Foreword

Like dark shadows over the wide vistas of Western literature, the subtle arts of the literary forger have always been found fascinating. Professor Rosenblum’s scholarship and research brings to life nine of these infamous scoundrels and their incredible stories. Each story not only enlightens the reader about the cunning, skill and techniques of the chosen forgers, but explores their personalities and varied motives. In Practice to Deceive we are offered a unique window into their world, their everyday habits and maybe even a glimpse into their minds. What compulsion drove these men to risk their good names, their professions, and for some, their freedom? What triggered the will to create their spurious literature and the audacity required to swindle or dupe their unsuspecting buyers?

The reader will find many motives in these stories. For most forgers, it was simply a quick way to easy money, with the added benefits of momentary fame, admiration or status among peers. However, with some of these fallen gentlemen, more subtle motives lurk just below the surface. The more discerning reader will find that some of the sinister forgeries of Mark Hofmann were designed to attack the very foundations of the Mormon Church. Did religious demagoguery have some part in Hofmann’s deadly crimes? Most of the 27,000 plus forgeries of the Frenchman Vrain- Denis Lucas (Prince of Forgers) had a strong patriotic theme to them as he tried to influence the course of French history while making his millions. Yet who could stay angry at a Frenchman who had the impudence to create letters in modern French between Cleopatra and Caesar about sending their son to France for, “Its good air and the things taught there.” And what was really behind the chicanery of the eighteen-year old William-Henry Ireland who found a “lost” Shakespearean play and pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in British theatrical history?

It’s probably the sheer audacity of these literary rouges and the gullibility of so-called “experts” and collectors that we find most interesting. As in the medieval passion plays and American Western dramas, truth and reason ultimately win out. Most of our colorful villains are discovered and exposed when they meet their match among literature’s great defenders. Usually through their technical carelessness, disdain for credibility, or their vanity, they seemed to plant the seeds of their own exposure.

In this intriguing work, Professor Rosenblum gives his readers a profound look into the ingenious, if not a bit melodramatic world of the literary forger, and captures all the frailties of the human condition with humor, suspense and well-written prose.

John Lewis

Accomac, Va.

                         Introduction

Forgery from Antiquity to 1700

Of the making of books there is no end, saith the preacher, and some of those books have proved not to be what they appear. The nine forgers examined in this book are among the most notorious, and fascinating, practitioners of the art in the past three centuries. They were, however, working in a tradition that is as old as literature itself. Already in the 5^th century B.C., the Greek historian Thucydides maintained that written records were not to be trusted because they could so easily be manufactured.

A millennium later, David the Armenian listed five reasons for forgery. Chief among these was the delight the creators took in passing off their own works as those of others. Western literature begins with Homer, and so does forgery. The Greek historian Herodotus commented in the 5^th century B.C. that the so-called Homeric Hymns and Margites, attributed to Homer, were thought to be by someone else (Book II, 117; Book IV, 32). The scholars at the Alexandrian Museum divided the works of Aeschylus into “Aitnaiai gnesoi” and “Aitnaiai nothoi,” the legitimate and the spurious. Even Aeschylus’ authentic works, though, were subject to contamination. At the end of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes (467 B.C.), the herald announces that Eteocles is to be buried, but the body of his brother, Polynices, is to be left for birds and dogs to consume. Antigone, sister to the dead men, resolves to bury Polynices despite the decree. It is likely that this section of Aeschylus’ play is a later addition taken from Sophocles’ Antigone (441 B.C.), rather than part of the original.

