A young man presented himself at a hosier’s shop under the style of “the Honourable Mr. Bolingbroke.” He selected silk stockings, ordered them delivered to Hanover House, and promised to discharge the debt. He then took off his fine coat, resumed his ordinary attire, and returned to the shop: his master entrusted into his very hands the parcel destined for this imaginary customer. He carried it forthwith to a pawnbroker. Charles Price had contrived the trick to rob his own employer; the deceit was uncovered, and he lost his place. In Pelham’s account, this early scene already foreshadowed his method: to borrow an identity, rely upon outward appearances, and leave another to bear the instruments of the fraud.
Price was born in London around the year 1730. His father sold second-hand apparel in Monmouth Street. According to the chronicle, the boy stole articles from him, sold them under a disguise, and occasionally let his brother take the beating in his stead. He was bound apprentice to a hosier in St. James’s Street. The theft of the stockings put an end to this first attempt at an honest calling.
Departing subsequently for Holland, he took the name of Johnson and procured a clerkship in a merchant’s house by means of a forged letter of recommendation. Pelham asserts that he seduced his employer’s daughter and made off with a considerable sum before returning to England. There he rapidly squandered the money. Pelham depicts him flitting from one trade to another as each enterprise miscarried: brewing, Methodist preaching, begging letters, lotteries, and commercial speculations.
In 1775, Price advertised for a partner in a brewery. He promised a return of fifty per cent “without risk” and requested between five hundred and a thousand pounds to purchase equipment. The address given was the Cardigan Head, at Charing Cross. Samuel Foote, the comedian and playwright, advanced him five hundred pounds. The money vanished; the undertaking yielded Foote nothing. Price subsequently returned to propose a partnership in a bakery. Foote replied: “As you have brewed, you may bake; but I’ll be damned if you ever bake as you have brewed!” The retort concluded the episode, but Price was not long at a loss for a new part to play.
Pelham relates further that Price set up as a Methodist preacher, inserted an advertisement to procure wives for gentlemen, and subsequently extorted fifty guineas from a man named Wigmore. Pursued for this fraud, he restored a portion of the sum and made his escape. He then established a brewery in Gray’s Inn Lane, failed in 1776, and departed for Germany. Arrested for smuggling, he returned with three hundred pounds, says Pelham. He tried his hand once more at a brewery in Lambeth, operated a lottery office, and dispatched begging letters. Pelham connects him to a confederacy that manufactured and uttered forged notes; he took care, it is said, never to present the paper himself, enlisting intermediaries instead.
In 1780, under the name of Brant, he engaged a young servant after inserting an advertisement. The lad waited a week before a coachman came to fetch him. Inside the carriage, he found an elderly gentleman whose countenance was almost entirely concealed: his legs were swathed in flannel, his coat buttoned to the chin, a large black patch covered his left eye, and he spoke with a foreign accent. When the servant next saw his employer, the latter appeared as a slender, well-attired young man. The chronicle dwells upon this contrast; it does not record the lad’s name. Price is said to have chosen him because he deemed him simple enough to execute the errands without comprehending the nature of what he carried.
According to Pelham, the lad put about fifteen hundred pounds’ worth of forged notes into circulation, chiefly in the purchase of lottery tickets and shares. Upon his arrest, he lay nearly a year in prison; he was ultimately acknowledged innocent and discharged. Price, meanwhile, had vanished from public view.
Price reappeared in 1782, employing a lad named Power for his petty transactions. He likewise repaired to Roberts, a grocer in Oxford Street, first as an ordinary customer, then disguised as an old man, and at last with his face painted as though afflicted with jaundice. The shopman offered him a remedy his father had once used. Some days later, Price returned, feigned recovery, and rewarded the young man with a ten-pound note. He then requested change for a fifty-pound note. The shopman had it cashed at a neighbour’s.
On the morrow, Price returned while the master was abroad. He placed five more fifty-pound notes in the shopman’s hands and begged him to take them to Roberts’s bankers. The bankers, believing they were accommodating their customer, gave cash for them. The clerk had performed what seemed a commonplace courtesy; yet by that act he had been brought to carry forged paper into several establishments. This apparent complicity arose solely from the imperfect knowledge that Price had so artfully contrived.
He practised the very same artifice, under the name of Wilmot, upon Spilsbury, the proprietor of a celebrated medicine, and upon other tradesmen. Pelham affirms that in a single day Price uttered sixty ten-pound notes and exchanged fourteen fifty-pound notes for seven of one hundred pounds.
For his final enterprise against the Bank, Price assumed the name of Palton and passed himself off as an Irish linen merchant. He employed two youths to pass the notes and remained himself in the background, perpetually disguised. A pawnbroker at last aided in his identification. Apprehended on the 14th of January, 1786, Price solemnly denied the charges and bore himself with insolence before the magistrate. Yet several persons identified him despite his transformations. Pelham records neither trial nor verdict: before the Bank could bring him to the bar, Price was found hanging from the door-post of his cell in the Bridewell at Tothill Fields.
The turnkey cut him down, already lifeless. Three letters were concealed about his person: one directed to the Directors of the Bank, wherein he confessed, according to Pelham, his share in the fabrication and uttering of the notes; another to his wife; and the third to the gaoler, thanking him for the humane treatment he had received in prison. A coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of suicide. The chronicle relates that the body was interred at Tothill Fields, and that a stake was driven through his remains.
Following his death, a box was discovered containing two artificial noses fashioned to imitate nature. The copper plates used for printing the notes had been buried in a field near Tottenham Court Road, and the turf carefully replaced. The officers of justice caused these plates, together with a press and the remaining implements seized at his lodgings, to be destroyed. His wife, who had been detained as an accomplice, was discharged after the burial. She had borne Price eight children.