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  William swiftly followed this with another mini-hoax, a forged letter pertaining to a bust of Cromwell. Typically of his lack of thoroughness, he had not bothered to find out that the correspondent claiming to be giving this fine portrait-sculpture to Cromwell was in fact one of the man’s arch rivals and so very unlikely to be wishing him anything but ill luck. Fortunately, Ireland Senior was also oblivious to the fact and accepted the new addition to his collection with glee.

  Now the stage was set for William’s hoaxing operation to launch in earnest. He stocked up on old paper by buying the unused end-pages of folios from a bookseller in St Martin’s Lane. He bought a collection of antique seals and doctored them according to his limited knowledge of Elizabethan heraldry. He even tore a piece of cloth from a wall-hanging in the House of Lords, when he visited to hear the king speak, and pulled it apart to make the string with which he had heard old documents were customarily tied together. Finally, he laid in a good supply of the magic ink from the man in New Inn Passage and set about practising the signature he had seen in facsimile in his father’s copy of Dr Johnson’s Shakespeare. Then he went back to Norfolk Street and told an astonished Samuel that he had found the bard’s signature on a mortgage deed.

  At that moment, after nearly twenty years of effective parental abandonment, William had the full and rapt attention of his father. Overjoyed with his son’s discovery, Samuel immediately wanted more. He begged to know where the boy had found this incredible relic and William, thinking on his feet, began to spin the unlikely tale of Mr H.

  Mr H, who wished to remain anonymous, had, he said, encountered William by chance one day when he was on an errand and discovered that the boy had an interest in antiquities. He happened to mention that he had a chest full of old papers at his grand house across town and, having little interest in such things, invited William to come and rifle through it and take away anything that caught his eye.

  Blinded by ambition to the absurdity of this story, Samuel implored his son to return to Mr H’s house and bring him back more treasures, even hinting at the specific sort of things it would be most pleasing to have him unearth. Fuelled by his father’s enthusiasm, William threw himself into a frenzy of activity which must have been something of a shock to the system for such an idle youth. Happily, his employer was rarely in his chambers, so he kept his forging materials in a locked cabinet there and continued his work undisturbed.

  The next Shakespeare document he produced was a receipt pertaining to the business of the Globe Theatre. Claiming to be a rare promissory note from the bard to his colleague John Hemynge, it contained both a mistake in the year the theatre was built and a misspelling of Stratford. This was passed off as a mere sign that, in Shakespeare’s time, orthography was less standard, and scribes were more careless. William appeared to be on a roll. Another note regarding a play performed before the Earl of Leicester was dated after Leicester’s death and also misspelled his name, but, astonishingly, no one seemed to mind. William even created a letter claiming to be from Shakespeare to an ancestor of the Irelands (also called, coincidentally, William) thanking him for saving him from drowning.

  Of course Samuel, not wishing to compromise his carefully built reputation as a serious book-collector, sought to have all these papers authenticated. Poor William had to sit by half-terrified and half-amused as the city’s foremost handwriting, bookselling and heraldry experts scrutinized everything from seal to letter-formation. The fact that these great men would sit in what William now realized was a bogus Shakespeare courting chair only served to increase the sense of superiority the young hoaxer felt when they all deemed the documents bona fide.

  Before long, William was using his phoney papers to paint the great man in colours which he thought would especially please his father. Unbelievably boldly, these included a lengthy profession of Shakespeare’s Protestant faith, written in his own hand, which was designed to put paid once and for all to rumours of his Catholicism. Then came a love-letter to Anne Hathaway, complete with lock of hair and romantic verses. In his later Confession, William would admit he composed these things ‘just as the thoughts arose in [his] head’ and, as for the actual writing, a spidery scrawl with weird orthography and nothing recognizably Shakespearean, he merely used as many ‘double-yous and esses as possible’.

