Cap XV. Item for certayn great causes and consideracions touchynge the suretye of the kynges noble persone as of this realme, by the advyce and assente of his lordes spirituall and temporal, and the commons in this present parliament assembled, and by the auctorite of the same. It is ordeined established and enacted, that all letters patentes, states confrymacions and actes of parlyament of anye castels seignowries, maners, landes, teneinentes, fermes, fee fermes, franchises, liberties, or other hereditamentes made at any tyme to Elizabeth late wyfe of syr John Gray Knight; and now late callinge her selfe queene of England, by what so ever name or names she be called in the same, shalbe from the fyrst day of May last past utterly voyd, adnulled and of no strengthe nor effecte in the lawe. And that no person or persons bee charged to our sayde soveraygne lord the Kynge, nor to the sayde Elyzabeth, of or for any issues, prifites, or revenues of any of the sayde seignowries, castelles, maners, landes, tenementes, fermes or other hereditamentes nor for any trespas or other intromittynge in the same, nor for anye by suretye by persone or persones to her or to her use — made by them before the sayde fyrst daie of May last passed, but shalbe therof agaynste the sayd Kynge and the sayde Elizabeth clerly discharged and acquyte forever.”1
1 In the above memorandum no statement is made regarding Jane Shore, though it may be that she had much to do with Perkin Warbeck.
B. The Hidden King
THE personality, nature and life of Sebastian, King of Portugal, lent themselves to the strange structure of events which followed his strenuous and somewhat eccentric and stormy life. He was born in 1554, and was the son of Prince John and his wife Juana, daughter of the Emperor Charles V. He succeeded his grandfather, John III, at the age of three. His long minority aided the special development of his character. The preceptor appointed to rule his youth was a Jesuit, Luiz–Goncalvoz de Camara. Not unnaturally his teacher used his position to further the religious aims and intrigues of his strenuous Order. Sebastian was the kind of youth who is beloved by his female relatives — quite apart from his being a King; and naturally he was treated by the women in a manner to further his waywardness. When he was fourteen years old he was crowned. From thence on he insisted on having his way in everything, and grew into a young manhood which was of the type beloved of an adventurous people. He was thus described: “He was a headstrong violent nature, of reckless courage, of boundless ambition founded on a deep religious feeling[4q]