The anonymous authors of the Homeric hymns and of the addition to Seven against Thebes apparently did not flaunt their activities. In the 4 ^th century B.C., Dionysius “the Renegade” was less discreet. He composed a play, Parthenopaeus, which he claimed was a lost work by the 5 ^th -century B.C. Athenian tragedian Sophocles.¹ Dionysius then showed his “discovery” to the critic Heraclides, who had himself indulged in the occasional fabrication. After Heraclides accepted the Sophoclean attribution, Dionysius declared himself the author. Heraclides responded with the Greek equivalent of “Piffle.” Whereupon Dionysius showed Heraclides certain acrostics concealed in the text. One of them read, “An old monkey isn’t caught by a trap. Oh yes, he’s caught at last, but it takes time.” Even more biting was another: “Heraclides is ignorant of letters.”²

The 2 ^nd -century A.D. physician Galen was prompted to compile a bibliography of his works when he discovered a spurious title being sold as his at a Roman bookstore.³ Perhaps Galen took some comfort from the knowledge that the Hippocratic corpus had been emended by later additions attributed to the founder of medicine. Galen’s edition of Hippocrates sought to distinguish these accretions from the authentic originals.

This delight in passing off one’s own work as that of another’s infected the greatest of Renaissance scholars and clerics. The 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica called Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) “the most eminent scholar of his time.”⁴ He used his extensive knowledge of classical history to produce a spurious Greek chronicle, and his fluency in that language allowed him to manufacture a collection of poetry that he attributed to Astrampsychus. In 1529 Antoine Guevara, archbishop of Montenedo (Spain), published the Libro aureo de Marco Aurelio emperador (the golden book of the emperor Marcus Aurelius), supposedly consisting of the letters of this stoical ruler. Accepted as genuine and translated into English as The Dial of Princes (1557) by Sir Thomas North, it contributed to the vogue of ornate Euphuistic writing epitomized by the Elizabethan John Lyly. The 16^th-century historian Carlo Sigonio was arguably the greatest Ciceronian scholar of his day. In the 1580s he published the complete text of Cicero’s Consolatio, written by the 1^st-century B.C. Roman rhetorician on the death of Cicero’s daughter, Tullia. The Consolation had been known since antiquity and had been preserved in fragments; Sigonio’s text was a brilliant recreation, but it was not genuine. The style was, however, so convincingly Ciceronian that the fabrication was accepted for two centuries.

As a second motive for forgery David the Armenian listed money. Even in the classical era, age bestowed value. In the 1^st century A.D., Juba II, ruler of Mauritania, is known to have paid a premium for manuscripts of Pythagorus that had been artificially antiqued. That greed can prompt forgery in unlikely places is evidenced by the monks of Crowland, Lincolnshire. They created charters to hold on to their lands and privileges, and in 1393 Richard II confirmed two of these documents, one supposedly granted by Ethelbald of Mercia in 716, the other by Edred, king of England, in 948. Some twenty years later, facing a legal challenge from the monastery at Spalding, the monks of Crowland produced a whole series of fictitious charters, which they embedded in a history they attributed to Ingulf (d. 1109) and Peter of Blois. “Despite occasional doubters such as Edward Gibbon, the deception continued to be accepted well into the 19 ^th century.⁵ The fabrication of legal documents was widespread in the Middle Ages. Giles Constable found that “of 164 known charters attributed to Edward the Confessor, 44 (27%) are spurious, 56 (34%) are uncertain, and 64 (39%) are authentic.”⁶

David noted that collectors desiring rare books were tempted to manufacture what they could not find. In the 6^th century B.C., the historian Acusilaus of Argos claimed that he had discovered in his garden ancient bronze plates inscribed with genealogical information. Pliny the Elder in the 1^st century A.D. reported in his Natural History (XIII, 13) that a temple in Lycia possessed a letter on papyrus written by its native son Sarpedon, who was killed by Patroclus in the tenth year of the Trojan War.⁷

A motive that escaped David’s list, but that may have been responsible for more forgeries than any others in the Middle Ages, was religion.⁸ Two of the best known of these are the Donation of Constantine (8^th century) and the False Decretals (9^th century). Pope Adrian I first referred to the Donation of Constantine in 777. According to this document, Pope Sylvester had cured the Roman Emperor Constantine of leprosy. In gratitude, Constantine retired to Asia Minor, where he built a capital city named for himself, and ceded the Lateran Palace and the entire Western Roman Empire to the pope. Constantine granted Sylvester religious authority over all other Christian churches. Because the Donation gave popes temporal authority over all the islands of the sea, the only English pope, Adrian IV (1154–1159), awarded Ireland to Henry II, king of England. The consequences of that gift have troubled both countries ever since. Not until the 15^th century did the humanist Lorenzo Valla and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa demonstrate that the Donation was fraudulent.

