SPEAKER_00 0:17

If history has a margin, this is where it lives. I'm Wendell Marshant, and this is the Footnote. London. Friday, the 22nd of February, 1889. In the probate, divorce, and admiralty court at the Royal Courts of Justice, a room built for the wills of the wealthy and the dissolution of their marriages, a man named Richard Piggott is standing in a witness box, and Sir Charles Russell, QC, is asking him about a rendezvous in Paris. The correspondent for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, cabling home the next morning, put Russell's questions on the wire in a single unbroken volley. Who were the mysterious strangers who made an offer of five hundred? Were they tall or short, dark or fair? Did they wear masks or were their faces blackened? Did they speak with a brogue? Did you stand the drinks and ask them to call again? And Pigot, this is the detail I keep coming back to. The dispatch said the quill pen he was holding rattled like a Morse telegraph key on the shelf of the witness box. A man's hand shaking hard enough to sound like news going out over the wire. That is what the collapse of a fraud looks like from ten feet away. Let me back up two years. 1887. The Times of London, The Thunderer, The Paper of Record, the paper that told England what England thought, runs a series called Parnellism and Crime. The centerpiece of the series, published that spring, is a facsimile. A letter, printed in what the Times insists is Charles Stuart Parnell's own hand, appearing to condone the Phoenix Park murders of five years earlier. In 1882, in a Dublin park a mile from Dublin Castle, two British officials, Lord Frederick Cavendish, newly arrived as Chief Secretary for Ireland, and his under-secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, had been walking home to the Viceregal Lodge when they were set upon and stabbed to death with surgical knives by a splinter group calling itself the Irish National Invincibles. Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the uncrowned king of Ireland, the man who was on the verge of dragging home rule through Westminster by sheer parliamentary skill, Parnell, according to this letter, had written privately, some weeks after the murders, that Burke had got no more than his desserts. If the letter was genuine, it finished him. Not because Englishmen believed all Irishmen were murderers, but because they were, in 1887, prepared to. It confirmed a suspicion they were already carrying, and that is the only kind of forgery that ever works. Parnell stood up in the Commons the same night and called the letter a willful and deliberate fabrication. The Times stood by it. Two more letters appeared over the following months, similarly signed, similarly damning. And when a related libel action brought by an Irish MP went badly for the plaintiff, the government of Lord Salisbury moved to appoint a special commission. Three judges empowered to investigate not just the letters, but every allegation the paper had made about Parnell and his colleagues over the previous four years. The commission sat, on and off, for 128 days. The paper had bought the letters through a middleman, a young Dublin Unionist named Edward Caulfield Houston, honorary secretary of a body called the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union. Houston, in turn, had bought them from a man he had been warned repeatedly to stop dealing with. That man was Richard Piggott. Who was Piggott? Richard Piggott had, once upon a time, been the proprietor and editor of a Dublin nationalist paper called The Irishman. In the eighteen sixties and seventies it was, by the standards of the Dublin press, a real newspaper. But Piggott's professional gift was not journalism. It was need. He was, always, chronically, one week from ruin. He had a wife and children he could not support, he had creditors he could not outrun, he had, by all accounts, a real and unquenchable appetite for the kind of respectability a Dublin journalist could not afford. And a man who is always one week from ruin will eventually work out that a compromising letter is worth more than a story. By the eighteen eighties he had done this to nearly everyone nationalists, unionists, bishops, cabinet secretaries. He had written begging letters, threatening letters, and letters that were both at once. The Pittsburgh Dispatch correspondent, walking through his career on the 23rd of February, described a man who had obtained money from Chief Secretary Forster's private purse on the plea of poverty and persecution, and Forster's sympathizing letters and many similar acts of kindness, rewarded finally by an attempt to extort money by infamous threats. That was Piggott's method. Take the alms, keep the threat in the drawer. There was a letter produced in evidence that Piggott had sent to William Edward Forster in June 1881, offering papers which he said would break up the league for 1,500 pounds, or negotiable 1,000. He testified, because