The traveller arrived at Hare Hatch towards four o'clock in the afternoon. An hour later, so he recounted, three bargemen fell upon him, stripping him of his watch, his coin, and his bank-notes, before dragging him to a pit by the wayside. There, he alleged, they bound him, threatened his life should he cry out, and abandoned him to his fate. Chandler maintained he had lain three hours within that ditch, near enough to the highway to hear the passing horses, before he rose and hopped, hand and foot bound, nearly half a mile uphill. Night having fallen, he encountered a shepherd who severed his bonds. His first inquiry was where he might find a constable.
This tale had not had its genesis upon the open road. William Chandler, the only son of a husbandman near Devizes, was then completing his articles as an attorney’s clerk. With an eye to setting up his own practice, the chronicle ascribes to him a deliberate design: to amass a sum of money, and thereupon demand of the “hundred”—a local jurisdiction held liable under statute for losses sustained in certain robberies—the restitution of an invented brigandage. Thus Pelham expounds the contrivance of the affair, without asserting it as a general rule governing all robberies.
Chandler had already gathered funds through sundry channels. He had persuaded his father that an advantageous marriage was in train; the elder man had thereupon settled upon him an estate valued at four hundred pounds. To his master, Mr. Hill, the solicitor, he asserted that a wealthy uncle in Suffolk had advanced him five hundred pounds. He next solicited from Hill a further five hundred pounds, purporting to place it out at interest upon a mortgage of lands near Enford. Hill demanding security, Chandler proffered a mortgage upon his own estate. To lend colour to the design, he entered into treaty with a Mrs. Poor for a loan secured upon her Enford properties.
The appointment to deliver the funds and exchange the deeds was fixed for the 25th of March, 1748. As early as the 24th, Chandler converted a portion of his funds into notes of smaller denomination. The paper, he protested, formed too bulky a packet to lie concealed beneath his garters; he therefore exchanged four hundred and forty pounds, and subsequently negotiated a four-hundred-pound note at the banking-house of Sir Richard Hoare. He returned to Hill’s chambers with three notes amounting in all to four hundred pounds. At his request, his master noted down their numbers and dates. Chandler quitted the chambers about noon on the 24th of March, a full day prior to his appointed meeting with Mrs. Poor.
Upon the ground where he alleged the assault had taken place, Chandler dispersed notices bearing so minute a description of the felons that one witness fancied he recognised three men who had passed near his dwelling. The Mayor of Reading, encountered by chance upon the road, likewise recollected having observed certain bargemen near Maidenhead. Richard Kelly, the constable, took his deposition and the initial notices. Chandler thereupon repaired to the inn where he had previously baited, recounted his misfortune to the host, declared his intention to sue the hundred, and bespoken an ample supper together with a bowl of punch.
On the morrow, he returned to London and waited upon Hill for assistance. The solicitor restored to him the memorandum of the numbers and dispatched him to the Bank to stop payment on the notes. Chandler did not go. Instead, he purchased a silver tankard from Tufley, the silversmith, paying for it with a hundred-pound note newly obtained from Hoare. He represented to Hill that the Bank had been closed on account of the great fire in Cornhill. Presenting himself there on the following day, he left with the clerks a list wherein the dates and numbers of the three notes had been altered, while pretending to have tendered the true transcript. Chandler had in truth retained Hill’s original memorandum, lodging with the Bank a fabricated schedule.
On the 26th of March, Chandler caused an advertisement of fifteen notes to be inserted in the public prints, offering a reward of fifty pounds for the whole, or a proportionate sum for any part thereof. That very afternoon, he withdrew his notices and carried off the drafts. Three days later, he caused the statutory notice of the robbery to be published in the London Gazette, but omitted any detailed recital of the notes such as had appeared in the daily sheets. In May, he swore his information before a Justice of the Peace, accompanied by Hill. Here again, the inventory of the notes was missing.
On the 18th of July, 1748, Chandler brought his action against the hundred before a special jury at Abingdon. Following a twelve-hour trial, the jurors found for him in the sum of nine hundred and seventy pounds, subject to a point of law reserved touching the sufficiency of the notice published in the Gazette. The verdict favoured him, yet its fruit hung upon the adjudication of the Court of Common Pleas. In the interim, Chandler took fright lest the disclosures made at trial should awaken suspicion. He withdrew to Colchester, where his brother-in-law, Humphry Smart, kept an inn, and entered into partnership with him. To conceal his whereabouts, he directed his correspondence to be addressed to “Thomas Chandler” at Easton, Suffolk, with instructions that it be left at the Crown, near Colchester.
Hill, who was shortly to argue the reserved point of law, pressed him to return to London. Chandler offered mere pretexts. Meanwhile, the notes resurfaced: twelve of them were presented together at the Bank, having been purchased in Amsterdam on the 31st of October, 1748, by Barnard Solomon, a broker, from an Englishman passing under the name of John Smith. Smith had tarried but a few days in Holland, travelling in company with a merchant named Casson. Casson’s description of Smith tallied closely with the person of Chandler. When Hill urged him to come forward and clear himself, Chandler refused.
The Barons of the Court of Common Pleas subsequently arrested the civil judgment. Chandler had neither inserted the numbers of the notes in the Gazette nor sworn to them before the magistrate; for want of this statutory particularity, the plaintiff was non-suited without award of a new trial. This judgment did not pronounce upon the fraudulent robbery itself. However, the deceptive schedule Chandler had deposited at the Bank was brought to light. Upon inspecting it, Mr. Hill perceived that he had been duped. A collation of the Bank’s ledgers with those of Sir Richard Hoare enabled the authorities to reconstruct the entire traffic in the paper. Hill posted to Colchester to cause his former clerk to be apprehended; but having searched for him even within the inn he kept, he was obliged to return empty-handed.
Chandler had descried his pursuers. He fled Colchester for Coventry, where he set up a small public house. Being desirous, as the chronicler relates, of restoring some portion of the money to Hill, he remitted him one hundred and fifty pounds from Nottingham. The postmark betrayed his retreat to Coventry. Indicted for perjury in respect of the deposition sworn before the magistrate, he was taken upon a bench warrant and conveyed to Abingdon. On the 22nd of July, 1750, he was arraigned upon the indictment, but traversed his trial to the following assizes, a privilege which the chronicle observes was his by right.
In the following year, the issue was joined before the court. This time, the testimony and the documentary evidence marshalled against him carried conviction to the jury. On the 16th of July, 1751, Chandler was sentenced to seven years’ transportation, following three months’ imprisonment in the county gaol. The affair, which had opened with a perjured charge against three innocent bargemen, was thus brought to a close by the very oath Chandler had sworn.