On searching a box in his room they found a large quantity of Irish and Cornish newspapers, many of them containing the advertisement referred to.
He was found guilty, and was sentenced to hard labour for fifteen months. The young woman was acquitted.
The judge, in passing sentence, observed that the prisoner had been convicted of swindling poor people, and his being respectably connected aggravated the case.
We give the following illustration of an English swindler’s adventures on the Continent.
A married couple were tried at Pau, on a charge of swindling. The husband represented himself to be the son of a colonel in the English army and of a Neapolitan princess. His wife pretended to be the daughter of an English general. They said they were allied to the families of the Dukes of Norfolk, Leinster, and Devonshire. They came in a post-chaise to the Hotel de France, accompanied by several servants, lived in the style of persons of the highest rank, and run up a bill of 6000 francs. As the landlord declined to give credit for more, they took a château, which they got fitted up in a costly way. They paid 2500 francs for rent, and were largely in debt to the butcher, tailor, grocer, and others. The lady affected to be very pious, and gave 895 francs to the abbé for masses.
An English lady who came from Brussels to give evidence, stated that her husband had paid 50,000 francs to release them from a debtors’ prison at Cologne, as he believed them to be what they represented. It was shown at the trial that they had received letters from Lord Grey, the King of Holland, and other distinguished personages. They were convicted of swindling, and condemned to one year’s imprisonment, or to pay a fine of 200 francs.
On hearing the sentence the woman uttered a piercing cry and fainted in her husband’s arms, but soon recovered. They were then removed to prison.
The assumption of a variety of names, some of them of a high-sounding and pretentious character, is resorted to by swindlers giving orders for goods by letter from a distance—an address is also assumed of a nature well calculated to deceive: as an instance, we may mention that an individual has for a long period of time fared sumptuously upon the plunder obtained by his fraudulent transactions, of whose aliases and pseudo residences the following are but a few:—
Creighton Beauchamp Harper; the Russets, near Edenbridge.
Beauchamp Harper; Albion House, Rye.