Detective and mystery stories, English; Police -- Fiction; Short stories
He was found guilty, and passed the day that had been fixed for his
wedding, as a condemned criminal.
On the 11th May, 1758, Richard William Vaughan was executed at Tyburn.
By his side, on the same gallows, there was another forger--William
Boodgere, a military officer, who had forged a draught on an army-agent
named Calcroft, and expiated the offence with the first forger of
Bank-of-England notes.
The gallows may seem hard measure to have meted out to Vaughan, when it
is considered that none of his notes were negotiated and no person
suffered by his fraud. Not one of the forty-eight notes, except the
twelve delivered to Miss Bliss, had been out of his possession; indeed
the imitation must have been very clumsily executed, and detection would
have instantly followed any attempt to pass the counterfeits. There was
no endeavor to copy the style of engraving on a real Bank note. That was
left to the engraver; and as each sheet passed through the press twice,
the words added at the second printing, "For the Governor and Company of
the Bank of England," could have fallen into their proper place on any
one of the sheets, only by a miracle. But what would have made the
forgery clear to even a superficial observer, was the singular omission
of the second "n" in the word England.[D]
[D] Bad orthography was by no means uncommon in the most important
documents at that period; the days of the week, in the day-books of
the Bank of England itself, are spelt in a variety of ways.
The criticism on Vaughan's note of a Bank clerk examined on the trial
was--"There is some resemblance to be sure; but this note" (that upon
which the prisoner was tried) "is numbered thirteen thousand eight
hundred and forty, and we never reach so high a number." Besides, there
was no water-mark in the paper. The note, of which a fac-simile appeared
in our eighteenth number, and dated so early as 1699, has a regular
design in the texture of the paper, showing that the water-mark is as
old as the Bank notes themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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