On 25 January 1752, at the Châtelet of Paris, a judicial decree afforded two English Members of Parliament the vindication they had demanded against the man who accused them of having robbed him. It ordered James Roberts, whom the instrument also designated by the name of Abraham Payba, to make public acknowledgement of their honour, to pay each of them ten thousand livres in damages, and to bear the costs of the suit. Yet the very text that records this judgment preserves, prior to the verdict, a vastly different narrative: that of a traveller who claimed to have been made drunk, lured into gambling, and subsequently threatened and plundered. The ruling brings an accusation to its close; it does not make us eyewitnesses to the game.
The English printed record translates a sentence rendered by the Lieutenant Criminel of Paris. It sets forth the complaints, petitions, and interlocutory orders entered into the proceedings before delivering the final adjudication of 25 January. This is neither a verbatim transcript of the hearings nor an impartial chronicle: one must scrupulously distinguish between what Roberts alleged, what his adversaries demanded, and what the magistrate ultimately decreed. Roberts’s complaint was lodged on 25 October 1751; the printed account places the principal alleged occurrences in the preceding September, subsequently tracing the procedural course through to the January sentence.
According to the complaint attributed to Roberts, he had departed England in the month of May alongside a female companion styled Eleanor Rose, carrying with him bills of exchange drawn upon London bankers. Having reached Paris, he engaged a furnished apartment in the Rue de Touraine, at the Hôtel d’Entragues; he then departed for Poissy, where he reportedly remained for some two months, before returning to the capital to lodge at the Hôtel d’Orléans in the Rue des Petits-Augustins. This itinerary, these addresses, and the funds he professed to possess constitute the opening chapters of a narrative destined soon to pass from inn parlours to the clerk’s office.
An Englishman named Edward Wortley Montagu presented himself at his lodgings, so the complaint asserts, on Monday, 20 September 1751. Roberts professed not to know him and to have marveled at the intrusion. On the morrow, he quitted Paris for the country; upon his return on Thursday, 23 September, he found a card inviting him to dine the following day at Montagu’s quarters in the Hôtel de Saxe, Rue du Colombier. He accepted, he explained, out of a desire to reciprocate his host’s civility.
The table gathered a considerable company of Englishmen. Roberts maintained that Montagu pressed upon him a variety of wines and liqueurs until he was thoroughly intoxicated. Dinner ended, toward six of the clock, the guests withdrew upstairs for coffee; when the wider company dispersed, there remained only Montagu, Theobald Taaffe, Lord Southwell, and Roberts. Taaffe, continues the recital of his complaint, produced dice and proposed a hazard. Roberts initially declined: he had but two crowns in his pocket and was on the eve of his departure for Italy. He was answered, so he alleged, that he might play upon his word. He claimed to have yielded at a moment when he was no longer capable of measuring his own actions.
In less than an hour, he asserted, he lost eight hundred and seventy louis d’or, valued at twenty thousand eight hundred and eighty livres. The complaint distributes this sum with meticulous precision: four hundred louis to Taaffe, one hundred and twenty to Montagu, and three hundred and fifty to Southwell. Such arithmetic lent the charge an air of settled accounts; it did not, in itself, prove the manner in which the hazard had been conducted, nor the allegation of loaded dice, which Roberts claimed to suspect.
On the following day, Saturday, 25 September, Taaffe is said to have sent him a card bidding him to supper; Roberts replied that he was indisposed. On Sunday the 26th, according to his complaint, he received a missive demanding the four hundred louis won by Taaffe. He promised to wait upon him; but in the dead of night, on Monday, 27 September, Montagu, Taaffe, and Southwell allegedly came knocking at his door. He attributed menaces to them: should he fail to sign a draft for each, he would be thrown into the Bastille; words were even spoken, he claimed, of slashing his face. He professed himself ignorant of French customs and terrified for his life. Thus, in his version of events, he drew three drafts upon Waters, a Parisian banker who, he noted, held none of his funds.