  How could so many people have been fooled? How could even Boswell be blind to the truth? To a large extent the lack of special forensic techniques must be to blame, and also the paucity of examples of Shakespeare’s real writing. But in the main, as with all successful literary hoaxes, it was simply because people wanted it so much to be true. Like the perpetrators of the Sophocles hoax and the Hitler Diaries, William Henry had tapped into a vein of cultural enthusiasm so rich that it obscured the rational minds of any number of intelligent men.

  If the imaginations of the victims were willing, so was that of William himself, albeit to a different, more private end. He was never so unhinged as to trick himself into believing his output was real, but as he began to see that his actions might actually be discrediting his father rather than helping him, he began to enter into a most bizarre correspondence with him – writing as Mr H.

  Samuel had wanted to apply in writing to Mr H to ask him about the provenance of the papers, and William encouraged him to do so. In his replies he used his imagined relationship with the son to tell the father how much he liked and admired the boy, and how clever and soulful he thought he was. In one letter, which reads very much like a schoolboy’s madeup games note, he even opined that he thought Samuel ought to stop making William powder his wig, because it was unnecessary and expensive. In this imagined voice, over a series of increasingly emotional letters, he says to his father all the things he could not say in real life. This is about as far from hoaxing for financial gain as you can get.

  Still using the story of Mr H, still responding to the excitable desires of Samuel who was now becoming quite famous in London for his burgeoning collection of Shakespeare papers, William set about the coup de grâce that would ultimately bring the whole edifice of his deception crashing down around him: the creation of an entire new Shakespeare play.

  The story of Vortigern and Rowena is one Shakespeare might well have told. It can be found in Holinshed’s Chronicles, one of his favourite sources, and tells a Lear-ish, Macbeth-ish tale of an ancient British king who would give away half his crown. But in Ireland’s clumsy hands it is about as un-Shakespearean as it is possible to imagine. At the very worst, it reads like a silly pastiche, or so thought the various dissenters, growing in number and led by the renowned Shakespeare critic Malone, who were beginning to question the papers’ authenticity. And so thought the cast and audience at Drury Lane when, amazingly, in April 1796, Samuel persuaded his contacts in the theatre to put on a performance of it.

  By this time, even before the night of the ill-fated play (which surely rates as one of the most disastrous events in English theatre), William knew he was in too deep. Journalists were writing unforgiving editorials about the Shakespeare papers, cruel satires on William’s crazy spelling abounded in magazines and more and more experts were joining Malone in opposing the Irelands’ version of events. Despite the initial support of the Prince of Wales, Pitt the Younger, Edmund Burke and Boswell, William was making too many mistakes for his hoax to last for long. He had just produced an ‘original’ text of King Lear. Its spelling was a sight to behold (‘Unfriended, new adopted’ becoming ‘Unnefreynnededde newee adoppetedde’) but even if that did nothing to alert any remaining doubters, the fact that he prefaced the text with an address to ‘mye gentle Readerres’ ought to have rung alarm bells with anyone conversant enough with Shakespeare to know that he had viewers, not readers.

  Malone, referring to the mythical chest in which William claimed Mr H kept the papers, said that after the imaginary chest in which Chatterton had ‘found’ his poems, he ‘did not expect to have heard again, for some time at least, of such a repository for ancient manuscript
s’. A satirical poem was written about Ireland, positioning him alongside Macpherson, Chatterton and Lauder as one of the famous ‘four forgers’ of the day. And when the cartoonist James Gillray illustrated the verse with an unkind caricature, the Irelands’ fate never to be taken seriously was surely sealed.

  Finally, William decided to confess his crime to his family. First he told Mrs Freeman and his sisters, then his father. All of them flatly refused to believe him. It was beyond their comprehension that the intellectually puny black sheep of their family could pull off such a stunt, and it would take months of persuasion for them even to start to believe that maybe this Mr H was the hoaxer. As long as he lived, which was not to be very long, Samuel never accepted his son had perpetrated the scam.

