of relations—parents and children, brothers and cousins. It has been observed that the most notorious Italian brigands regularly inherited the business from their parents; we shall see presently how the Coles and Youngers of the Western States of America were all closely related; many of the most desperate members of the Neapolitan Camorra were brothers. There is a village in the south of Italy which has been a nest and focus of criminals for centuries. The natives are mostly related to each other by intermarriage, and all seem bound by tradition to prey upon their fellows. Again, in the Madras Presidency, at Trichinopoly, a whole caste of thieves existed, one and all vowed to various kinds of crime; and the practice of crime by certain Indian tribes generation after generation is well known to Indian police officers.
That the criminal virus is widely disseminated is proved by its unfailing reappearance in all times and places. Crimes of the same sort have been and are being continually committed, with no greater difference than is due to surroundings, opportunities, individual idiosyncrasies, the changing circumstances that accompany the varying conditions of life. I propose to show now from a number of selected cases how thieves, swindlers, depredators, murderers, and all kinds and classes of criminals who make mankind their prey, have been reproduced again and again. Both men and women have been found acting under the same baleful impulse, showing greater or less ingenuity, but working on the same lines. The sharper follows out his long career of successful fraud and imposture century after century. Such men as Hatfield, Collet, Coster, Sheridan, Benson, Shinburn, Allmeyer, are the seemingly inevitable recurrence of one and the same type. Jenny Diver and the German Princess have had their later manifestations in Mrs. Gordon Baillie, La “Comtesse,” Sandor, and Bertha Heyman. Cain has innumerable descendants; nothing stops the murderer when the savage instinct is in the ascendant; he feels no remorse when the deed is done. I shall presently give a short account of one or two of those miscreants who might otherwise escape classification, and whose very names are synonymous with great crimes—Troppmann, Bichel, Dumollard, De Tourville, and Peace. But this section may very well begin with some account of a few famous swindlers.
HATFIELD.
One of the earliest swindlers in modern records was John Hatfield, a youth of low origin, who was yet so gifted by nature, had such mother wit and such a persuasive tongue, that he succeeded in passing himself off as a man of rank and fortune without detection or punishment for a long series of years. He was born of poor parents in Cheshire, in 1769, and on reaching manhood became the commercial traveller of a linen-draper, working the north of England. On one of his rounds he met with a young lady, a distant connection of the ducal house of Rutland, who had a small fortune of her own, and, using his honeyed tongue,
he succeeded in inducing her to marry him. The happy pair proceeded to London, where they lived on their capital, the wife’s dowry, some £1,500, which was quickly squandered in extravagance and riotous living. It was impossible to keep this up, and Hatfield again retired to the country, where he presently deserted his wife, leaving her with her children in complete destitution. He made his way once more to London, and, boasting much of his relationship with the Manners family, got credit from confiding tradesmen, until the bubble burst, when he was sent to a debtors’ prison. About this time his wife died in great penury. Hatfield soon afterwards, by a series of artful misrepresentations, obtained money from the Duke of Rutland, who secured his release.
In 1735 the Duke was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Hatfield, hoping to find fresh openings for exercising his ingenuity, determined to follow him to Dublin. Here he gave the landlord of a good hotel a plausible excuse for his arriving without servants, carriages, or horses, and for some time lived very pleasantly, being treated with much deference as a relative of the Viceroy. At the end of the month the landlord presented his bill, and was referred to Hatfield’s agent, who, strangely enough, was “out of town.” When the bill was again presented, Hatfield gave the address of a gentleman living in the castle; this gentleman, however, declined to be answerable, whereupon Hatfield was served with a writ, and conveyed at once to the Marshalsea, in Dublin. He was there able to win the commiseration of the gaoler and his wife by the old story of his high connections, and by his deep anxiety that his Excellency should hear of his temporary embarrassments. By means of these lies he was lodged in most comfortable quarters, and was treated with every respect; and upon his making further application to the Duke of Rutland, his Grace again weakly agreed to pay his debts, on the condition that he left Ireland immediately.
Hatfield, on his return to England, visited Scarborough and renewed his fraudulent operations, but he was discovered and thrown into prison, where he remained for eight and a half years. At the end of that time he was released through the intervention of a Miss Nation, a Devonshire lady, who paid his debts for him, and afterwards gave him her hand in marriage. He now posed as a reformed character, and lived an honest life for just three years, during which period he became partner in a firm at Tiverton. Then he offered himself as parliamentary candidate for Queenborough, but his past misdeeds had been too notorious, and the constituency would not elect him. Balked in his attempt, he straightway left his home and family, and once more disappeared.