The Donation was included in the False Decretals that appeared in the 9^th century. These were attributed to the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville (d. 636). Some of the material here was authentic, such as the “Hispana collectio,” a gathering of the decisions of Greek, African, Gallic, and Spanish councils to 683. However, sixty papal rulings in the first part of the Decretals are spurious. Part III includes genuine letters from the 4^th to the 8^th centuries, but thirty-five forgeries are intermingled with them. One purpose of these fabrications was to protect the clergy from lay authority. Thus, Pope Eusebius is made to say, “It has hitherto been observed and ruled that the laity should not accuse the bishops, because they are not of the same mode of life.” Similarly, Pope Felix declares, “It has been decreed by the rulers of the synods that no one should accuse a bishop before secular judges.”⁹

Sectarian prejudice also underlies the fabrications of Robert Ware. Robert’s father, Sir James Ware (1594–1666), was a scrupulous Irish antiquarian. Robert was less addicted to the truth. In 1705 he published The Antiquities and History of Ireland by the Right Hon. Sir J.[ames] W.[are] Now First Published in English, and the Life of Sir James Ware Prefixed. Historians from the early 18^th to the 20^th century accepted the work as authentic, but Robert had interspersed various of his own creations, such as the correspondence between Sir James Croft, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and George Dowdall, Archbishop of Armagh. Robert held strongly anti-Catholic views, which he promulgated through his forgeries. In 1678, for example, he published Strange and Remarkable Prophecies and Predictions, which he attributed to another archbishop of Armagh, James Usher. Usher predicted dire consequences for Ireland for failing to enforce anti-Popery laws.

Three years later Robert Ware brought out Historical Collections of the Church of Ireland during the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary. In one of Ware’s stories here, Elizabeth Edmunds, a Protestant maid at an inn at Chester, stole a commission issued by the Catholic Queen Mary and carried by Dr. Cole, dean of St. Paul’s, ordering the Lord Deputy of Ireland to prosecute Protestants. For her theft, the maid was rewarded by Queen Elizabeth with a pension of forty pounds a year. Ware claimed that he had found this account among his father’s papers. He may have done so, but only if he placed the story there first, since it was his own invention. Another anecdote that Robert Ware published supposedly derived from William Cecil’s memoirs. In August 1559, a Catholic canon of the cathedral of Christ Church, Dublin, sought to disrupt the reading of the reformed liturgy by placing a blood-soaked sponge on the crucifix at the altar. As blood began to trickle down, one of the canon’s cohorts declared, “Behold, our Savior’s image sweats blood,” and another replied, “How can he choose but sweat blood when heresy is come into His Church?” An examination of the crucifix revealed the hoax, which led to Queen Elizabeth’s decision to remove crucifixes from Anglican churches. Robert had created this tale, too.¹⁰

Politics must rank with religion as a leading begetter of fabrications. The Athenian lawgiver Solon in the early 6^th century B.C. and the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus later in that century were accused of inserting references to Athens into Homer’s Iliad to demonstrate that their city had been important as far back as the Bronze Age. Modern scholars suspect that many of the place-names mentioned in the catalogue of Greek forces in the second book of the Iliad were introduced by traveling bards seeking to flatter their royal hosts. The “Royal Diaries” were composed in the late 4^th century or early 3^rd th century B.C. to blacken the reputation of the recently deceased Alexander the Great by making him appear to be almost constantly drunk. Philo of Byblos (c. 70-c. 160 A.D.) produced a Phoenician history that he claimed was a Greek translation of the Phoenician Sanchuniathon (c. 1400–1200 B.C.). According to Philo, Hesiod  and other Greeks had drawn on Sanchuniathon to produce their mythology. The Phoenician History also attacked contemporary Greek historians, particularly Plutarch, for their allegorizing tendencies. Philo’s “translation” was accepted well until the 20^th century; only in 1981 did Albert Irwin Baumgarten demonstrate that Philo had manufactured his account as an attack on the dominant Greco-Roman culture, and an attempt to establish the primacy of Semitic civilization.¹¹