  William would go on to marry, travel, set up a private lending library in Kensington and write many books and poems, not all bad, of his own. But his most fascinating work is his Confession, published some time after the event, in which he describes his duplicitous acts as those of a foolish boy who only wanted to please his father. And in 1832 he would publish Vortigern as his own work of fiction – a final publicity-hungry move which prefigures the twentieth-century literary hoaxer’s vogue for selling as fiction what he was once vilified for trying to ply as fact.

  2

  THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  MARIA MONK

  RIGHT-WING AMERICA in the 1830s was in the grip of a religious hatred far greater than that felt by some for Islam or Judaism today. It was the conviction of Protestant groups that the increasing numbers of Irish Catholics who were arriving on the East Coast had been instructed by their pope to eradicate America’s precious Protestantism by overrunning the population with their people. So serious was this perceived threat, and the notion that the Democratic party was in cahoots with it due to its many Irish supporters, that new political groups were being founded on anti-Catholic principles which would eventually combine to become the Republican party.

  But the Grand Old Protestants who would eventually take control of the States were, at the time of the great hoax of Maria Monk, only getting started. Monk – her real name – was born to Scottish–English parents in Canada in 1816 or 1817. By the time she was grown up (and she grew up before her time) North America would be rife with propaganda and even riots and arson attacks against Catholic institutions, and the seeds of this unrest were already sown when the young Maria was sent to the Magdalen Asylum for Wayward Girls in Quebec. Maria was barely educated and entirely despaired of by her parents by the time she was sent away from home: her unpredictable behaviour, lack of academic ability and refusal to adhere to rules was, it seems, brought on by a childhood head injury in which a pencil got stuck in her ear. It cannot have been an easy decision for her family to send her into the arms of Papists, but they were convinced no other charitable institution could help their uncontrollable daughter, especially as one aspect of her shameful behaviour seems to have been sexual, and there is some evidence that she earned money from prostitution while she was at the asylum, which also functioned as a school.

  By the time she was eighteen and had been there for seven years the nuns had her expelled for just about the worst crime a Catholic or pseudo-Catholic can commit: unmarried pregnancy. Destitute and outcast, wandering the streets of Quebec, she sought help at the Canadian Benevolent Society and somehow managed to become acquainted with its director, a man called William K. Hoyte. Hoyte’s Protestant missionary work was fuelled by a passionate hatred of Catholicism, and clearly he saw poor, pregnant Maria as an example of just how damaging a spell living in a convent could be. He also fell in love with her. He took her as his live-in mistress and promptly moved her to New York to assist him in the various Catholic-bating projects which would result in the most explosive autobiographical book of the decade.

  In New York he and Maria gathered round them a group of educated friends who shared Hoyte’s religious and political views. Among them were the Reverend John Slocum, Reverend George Bourne and Theodore Wight, all members of the nativist movement which campaigned for new laws to halt immigration by Irish Catholics. Slocum fancied himself as a writer and, as it turned out, he rather fancied Maria too.

  It was decided that the group would collaborate on a book based on Maria’s experiences in the Magdalen Asylum which would bring their cause the attention and money it required if it was to rid America of the Irish scourge. Mostly written by Slocum, with Hoyte and Bourne as advisors, The Awful Disclosures began to take shape as the story of an innocent girl who was plucked from her Godfearing Protestant home and flung into a den of terrible sin masquerading as a religious order. Clearly, Maria had told some tall tales to her lover-rescuer, Hoyte, and given her likely history of brain damage it may have been unclear even to her which aspects of her story were true and which were made-up. But she – and they – had nous enough to know that the more lurid the revelations about sex and violence behind the closed doors of the Hôtel Dieu, the more successful the book would be.

  The Hôtel Dieu was a real institution and in the aftermath of publication it maintained a dignified silence on the subject of Maria’s supposed revelations. And what revelations they were: the book reads like the spiciest kind of gothic novel. Beginning with the arrival of the optimistic young Maria as a novice, she is surprised to find that when she goes to her first confession, which is taken by priests from the monastery next door, the man on the other side of the wooden grille ‘put questions to me, which were often of the most improper and even revolting nature, naming crimes both unthought of and inhuman’ and using any number of ‘corrupt and licentious expressions’.

