In 1802 he came to the surface under the assumed name of Colonel the Hon. Alexander Augustus Hope, brother to Lord Hopetoun, and member for Linlithgow. Hatfield was staying in the Lake district, at the Queen’s Hotel, Keswick, and near here, at Buttermere, he met a village beauty, Mary Robinson, whose parents owned an hotel on the shores of the lake. He was not long in winning her affections. But the double-faced scoundrel at this moment was paying attention to another young lady, the rich ward
of an Irish gentleman, Mr. Murphy, who, with his family, was resident in the same hotel. This suit prospered. Hatfield’s proposal was accepted, and communications were opened with Lord Hopetoun. The villain allowed none of the letters to reach their destination. The day was even fixed for the marriage. At the last moment the bridegroom did not appear, but Mr. Murphy received a letter from him at Buttermere, under his name of Colonel Hope, asking him to cash a cheque or draft which he enclosed, drawn on a Liverpool banker. The money was obtained, and sent to Buttermere, but Colonel Hope continued to be missing, until the news arrived that he had run off with Mary Robinson. It never transpired why he preferred this sweet girl, whose charms were afterwards sung by Wordsworth, to his other well-dowered partie. Some do him the credit of saying that he really loved Mary Robinson; others that, already fearing detection and exposure, he thought it wise to disappear.
Exposure was, indeed, close at hand. Mr. Murphy wrote direct to Lord Hopetoun, and soon heard that the supposed Colonel Hope was an impostor. The draft on the Liverpool bankers also proved to be a forgery, and many letters fraudulently franked by Hatfield as an M.P. were brought up against him. After his marriage with Mary Robinson he had gone to Scotland, but had cut short his wedding trip to return to Buttermere, where he was arrested on several charges. Hatfield dexterously made his escape from the constable who took him, and was long lost sight of. At last, after many wanderings, he was captured in the neighbourhood of Swansea, and sent to the gaol of Brecon. He tried to pass off as one Tudor Henry, but was easily identified, and on his removal to Carlisle was tried for his life. Sentence of death was passed upon him, and he suffered on the 3rd of September, 1803. “Notwithstanding his various and complicated enormities,” says a contemporary chronicle, “his untimely end excited considerable commiseration. His manners were extremely polished and insinuating, and he was possessed of qualities which might have rendered him an ornament to society.”
COLLET.
Anthelme Collet stands out in the long list of swindlers as one of the most insinuating and accomplished scoundrels that ever took to criminal ways. A number of curious stories have survived of his ingenuity, his daring, and his long, almost unbroken, success. He is a product of the French revolutionary epoch, and found his account in the general dislocation of society that prevailed in France and her subject countries in the commencement of the last century.
Collet’s parents lived in the department of the Aisne, where he was born in 1785. From his childhood up he was noted as a consummate liar and cunning thief, and to cure him of his evil propensities he was sent to an uncle in Italy, a priest, who kept him by his side for three years, but made nothing of him. Young Collet then returned to France, and entered the military school at Fontainebleau, from which he graduated as sous-lieutenant, and passed on to a regiment in garrison at Brescia. Here he soon made friends with the monks of a neighbouring Capuchin monastery, and, preferring their society to that of his comrades, became the subject of constant gibes. Exasperated by this, and chafing at the restraints of military discipline, he resolved to desert. A wound received in a duel strengthened him in this determination. He was sent for cure to a hospital, that of San Giacomo, in Naples, and there met a Dominican monk, chaplain of the order, who persuaded him to take the cowl. Collet also earned the gratitude of a sick mate, a major in the French army, whom he seems to have nursed, but who was so seriously wounded that he did not recover. At his death the Major left Collet all his possessions—3,000 francs in money, a gold watch, and two very valuable rings.
Collet, in due course, entered as a novice with the brothers of St. Pierre, and was soon so high in the good graces of his companions that the Prior appointed him quêteur, the brother selected to seek alms and subscriptions for his convent. The young man’s greed could not resist the handling of money; he quickly succumbed to temptation, misappropriated the funds he collected, and returned to the convent from his first mission several thousand francs short in his accounts. Fearing detection, he made up his mind to disappear. One day, talking with his friend the syndic of the town, he succeeded in securing a number of passports signed in blank. Then he went to the Prior, and informed him that he had come into a large fortune, but had hesitated to claim it as he was a deserter from his regiment. If the Prior would protect him he would now do so, and on this he was permitted to go to Naples, armed with introductions to a bank, and other credentials from the convent.
At Naples, Collet’s first act was to obtain 22,000 francs from the bankers by false pretences, and, being in funds, he threw off his monkish garb, assumed that of a high-born gentleman, and, filling up one of his passports in the name of the Marquis de Dada, started viâ Capua for Rome. En route he again changed his identity, having become possessed of the papers of one Tolosan, a sea captain, and native of Lyons, who had been wrecked on the Italian coast. Some say that Collet had picked up Tolosan’s pocket-book, others that he had stolen it. In any case, he called himself by that name on arrival at Rome, and as a Lyonnais sought the protection of a venerable French priest also from Lyons, who was acquainted with the Tolosan family, and through whom he was presented to Cardinal Archbishop Fesch, the uncle of the Emperor Napoleon.