Bank with another power of attorney. Again the signatures of the trustees were forged and again the witnesses were bogus.
The Bank made no checks and paid out £3,000 (£302.000), which enabled him to drain entirely his
The forged signatures of the trustees and the fictional witnesses on the power of attorney that enabled the heavily-indebted Wainewright to defraud the Bank of England and drain the last of his grandfather’s bequest before fleeing to France.
National Archives
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grandfather’s trust fund. There was now nothing left for Eliza after his death or for any child of their marriage. But then he and Eliza had been married for several years, and there was no sign of any offspring.
He was, however, taking a terrible risk, the penalty for such forgery was death by public execution, and a few months after his last visit to the Bank came a cause célèbre which must have caused him considerable disquiet - the case of the city banker Henry Fauntleroy, who had also forged powers of attorney and defrauded the Bank of England, just as Wainewright had done.
Newspaper stories reported Fauntleroy’s dissolute life with vast sums spent on women and gambling. But a confession found in a tin box at the bank in which he was a partner, said he had done it to keep his own bank going and blamed the Bank of England for rejecting his payments and refusing him credit. “They shall smart for it”, he wrote. The confession was found by Freshfields the Bank of England solicitors, who were to pursue Wainewright many years later.
On November 2, 1824, at the Old Bailey, Fauntleroy was convicted of forging powers of attorney to secure £170,000, though the real figure was said to be £400,000. The case attracted enormous public attention and sympathy for Fauntleroy, but despite 16 character witnesses, he was sentenced to death and on November 30 he was hanged in front of the debtor’s door at Newgate Prison.
There had been a series of petitions and appeals to no avail; an Italian was said to have offered to take his place on the scaffold; another tale said
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he had inserted a silver tube in his throat and escaped death - hardly likely as it was an execution before a crowd estimated at 100,000 people; public executions were common in England until 1866.
Charles Lamb, writing after the execution, and quoted by Carew Hazlitt, said pointedly that it had made him cast reflecting eyes on such of his friends in a parity of situation, all exposed to a similarity of temptation. As a friend and admirer of Wainewright, perhaps he had his own suspicions.
For prodigious spending soon exhausted the illicit sums from the Bank and by 1826, Wainewright was borrowing heavily from a solicitor friend, John Atkinson, who was exacting unusual terms. To guarantee an existing loan of £3,000 and to secure a further £1,500, Wainewright agreed to pay Atkinson and several of his relatives £150 a year for their lives, and to the end of the life of the last survivor. He had to give as security books, engravings and pictures which were kept in boxes by another solicitor, Robert Shank Acheson. This was to be followed by a series of other loans, warrants of attorney and stratagems to keep the Wainewrights afloat.
There was no hope now of an artistic career; the slender talent of the precious young man who had delighted literary London ten years before had burned itself out; and in painting there was no prospect that he would have a fashionable studio in the West End to which society would flock.
It was obvious that the seven years of high living at Great Marlborough Street had to come to an end. In the autumn of 1827, the Wainewrights forsook the expensive West End to move to the
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rustic grandeur of Linden House in Chiswick to live with uncle George. Whether he invited them or whether they foisted themselves upon him is not known. But once they were ensconced there, uncle George’s days were numbered.
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CHAPTER 6
SUDDEN DEATHS AT LINDEN HOUSE
Uncle George had sold the Monthly Review in 1825 and retired to potter in the grounds of Linden House and tend his beloved gardens, but his retirement was short-lived once the Wainewrights had arrived. He died in convulsive agony in January 1828 and was buried on the 24th at Turnham Green. He was only 56. His death had been witnessed by the doctor’s old servant, and Wainewright’s nurse, Sarah Handcocks, who was to tell of it later as coincidences began to mount.
Some sources put the date of George’s death as January 16th; if so it was an extraordinary day at Linden House. For Eliza, after nearly 10 years of marriage, had given birth to a boy on the same day. He was called Griffiths - named after his mother, grandfather and great-uncle.
The birth date appears in the records of St Nicholas Church, Chiswick, but young Griffiths was a long time being christened. It was nearly six months later, on June 4, that the ceremony took place. The delay was unusual and so possibly was the parentage itself.
Wainewright was to write in one of his several petitions for clemency that in 1823, when the first forgeries took place, after six years of marriage, he…”neither had or (sic) was likely to have Children”.
Suddenly he had a son. Many years later there was gossip, mainly fomented by his erstwhile
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friend Barry Cornwall, that the real father was a “dissipated and impoverished peer”, though this has never been substantiated, and Wainewright would hardly have named the child after himself if he suspected he had been cuckolded, though Eliza herself was to prove less than trustworthy, and indeed deadly, in other matters.
However, the birth records show that Eliza and Wainewright - who is described in the column for Quality, Trade or Profession as “Esquire” - were the parents of the hapless Griffiths, whose childhood was to be ruined by Wainewright’s actions.
He was now the owner of the magnificent Linden House and another £5,000, for bachelor Uncle George had died without bothering to make a will and Wainewright was the only living relative. Dr Griffiths had not wanted to leave a penny more to his grandson than he had settled on his daughter, but now the dissipated dandy had inherited the lot – the huge house, its contents, horses and carriages - and cash.
Wainewright might have expected even more, but the Monthly Review had been loss-making and the costs of running a large country house were huge. He was now living in his usual high style, this time as a country gentleman, but he had inherited a white elephant which would make his problems much worse.
In April, he began selling off the library at Linden House, including around a thousand volumes of the newspapers and magazines that George Griffiths and his father had used in editing the Monthly Review. Rare books, pictures, music and casts were to follow. Notable among them were 200 volumes
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