The annals of fraudulent crime probably contain nothing which in dramatic interest can compare with the conviction of William Roupell for forgery. As the case must still be well remembered by the present generation, it will be necessary to give here only the briefest summary. William Roupell was the eldest but illegitimate son of a wealthy man who subsequently married Roupell's mother, and had further legitimate issue. William was brought up as an attorney, and became in due course his father's man of business. As such he had pretty general control over his father's estates and affairs. In 1855 he instructed certain solicitors to prepare a deed of gift as from his father, conveying to him estates near Kingston. The old gentleman's signature to this deed of gift was a forgery, but upon this forged and false conveyance William Roupell, who had already embarked upon a career of wild extravagance, obtained a mortgage of £7000. In 1856 the father died. It had been supposed up to this date that he had willed his property, amounting in all to upwards of £200,000, but after the funeral William Roupell produced another and a later will, leaving everything to the widow, and constituting William sole executor. This will was a deliberate forgery. Five or six years later, William Roupell minutely described how he had effected the fraud. The day his father died he got the keys of his private bureau, opened it, and took out the authentic will. After reading it, and finding this unfavourable to himself, he resolved to carry out his deliberate plan, namely, to suppress it and substitute another. He himself prepared it on a blank form which he had brought with him on purpose. To this fraudulent instrument he appended forged signatures, and in due course obtained probate. As he possessed nearly unbounded influence over his mother, her accession to the property meant that William could dispose of it as he pleased. He embarked forthwith in a career of the wildest extravagance, and ere long he had parted in his mother's name with most of the landed estates. One large item of his expenditure was a contested election at Lambeth, which he gained at a cost of £10,000. No fortune could stand the inroads he made into his mother's money, and in 1862 he was obliged to fly the country, hopelessly and irretrievably ruined.