  She is further surprised to hear from another inmate a story about a young Indian girl who used to visit a particular priest and whose dead body was found soon after, along with a knife bearing that priest’s name. The violent punishments inflicted by the nuns – including the use of archaic instruments such as leather gags – become commonplace, and other than needlework, it seems that the academic side of life is completely ignored. But it is when she finally takes holy orders herself, moving from the state of novice to Sister of the Hôtel Dieu, that the full horror of the institution is matter-of-factly revealed to her. After a ceremony involving her lying half-smothered in an incense-scented coffin bearing her name (a detail likely to appeal to Protestant readers), the mother superior makes it clear to her that as well as serving God she will now be expected to service the priests next door. And should she become pregnant from one of these liaisons, her offspring will go the way of all the convents’ illegitimate children: ‘baptized and immediately strangled’.

  So, aside from the fact that these Catholics talked rude in the confessional and gagged or murdered their wayward charges, they were fornicating baby-killers to boot. Just as the authors suspected, the public lapped it up.

  Coming hot on the heels of two similar bestselling exposés, The Nun by Mrs Sherwood and Six Months in a Convent by Rebecca Reed, the first print run in 1836 sold out immediately, bringing exactly the combination of revenue and scandal that Maria’s keepers had hoped for. Despite the book not containing any sexually explicit language, its content was considered so inflammatory that the publishing house Harper Bros went so far as to set up an imprint especially for it in the name of two of its workers, Howe and Bates.

  The 1836 Howe & Bates edition – which would be followed by several others that year alone and dozens more for well over a century afterwards – was well received not only by readers but by the anti-Catholic periodicals popular in New England at the time: The American Protestant Vindicator welcomed the book, as did the even more powerfully named periodical The Downfall of Babylon.

  But as with all such extreme literary hoaxes, there were one or two people clear-sighted enough to question the content of the book from the outset. One such man was William Leete Stone, a Protestant and indeed an adherent to Hoyte’s nativist ideology, but one who happened to be staying amongst Catholics in Canada in the year of the book’s publicat
ion and who heard and saw evidence that no such salacious horrors had ever existed in the region’s religious communities. He proposed to visit the Hôtel Dieu and investigate whether there were indeed mass graves of murdered babies, underground prison cells containing recalcitrant novices and a secret passage connecting the priests’ house next door with the women’s quarters. At first the nuns admitted him only into the public areas of the convent, but he saw enough of life there to feel sure that Maria’s testimony was made-up. He returned to New York to interview her and then took the trouble of journeying back to Montreal for one last decisive tour of the nunnery. This time the nuns – seeing that he was in serious pursuit of the truth and not a mere scandal-obsessed tourist – let him see everything. It was abundantly clear that The Awful Disclosures bore no relation to reality.

  If Maria was undone by these revelations, her male handlers undid themselves by becoming embroiled in a series of angry legal disputes over who owned the rights to the book they had created. The fact that Maria had recently ceased being the mistress of Hoyte and gone over to the charms of Slocum only made their wrangling more bitter. Amidst the legal furore over authorship, money and romantic affiliation, Maria did what she had done last time things got tricky: she ran off with a new man to a new city. She arrived in Philadelphia the year after publication and when the brief liaison that had taken her there ended, she found lodgings with a local physician called William Sleigh. At first her charms worked on him sufficiently well that he believed her story that she had been kidnapped by a group of priests who were trying to cart her back to Montreal to be punished by the evil inmates of Hôtel Dieu. If he felt let down by her eventual admission that this story was not entirely true, he was at least able to cash in on the Monk mania sweeping the American media by publishing his account of his time with the now infamous woman, An exposure of Maria Monk’s pretended abduction and conveyance to the Catholic asylum, Philadelphia by six priests on the night of August 15, 1837: with numerous extraordinary incidents during her residence of six days in this city.