In September 1836, George Edward Peacock appeared before the Central Criminal Court in London, indicted for forging a power of attorney. The instrument was intended to effect the transfer and sale of stock settled upon the marriage of his brother, the Reverend Peacock, to Selina Willmar. According to the evidence summarised by Pelham, the settlement had appointed the Reverend W. A. Fountain, W. Watkins, and George Edward Peacock as trustees, for the sole benefit of Peacock’s wife. Camden Pelham’s account, published in 1891, records the sum in the Three per Cent. Consols at 7,814 pounds. Peacock was merely thirty years of age; he practised as an attorney in Chancery Lane and was descended, the chronicle notes, from a family of high respectability in Yorkshire. At his trial, numerous witnesses came forward to attest to his unblemished character and professional probity.
On 7 December 1835, the stock was transferred through the agency of Mr Clark, a broker. The power of attorney presented for the transaction bore the names of all three trustees. The judicial narrative compiled by Pelham establishes that the signatures of Watkins and Fountain were forged. Furthermore, the individuals subscribing as witnesses to their execution had no existence whatever. This was no mere irregular delivery of instruments by their lawful holder: an entirely fabricated document made two absent men speak, empowering Peacock to act as though his co-trustees had given their free consent. The chapter assigns no precise date to the discovery of the fraud and does not pursue the destination of the funds after the sale. It restricts its summary of the evidence to the instrument of transfer and the subsequent confession, while Peacock directed his entire defence toward an asserted intention of replacing the money.
The trial opened on Wednesday, 21 September 1836. The case for the prosecution having closed, Peacock craved the court’s indulgence and addressed the judge and jury from a written paper. He offered no denial of the crime. According to Pelham, he stated that he had pleaded guilty from the outset to spare his family the public mortification of a protracted exposure. He contended, however, that he had been impelled by dire necessity rather than criminal inclination, maintaining that he had merely conceived the design of using the funds upon a temporary emergency. In confirmation of this purpose, he urged that he had made no effort to flee: he had remained at his usual post for several days, both before and after the discovery. He added that his brother was fully aware of his intention to replace the stock, a resolution he had firmly embraced. These assertions proceed entirely from his own address, unsupported by any instrument of repayment reproduced by Pelham.
He recounted the series of embarrassments that had driven him to this extremity. Admitted as an attorney in 1830, he had commenced practice in London under auspices he described as exceedingly favourable. He subsequently sustained losses of 1,500 pounds and was obliged to pay a further 600 pounds on behalf of an acquaintance for whom he had become surety. To meet these pressing demands, he had recourse to bills of exchange; failing to honour them at maturity, he contracted fresh loans. In the year preceding the trial, his liabilities and losses amounted, by his own reckoning, to nearly 5,000 pounds. He maintained that a substantial portion of these borrowed sums had been expended in maintaining his household and preserving the credit of his practice. As these obligations matured, he observed, a loan obtained to meet one draft served only to multiply his difficulties. This tale exhibits an accumulation of financial disasters rather than a premeditated design; yet it remains the self-serving narrative of a man who stood convicted by his own mouth of a forgery committed to consummate an actual sale.
These explanations rested solely upon the prisoner’s word. Peacock stated that he had conceived the scheme of employing his brother’s property for a short season to retrieve his fortune, in the confident expectation of replacing the sum before any loss could accrue to the Bank of England. He had persuaded himself that his brother would be satisfied could he but demonstrate that he would ultimately be reimbursed. His speculations, however, proved abortive; at the moment of his arrest, he asserted that he was well-nigh penniless. He likewise tendered his acknowledgments to the Bank of England for affording him ample leisure to prepare his defence, while repeating that he had never entertained the thought of defrauding that establishment. In this plea, he drew a distinction between the transient use of family trust property and an intent to defraud the Bank. Yet the stock was legally secured under the settlement for the benefit of his brother’s wife: such a casuistical distinction could never supply the lawful concurrence of the trustees, which the forged instrument had purported to convey. The account renders his line of defence intelligible, but it affords no proof that restitution was ever feasible, or that it would have been accepted.
Peacock did not urge that an intention to repay could constitute a legal justification. He acknowledged that his motives formed no excuse in the eyes of the law, and gave utterance to his profound contrition. He did not claim that pecuniary embarrassment could legitimise the forged signatures of Watkins and Fountain; he merely implored the court to look with a different eye upon the wretched man who had traced them. He then besought the jury to weigh the dreadful consequences of a capital sentence upon his wife and child, his aged parents, and his friends. Pelham records that his emotions here overpowered him, and he paused, weeping bitterly, before resuming his appeal for mercy. He spoke in turn of his wife and infant, of his two aged parents, and of the circle of friends whose lives would be clouded by the ignominy of his execution. His written address concluded with an entreaty that the jury would temper justice with that compassion which they themselves might one day hope to receive. This moving scene belongs to a retrospective chronicle; it must not be regarded as a verbatim stenographic transcript of every syllable uttered.
Witnesses of the highest respectability were subsequently called: clergymen, barristers, merchants, and solicitors bore unanimous testimony to Peacock’s honourable conduct in his profession and the uprightness of his previous life. Yet such tributes could neither efface the forged signatures nor undo the sale of the stock.
The jury remained in consultation for barely ten minutes. They returned a verdict of guilty, accompanied by a unanimous and earnest recommendation to mercy, grounded upon Peacock’s unexceptionable character prior to this unhappy transaction. This recommendation in no way qualified their finding upon the fact; it was directed solely to the mitigation of the sentence. The record gives no warrant for supposing that the jury accepted the plea of a temporary loan or regarded his embarrassments as an excuse. On Monday, 26 September, five days after the trial, the prisoner received sentence of death. The ultimate penalty was not, however, carried into effect: upon an examination of all the circumstances, his sentence was commuted to transportation. The chapter records neither the exact date of this clemency nor the term and precise destination of his exile.
Pelham’s chronicle holds in balance two truths which Peacock’s address sought to divide. The attorney had confessed to a deliberate forgery designed to effect the disposal of the funds; he insisted that he had purposed to replace them, and that the Bank would have suffered no detriment. The jury affirmed his guilt while petitioning for mercy on the ground of his former life. The royal prerogative altered the punishment, not the conviction. It remains impossible, from the pages of this 1891 compilation alone, to ascertain what specific representations were laid before the Crown after the trial, or what precise considerations guided the ministers of the Sovereign.
The chronicle thus depicts professional credit as an intangible capital which Peacock claimed to have preserved by hazarding trust funds over which he had no sole right. His brother’s wife, the rightful beneficiary of the settlement, remains almost entirely absent from the narrative; the brother appears chiefly through Peacock’s own deposition, in which he asserted that his sibling was privy to his purpose of replacing the stock. The interest of the trial turns wholly upon the conscience and standing of the forger, and the dread penalty hanging over him. Such is the perspective adopted by Pelham, who devotes broad pages to the prisoner’s address, his character, and his domestic ties; yet it cannot supply the place of the trust accounts or the official trial minutes, which find no place in the chapter.