The primary instrument that occasioned the prosecution was a promissory note for the sum of £1,260, bearing the date of 16 August 1727, drawn payable to Samuel Edwards. It bore the signature of Thomas Kinnersly, a clerk in holy orders, and carried an indorsement ascribed to Edwards. The whole affair turned upon a leaf of paper contrived for circulation: a borrowed name, an impugned signature, and an engagement to pay sufficiently grand to satisfy a lender. When such an instrument was laid before their Lordships, every trace of ink became a deposition in itself.
This note was subsequently employed to raise money: Hales conveyed it to Thomas Bird, from whom he procured £750 upon his own personal note, depositing Kinnersly’s paper by way of collateral security. He afterwards reimbursed £400, which was duly credited upon his own note; the remaining balance remained unpaid. Bird consequently dispatched an attorney to demand satisfaction of Kinnersly. The clergyman admitted having penned the body of the note, but profess’d himself unable to explain how the name of Edwards came to be affixed thereto. He declared himself undone and destitute of means, whilst observing that Edwards, for his part, was a gentleman of substance well able to discharge an obligation attributed to his hand.
The witness Wright offered a more direct account of this conference. He had heard Kinnersly acknowledge the writing of the note, adding that he was indebted to Hales, who had requested him to draw the instrument payable to Edwards. The parson was upon the point of speaking to the indorsement when a gentleman of the law, one Mitford, checked him. Mr. Justice Hopkins deposed to nearly the same circumstance: Kinnersly appeared ready to deliver a full confession, but stopped short following Mitford’s intervention. This interruption, whilst it could not prove who had appended the name of Edwards, nonetheless left a vital question suspended at the very heart of the inquiry.
The origin of the paper itself assumed a distinct importance in the evidence. Maddox testified that Hales lodged over against the dwelling of Edwards, who had frequently accommodated him with franked covers for his correspondence. In July, Hales’s man-servant brought six blank covers; the postal clerks refused to frank them unless the superscriptions were written by Edwards’s own hand. The servant returned shortly thereafter with three addresses set down upon a note for his master. In the judgment of Spicer, the disputed note had been fabricated from one of these very covers: the faint impression of previous letters remained visible in the paper, whilst the word “free” had been carefully erased and altered into “for.” This body of material proof linked the credit obtained by Hales directly to the familiar access he had enjoyed to the gentleman’s writing-desk.
Kinnersly’s counsel sought to represent the drawing of the note as an ordinary acknowledgement of debt. One witness had heard it said that the clergyman owed moneys to Hales, though he possessed no personal knowledge of their reckonings nor of their dealings. Other witnesses confirmed that the two men had maintained business relations; the prosecution did not contest this intimacy, but contended that it had furnished the very cloak for the forgery. To the moral argument urged for the prisoner—that a man who refused an offer of one hundred pounds to commit an unlawful act must needs be a man of conscience—the Crown replied that it is an easy matter to refuse an overture when one perceives the snare already closing about him.
The defence had announced two witnesses to substantiate the clergyman’s debt. Robert Burkett appeared, but could depose to nothing beyond what he had heard fall from Hales. Cross-examined as to his personal acquaintance with their accounts, he was constrained to confess he knew nothing of the matter. And where was the second witness? Burkett knew not where he might be found. Thus did counsel behold the very foundation of his defence crumble away. In the trial record, his vexation turns sharply upon these two phantom props of his cause: the one failed to appear, whilst the other could depose to no fact of his own knowledge.
The jury pronounced both prisoners guilty in respect of the first note. Hales was thereupon tried separately for having fraudulently obtained £750 from Bird. The proof rested upon the selfsame instruments and the selfsame loan, though the form of indictment now elevated the sum advanced into a distinct felony. Thereafter, Kinnersly and Hales were once more arraigned together upon a second note, for the sum of £1,650, this time made payable to Kinnersly and bearing the signature of Edwards. Hales had carried this second paper to another money-broker, from whom he obtained £400 in promissory notes.
This second lender, Thriip, deposed that he had parted with his money without the least suspicion, having long known Hales and never conceiving he would attempt to overreach him in such a manner. The sum was never repaid. The variation between the two forgeries was deemed material by the witnesses: the first promised payment to Edwards, whereas the second constituted Kinnersly the ostensible payee and bore the signature “Samuel Edwards.” Dated 30 March 1728, the paper promised payment of £1,650 six months after date. It was no mere transcript of the former instrument, but an entirely distinct employment of Edwards’s name, directed to another lender.
The comparison of hands was conducted under the very eyes of the jurors rather than upon the bare credit of an expert: Williams laid the parish register which he had brought into court beside the note, desiring the jury to compare the handwritings. Lenton, who had likewise seen Kinnersly write, gave testimony to the same effect. The parish register—the ordinary record of his sacred ministry—was thus converted into a piece of evidence against him. The contrast was striking: in the first trial, Kinnersly’s hand upon the face of the bill had been undisputed, while Edwards’s indorsement was the point at issue; in the second, both the name of the indorser and the collation with the church book brought the charge directly home to the clergyman’s own hand.
The sentence of the court fell with unequal weight upon the culprits. Both men were condemned to stand twice in the pillory: first in Fleet Street, and afterwards hard by the Royal Exchange. Hales was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, to pay a fine of fifty marks, and to find sureties for his good behaviour for seven years following his discharge. Kinnersly received two years’ imprisonment, a fine of two hundred pounds, and three additional years under security. His sacred character availed him nothing against public ignominy: he was placed in the pillory arrayed in his canonical habit.
Borrow records that printed sheets were scattered by Kinnersly among the press; officers armed with long staves had been hired to protect the convicts from the fury of the populace. The spectacle presents a singular reversal of the written word: the forged bills had served to raise funds in the name of another, whereas the sheets flung from the pillory appeared to address to the public a final narrative which the prisoner was determined to set in motion himself. The chronicle makes no mention of what was printed thereon; one must not, therefore, invent either a confession or an apology.
Both convicts were removed to Newgate. Kinnersly perished of a malignant fever in the quarter known as the Press-yard on 7 April 1729; Borrow adds that Hales also died within the same gaol, though he assigns no date to his end.