The five-broad piece is said to have been given by the King on the scaffold to Archbishop Juxon; it is a pattern, and apparently unique. The type resembles that of the ordinary broad, of which there are impressions in silver. I have one of unusually medallic fabric.
I heard an odd story of a F.N.S. to whom some ignorant correspondent offered the noble itself—a piece of great value—and who pronounced it worth 6s. 8d.—the current rate at the time of issue, about 1528. The Forster example in 1868 fetched £17, 17s.
A rather distressing incident occurred to ‘Pedigree’ Wells of Piccadilly during his absence one day from business. He had in his window a coin advertised as ‘a three-pound piece of Charles I.’ to which the astute owner attached no price, leaving that detail to be regulated by the circumstances. A person entered the shop, and saw Mrs Wells, who was unversed in numismatic subtleties, and laying down £3, said, ‘I will take that coin in the window,’ which accordingly he did, greatly to Wells’s satisfaction, no doubt, and to the promotion of domestic harmony.
The hero of this small anecdote owed his sobriquet to his fertility of resource in providing his fine-art acquisitions with a genealogical tree.
We had a controversy in Bloomsbury on one occasion about a gold Athenian stater sent to me on approval. All gold Athenian staters are ipso facto doubtful. Whelan condemned it. Canon Greenwell, who was present, was not sure. I shewed it to Dr Head; and he supported Whelan. The coin was returned. At another time I obtained from a dealer who avouched, and still avouches, it to be absolutely genuine, a gold ῆμίεκτον of the same State; and at this Whelan equally shook his head. But I took it to be right, and retained it. The fact is, that the Athenians struck gold very sparingly, and there have been modern attempts to supply the deficiency.
One leading inducement to fabricate pieces lacking in series or of signal rarity has been the cheapness of labour and the more limited conversance with the discrepancies between originals and copies or absolutely fictitious examples, partly arising from the absence of means of communication among numismatists in various countries. These inventions or contrefaçons were calculated, again, for different markets. The false gold staters of Nicomedes II. of Bithynia, which are executed with unusual skill, and the far less clever imitations of the Athenian gold, could only answer the purpose, where they found an English or French customer able to pay a handsome price for the means of supplying a hopeless or almost hopeless lacuna in his Greek cabinet. But those of such common coins as the tetradrachms of Athens or Alexander the Great appealed rather to still more inexperienced buyers, whom a low figure was apt to tempt; and these even occur plated or washed with silver.
Whelan once amused me and himself by submitting to atmospheric treatment a large copper coin of the Two Sicilies—a 10-grana piece of Ferdinand IV. 1815. He offered it to me, and I declined it, because the surface was unsatisfactory in my eyes. He said nothing; but about three months later he brought it to me from a window sill, where it had been taking an aërial bath of rather prolonged duration; and the effect was certainly surprising. All the repellent aspect of the superficies had vanished. I took it, and laughed, when he told me that there was only a shilling to pay for a quarter’s incessant scientific manipulation.
I have been studiously frugal in my adoption of Oriental coins, because, frankly speaking, I have no faith in them as an investment. But I have retained a few early acquisitions, including a square gold mohur of the Emperor of Hindostan, the famous Akbar, and a dinar in the same metal of the good caliph, Haroun el Reschid. Whelan helped me to both these. The latter formed part of a parcel of such pieces, the property of a Parsee at Calcutta, and sold in London. The dinars of El Reschid were rather numerous, and were not recognised. The British Museum got several, and I got the finest. How were the public to guess that they were connected with so celebrated a personage, when the catalogue described them as of El Reschid?
There also remains with me a gold dinar of the 13th century, of the last Caliph of Bagdad. My learned friend, Mr Michael Kerny, deciphered for me many years ago the inscriptions in the older Arabic character in the inner circle on either side. They read: Praise to God Mohammed the Apostle of God God bless him and protect the Imăn there is no God but God only He has no Peer al Mustansir b—illah Prince of the Faithful by the grace of God.
An ill-starred Swede visited England, or rather London, several years ago, and endeavoured to find a customer for a rather weighty package of old currency of the Northern Kingdoms, which he had borne with him across the sea, and after fruitless essays elsewhere he tried Whelan. The latter did not see his way, and the stranger re-embarked for his native country with his burden, so to speak, on his back. On the floor in Bloomsbury Street, however, he left two small pieces (schillings of Christian IV. 1621 and 1622), which, as Whelan had no idea who he was, or what his address, he presented to me.