Inside the tin box lay that which the bank’s ledgers had chosen to forget. It was neither a diamond wrested from some widow, nor a bond extorted in a boudoir, but a catalogue of names and sums, written out in the hand of Henry Fauntleroy. At the foot of the sheet stood a total; after the total, an explanation. The banker, who had borrowed the signatures of others to dispose of their fortunes, had preserved his own hand to account for their misappropriation.
Picture that document laid before men long accustomed to bills of exchange, maturities, and pledges: they had no need to guess at the function of such an instrument. They could read a column. Yet the names they perused were those of clients, and figures hitherto kept apart by the polite reserve of banking secrecy were now united under a single indictment. Contemporary accounts would set the total of these fraudulent transactions at some one hundred and seventy thousand pounds. Confidence had held fast in the drawing-rooms; it foundered upon a sheet of paper.
The house in Berners Street possessed every attribute that spares a financial establishment from suspicion. There, the fortunes of families were intimately known, their instructions received, and that respectful familiarity perpetuated from one generation to the next which allows one to speak of interest without seeming to speak of greed. Fauntleroy’s father had been a partner in the firm. The son had succeeded him, and the inheritance of a name, in such quarters, is readily mistaken for the inheritance of virtue: signatures are scrutinised, but esteem is taken upon trust.
Henry worked incessantly. This detail, which his apologists might well have cited in honour of his character, assumed a less comforting significance following his arrest. In an establishment where several partners lent their names, the man who understood the affairs best was naturally the one to whom their conduct was surrendered. Clients witnessed his diligence; they could not perceive what that diligence cost them. He did not invite them to risk their fortunes upon some extravagant hazard. He rendered them the services they anticipated, with a punctuality that precluded inquiry.
Among these clients was Miss Frances Young, of Chichester. She had entrusted the bank with the receipt of dividends on government stock inscribed in her name. For her, the mechanism presented no mystery: her capital remained invested, her income was duly remitted. A gentlewoman who regularly receives what is owed to her does not wake of a morning suspecting that the very substance of her property has vanished. It was precisely upon this peace of mind that Fauntleroy traded.
Two distinct powers were here involved, and in the distinction between them lay his entire fortune, and presently his utter ruin: the authority to receive the dividend upon an investment does not convey the power to sell the principal. To bridge that divide, the banker forged a power of attorney. Frances Young’s name was set down; the names of the attesting witnesses likewise. The instrument appeared to warrant that which she had never directed. Stock was sold, and the lady continued to receive her dividends. Her property had departed; her habits remained undisturbed.
One may imagine, without pretending to transcribe an authentic colloquy, the modest scene that ought to have dispelled the illusion. A client lays the voucher of a payment before her banker; she asks not for her money, for that has arrived, but for the document that explains where her capital is henceforth lodged.
“It remains in my name, then?”
“Your dividends are duly paid, Madam.”
She draws the voucher back toward herself. The reply is accurate; it answers nothing. In that interval between what is asked and what one consents to hear, a fraud may gain years of advance. Frances Young had no need to utter those words for the whole catastrophe to reside within their discord.
Fauntleroy was taken into custody on 10 September 1824. The alarm had arisen over an unrelated matter, touching securities held for another beneficiary and the signatures of co-trustees. Yet a bank resembles one of those ancient houses where, upon bringing down a partition, one discovers that the fissure runs through every floor. The initial inquiries led to others. What had seemed an isolated irregularity unmasked an entire sequence; dispersed sums reappeared, warrants were scrutinised, confidences weighed and compared.
Abroad, the intelligence produced the usual consequence of extraordinary tidings: each man resolved to be prudent before his neighbour. Depositors crowded the doors; those who yesterday would have deemed it an insult to question the solidity of the house wished today not to leave a single shilling behind. Suspicion did not rest upon the arrested partner alone; it extended to his associates, to their engagements, even to the sign under which so many transactions had quietly run their course. Cash payments were suspended. Bankruptcy imparted to the rumour a reality which the most credulous were forced to comprehend.
On 30 October, at the Old Bailey, the prosecution was nonetheless obliged to narrow its compass. A financial catastrophe, however vast, does not exempt a court of law from the trial of a specific act. The proceedings returned to Frances Young, to the power of attorney, to the stock that had been sold. The signatures had to be examined as one examines, in a capital cause, the weapon that has passed through several hands: who had drawn it, who had tendered it, what had it served to obtain? The former credit of Berners Street had no voice here. A respectable name was now simply a name to be verified.
Before Frances Young could be heard, a legal argument disclosed an even stranger precaution. The Bank of England had replaced the stock in her name; it was necessary to prove that she possessed no remaining pecuniary interest in the verdict, so that her testimony might be admissible in law. Thus the woman whose signature had been counterfeited had to be restored to her property before she could swear, without her interest being urged against her competence, that she had never signed. She confirmed the regularity of the dividends and the absence of any authority to sell. The remittances had been punctual; the consent had never existed.
The memorandum found in the tin box was produced in court. In it, Fauntleroy had explained that he acted to support the credit of the house, that he had sold the stock without the privity of his partners, and that he had continued to pay the dividends without entering those disbursements in the firm’s ledgers. A bitter resentment against the Bank of England, whose conduct toward his establishment he deplored, was mingled with this justification. Thus, even in his confession, he cast about for an adversary that might allow him to view himself as something other than a common felon.
The pretension was singular: to sustain a banking house by despoiling those who sought its protection. Yet one must not reduce the drama to the point of rendering the man incomprehensible. An impending liability averted can masquerade as a victory; a second, as proof that one was right to temporise. Meanwhile, one pays, one promises, one keeps the machinery in motion. He who has appointed himself the saviour of the firm ends by treating the property of others as the provisional instruments of his salvation. And the provisional never ceases to clamour for fresh gold.
Gentlemen of the highest standing came forward to speak to the prisoner’s character. They had known him as an honourable, obliging, and upright man; several would have found it impossible to imagine him guilty of a dishonourable act. There was something profoundly mournful in these sincere assurances, uttered in the presence of proofs that exposed their vanity. These witnesses did not necessarily describe an invented man. They described the man with whom they had transacted, who had received them cordially, laboured with them, and rendered them service. The defrauded clients had known that very same man.
The conviction was returned for the uttering of the forged instrument, following an objection concerning the jurisdiction wherein the forgery itself could be held to have been committed. Then followed the petitions, the points of law reserved, the desperate hopes upon which a family may subsist so long as an answer is awaited. The exceptions taken could not save Fauntleroy. On 30 November 1824, he was executed before Newgate. A vast concourse of people choked the approaches to the gaol; broadsheets may have exaggerated their numbers, but the public fascination attending his fall was beyond dispute.
Windows had been hired to watch the banker die. For those drawn into the bankruptcy, another narrative dragged on: that of compositions, dividends in bankruptcy, and liabilities. Some had recovered their stock; the condition of all could not be resolved by a single measure. The scaffold restored no signature to its place. In the tin box, the names remained neatly aligned; elsewhere, behind every one of those names, a life had been staked upon the calculations of a man who had never been presented to them as a gambler.