The note was good, Jesson allowed; it was the name of its owner that proved embarrassing. In the public room of the George and Vulture, in London, James Bolland had just produced a promissory note for one hundred pounds. He wished to have it discounted. But his own name appeared upon the back, and Jesson would not suffer his own to stand beside it. Certain men lose their credit long before they have lost their money. Bolland had reached that disagreeable pass where a signature depreciates the very paper it is meant to warrant.
A companion took up a table knife. The judicial report preserved by Thomas Leach recounts that he set about scraping away the letters, beginning from the end. Bolland stayed his hand when nothing remained save the letter B: to proceed further was to risk piercing the paper through. He found another expedient. A few letters added to the initial would yield a different name. Thus Banks took the place of Bolland. It remained only to bestow an existence upon the endorser.
Six Shillings a Day
Long before this encounter in October 1771, Bolland had made the solvency of other men his livelihood. As a sheriff’s officer, he arrested debtors; he likewise kept a house wherein they might lodge prior to their removal to gaol. The distinction had its price. He who paid his reckoning purchased a delay, an arrangement less dreaded, the opportunity yet to receive some assistance. He who had nothing left was of no further interest.
The chronicle of his life describes first a house in Falcon Court, Southwark, and subsequently an establishment in Great Shire Lane, near Temple Bar. In the latter, a day’s lodging is said to have cost six shillings. The windows were unencumbered by those bars that would have announced too openly the character of the premises. Compulsion might wear the guise of ordinary lodging; it was enough that the inmate understood the alternative address to be a common gaol.
This chronicle is unsparing towards Bolland. It charges him with detaining guests who were still capable of paying, cheating them at play, and turning their distress to account. Not all of its episodes possess the precision of the judicial report concerning the note. These accusations must therefore retain their character as an adversarial account. They delineate, nonetheless, the world in which his name had acquired so foul a currency: a world of debts, bail-bonds, and signatures, where the man who enforced the law’s processes knew equally well how to turn them aside.
The Captain Had Kept His Receipt
Among the matters related is that of a sea captain who owed three hundred pounds. Charged with his arrest, Bolland obtained payment of the debt and charges. The vessel subsequently put to sea again. To his employer, however, the officer declared that the captain had escaped him; he even enlarged upon the pains and expenses of his pursuit. The creditor, thus informed, granted him a gratuity. The debt was discharged, but the beneficiary remained ignorant of the fact.
The falsehood had before it the entire duration of a voyage. Upon the vessel’s return, fresh process was entrusted to another officer, Bolland being absent. To this second demand the captain opposed the receipt given for the first. That paper, which ought to have closed the matter long before, opened it against the man who had signed it. Bolland had counted upon the distance of a man; he was confronted instead by the enduring presence of his own hand.
According to the same chronicle, he prolonged the proceedings, lost the suit, and experienced in his turn confinement, and thereafter the Fleet. His discharge under an insolvency measure did not signify that the creditor had been in the wrong; it merely allowed him to walk abroad. An acquaintance formed in prison subsequently assisted him in finding sureties and a place in the service of the Sheriff of Middlesex. Here history affords a return less edifying than might be expected: the experience of a gaol did not put an end to his dealings with prisoners.
Later, he sought to purchase the office of City Marshal. He was the highest bidder at two thousand four hundred pounds, but the requisite approval was denied him upon an examination of his character; his deposit was ordered to be returned. Purchase alone, therefore, did not suffice to make him the incumbent. He could still produce money; the city authorities would not, for all that, admit his name.
Mr Banks, Merchant
At the George and Vulture, the impediment had appeared easier to surmount. The note for one hundred pounds was dated 12 October 1771, payable two months after date to Samuel Pritchard or his order, and bore the signature of Thomas Bradshaw. Bolland maintained considerable and complicated pecuniary dealings with Pritchard. Jesson already held an unpaid bill for fifty guineas. His inquiry concerning its settlement had induced Bolland to produce the fresh note.
After the scraping, Jesson accepted the paper. He remarked, however, that the gentleman to whom he intended to deliver it would inquire who Banks was. Bolland was ready with his answer: a dealer in liquors established in the neighbourhood of Rathbone Place. The added name did not remain a mere succession of letters. It received a trade and an address, enough to permit money to pass with the semblance of security.
Francis-Lewis Cardeneaux took the note to discount it. He first advanced a sum to Jesson; subsequently Bolland came to demand the return of the bill or its value. The three men met at a coffee-house. Cardeneaux requested information concerning Pritchard and Banks. Bolland represented the former as a well-known horse-dealer of great property, and the latter as a man of substance dealing largely in wines and spirits. These qualities were the assurances he gave, not our own.
The settlement was concluded by means of several notes and a sum already advanced. Cardeneaux did not require Bolland’s signature: Jesson had explained to him that it would prejudice the negotiation of the bill, on account of his former standing as a sheriff’s officer. It was a singular precaution. The name of the man present was set aside, only that men might take comfort in that of a stranger whom they had never met.
The Paper Returns
Before the day of payment arrived, Bradshaw and Pritchard were declared bankrupt. Cardeneaux sought out Bolland to inform him that the note would not be honoured. He no longer found the holder eager to touch its value. According to the report, Bolland pretended never to have seen him, and raised against him the very absence of his endorsement. His name was Bolland; the note bore that of Banks. What had been altered at the tavern table now became his line of defence.
Cardeneaux placed the bill in the hands of an agent to obtain payment. An attorney named Levi, two of whose clients had likewise been wronged by Bolland according to the report, learned from Pritchard of the alteration of the name. He advised a prosecution. The note was recovered to serve as evidence, and subsequently deposited with the clerk of Sir John Fielding following Bolland’s arrest. It was to be produced at the trial, bearing the marks of the operation which its actors had performed before witnesses.
A further intervention ensued: after the committal, an unknown person brought one hundred pounds to Cardeneaux in the name of James Banks. Cardeneaux delivered a receipt, together with an undertaking to return the bill upon request. But the instrument was by then in the hands of the magistrate. The report adds that the existence of this James Banks of Rathbone Place was never established. The money reappeared; the surety, for his part, never came forward with a proven identity.
The Final Endorsement
At the February Sessions of 1772 at the Old Bailey, Bolland was indicted for the forged endorsement and for uttering it knowing it to be forged. The jury found him guilty, and sentence of death was passed upon him. Execution was nonetheless respited, in order to submit to the Twelve Judges a question whose full gravity the case brought into relief: could there be a forgery in the name of a person who had never existed?
It would be tempting to frame the answer as a final, triumphant pronouncement of the court. Leach forbids it: his report specifies that the opinion of the judges was not made public. He records thereafter the execution of Bolland at Tyburn, in 1772. The respite had not saved him. The chronicle attributes to him, before his death, the admission of many misdeeds, but likewise his steadfast refusal to acknowledge any intention to defraud in the affair that brought him to the gallows.
Years of clamour and complaint had not achieved such an end. A note passed from hand to hand had summoned into court the precise gestures of an encounter: a debt to be discharged, a name deemed inconvenient, a knife, a few letters preserved, and others added. Bolland had imagined he could sever his interest from his signature. The paper had returned at last, bearing both.