The constable believed he had laid before the jury a genuine coin and its counterfeit. The expert examined them both, then informed him that each was false. In the trial of Phoebe Harris, this small humiliation merits reflection: the court had convened to protect the King’s coin, yet one of its own officers had just demonstrated how difficult it was, even with the purest intentions, to distinguish true silver from its semblance.
It was April 1786 at the Old Bailey. Three persons stood indicted for coining: Joseph Yelland, otherwise known as Holman, Elizabeth Yelland, and Phoebe, whose Christian name appears as Phebe in the record. The case turned upon a single room in Drury Lane, a quantity of seized implements, and the recollections of a man who had long frequented the company of the accused before turning informer.
The Respectable Lodger
To Joel Sparkes, landlord of the lodgings in Swan Yard, the woman had first been known as Mrs. Brown. Francis Hardy had introduced her as a captain’s widow possessed of an independent income. The recommendation was of a kind to satisfy any landlord: a dead husband stirs no quarrels upon the stairs, and an annuity promises punctual quarter-days. Sparkes had no particular cause to suspect a tale that accorded so neatly with his own interest.
At the bar, Hardy admitted he knew the husband to be living. Phoebe, he explained, was parted from him; she wished her dwelling kept secret, lest he should come and carry off her goods. Garrow, for the defense, pressed the witness hard upon his part in this deception. Hardy had either invented the falsehood or repeated it, and now came before the court asking that the rest of his testimony be taken on trust. He defended himself by casting the blame upon Phoebe. The lie, he protested, had merely passed through his lips.
This initial exchange lent the proceedings a depth that the coining tools alone could never have afforded. Before the dubious shillings came the assumed name; before the betrayal, an act of neighborly assistance; before the constables crossed the threshold, a succession of visits in which all parties had seemingly tolerated what they now professed to abhor.
Two Women by the Hearth
On the afternoon of the eleventh of February, the officers had forced the door of the lodgings. They found both women within. As to their precise positions, the witnesses were not entirely in agreement: one remembered Elizabeth upon her knees, perhaps engaged in scouring; another swore he had seen them both seated near the fire. An object had fallen, though he who heard the sound could not say what it was. A candle was brought and lit.
The search yielded finished coin, molds, crucibles, and sundry instruments. A closet opened off the chamber; shillings lay concealed beside the bed. The constables alleged that Phoebe had made certain motions to shift the contraband. Joseph arrived several minutes after the officers and was secured in turn. Nothing of a criminating nature was found upon his person. The official minutes thus preserve, alongside the evidence for the prosecution, the very distinctions the defense might employ to sever the fates of the three prisoners.
A small pierced sixpence appeared to offer a striking resemblance to a counterfeit struck from its likeness. Yet the mishap of the two misidentified shillings served as a reminder that the examiner’s certainty was also on trial. Garrow did not pretend that base metal became honest merely because a peace officer had blundered. His endeavor was to prevent the mere existence of a workshop from condemning, without distinction, every soul who had stepped across its sill.
The Visitor Who Knew
Hardy supplied that which the silent tools could not: the prisoners at their labor. He swore he had seen the women preparing the blanks and Joseph busied with the molds. Garrow’s cross-examination compelled him to define what his eyes had truly witnessed. Had he seen the metal poured? He had not. Had he continued to visit the lodgings after a debt owed him was discharged? He had. How much time had elapsed before he carried his information to the authorities? His answers revealed a prolonged familiarity, which the witness sought to explain as a patient effort to turn his acquaintances from a perilous path.
The inquiry then turned upon Phoebe’s daughter. Hardy had taken the girl into his own house on the very day of her mother’s apprehension. He stated he had done so to remove the child from harm. The defense asked whether he had already laid his information before the officers prior to fetching her away. He swore he had not. Counsel pressed him further regarding an alleged attachment to Phoebe and words said to have passed between them; he denied both the affection and the speech.
It would be tempting, for a hasty chronicler, to resolve the matter into the vengeance of a suitor scorned. The record gives us no warrant for such a leap. It leaves us with something far more compelling than a convenient motive: a witness whose conduct was open to grave question, a woman who had accepted his aid, and a web of private ties laid bare by the interrogatory without ever being fully explained.
Three Names, Two Destinies
Joseph maintained he had called only to visit his ailing sister. Phoebe put in a written defense stating that a man named John Brown had engaged her to take the room and lodge certain goods of which she knew not the purpose. Elizabeth, she said, had come merely to scour the floor; Joseph had appeared only after the constables were inside. Witnesses to character were heard. Elizabeth cast herself upon the discretion of her counsel.
The jury withdrew. Upon their return, the three names received three distinct answers: Joseph not guilty, Phoebe guilty, Elizabeth not guilty. This divergence is the true dramatic crux of the record. Common implements, common company, and a single indictment had not brought forth a single judgment. For two of the prisoners, the bar swung open; for the third, it shut upon a sentence of death.
Phoebe was executed at Newgate on the twenty-first of June, 1786. Condemned to the stake for an offense then classified under the law of high treason, she was first strangled by the halter before her body was consigned to the flames. This circumstance spares the historian the necessity of painting her end in darker colors than the records justify. The peculiar rigor of the penalty when visited upon women provoked contemporary censure; we need not imagine her shrieks to perceive the inequality of the law.
At the opening of the story, a landlord had accepted a tenant on the assurance that she was a woman of means. At its close, a court condemned her for the manner in which she was said to have made them. Between these two moments, men of the law had scrutinized her coin, her name, her visitors, and even the suspected passions of the man who had delivered her up.
There remains of this trial a sequence of close, unyielding questions, far less simple than an old print of a woman at the stake. He who reads it sees more than the fall of a sentence. He watches, for a few hours, the desperate labor of the defense to tear reality from appearance: the difference between standing in a room and having committed the deeds that were done there.