Mrs. Cooke had come in search of gold. She found herself detained in a banking house. Her husband kept billiard rooms at No. 358, Strand, and had entrusted her with the notes received the previous evening, that she might exchange them at the several houses charged with their payment. Certain transactions had met with success. At Messrs. Glyn and Co., in Lombard Street, one of the notes brought her round to an abrupt halt. This scrap of paper, purporting to be a five-pound note of the Salop Bank, called forth demands for explanation, and presently the arrival of her husband. The night’s play had to be recounted from the beginning before the couple were permitted to depart.
The patron from whom the paper originated was one Richard Moore. He was thirty years of age. In the account given by Pelham of his London trial in February 1841, the man was of a prosperous Irish family and had received, upon attaining his majority, sufficient means to live in easy circumstances. The compiler ascribes to him a dissipated youth, first in his own country and subsequently in London, laying a great portion of his ruin to the gaming table. This biographical sketch prepared the ground for the plea of the defence. The facts argued before the jurors, however, turned upon banknotes, payments, and the letters indited when it grew difficult to pass them off for current coin.
On the 31st of January, Moore had entered Cooke’s premises in the company of a gentleman accustomed to the house. The company were playing at loo. In the course of the night, he won and lost by turns, discharging his initial losses with country bank notes possessing every appearance of ordinary paper. Cooke accommodated him with advances. At the moment of his departure, Moore stood indebted to him in the sum of thirty pounds. He delivered an acknowledgment of the debt and gave his address as Wright’s Hotel, in the Strand. Nine of the notes he had brought had likewise given rise to change returned by the landlord.
On the morrow, Mrs. Cooke accordingly set forth to convert them into coin. This journey into the City altered the very nature of the debt: the customer no longer owed thirty pounds merely to a gaming house; the payments he had made there now compromised those who had accepted his paper. Following the couple’s explanations at the bank, a porter from Fricour’s Hotel, in Leicester Square, brought a letter from Moore. The address given at the close of the play was not that from which he was now writing.
In this letter, Moore expressed his contrition. He declared he had discovered the notes to be counterfeit and protested his desire to indemnify Cooke at a later date. He claimed to have received them the evening before from an old schoolfellow, in settlement of a wager upon a race. Such was his explanation, not the established origin of the securities. Cooke proceeded to the hotel in the company of Forrester, the officer charged with discovering the gambler. They came upon him in the coffee-room. According to Pelham, Moore made no attempt to flee, nor did he deny the guilt imputed to him when they took him into custody.
The investigation then encountered a singular circumstance. The designs upon the notes were by no means clumsy imitations: they proceeded from the genuine copper plates engraved for the very banks whose titles appeared upon the paper. That which rendered them fraudulent lay elsewhere. The particulars requisite for their lawful issue, most notably the signatures, had been fraudulently subjoined. A genuine impression might thus be converted into a forged note, possessing a faultless design and an utterly worthless promise to pay.
The engravers Messrs. Perkins and Co., established in Fleet Street, explained their practice. They were accustomed to transmit to country banks proof-impressions of their plates, as specimens of their workmanship. These sheets were pasted upon thick pasteboard. The impressions made use of by Moore had been detached from their backing. As the plate paper was too thin to resemble that of a circulating banknote, a second leaf had been applied to the reverse. This pasting together imparted to the whole a more plausible body and consistency. The signatures, on the other hand, had not all been transcribed from genuine paper; certain of the names did not even correspond to those of the directors of the banks.
Pelham leaves unresolved the question of how these proofs had come into the prisoner’s hands. The material contrivance was described; its chain of supply was not. The jurors were called upon to decide upon their uttering and upon Moore’s knowledge of their fraudulent character. His counsel, Mr. C. Phillips, sought to replace these transactions within the world where they had been received. His client, he contended, had been plundered by sharpers and had endeavoured to recover what he had been made to lose, by dishonest means, no doubt, yet means comparable to those employed by his antagonists.
Phillips touched upon those counterfeit notes of which gaming houses might, according to his submission, make use to lure their victims. Above all, he pleaded the letter addressed to Cooke: this spontaneous warning ought to earn his client some measure of consideration. The jurors did not acquit him. They returned a verdict of guilty, whilst recommending him to mercy upon the ground advanced by the defence. The tale of the ruined gamester had procured this recommendation; it had not rendered the notes payable.
A second indictment awaited Moore. It concerned two notes, of five and ten pounds, purporting to be of the Boston Bank. These transactions were prior to the evening at Cooke’s: they dated back to the 28th of January, in a gaming house kept by Thompson at No. 7, Leicester Square. Moore had enquired whether play was going on and what sum constituted the bank. He was informed it was one hundred and thirty pounds. In the absence of any other antagonist, Chappell, an attendant of the place, consented to play with him.
Loss followed upon loss. Chappell won from him seventy pounds, paid in country notes. Moore declared he had no more money about him, asked whether the room would remain open, and returned about a quarter of an hour later. Thompson was by then present. Towards four o’clock in the morning, the gamester had lost an additional seventy-five pounds. He wished to go in quest of further funds. The keeper demurred: the customary hour of closing was past. Moore went forth nonetheless, and presently returned to find the door barred. He protested and demanded his revenge. Chappell at length admitted him.
By nine o’clock in the morning, according to the compilation, a further three hundred and eighty pounds had been lost. Moore handed over two bankers’ drafts on Manchester, the one for three hundred pounds and the other for eighty, before taking his leave. Thompson and Chappell subsequently went to convert the country paper received during the night. They obtained cash for certain of the notes from a bullion merchant in Cheapside, upon an allowance of two and a half per cent discount. At other banking houses, the presentation of the paper caused them to be detained. The very same course began anew: payments accepted across a gaming table grew suspect before a cashier’s counter. The two men were set at liberty after having explained whence the notes were derived.
When Moore was apprehended, he carried upon his person another letter, addressed to Thompson. Therein he stated, once more, that he had discovered himself to have been deceived and that he had paid with counterfeit notes. He proposed bills of exchange at various dates to cover the sum due. The defence renewed the arguments previously urged; the second verdict was likewise one of guilty.
Mr. Justice Coltman adopted a view directly contrary to that of the plundered gamester. Moore’s station in society and his education, in the learned judge’s estimation, aggravated the offence. In a commercial country, he observed, one could not treat lightly the falsification of those instruments upon which all transactions reposed. He passed sentence of fifteen years’ transportation. The compilation follows the convict no further beyond this doom. It leaves behind two letters of contrition and an engraver’s proofs turned into money: around the tables, Moore had been suffered to go on losing; at the teller’s window, someone had to answer for that which he had given in payment.