The initial letter promised not merely a fortune: it commanded absolute silence. In January 1875, John Harvey, a merchant of the City of London, received a confidential missive informing him that a long-neglected will entitled him to forty thousand pounds. The correspondent signed himself F. C. Judford—"a name partly and necessarily assumed"—and instructed Harvey to reply under sealed cover to a gentleman styled Herr von Howard, in Switzerland. Eighteen months later, at the Old Bailey, the prisoner answering to the name of Charles Howard stood indicted for having obtained £380 by false pretences. His counsel contested the very jurisdiction of the Court to try him.
Howard had been apprehended at Eisenach, in Saxe-Weimar, and subsequently delivered over to the British police at Hamburg. His barrister contended that the material letters had been written in Germany, and that the monies had been received there; he challenged both the jurisdiction of the Court and the regularity of the surrender under the extradition treaty. Mr. Justice Lush declined to entertain this latter objection: the prisoner was before the bar, he observed, and it sufficed to determine whether letters posted in England, addressed to an individual in England, had operated to obtain the money within the realm. The prosecution was nonetheless required to establish that Howard had been present on English soil during the transaction.
The earliest evidentiary threads led directly to the Hotel Rautzenkrantz in Eisenach. The head waiter, Hermann Zimmermann, recalled a guest who had called three weeks prior to taking up residence, reserving three apartments and inscribing the register as "Count von Howard." In November 1875, he returned accompanied by a woman presented as his wife and fourteen or sixteen trunks, which were kept secured within a locked writing cabinet. He fetched his correspondence from the post office in person; he spoke little German and would occasionally depart early in the morning to return late at night, offering no account of where he had gone.
On the twenty-first of the following February, the deputy burgomaster, Ernst Schmidt, arrived at the hostelry pursuant to intelligence received from England. According to Zimmermann, Howard held no passport, and the German authorities took him into custody within his cabinet. That very afternoon, an examining magistrate and a local schoolmaster conducted a search of his papers and trunks. Among the articles seized were armorial signets, letters from several dozen correspondents, envelopes inscribed in the name of "Judford" intended for reforwarding, and two memorandum books wherein the names Harvey and Williams appeared alongside dates, pecuniary sums, and notations such as "final coup." Professor Carl Baltzar also discovered a letter bearing the name of Richard Harvey and an unfinished draft.
At the trial, however, the central exhibit came not from Germany, but from the London post. John Harvey described the first letter, dated 15 January 1875 and registered under a black wax seal. It asserted that an opulent gentleman who died in 1870 had devised forty thousand pounds to the son of William James and Isabella Harvey of Carnousie. To secure the particulars, John was required to pledge inviolable secrecy. He replied by post to the address of a certain von Howard, enclosing within his packet a communication directed to Judford, whose name was pencilled upon the envelope so that it might be reforwarded.
This interchange persisted over several months. In February, the correspondent disclosed that the deceased was Richard Harvey, whose will and codicils were said to have superseded an earlier settlement. The putative legatee was urged to furnish funds to procure the release of the instrument, which was allegedly detained by trustees. In April, the sum of £380 was demanded. Harvey initially dispatched the half of a fifty-pound bank note as a guarantee; in June, he forwarded halves of notes to the amount of £300, £20, and £10, followed by the corresponding counterparts, all sent by registered post. He never received the testament. He remained persuaded that he was corresponding with an intermediary acting on behalf of a client, deposing that he would never have parted with his money had he not credited the assurances.
A material link connected these communications with the chambers at Eisenach. Harvey’s letters had been addressed to Howard at diverse continental locations, among them Urach; a postal clerk from that town produced the register wherein the prisoner had signed "Howard" for scores of registered packets from England. The proceedings thus exposed an elaborate postal circuit: Harvey posted from London, Howard collected the remittances abroad, and the replies were redirected to the British accommodation addresses provided by Judford. The German authorities surrendered to the British constabulary envelopes, pocket-books, seals, and letters discovered in the trunks. The case for the Crown did not rest solely upon the resemblance of a signature.
A second chain of correspondence came to light involving Charles Henry Williams, formerly Member of Parliament for Barnstaple. In 1873, he had received from a party styling himself "Tent" a missive of nearly identical tenor, announcing a bequest of fifty thousand pounds and enjoining the same pledge of confidentiality. Williams had remitted divided bank notes to a series of addresses, but never laid eyes upon the will. He believed that Richard Harvey, a kinsman, had left an immense estate; the value sworn for probate, according to the registrar examined at trial, fell short of £350,000. The prosecution tendered these transactions as demonstrating a systematic course of conduct. Williams, however, was not the injured party named in the indictment then before the Court.
To test the veracity of the representations made to John Harvey, the jurors heard testimony from those acquainted with the authentic testamentary dispositions of Richard Harvey. A clerk from the Principal Registry at Somerset House produced the will executed in 1868, accompanied by four codicils, and testified that probate had been granted in December 1870. Joseph Childs Batten, the solicitor who prepared the instrument, testified that no subsequent will had ever been drawn in his office. The record does not convert this deposition into an exhaustive canvass of all imaginable settlements; it directly rebutted the existence of the later instrument asserted in the letters.
The seals assumed a role at once theatrical and evidentiary. Zimmermann and Schmidt recounted having seen a box of armorial signets in the cabinet; several impressions matched the wax upon the envelopes addressed to Harvey and Williams. A London publican, Henry Markman, related that in 1873 an envelope transmitted from Germany instructed him to distribute numerous letters, mostly secured with black wax, to unknown recipients. A handwriting expert, Charles Chabot, examined the letters written in the name of Judford, those signed Tent, annotations in red ink, signatures in the German registers, and a letter penned while in custody. He concluded that many of these papers were produced by the same hand, while conceding that certain specimens appeared disguised and that his opinion rested upon disputed comparisons.
The question of identity extended far beyond the Judford alias. Inspector George Clarke of Scotland Yard testified that the prisoner gave his name as Charles Howard upon being surrendered at Hamburg. Matthew Wyatt Gunning, a clerk in the War Office, recognized the handwriting as that of Talbot Bouverie Cleveland Wilmot, formerly a temporary clerk in the department from 1855 to 1858; he believed the letters produced in court to be in that hand, though admitting that many years had intervened. Official records showed that Wilmot had applied for reinstatement following an absence occasioned by an injury to his thumb. These documents were submitted by the prosecution; they remained subject to the jury's assessment as to their weight.
Acting upon the advice of counsel, Howard declined to plead upon the jurisdictional point; the Court accordingly directed a plea of not guilty to be entered. Following the testimony concerning the letters and remittances, the defense maintained that the accused had not been within the realm during the material period. The jury was specifically directed to determine this fact and found that he had indeed been in England. Mr. Justice Hannen summarized the evidence, adverting notably to an epistle wherein Howard claimed he had merely accommodated a friend by forwarding the packets. The jury returned a verdict of guilty. The formal caption of the indictment laid the obtaining of the £380 from Richard Harvey, whereas the evidence clearly showed the remittance to have been made by John Harvey.
The prisoner was then arraigned upon a previous conviction, recorded in February 1864 under the name of Campbell Bouverie Cleveland Wilmot for obtaining a book by false pretences; to this he pleaded guilty. Inspector Clarke informed the Court that Howard had pursued this system of fraud for ten years, securing large sums from other individuals—a general assertion that did not form part of the substantive charge involving Harvey. The sentence of the Court was five years of penal servitude. The verdict established his guilt upon the indictment tried; it did not, of itself, resolve the totality of the correspondence discovered, the complaints of Williams, or the multiplicity of identities attributed to the prisoner by the Crown.