MAJOR SEMPLE.
Among our own compatriots Major Semple, alias Lisle, has been handed down as a champion swindler in his time, and he was certainly convicted of frauds and thefts often enough to entitle him to a foremost place in criminal records. But he could not have been wholly bad, for his offences may be largely traced to ill
luck. The man was wanting in perseverance, steadiness, moral sense; he succeeded in nothing, stuck to nothing long, and in the end became a frank vaurien, a low-class adventurer, put to all sorts of shifts to live. In his early days he had served with the colours, not without distinction; had borne a commission and taken part in the American War of Independence, in which he was wounded and made prisoner. When, after his release, he was retired on a pension, he married a lady of good family with some means. What afterwards befell him we do not know, but he was a widower, or separated, when he became associated with Miss Chudleigh, afterwards famous as the Duchess of Kingston, in her expedition to St. Petersburg, where she set up a brandy distillery. It was probably through her good offices that he was introduced to Prince Potemkin, through whom he was appointed captain in a Russian regiment, with which he made several campaigns. He was on the high road to rank and honour; but in 1784 his roving disposition, and a certain discontent at his prolonged exile, led him to resign his place and return to England, where he was soon without resources, and lapsed into crime.
The first offence with which he was charged was the theft of a postchaise which he hired and appropriated. His defence was that he had only committed a breach of contract, but, as he had sold the article, it was called felony, and he was convicted of a crime. His sentence was seven years’ transportation; but at this time he still had friends, and some influential personages obtained a commutation of his punishment. After a short stay in the hulks at Woolwich, awaiting transfer to Botany Bay, he was pardoned on condition that he left the country forthwith. This took him again to France, just then in the throes of the Revolution, and he became actively concerned with Pétion, Roland, and others in the events of that epoch. He was present at the king’s trial, but was soon afterwards denounced to the Committee of Public Safety as a spy, and with difficulty escaped the guillotine. Once more this soldier of fortune returned to his old profession, and joined the allied armies now operating on the frontier against the French republic. He was engaged in several important actions, and always distinguished himself in the field.
Yet within a year or two the waters had again closed over him. He left the Austrian army in a hurry, having been placed under arrest at Augsburg; why, exactly, we do not know, presumably for some shady conduct, the consequences of which he must have evaded, for he got back to London, and was soon in serious trouble. He must have fallen into great destitution, or he would not have been taken into custody for so sorry an offence as obtaining a shirt and a few yards of calico on false pretences. In the “Reminiscences” of Henry Angelo about this date (1795) a side-light is thrown upon him and the petty devices he practised to get a meal. He had become a confirmed cadger, and had introduced himself to Angelo on the pretence of learning to fence. “Semple always stuck close to us,” writes Angelo, “took care to follow us home to our door, and, walking in, stopped till dinner was placed on the table, when I said, ‘Captain’ (no assumed major then), ‘will you take your dinner with us?’ Though he always pretended to have an engagement, he obligingly put it off, and did us the honour to stop. In the evening, if we were going to Vauxhall, or elsewhere, he was sure to make one, and would have made our house his lodging if I had not told him that all our beds were engaged except my father’s, and that room was always kept locked in his absence. Our sponging companion continued these intrusions for about three months, when suddenly he disappeared without paying for his instruction or anything else. To write of his various swindling cheats, so well known, would be needless.”
The calico fraud ended in another sentence of transportation for seven years, and again interest was made to spare him the penalty, but this time without avail. He was shipped off, but on the voyage out escaped convict life for a time. He was concerned with some of his felon comrades in a mutiny on board the convict ship, and the authorities, to be well rid of them, sent them, twenty-eight in number, adrift in the Pacific in an open boat. They reached South America in safety, and, passing themselves off as a shipwrecked crew, were well received by the Spaniards. Semple was put forward as the leader, and described as a Dutch officer of rank, thus gaining courteous treatment. He must have been assisted to return to Europe, for he is next met with at Lisbon, where his real character and condition came out, and he was arrested at the request of the British Minister, who had him conveyed to Gibraltar. He was still seemingly a free agent on the Rock, and misused his liberty to enter into some mutinous conspiracy afoot in the garrison, for which he was arrested and sent off to Tangier. Next year an order was issued to capture and send him home to England, whence he was passed on a second time to the Antipodes.
Semple survived to return again to England and to his old ways. For some time he made a precarious living as a begging-letter writer, and the same diarist, Angelo, preserves two specimens of Semple’s correspondence. One letter, however, is an impudent attempt to take Angelo to task for daring first to cut him, then to expose him to the ridicule of others. “This is not the sort of conduct I expect,” said Semple, “from a man bred in the first societies, and to which, however innocent you think it, I cannot, must not submit.... Do not, I request you, again expose yourself....” The outrage and the protest were both forgotten when, nine years later, he wrote to Angelo, pleading that the “sad urgency” of his situation “cannot be described. I am at this hour without a fire (in February) and without a shirt.... Let me pray you to accord me a little assistance, a few shillings.” Angelo records that he “sent the poor devil a crown in answer to his letter, which was most probably a tissue of falsehoods designed to create sympathy.”