the letter was in his own hand and he had no other choice, that the issue of the Irishman depended upon his receiving this sum, as his creditors were pressing him. Forster refused. Piggott went on pressing. He wrote to Patrick Egan, the League's treasurer, at addresses in Paris, Madame Rouyer, ninety nine Avenue de Villiers, asking for the means to communicate with Mr. Parnell on a matter of vital importance. He wrote to Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin, offering, for a consideration, to expose the whole conspiracy against the Irish party as fraud, and in the same weeks, writing to the Times offering that same conspiracy for sale. This was the man from whom the Times in 1886 was buying letters supposedly in Parnell's own hand. The commission opened in september eighteen eighty eight. Piggott was called to the box in mid-February eighteen eighty nine. The direct examination, conducted by the Attorney General, Sir Richard Webster, the Crown's chief law officer, went smoothly. Piggott had rehearsed. He named his intermediaries, a shadowy pair he had met, so he said, in Paris, the men who had sold him the packet of letters for a modest sum. He was steady. He was, in the phrase of one observer, almost bland. While Webster worked through the direct exam, Parnell sat where he had been sitting for months, beside Sir Charles Russell, and the evening capital of Annapolis, running the American wire, said he sat unmoved, with the suggestion of a smile upon his lips. The Times manager MacDonald had by then, in the dispatch's own phrase, ceased to haunt the court, utterly sick and heart sore. Houston was still in his usual place. Houston had, days earlier, taken a solemn farewell of his faith, and since then had done nothing but sit and glare at Piggott. Then Sir Charles Russell rose to cross-examine. Russell was Irish, Catholic, and Parnell's lead counsel. He had, in the London Bar of the eighteen eighties, a reputation for a kind of surgical cheerfulness on cross. He asked friendly questions and left the room in ruins. He began, according to the dispatch, in the most indifferent manner. He had, resting on the bench in front of him, a stack of Piggott's own letters that the witness did not know existed. The first thing he did, this is the moment that broke it, he asked Piggott to write on a piece of paper handed up to the box, a series of ordinary English words, innocuous words, words a schoolmaster might dictate. Among them was the word hesitancy. Piggott wrote it out. He spelled it with an E where the second syllable belongs. H-E-S-I-T-E-N-C-Y. It was the same misspelling that appeared in the forged Parnell letter in the same hand on the same paper stock from the same misfired instinct that had produced them all. The room understood at once. The judges understood. Everyone in that courtroom understood, except possibly Piggott himself, who had walked into the box on a Friday morning as a paid witness for the greatest newspaper in the world, and would, within a week, be dead in a hotel room in Madrid. The dispatch correspondent that same evening described what he had watched as close questioning on the startling similarity of spelling and phraseology in the forged letter and in genuine letters, and letters admittedly written by Piggott, and he wrote, ere long the world was let into the secret of the forger's methods, and given pretty clearly to understand that the forger was Piggott. From there it accelerated. Russell produced the correspondence with Archbishop Walsh. Piggett had, over the course of 1887 and into 88, been writing to his grace offering, for a price, always for a price, to expose the whole scheme against Parnell as fraud. He had written that the documentary and personal evidence to be produced before the commission could be rendered harmless by an exposure of the means by which it had been obtained. In other words, pay me and I will unbuild the case I built. Russell held up the letters and read from them, and asked Piggott the plainest question in cross-examiner's English. You deliberately wrote lies. Piggott, after a pause, said, Well, exaggerations. Russell, did the exaggerations have no truth? Very little. The court laughed. It is one of the specific and awful pleasures of the transcript. The dispatch keeps noting the courtroom laughing. Not cruelly, in the way a room laughs when the last small pretense of dignity has been formally withdrawn. At one moment, Piggott, groping for something salvageable, told Russell he had actually written to Houston strongly remonstrating against the Times publishing the forged letter. Houston, in his seat, jumped to his feet on the spot and cried out that he never received such a letter. Then sat back down, the dispatch said, pale, panting, and almost weeping at this crowning outrage on his feelings. Then Russell asked about the mysterious strangers in Paris, the men who had supposedly sold Piggott the letters. Who were they? Tall or short, dark or fair, masked