Richard Gifford had already brought off a successful transaction under the name of William Green when he presented himself at the Bank of England in the guise of Richard Mann. For this second venture, he required a referee. He gave the name of the broker who had facilitated the first: a Mr. Linton. On this occasion, the reference proved unexceptionable. It served to reveal his identity. In Camden Pelham’s chronicle, the stratagem thus recoils upon its author: the very man summoned to clear the path to payment is the one who can unmask the impostor.
The volume published in 1891 relates an affair from the year 1829. It likewise draws from it a sermon on low company, intemperance, and squandered benefactions. This moralizing tone belongs entirely to the compiler; it attends nearly every stage of Gifford’s descent. The fraud itself may be traced through firmer particulars: two borrowed names, two distinct sums, receipts, and an act of recognition that did not twice yield the same outcome. The chronicle does not supply the verbatim minutes of the trial, but sets forth the transactions and the prisoner's pleas of guilty.
The first doors in life had opened to Gifford without any need for assumed names. His father had been a servant in the household of Mr. Abbott, later Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Colchester; his mother had served beneath the same roof. Following their marriage, Abbott secured for the father an appointment in the House. Richard, their eldest son, profited in turn from this patronage: he gained admittance to Christ’s Hospital, the Blue Coat School, and subsequently obtained temporary employment as an amanuensis in the parliamentary offices. Colchester’s influence ultimately procured him a clerkship in the National Debt Office.
At first, he gave satisfaction. Vacancies arising from the deaths, promotions, and resignations of senior clerks favored his advancement, writes Pelham. Then followed absences and neglect of duty. He was suspended three or four times; influential intercessions each time secured his reinstatement. Yet these reprieves wrought no lasting cure. His absences grew longer, and the authorities eventually dismissed him. The contrast emphasized in the book is that of a man repeatedly upheld, who nonetheless forfeited the station that had been won for him. The compiler imputes this downfall to habits of drinking and dissolute companions, though he reproduces no departmental records to support the charge.
His family no longer knew where to find him, and feared he was dead. His mother at length discovered his retreat and brought him home. To keep him within doors, his parents deprived him of his hat, his pocket-money, and almost of his clothes. Solicitude here assumed, in Pelham’s telling, the shape of rigorous physical restraint. Gifford at first displayed neither remorse nor concern for his past conduct. When they fancied they perceived an amendment, his mother ventured to take him abroad once more. Yet he eventually made his escape, declaring that he would make them remember their treatment of him. The chronicle records the menace, though it does not establish what he intended to visit upon his parents.
Word was subsequently received that he was living near Waterloo Road, well-attired and maintaining an appearance of respectability. He accounted for this sudden improvement by his marriage to a woman of fortune. This was his own explanation, not an alliance verified by the compiler. Soon afterwards, he appeared before the Lord Mayor upon charges of forgery committed at the Bank. The money and the aliases were now to enter the legal record in a guise far different from that tale of domestic good fortune.
On March 6th, Gifford had applied to Mr. Linton, a stockbroker of Shorter’s Court, to sell stock standing in the name of William Green, an artisan of Crucifix Lane. Linton did not know his applicant and initially refused to act. Gifford then appealed to the broker’s father, who, he maintained, had often seen him at the National Debt Office. The elder Linton was summoned. He remembered having met the man, but could not say where. This proved sufficient for the son. A vague recognition, which in no way confirmed the identity of Green, was enough to dispel his first refusal.
Linton prepared the transfer papers. Gifford signed the receipt in the name of Green; a comparison with an earlier signature upon a dividend warrant for the same stock showed an exact correspondence in the handwriting. Pelham notes this comparison without explaining how Gifford had achieved such an imitation. The text offers no clue as to any supporting papers or forged models. The indictment charged him with personating Green and obtaining one hundred and twenty-five pounds, the value of the stock inscribed in the books of the Bank.
A few days after this transaction, Gifford presented himself at the Bank Rotunda under the name of Richard Mann. Mann was the holder of three hundred pounds in consolidated annuities. On this occasion, the object was not to sell the stock, but to receive a dividend of twenty-seven pounds. Gifford requested a broker to identify him upon his receipt. The broker demanded a reference; Gifford gave the name of Linton. The latter happened to be close at hand. Summoned on the instant, he immediately recognized the man who had duped him under the name of Green. The son had no further need to ask his father where that face had been seen. He now knew precisely to which transaction it belonged.
At the October sessions of the Old Bailey in 1829, Gifford pleaded guilty to both indictments. Pelham distinguishes the one hundred and twenty-five pounds of Green’s stock from the twenty-seven pounds of Mann’s dividend. He adds that the learned judge advised the prisoner to withdraw his plea, but that Gifford declined to do so. The chronicle records neither the motive for this judicial caution nor the grounds for the prisoner’s refusal. Sentence of death was pronounced; following the Recorder’s report to the King, his execution was ordered. Both transactions set forth in the work led to this solitary judicial conclusion.
On Monday, October 19th, 1829, Gifford was executed alongside two men convicted of burglary. He was in his twenty-sixth year. Pelham depicts him as utterly unhinged, casting rapid, terrified glances about him, and attributes to him a deep and fervent repentance. This final portrait remains that of the compiler. The scene among the brokers offers a firmer purchase: a shadowy recollection had enabled Gifford to pocket Green’s money; a recent encounter brought about the detection of the very same man under the name of Mann. He had furnished a genuine reference. It was the instrument of his destruction.