In July 1804, the Earl of Clarendon received at Wade’s Mill a letter signed by a certain H. Grant. The young woman represented herself as a native of Jamaica, the daughter of an affluent house; her husband, a Scotsman whom she had not loved, had squandered her portion in gaming and drink before perishing. Left a widow, destitute, burdened with two infants and great with a third, she sought sanctuary beneath the roof of an Essex widow to evade the clutches of her creditors. Her tale was pure fabrication, yet the Earl was none the wiser. The compassion she implored was the very breach through which Henry Perfect intended to advance.
Lord Clarendon replied with judicious circumspection: he desired to know who had recommended her suit. The rejoinder arrived on July 14 under another hand—that of Mrs. Smith, the widow of a sea captain who professed to have known the Grant family in Jamaica. She attested to the calamity and gave assurance that the young woman’s father would eventually remit funds. For the present, she averred, only immediate succour could preserve her from ruin. The Earl dispatched five guineas and offered to write to a physician or some respectable resident of Harlow.
On July 23, H. Grant returned thanks to her benefactor, mentioning a passage home to the West Indies. She expressed an earnest wish to thank him in person, provided the interview took place away from London, “lest a malicious world should put an ill construction upon it.” Clarendon appointed the Bell Inn at Kilburn as their place of meeting. Ere the appointed day, a fresh missive announced that Mrs. Grant had lost her infant, was seized with a milk fever, and dared not venture beyond Whitechapel. Possessing a mere twelve shillings, she begged five pounds, to be remitted to a Mr. Paul at the Saracen’s Head, Aldgate.
His lordship remitted the money. A letter from the Reverend H. Paul acknowledged receipt, reporting that Mrs. Grant was in a state of delirium; he promised to write on her behalf during her intervals of lucidity. When Clarendon offered medical assistance, Paul pleaded his patient’s delicacy and refused to disclose her lodging. Thus the charity drifted from a solitary tale of distress into an epistolary round-robin: Mrs. Grant, Mrs. Smith, and now the divine answered for one another, while the Earl was never permitted to set eyes upon the object of his bounty. The receiving points shifted likewise: George’s Coffee-house, the Saracen’s Head, and subsequently the Chapter Coffee-house were substituted for any fixed dwelling where Clarendon might have called.
On August 8, at Kilburn, his lordship at length encountered the ostensible clergyman. The prisoner, presently to be unmasked as Perfect, introduced himself as Henry Paul. He recounted having met Mrs. Grant in the Ongar stagecoach, where a young woman, two children, and an elderly gentlewoman were all travelling in deep mourning; the young creature was the daughter of a gentleman whose hospitable roof he had frequented in Jamaica. He described having found her languishing, the curtains drawn about her bed, and having ministered to her distress. He claimed to have received his education at Westminster and Oxford, to hold a living in Saint Kitts worth seven hundred pounds per annum, to possess estates in Ireland, and to be upon the eve of sailing for America. Every circumstance parried the Earl’s enquiries and lent colour to the design.
Paul asserted he had advanced two pounds to Mrs. Grant. Clarendon reimbursed him the sum, a transaction effected by a banknote which formed the gravamen of the indictment. His lordship subsequently testified that he entertained not the slightest suspicion: his companion spoke with the address of a scholar and appeared animated by the most upright motives. Following this colloquy, the petitions assumed a less overtly pecuniary complexion. Linens, poultry, fruit, and wine were requested for the convalescent, and the Earl duly caused them to be sent.
On August 23, Paul wrote that six pounds two shillings had been laid out on Mrs. Grant’s behalf. The sheeting supplied, having been kept near sulphur, had allegedly made her ill, and some fine old linen was required. Paul excused the errors of his scrawl, pleading a cephalalgia and a slight ague. Then, on September 1, a letter from Grant shifted the scenery once more. An austere aunt had carried her off to the country, but she must needs absent herself for some days. Grant solicited four pounds that she might wait upon her benefactor, directing the answer to be addressed under a fresh alias, Mrs. Harriet, at the Waltham post office.
Clarendon now began to suspect deceit. Grant replied that his lordship was in error, which he would acknowledge once she had embarked for the Indies. In a postscript, she announced that “the best of men,” Mr. Paul, had died suddenly the preceding Saturday. The correspondence of Grant and Paul terminated forthwith. Shortly thereafter, Clarendon received an appeal from a Reverend Mr. Bennett, reciting another narrative of woe.
Lord Clarendon thereupon instructed his steward to probe the correspondent’s identity. The individual discovered proved to be the selfsame person who had styled himself Paul. In his lodgings, a memorandum-book in his own handwriting was impounded, wherein were recorded the sums received and the names of his benefactors. Over two years, according to this ledger as reported by Pelham, he had procured four hundred and eighty-eight pounds. The list encompassed the Duchess of Beaufort, divers peers of the realm, prelates, countesses, and other luminaries of high life.
The memoranda found alongside the volume revealed an even more methodical system. Perfect noted down the variations of handwriting he must employ for each assumed character, as well as the particular paper, sealing-wax, or wafers required. This was no sequence of extemporised appeals: each persona received its appropriate complexion and material apparatus. The letters breathed life into Mrs. Grant, then into Mr. Paul, through designated addresses, notes, requests, and bulletins of failing health.
The chronicle rehearses certain details of Perfect’s antecedents: the son of a Leicestershire divine, he had borne a commission as lieutenant in the 69th Regiment. He had obtained substantial fortunes by two wives, but possessed merely a life interest therein; upon the decease of the second, he found himself utterly destitute. He had previously levied contributions under the cloaks of divines and widows. His arraignment in 1804, however, turned strictly upon the two pounds obtained from Clarendon.
On October 27, 1804, at the Middlesex Sessions at Hicks’ Hall, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Perfect. The bench forthwith sentenced him to seven years’ transportation. In April 1805, he was shipped to Botany Bay. The victim of the imposture, Lord Clarendon, had in the first instance answered a phantom created by his own mail; the diligence of his steward ultimately traced back the figures of Paul and Bennett to a single hand, and, behind the paper widow, revealed the author of the entire correspondence.
In this affair, the fraudulence resided not in a forged promissory note, but in the uninterrupted thread of an ongoing narrative: a deceased husband, orphans, sickness, an unbending aunt, a benevolent churchman. Each complication excused a fresh remittance or precluded ocular verification. The ledger seized in Perfect’s lodging knit together the charities that the several correspondences had kept apart. The verdict struck at the specific petition directed against Clarendon; transportation brought an end to this singular parade of shadows.