or not? Did they have brogues? Did you buy them a drink and ask them to come back? The dispatch reporter said Piggott, pawing at his face, mumbled out negatives or affirmatives quite irrespective of the nature of the questions, and not infrequently gazed at his tormentor with an open mouth whence no sound issued, although his tongue seemed to wag. That is when the pen started rattling on the shelf. Later that afternoon, Russell produced still more letters, letters in which Piggott had, in the same weeks he was selling the Parnell forgeries to the Times, been writing to Archbishop Walsh, insisting on his own innocence. I trust your grace, one of them read, will do me the justice to believe that I am not the fabricator of the letters, as is falsely alleged. Russell asked, who was the fabricator? Piggott said he did not know. Russell asked whether he believed there had been fabrication at all. Piggott said no. The court once again laughed. At some point that afternoon, Piggott turned his face to the three judges and asked, in so many words, for protection. The presiding judge, Sir James Hannon, rebuked him, not cruelly, but with the kind of formal coldness a bench reserves for a man it has decided is going to prison. The dispatch said the rebuke left no doubt of what the opinion formed by their lordships was. Russell had been on him all told for six more agonizing hours that Friday, and by the time the judges rose, Piggott had reached, again the dispatch's phrase, the state at which a scoundrel brought to bay either loses his wits entirely or becomes utterly reckless. Which of the two, the correspondent added, no one present could say with certainty. When the court rose at four o'clock, Hannon quietly ordered a Scotland yard detective to shadow Piggott out of the building. Piggett had already been under guard. The court had assigned two plainclothes constables to him from the start of the commission. But Hannon wanted a third pair of eyes, because Piggott, in the dispatch's phrase, might want to visit some of his mysterious friends in France. Outside on the strand, a crowd had gathered, Parnolites mostly, waiting to cheer their man out of the building, and in the course of that, to give Piggott what the dispatch called the joyously planned pleasure of hooting the perjurer as he passed. Piggot stayed in the corridor until it was almost five. By then the crowd had dispersed in deep disgust at being deprived of it, and Piggott, closely followed by the two constables in plain clothes and, at a discreet distance, the third, slipped out a side door. The court adjourned until Tuesday. Piggott did not wait for Tuesday. Here is the sequence, insofar as the papers were able to reconstruct it. Saturday, the twenty third of February. Piggott shows up uninvited at the office of Henry Labouchaire, a radical MP, editor of a weekly called Truth, and one of the few voices in London journalism that had been on Parnell's side throughout. Labouchaire, sensibly, refuses to see him alone. He calls in witnesses, including the veteran journalist George Augustus Sala, then the best known descriptive reporter in England. In their presence, Piggott dictates and signs a written confession. He forged the letters, all of them, the ones attributed to Parnell and the ones attributed to Egan and Davitt and O'Kelly. He perjured himself before the commission. He puts his name to it. Sunday. Nothing publicly happens. The confession is held. Monday. Piggett leaves his London hotel at eleven o'clock at night. His counsel does not know where he has gone. On that same Monday morning before he left, Piggott had written one more letter, this one to Joseph Soames, the solicitor for the Times. Attorney General Webster on Tuesday would rise in court and mention it almost in passing. The offered to produce his solicitor to prove it if Parnell's counsel wanted. The letter itself was never read into the record and, so far as I can find, has never been printed. Tuesday morning, the 26th of February, the Commission reassembles. Sir Charles Russell stands and, in the phrase the evening capital of Annapolis, Maryland, picked up two days later off the wire, says that he has a statement to make. He describes the Saturday meeting at La Bouchère's office. He produces the confession. He asks President Hannon for a warrant for Piggott's arrest. Hannon replies that the warrant will be ready in an hour. The court then waits for Piggott to be called. He is called. He does not appear. His counsel, asked where his client is, replies that Piggott left his hotel at eleven o'clock the previous night, and that his counsel is ignorant of his present whereabouts. Hannon adjourned the court for half an hour to give the witness a chance to arrive. If he had not appeared by the end of it, Hannon ruled, his papers at the London Hotel would be seized. The half hour passed. The papers were seized. Piggott was already on the boat train. The Evening Capitol wrote that the statement caused a great