On the 26th of February, 1803, a parcel of Exchequer bills to the value of two hundred thousand pounds ought to have passed from the hands of the cashier into those of the Directors of the Bank of England. The ledgers bore their signatures; the papers themselves reappeared upon the open market. Robert Aslett, an officer in the service of the Bank for five-and-twenty years and a cashier since 1799, stood accused of having converted them to his own use. The initial prosecution was to founder upon a point far narrower than the embezzlement itself: were these leaves of paper, in the eye of the law, true Exchequer bills?
The purchases were conducted through the broker Templeman, by way of Goldsmid. Aslett compared the bills against the docket, entered them into the purchase ledger, and discharged the broker. So long as the parcels remained within the cashier’s office, they were kept in an iron chest. When they were prepared for final deposit, he tied them into bundles; the director in waiting compared them against the entry and the original book, whereupon two directors subscribed the receipt. The bills were then to be conveyed to a strong-room, secured by three separate locks, the keys whereto were apportioned among the directors. Before the jury, the counsel for the Crown, Mr. Garrow, would minutely retrace each of these solemn gestures.
On that day, according to the indictment, three parcels—amounting respectively to one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, and four hundred thousand pounds—had been prepared. Two directors signed for the entry of the seven hundred thousand pounds. Yet the middle parcel, representing two hundred thousand pounds, never reached the chest, as the prosecution contended. The remaining bundles had been duly received. It was not enough to establish an omission in an account: it was incumbent to prove that the papers circulating upon the market were the very securities newly purchased by the Bank, and that Aslett had purloined them before the directors had assumed their custody.
On the 16th of March, Aslett instructed Mr. Bish to purchase for his account fifty thousand pounds in Consols. By way of collateral for the transaction, he delivered three bills that had already passed through the Bank. Bish recognized the securities and, on the 9th of April, disclosed his discovery to the directors. In the presence of Abraham Newland, the chief cashier, they first inquired whether bills placed under the custody of the Bank could possibly return to the market. Both men replied that it was impossible. When shown the bills in question, Aslett admitted having pledged them, but maintained that they did not belong to the Bank and had not been entered in the purchase ledger. The discovery, therefore, arose from three papers delivered to a stockbroker, and not from an audit that had suddenly brought a deficit to light.
At the first hearing, Garrow set forth the precautions governing the deposit, as well as the sum the Bank had been obliged to expend in order to buy back the bills returned to circulation: upwards of one hundred thousand pounds, according to his opening address. Counsel for the prisoner, Mr. Erskine, shifted the ground of debate to the very issuance of the instruments. The statute required that Exchequer bills be signed by the Auditor of the Exchequer, or by a deputy duly authorized under the written authority of the Commissioners of the Treasury. Yet Jennings, who had subscribed the instruments in question, held no valid authorization for those particular issues; the authority granted him in 1799 did not extend to the more recent emissions. This defect did not render the papers null and void in the eyes of the Bank; but it altered the legal description the prosecution could properly invoke.
The presiding judge likened the case to that of an individual indicted for stealing a current coin of the realm which should prove to be forged of base metal. Mr. Justice Rooke concurred in the objection: the indictment charged the theft of Exchequer bills, whereas documents issued without due authority were not, in law, the instruments so denominated. The jury were directed to acquit Aslett, and they acquitted him forthwith. Garrow moved that he remain in custody; the court remanded him, as the Bank intended to pursue civil remedies for the recovery of its funds. Kirby, the keeper tasked with retaking the prisoner, hesitated: he had just heard him acquitted. A peremptory order from the bench silenced his indecision. Aslett, clad in a light-brown coat with his hair powdered, had hitherto sat with bowed head. At the motion for his remand, he raised his eyes toward the bench. Pelham records his astonishment: this time, the word of acquittal opened no prison gates.
The prosecution returned with fresh indictments. The papers remained the same, but the terms used to designate them were altered: they were now described as instruments “purporting to be” bills, or as the property and effects of the Bank. The relation of Camden Pelham enables us to follow this second prosecution, upon which Borrow’s chronicle remains silent. The first indictment had laid the larceny of three bills of one thousand pounds each; the sum of two hundred thousand pounds described the missing parcel, not the value of those three individual instruments. On the 17th of September, 1803, three new indictments were read: they specified papers numbered 835, 2694, and 6061, amounting to a combined value of two thousand five hundred pounds, and alternated between describing them as securities and as effects belonging to the Bank. Erskine protested that this second proceeding prosecuted the selfsame conduct under a novel formulation; he further maintained that the subsequent Act of indemnity rendered the bills valid only in civil law and expressly excluded any retrospective operation upon past criminal offences. It was therefore no mere repetition of the former trial: the court had to decide whether an indictment could lie for instruments that were not genuine bills at the moment they were taken. The judges reserved the question of law while the witnesses established the facts alleged by Garrow. The jury returned a verdict of guilty. A murmur ran through the hall. Pelham depicts the prisoner as attentive, betraying neither fear nor levity: he paused for two minutes, bowed to the court, and withdrew in the company of the friends who had attended him.
It remained for the twelve judges to determine whether these papers fell within the classes of property protected by the Bank Charter Act. Pelham’s account states that eleven judges deemed several of the arguments of the defence worthy of consideration, but after multiple conferences, the majority resolved that the instruments constituted valid effects and securities within the meaning of the statute. In February 1804, sentence of death was pronounced; it was subsequently commuted to transportation for life. The objection that had once procured his acquittal had not availed to save him: the instruments had changed their title in the indictment, and the cashier his condition in the gaol. Borrow later encounters him in Newgate, where he lingered for several years before his departure. The three keys to the iron chest had failed to arrest the circulation of the securities; the two verdicts failed to restore him his liberty.