In London, two bank notes were altered and successfully negotiated before the bank’s check-ledger disclosed the fraud. Baron and Countess Vanloden had taken part in the enterprise, and their testimony furnished the principal account of the machinations laid to the charge of Frederick Schmidt.
Schmidt was a native of Breslau, born into a family described by the chronicler as honorable and possessed of substantial means. He was bred to commerce, yet was afforded an education far more liberal than that trade strictly required. For several years he traded in his native city, maintaining correspondence with Hamburg, Amsterdam, and other mercantile centers. Married while very young, at the urging of his friends, to a woman of considerable fortune, he parted from her after a dispute dissolved their domestic union. The historical record specifies neither the cause of this breach nor the influence it had upon his subsequent departures.
He had visited England more than a twelvemonth prior to transact certain affairs, and thither he returned in the company of the Baron and Countess Vanloden. Contemporaries were divided regarding the nature of their association: some accounted Schmidt a mere servant to the Baron, whilst he himself maintained that they lived as companions—a version the chronicler deems far more plausible. It was added that both men applied their wits to overreaching others in order to maintain the Countess in comfort. This judgment belongs to the memorialist of the day; the surviving record supplies no other independent narrative of the trio’s private life.
The method consisted in altering bank notes. It was essential that the erasure pass unperceived in the moment of payment, and according to the writer, their dexterity had initially succeeded in baffling all suspicion. Two bills were thus uttered before an inspection of the bank’s ledger exposed the fraud. The subsequent inquiry led directly to Schmidt’s apprehension and trial. The indictment did not rest upon an isolated transaction, but upon a series of manipulations whereof the circumstances of the first served to elucidate the second.
At his trial, it was sworn that Schmidt possessed a note for twenty-five pounds and had altered it to eighty-five. In company with the Baron, he was alleged to have tendered it to a Mr. Mallorey, who delivered over goods together with another note, this one for twenty pounds. It was this second paper that Schmidt was said to have carried upstairs; upon his return, according to the witnesses, the original denomination had vanished.
The narrative proceeds to detail the contrivance employed to finish the transformation: the paper was drawn through a dish of gum-water, then smoothed between sheets with a pressing-iron; the words “one hundred pounds” were then inserted in place of the obliterated sum. Schmidt then delivered the bill to the Baron, who went out with an interpreter to purchase plate. These purchases, according to the deposition, amounted to forty pounds.
The Baron and Countess further deposed that Schmidt had boasted to them of his ability to imitate twenty different hands, and had declared that, were he master of three or four hundred pounds, he could augment them to fifty thousand. This vaunt, reported by his accusers, might well illustrate the ambition they ascribed to him, though it did not prove that he had ever executed a design of such magnitude. Another piece of evidence proceeded from Schmidt’s own hand: he had written to a correspondent in Holland to inquire whether English notes were current there. The conjunction of this letter with the altered paper weighed heavily in his condemnation.
He was found guilty. The chronicle remarks that, by reason of his being an alien, a jury of a particular composition was granted him—a privilege presented as a notable indulgence of English jurisprudence. Despite the verdict, Schmidt appeared scarcely capable of believing his life in jeopardy. Upon being conducted to the condemned hold, he told his fellow prisoners, in such English as he could muster, that he should not be hanged with them. For the first two or three days, he refused so much as to look upon a book or to join in prayer. He spent his time instead in inditing numerous letters to merchants, foreign ministers, and persons of distinction in Germany, still persuaded that he would escape the gallows.
A Lutheran minister came to visit him, yet Schmidt would hardly deign to speak with him. He subsequently received a letter from the person who had sustained his hopes of a favorable issue, informing him that all expectation was vain. It was then that he turned with gravity toward the divine he had formerly dismissed, though the chronicler does not describe him as seized by any overt terror. Soon thereafter, he fell into an illness so debilitating that he could no longer stand upright. He then confessed to the minister that he was indeed guilty of the crime for which he was to die. The narrator adds that he appeared never to have conceived, when committing the fraud, that it was a capital offense; he had only become sensible of the fact a few days prior to his execution.
A rumor ran that Schmidt had committed a similar fraud in Paris, whence he had been forced to flee. This he utterly denied. He imputed these reports to the Baron, whom he described as the son of an apothecary, initiated through his father’s trade into the secret waters used to discharge ink from paper. Schmidt in turn accused the Baron of assuming an unmerited air of innocence, averring that he had perpetrated many such frauds, and that the Countess had contrived still more. The text leaves these reciprocal accusations unverified; it notes only that all three blackened one another’s character, observing that in this mutual contention, the testimony of the Baron and Countess had delivered Schmidt to the scaffold.
On April 4, 1724, at Tyburn, Schmidt had to be supported in the cart, so spent was he by disease. He joined at first in the devotions, then seemed to lose the thread, gazing upon the other malefactors with a curiosity the chronicler deemed singular. The chronicler remarks that his countenance and demeanor seemed less an expression of terror than the effect of that extreme languor which excited the pity of the spectators. Before he was turned off, he entreated the minister to acquaint his aged mother in Germany with his fate, and begged the executioner to perform his office as gently as possible. He was in his forty-fifth year. Thus ended the life of an educated merchant who had turned his talents to a forgery whereof the very beneficiaries were his chief accusers; the chronicle preserves at once the material proof of the alteration, Schmidt’s confession, and the interested motives of those who bore witness against him.