In 1796 Mr. W. H. Ireland published a full confession of his forgeries, fully exonerating his father from all connivance in his foolish fraud, claiming forgiveness for a boyish deception begun without evil intention and without any thought of danger. “I should never have gone so far,” he says, “but that the world praised the papers too much, and thereby flattered my vanity.”[80] After the failure of “Vortigern,” the father, Mr. S. Ireland, still credulous, had written a pamphlet, accusing Malone, his son’s chief assailant, of mean malice and unbearable arrogance.
The true story of the forgery is this. W. H. Ireland, then only eighteen, was articled to a solicitor in New Inn, where he practised Elizabethan handwriting for the sake of deceiving credulous antiquaries. A forged deed exciting the admiration of his father, who was a collector of old tracts and a worshipper of Shakspere, led him to continue his deceptions, and to pretend to have discovered a hoard of Shaksperian MSS. A fellow clerk, one Talbot, afterwards an actor, discovering the forgeries, Ireland made him an accomplice. They then produced a “Profession of Faith,” signed by Shakspere, which Dr. Parr and Dr. Warton (brother of the poet) declared contained “finer things” than all the Church Service. This foolish praise set the secretive lawyer’s clerk on writing original verse,—a poem to Anne Hathaway, and the play of “Vortigern,” the most recklessly impudent of all his impostures. Boswell was the first to propose a certificate to be signed by all believers in the productions. Dr. Parr, thinking Boswell’s writing too feeble, drew up another, which was signed by twenty-one noblemen, authors, and “celebrated literary characters.” Boswell, characteristically enough, previous to signing his name, fell on his knees, and, “in a tone of enthusiasm and exultation, thanked God that he had lived to witness this discovery, and exclaimed that he could now die in peace.”[81] Lords Kinnaird, Somerset, and Lauderdale were the noblemen. There were also present Bindley, Valpy, Pinkerton, Pye the poet laureate, Matthew Wyatt, and the present author’s grandfather, the Rev. Nathaniel Thornbury, an intimate friend of Jenner and of Dr. Johnson, who had at this time been twelve years dead. The elder Ireland, in his pamphlet, alludes to the solemn and awful manner in which, before crowds of eminent characters, his son attested the genuineness of his forgeries. “I could not,” says the honest fellow, “suffer myself to cherish the slightest suspicion of his veracity.”[82]
Singularly enough Mr. Albany Wallis—(a solicitor, I believe), of Norfolk Street,—who had given to Garrick a mortgage deed bearing Shakspere’s signature, became the most ardent believer in the unprincipled young clerk’s deceptions.
The terms agreed upon for Ireland’s forgery of “Vortigern” was £300 down, and a division of the receipts, deducting charges, for sixty nights. The play, however, lived only one night, for which the Irelands received their half, £103. The commentators Malone and Steevens remained sceptical, and Kemble was suspicious and cold in the cause, though he was to be the hero; but the gulls and quidnuncs were numerous enough to cram the house, and that most commonplace of poets, Sir James Bland Burges, wrote the prologue. The final damnation of the play was secured by a rhapsody of Vortigern’s, a patch-work thing from “Richard II.” and “Henry IV.” The fatal line—
“And when the solemn mockery is o’er,”
convulsed the house.[83] Mr. W. H. Ireland in later life was editor of the York Herald, and died in 1835.[84]
Another eminent historical antiquary, Dr. Birch, lived in Norfolk Street. The son of a Quaker tradesman at Clerkenwell, he became a London clergyman and an historian, famous for his Sunday evenings’ conversaziones, and was killed by a fall from his horse in 1766. He seems to have been a most pleasant, generous, and honest man. He edited Bacon’s Letters and Speeches, and Thurloe’s State Papers, etc. His chief work was his Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. He left books, manuscripts, and money to the British Museum, for which let all scholars bless the good man’s memory. He appears to have been a student of boundless industry, as from the Lambeth Library alone he transcribed with his own hand sixteen quarto volumes. He was rector of St. Margaret Pattens in Fenchurch Street. Dr. Birch must have been a kind husband, for his wife on her deathbed wrote him the following tender letter:—
“This day I return you, my dearest life, my sincere, hearty thanks for every favour bestowed on your most faithful and obedient wife,
Hannah Birch.”
We leave it to the watchful cynic to remark that the doctor had been married only one year. It was of this worthy book-worm that Johnson said—“Yes, sir, he is brisk in conversation, but when he takes up the pen it benumbs him like a torpedo.”