sensation, and the prevailing opinion was that Piggott had made his escape. Which is a delicate phrase for a country the size of England in 1889, admitting that it had lost track of a man it had put a Scotland Yard shadow on four days earlier. Michael Davitt cabled Chicago that same day, and the Annapolis paper printed the cable in full. Piggott has bolted, Davitt wrote. Whether that was true, whether the paper of record and the Salisbury government had, in some panicked committee, funded the flight of their own witness to spare themselves the spectacle of watching him convicted in open court is a question no historian has ever definitively answered. Sir Charles Russell, at the bar that Tuesday, alleged what he called a foul conspiracy behind Piggott and Houston. He did not name the conspirators. He did not ever need to. Joseph Soames rose in his place for the Times and emphatically denied doing anything to assist Piggott's escape. He was not particularly asked to elaborate. Piggott went to Paris first. Then, as the wire reports filled in the picture over the following days, south by train, across the border, and down through Spain to Madrid. He checked into a small hotel near the Puerta del Sol under the name Ronald Ponsonby. On the first of March 1889, Spanish police, acting on a telegram from Scotland Yard, arrived to arrest him. He asked to go upstairs and collect his belongings. They let him. In the room, he opened a trunk, took out a revolver, and shot himself through the mouth. There is a smaller death in the same week's papers, easy to miss. Professor McGuire, one of Houston's colleagues at the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union, another man who had been summoned to give evidence for the Times, died suddenly in London on hearing that Piggott had bolted. The Evening Capitol reported the cause as apoplexy. The papers the following day ran the news of Madrid with something between horror and satisfaction. The horror was theirs. The satisfaction was Parnell. Now, here is what I want to say about all of this. The Times did not, in any technical sense, forge the Parnell letters. Piggott forged them. But the Times, the Thunderer, the paper of Delane and Barnes, the paper whose reputation for accuracy was, in the 1880s, the closest thing the English-speaking world had to a public trust, the Times published them without seriously testing them. It published them because the man who brought them, Edward Houston, had a good manner and a respectable pedigree, and because the letters said what a considerable portion of the paper's readership already believed. That is the pattern I keep meeting in these stories. The forger is almost never the interesting figure. Piggott is a very ordinary type, the chronically broke man of medium talent who discovered at some point that a compromising letter pays better than a filed column. He was not a mastermind. He could not, under six hours of cross-examination, spell the same word twice. The interesting figure is always the mark. In this case, the mark was a great newspaper, and, standing behind it, a conservative government that wanted Parnell finished and did not want to look too closely at the mechanism by which he might be finished. The Phoenix Park murders had happened. The Times wasn't inventing a fear out of nothing. Cavendish and Burke had been stabbed to death by real men with real knives, and a real jury in Green Street had convicted the ringleaders and sent them to the gallows in Kilmanum jail. But between the real historical crime and the manufactured document tying Parnell to it, there was a hole across which the paper made a leap it did not need to make. And once the letters were in print, and once the commission was sitting, and once the Attorney General of England was on his feet in a courtroom vouching for a witness, at some point the institution had committed itself in a way that no further examination of the underlying evidence could undo. That is why they, or somebody near them, may well have paid Piggott to run. Not because they still believed him, because they had already built the courtroom around his testimony, and could no longer afford to hear it questioned. Parnell was vindicated by the commission's final report, delivered a year later. He was, briefly, a hero, cheered in the Commons lobby, invited to dine with Gladstone, granted the tribute of an editorial climb down from the very papers that had traduced him. Within 18 months, he was destroyed by the O'Shea divorce case, the wife of one of his own MPs, a long-running affair the Irish party could not survive politically once it became a matter of public record. And he was dead by October of 1891 at forty-five. Which is the other footnote to the footnote. The forgery didn't kill him. His own life did. But the forgery is the part I keep reading. Because the forgery is the part where an institution that ought to have known better decided that its wish and the evidence were the same thing.