Mary, Queen of Scots, was the victim of forgeries designed to blacken her reputation and eventually bring about her execution. In 1567, her political enemies in Scotland “discovered” a casket containing eight letters from Mary to James Hepburn, 4^th Earl of Bothwell, 158 lines of poetry, and two contracts for the marriage of Bothwell and Mary. According to these “Casket Letters,” Mary and Bothwell planned the murder of Mary’s husband Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, and the two conspirators were contracted to marry before Bothwell had divorced his wife. The letters were produced as evidence against Mary in her first trial in England in the winter of 1568–1569 and may have contributed to Queen Elizabeth’s decision to keep Mary a prisoner. Nearly twenty years later, in October 1586, Mary was tried again, this time for conspiring to kill Elizabeth and take over the English throne. That Mary, after twenty years a prisoner, had been involved in plots to escape, is true. However, some of the letters produced in evidence against her were probably altered, if not written entirely, under the direction of Sir Francis Walsingham, director of what might be styled Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Mary was beheaded on 8 February 1587.

Such forgeries were undertaken in deadly earnest. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1356?) offers an example of fabricating for fun. The author claimed that he had been born and raised at Saint Albans, that he began his travels on Saint Michael’s Day in 1322, and recorded his adventures from memory in 1356. Sir John’s journey took him to Egypt, Palestine, Armenia, Persia, the land of the Amazons, India, and China. In the course of his narrative, the author described the customs of the natives, the landscape, and monsters he had encountered. The English Sir John probably was the Frenchman Jean de Bourgogne, who never left Europe. He manufactured his travels by combining his reading with a vivid imagination.

Another author who delighted in fabrication is Thomas Dangerfield (1650?–1685). Dangerfield dabbled in various types of counterfeiting, including coining. He also helped manufacture evidence of a Presbyterian plot against King Charles II. A more lighthearted manifestation of his penchant for falsification in his Don Tomazo (1680), his supposed autobiography. Like Sir John Mandeville he claimed to have traveled widely, serving as a soldier in Spain; leading a life of dissipation in Cairo, where he disguised himself as a Turk; spying for both the Dutch and the French back in Europe.

The following nine chapters will reveal a mixture of these six motives. For some, money was the primary incentive; others were prompted by religious or patriotic impulses. Whatever the reasons that led these men to weave their tangled webs, all nine confirm James Anson Farrer’s assessment of the breed of forgers: “Audacious, designing, but interesting figures, who, in revolt against the world’s conventional standards, employed letters, as other men freely and without censure employ politics.”¹²

    1  Parthenopaeus, whose name means maiden-one or maiden-faced, was one of the seven generals leading the attack against Thebes in Aeschylus’ play on this subject. Parthenopaeus is killed in the battle.

    2  Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3–4.

    3  De libris propriis (of his own books).

    4  10:497.

    5  T.F. Tout, “Mediaeval Forgers and Forgeries,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 5 (April – November 1919): 208–234, 222–224.

    6  “Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages,” Archiv für Diplomatik, Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde 29 (1983): 1–14,11.

    7  See Iliad, Book XVI.

    8  David’s final two explanations for the existence of forgeries relate to inadvertent confusion: editors mistaken for authors, or two people of the same name being mistaken for each other.

    9  Quoted in James Anson Farrer, Literary Forgeries (London: Longman, Green, 1907), 135.

  10  Philip Wilson, “The Writings of Sir James Ware and the Forgeries of Robert Ware,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 15 (1920): 83–94, 91.

  11  Albert Irwin Baumgarten, The Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos: A Commentary (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1981).

  12  Literary Forgeries, 281.