Roberts then departed for Lyons, on Tuesday, 28 September, according to the print. He asserted that upon his departure the three gentlemen returned that very morning to his lodgings, where they found only Rose and her sister. Taaffe allegedly persuaded both women to abandon him, promising Rose that he would shortly convey her back to England. The complaint further charged him with having ransacked trunks, portmanteaus, and drawers—the keys to which had reportedly been left in the locks—and carrying off a considerable sum in gold and coin, jewellery purchased in Paris, diamonds, lace, rings, and snuffboxes. The narrative piles up even the trivial objects the complainant left behind; its sheer abundance reflects the magnitude of the plunder he alleged, not the evidentiary weight of each individual article.
A complaint of such gravity did not halt at an innkeeper’s threshold. Commissaire Lévis was empowered to conduct an inquiry; the answers and depositions were laid before the King’s Procureur. Montagu and Taaffe were interrogated on 2 November, and an order of the 4th directed that the witnesses be re-examined, confronted if necessary with the accused, and that the latter undergo further examination. On the 6th, Roberts was granted a brief delay to pursue these confrontations and put the cause in a posture for judgment. Throughout these proceedings, the requirement of confrontation appears as a prescribed procedural stage, not as proof that all conflicting testimonies were ever brought into harmony.
The legal manoeuvres crossed paths. Roberts moved for seals to be affixed to the effects of Montagu and Taaffe; the two gentlemen petitioned for their liberty. Following these steps, an interlocutory order directed their release on bail, pending fuller proofs and the necessary citations; both men furnished sureties and established their domicile in Paris. An order likewise directed the removal of the seals and an inventory of any papers or effects material to the inquiry. The record reveals no dramatic discovery: it traces instead the measured progress of decrees, notices, and petitions addressed to the same magistrate.
To these measures was joined a counter-offensive. Montagu and Taaffe lodged several cross-complaints against Roberts, accusing him in turn of having defamed them under an assumed name; they demanded public amends and exemplary damages. They further prayed that criminal informations be pursued upon their own charges. The sentence summarizes these steps and the inquiries that followed, but it does not transcribe the depositions in full. We are therefore unable to reconstruct the full roll of witnesses examined, nor can we read the interrogations as a continuous dialogue.
Roberts, for his part, maintained that he had been coerced into signing the drafts, that he was an infant of twenty-one years under the laws he invoked, and that the money lost had not been fairly won. He likewise disputed the validity and effect of those bills. These points formed the core of his claim and pleadings, as the print abstracts them. The Members of Parliament answered that he had contrived a calumnious accusation, that he went under a false name, and that the elements of their own cross-proceedings warranted his punishment. At this juncture, charge answered countercharge, without it being possible for the modern reader to transmute partisan pleadings into independent findings of fact.
On 25 January, following the submissions of the King’s Procureur and a fresh interrogation of Montagu and Taaffe in the presence of counsel, the Lieutenant Criminel resolved this initial proceeding. He dismissed Roberts’s complaints against them and ordered their names expunged from the prison registers. Roberts was condemned to make honourable amends before twelve persons of the gentlemen's choosing: he was to declare that his accusation had been falsely and maliciously devised, to acknowledge their integrity, and to have a formal notarial act drawn of this recantation. To each, he was ordered to pay ten thousand livres in damages and interest; he was likewise condemned in all costs, including those of the formal amends and the printing of the sentence.
The magistrate ordered the two drafts deposited with the clerk of the court to be restored to Montagu and Taaffe, reserving to them the right to pursue such further civil remedies as they saw fit. The injurious expressions in Roberts’s petition were ordered struck from the record. Conversely, the sentence did not determine the status of Southwell, Rose, or her sister: proceedings for contempt instituted against them were directed to continue according to the ordinances. Montagu and Taaffe stood discharged of the accusations laid against them; the judicial fate of all the persons named cannot be equated with this single decretal order.
Thus, a tale of hazard, debts, and jewels culminated in the printed record as a conviction for calumny and an order for honourable amends. The judgment condemns Roberts upon the precise terms it lays down; it does not set before our eyes the gestures across the dinner table, the dice, nor the true contents of the coffers. Another decree, bearing the date of 14 June 1752 in the titles of subsequent legal briefs, pertains to a separate proceeding: its outcome is not determined here and forms no part of the present narrative. The reader remains poised between two planes that polemicists would gladly confound: what a man claimed to have endured, and what a magistrate decreed after weighing his accusation.