Two sheets of paper promised the very same money. So long as they were viewed apart, each had fulfilled its office: passing from one hand to another, reassuring a lender, putting off a day of settlement. It required their laying together for their very perfection to become an accusation. They bore the selfsame particulars; one of the two was superfluous. That fidelity of hand which had so long served William Wynne Ryland had just furnished against him a proof he could not efface by the retouching of a single line.
In the office we picture around this discovery, a clerk ceases his reading aloud. He turns back to the first bill, then to the second. His principal takes the papers from him, less in search of some new detail than to assure himself that a subordinate has not committed the error whose consequences no one yet wishes to draw. The name of Ryland alters their consternation. This is no obscure fellow come to seek a few pounds beneath a reckless signature. It is the King’s engraver.
The Name at the Foot of the Plate
A name may work long on behalf of him who bears it. Ryland’s had circulated beneath prints viewed with delight, offered as gifts, purchased, and preserved in households whence a common forger would have been turned away at the door. His hand possessed the secret of drawing from a copper plate all the subtleties of a crayon drawing. In the stipple method he helped bring to perfection in England, the line seemed to surrender its harshness; the gradations melted into a softness that the paper carried into the buyer’s parlour.
He had studied in Paris, worked after Boucher, won an academy medal, and returned to England to find commissions that brought him close to the Court. His portraits of the King and the royal circle were not merely lucrative employments. They established the artist in that sphere of credit where men insensibly confound the excellence of a work, the standing of its author, and the solidity of his bonds. The title of engraver to the King carried a pension; it carried also a character which no man thought to question every morning.
The commerce of prints, however, was not without its hazards. Ryland had entered into partnership with his former pupil, Henry Bryer, and kept shop with him in Cornhill. Their dealings were considerable; they ended in bankruptcy in December 1771. He subsequently resumed trade in the Strand, and thereafter retired to Knightsbridge. He had tasted enough of prosperity that his fall could never be accounted for as that of a starveling craftsman denied work.
The Newgate Calendar preserves the memory of a banker named Nightingale, who had advanced him three thousand pounds in September 1782. The lender, according to that collection, had declared he would have trusted him with the sum even without security. There is no speech more flattering to hear when money is wanting; there are few more bitter to recall when it is discovered that the pledge received was not worth the sum it professed.
A Counterpart
The suspect instruments took the form of bills of exchange connected with the East India Company. They brought into a London counting-house the promise of a payment which distant names and remote stations made present upon a sheet. One had no need to see the men who had drawn them to give them currency; it sufficed to recognise their hands and to acknowledge that the customary forms had been observed.
Ryland possessed precisely that species of skill which rendered such recognition perilous. It would be deceitful, nonetheless, to portray his workshop as a manufactory whose every operation lies open to our view. The old records consulted do not show us his hand at work upon the counterfeits. They show the result: papers resembling the genuine closely enough to have passed current, and then a duplication which rendered them irreconcilable. The discovery did not arise from the coarseness of a copy. It arose from the attempt to exact payment twice over for the identical appearance.
In our scene at the counting-house, the clerk is directed not to return the papers to the common parcel. He lays them aside, beneath a paperweight, and the ordinary gesture instantly assumes a newfound gravity. The file has not grown thicker; it has changed its nature. He who, but a few minutes before, was preparing a disbursement, finds himself charged with the custody of a piece of evidence. He casts one more glance upon the engraver’s name before closing the ledger.
Early in April 1783, Ryland disappeared from his dwelling. A public notice offering a reward for his apprehension followed close behind. The world in which his name had helped paper to circulate now learned to hunt the man. The very reputation that had smoothed his introductions made his absence the more conspicuous: people asked where he was, others remembered having seen him, and every recollection might now command a price.
The Lodging in Stepney
The engraver sought refuge near Stepney. The notice in the Dictionary of National Biography confirms this place of capture and the attempt at self-destruction that preceded it; the Newgate Calendar joins to it the story of a shoe, the responsibility for which must rest with that work. According to the collection, Ryland and his wife had taken lodgings under the name of Jackson in the house of a cobbler named Richard Freeman. The chamber concealed them; a familiar object is said to have betrayed them.
His wife carried a shoe to the cobbler to be mended. The name of Ryland was inscribed within. In this version of the tale, that which eluded the fugitives’ caution was neither a visit to an old associate nor an intercepted letter: it was a thing made for ordinary wear, a shoe worn before they had changed their name. The cobbler perceived the value of his discovery and denounced his tenant to secure the reward.
We may picture the woman awaiting the return of the shoe, reckoning how long she might yet remain abroad, resolving to leave nothing henceforth that might recall their former station. That suspense and those reflections are of our own imagining. They restore to the flight its domestic dimension: one does not tear oneself from a whole existence by the mere declaration of another name. One must still eat, sleep, go clad, and entrust something to another’s keeping.
When the officers arrived, Ryland had attempted his own life. He survived his wound and was carried before the magistrate. The chamber ceased to shelter him; it passed in turn into the tales that other men would tell of him. Those who had admired his manner of rendering a countenance upon paper were now to search his own features for the explanation of his deed.
The Final Imprint
The trial took place at the Old Bailey in July 1783. The two early accounts diverge as to the precise day and state the sums under differing forms; the fact established by their agreement is the engraver’s conviction for forgery. The Newgate Calendar reports that, against the presumption of pecuniary distress, he urged the extent of his property, his revenues, and his shares in the Liverpool waterworks. Why should he have hazarded a condition worth far more than the expected gain?
The objection carried considerable weight. It brought back before the jury an established man, an artist still capable of production, the possessor of interests it would have seemed reasonable to preserve. But the alleged wealth did not authenticate the papers. That which made the crime difficult to comprehend was insufficient to make the signatures genuine. Ryland was found guilty and received sentence of death.
On the 29th of August 1783, he was executed at Tyburn. The Dictionary records that a violent thunderstorm delayed the execution. It is not necessary to ascribe purpose to the heavens to perceive how frightful such a delay must have been: a man had been brought to the term of his punishment, and he was yet compelled to wait. He died leaving a widow and six children.
Two plates remained unfinished upon his copper. Other hands completed them for the benefit of his family: Bartolozzi took up the plate of King John signing the Magna Charta, and William Sharp that of the landing of Edgar and Elfrida. His widow maintained a print-selling business for many years. The work could thus continue to yield a livelihood after the author’s name had ceased to be a warranty. This division was less simple than the total condemnation of a talent alongside the man who had exercised it.
In the shop of our final scene, a lady leans over a proof. She is shown the delicate gradations of the shadows, the balance of the figures; she inquires the engraver’s name and pauses before she speaks. The print-seller leaves the sheet before her. It must be sold if she is to live. The customer’s eye wanders back to the picture, then down to the name; and this time, the picture alone no longer decides the purchase.