Bath had seen many a traveller pass through who assumed a name, a station, or an ample fortune. John Docke Rouvelett—whom other instruments style Dorke, Romney, or Rouvellet—long knew how to turn such licence to his profit. He claimed to hail from the West Indies, to be sprung from an illustrious family, and to subsist upon remittances from a planter uncle. He maintained he had been reared in Amsterdam, in the banking house of Hope, before serving as a lieutenant in the 87th Regiment of Foot. Elizabeth Barnet, who lived with him and was passed off as his wife, shared this shifting existence of lodgings, journeys, and grand narratives that forever eluded verification.
At Bath, the milliner Mary Simeon received him at first merely as a customer. He inspected lace and purchased a fan, returning shortly thereafter in Barnet’s company. The fabrics were costly: he spoke of veils valued at one hundred and fifty guineas and of a lace cloak. As the visits multiplied, the debt grew apace. Simeon and her brother, Du Hamel, ended by advancing him ready money; the goods and cash advances together amounted, by her reckoning, to two hundred and ninety-nine pounds.
Rouvelett offered to discharge this sum by means of a bill of exchange. Dated from Grenada, drawn by Willis & Co. upon the London banking house of Child & Co., it bore an acceptance that the latter had never given. The instrument promised four hundred and twenty pounds sterling, payable nine months after sight. When he delivered it into Simeon’s hands, he assured her that the endorser was of equal worth with the drawees. Barnet recalled having heard him announce the bill, and seeing him draw up an instrument several days later; she stated he had dispatched her to fetch red ink.
Simeon forwarded the paper to London. The answer was not long delayed: the acceptance was a counterfeit. She wrote to Rouvelett, who returned to Bath on a Sunday evening. Their conference was held in English, following upon the French exchanges that had attended the initial delivery of the bill. He demanded where the paper lay and urged Simeon to post to London herself to recover it. She declined to go alone. He then retained his attorney, Luke Evill, promising twenty pounds for the journey. Simeon and Evill set out in the dead of night; she was compelled to disburse three hundred guineas to the holders of the bill to retrieve it. After a single day spent in London, she returned to Bath, but Rouvelett had fled the town. On May 6, 1805, Dorant discharged to Simeon what Rouvelett still owed upon his departure.
The debt was not the only matter entangling him. Rouvelett had sworn to an alleged debt owed him by William Vernon Dorant, keeper of the York Hotel, and an indictment for perjury was likewise pending against him, according to the chronicle. Barnet stood as an essential witness to his life and movements, as recorded in the trial narrative. Yet the man who had long presented her as his wife soon undertook to brand her a thief.
Arrested for debt, he was committed to the Fleet Prison, then transferred to Somerset upon the capital charge of forgery. Barnet visited him in confinement. He forthwith accused her of having purloined from his room a purse containing forty guineas, a half-guinea, and a diamond. He fixed the theft on June 11, 1805, whereas she later testified that their cohabitation had ceased on June 6. Rouvelett’s account tangled itself further: he claimed to have lost all trace of her after the theft, yet admitted she had come to see him at the Fleet. Furthermore, he had found the means to institute a civil action against her and Dorant for deeds, mortgages, and bonds to the supposed value of some twenty thousand pounds. The Recorder, presiding over the court, did not fail to press him upon this contradiction: he could find Barnet to pursue her in the civil courts, yet claimed she was beyond his reach for the felony. He argued still that his witnesses from Liverpool had not been summoned in time and prayed for an adjournment of the criminal trial.
On July 5, 1806, he was brought from Ilchester, ironed at the wrists, to sustain this prosecution at the Old Bailey. An adjournment would have left Barnet under the shadow of a capital charge at the very hour she might testify against him in the other proceedings. The Recorder refused to delay the hearing. Interrogated regarding his origins, his family, his wealth, and his connections, Rouvelett spoke of his uncle, his remittances, and the house of Hope. He was compelled to answer a more searching question: had he vowed vengeance against Barnet because she consorted with Dorant, and declared he would fix a capital felony upon her? He could not recall having said so, then conceded a portion of the speech.
Cummings, his room-mate, had found the purse lying empty beneath the pillow on the very morning following the alleged theft. Rouvelett acknowledged that the purse had been restored, but this discovery did nothing to confirm the treasure he claimed to have placed within it. He had also sworn that Barnet had absconded; yet she had visited him in prison well after the date he assigned to her flight. Rather than prolong the inquiry, the Recorder halted the proceedings and directed the jury to acquit her, denouncing the indictment as a singularly scandalous charge. As Rouvelett was led away, the spectators hissed and groaned with such fury that the officers of the court could scarcely restore order.
The second trial opened at Wells on August 12, 1806, before Baron Thompson. This time, the instrument itself stood at the center of the prosecution: Rouvelett was indicted for having forged the acceptance of Child & Co. and for uttering the bill knowing it to be counterfeit. Philip George, a clerk to the Town Clerk of Bath, testified that he had received the bill from the Mayor and had kept it in his custody ever since. Simeon identified the paper given into her hands and recounted how the purchases, the advances, and the promised payment had followed one upon the other.
Barnet then described their life together as she had witnessed it. After her arrival in Liverpool, she stated, she had met Rouvelett in September 1804; she had followed him to London, and thence to Bath. She had heard him promise to pay by means of a bill accepted by Child & Co. She added that, after passing the note, he had appeared greatly agitated, called for his writing desk, and burnt a packet of papers. She had not been able to read what was written upon them. When she asked whether they were dangerous papers, he replied that there was one amongst them that must not be seen. This testimony, while not revealing the precise nature of the destroyed sheets, added its weight to the bill whose acceptance was proved fraudulent.
The clerk from Child & Co. confirmed that his house maintained no correspondence with any firm styled Willis & Co. in Grenada, and had never accepted the bill. Mary Simeon and her brother corroborated the transactions surrounding the purchases and the document; Barnet, for her part, related what she had seen and heard without pretending to know the secrets of the ashes. The prosecution rested securely upon the preserved instrument, the milliner who had taken it, and the banker’s clerk who disproved its authenticity.
After a trial of nearly twelve hours, the jury returned a verdict of guilty for forging the acceptance and uttering the bill knowing it to be forged. Rouvelett was executed at Ilchester on September 3, 1806. The chronicle dwells upon his blue coat, his striped trousers, his green slippers, and his fur cap. Hitherto, his credit had rested solely upon a name, a signature, and the boast of noble blood. Barnet, whom he had sought to send to the gallows, had lived to bear witness to the truth.