Ann Hurle – hanged for forgery in 1804.

Ann Hurle was one of twelve people to be hanged for forgery in 1804. The law took a very severe view of this offence at the time and few forgers were reprieved.

Ann was an educated young woman of twenty two, living in London, who had devised quite an elaborate plan to defraud the Bank of England of £500, which was a very large sum in those days and would now be the equivalent of over a quarter of a million pounds. The crime was perpetrated on Saturday the 10th of December 1803 when she met Stock Broker, George Francillon, at the Bank Coffee House and persuaded him to obtain a power of attorney for her to enable her to sell some Bank of England 3% stock belonging to one Benjamin Allin, an elderly gentleman from Greenwich. Mr. Francillon had known Ann for some six months and therefore was not overly suspicious. She told him that she had lived in Mr. Allin’s house as a child, where her aunt was the housekeeper, and that he had given her this stock in return for the aunt’s service to the household and the kindnesses she had shown him. Mr. Francillon obtained the power of attorney for Ann on the Saturday, and she told him that she was then going to take it Greenwich to get it signed by Mr. Allin.
Ann returned on Monday morning with the document purportedly signed and witnessed by Thomas Noulden and Peter Verney, who both ran small businesses in Greenwich. Ann met Mr. Francillon at the Bank of England where he took the document to the Reduced Office for verification. Ann meanwhile went off to sell the stocks. Mr. Thomas Bateman, the Clerk in charge of powers of attorney, asked to see George Francillon with Ann and informed them that Benjamin Allin’s signature on the power differed from that on the specimen held by the bank. Ann told Mr. Bateman that she knew Mr. Allin and that as he was nearly ninety years old, in poor health and nowadays wrote very little, it was not surprising that his signature differed. She also offered to take out another power of attorney and obtain a new signature on it. Mr. Bateman did not feel that this was necessary but wrote a letter to one of the witnesses to the document.

During the conversation in Mr. Bateman’s office, Ann mentioned that she had recently married and asked by Mr. Bateman why she had not taken out the power in her married name, she told him that she feared her marriage to one James Innes was not a good one. She suggested that he had stolen her money and then boarded a ship at Bristol and that he was already married to another.

Ann left the bank and returned on the following Tuesday. In the meantime, Mr. Francillon had become suspicious when he checked the document. He put their main meeting off to the following day while he did some further research, including going to see Benjamin Allin. As arranged, Mr. Francillon met Ann on the Wednesday morning at the Bank of England. He had previously had a meeting with Mr. Newcomb the principal clerk in the Reduced Office and explained his suspicions. He and Mr. Newcomb had a meeting with the Governors. Ann came to the Bank with a young man and must have realised from the delays in seeing her that all was not well and left. She was arrested the following day in Bermondsey and taken to the Mansion House for questioning. The young man turned out to be James Innes, who was also questioned. She was charged with the forgery and he with being an accessory to the crime, although it seems that his case was dropped as there is no record of a trial for him. The case was obviously unusual and of some public interest as it was reported in The Times of Wednesday, the 21st of December 1803. Ann was committed for trial at the next Sessions of the Old Bailey in London.

These Sessions opened on the 11th of January 1804, before the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, Sir Archibald Knight. Ann was charged with four offences. The first was “feloniously, falsely, making, forging, and counterfeiting, on the 12th of December, a certain instrument, or letter of attorney, with the name Benjamin Allin thereunto subscribed, purporting to have been signed, sealed, and delivered, by one Benjamin Allin, of Greenwich, in the county of Kent, gentleman, a proprietor of certain annuities and stock transferable at the Bank of England, called Three per Cent. Reduced Annuities, to sell, assign, transfer, and convey, the sum of five hundred pounds of the said transferable annuities, the property of the said Benjamin Allin, to her, the said Ann Hurle , with intent to defraud the Governor and Company of the Bank of England.” The second count was, “For uttering and publishing as true a like forged deed, knowing it to be forged, with the like intention.” There were two further counts on the indictment against her, being the same offences against Benjamin Allin. Mr. Garrow led for the prosecution and Mr. Knapp for the defence.

George Francillon and Benjamin Allin were the principal prosecution witnesses. Mr. Francillon related the above story to the court and Mr. Allin examined the power of attorney document and declared that the signature was not his and that he had never signed such a document. Thomas Bateman, Peter Verney and Thomas Noulden also testified against her. Ann’s aunt, Jane, told the court that Ann had not visited Mr. Allin’s house recently and neither had Messrs. Verney and Noulden, the two purported witnesses to his signature on the document.

The witnesses testimonies were cross examined at this time but Ann offered no actual defence leaving this to her counsel. She was thus convicted and remanded to Tuesday, the 17th of January 1804 for sentence. Four men and three women were bought before the court to received their death sentences that Tuesday, with the Recorder of London making particular reference to the gravity of Ann’s crime and the fact that she preyed upon “an infirm and imbecile old man”. He opined that only death was sufficient punishment for such a crime. He then proceeded to pass sentence on each prisoner. When Ann’s turn came, she was asked in the normal way if their was any reason why sentence of death should not be pronounced against her and replied that she thought she was “with child” (pregnant). She did not make this claim with any apparent confidence so no further enquiry into its validity was made. Sarah Fisher, another of the condemned women, also claimed to be pregnant but did so much more forcibly, thus requiring the court to empanel a Jury of Matrons, who examined her and declared that she wasn’t. It is feasible that both women could have been in the early stages of pregnancy, although neither was “quick with child”. Only if the prisoner was obviously pregnant was her execution respited until after she had given birth. In most cases she was reprieved altogether and her punishment commuted to transportation. “Pleading the belly” as it was called was a frequently used tactic at this time by women desperate to avoid the noose.

The Recorder of London reviewed the cases of those condemned to death and made a recommendation in each one. He then presented his recommendations in person to the Privy Council, which was chaired by King George III. In Ann’s case, there could be no recommendation for a reprieve. She was therefore scheduled for execution, along with Methuselah Spalding who had been convicted of sodomy at the previous Sessions held on the 30th of November 1803. It is interesting to note that Spalding was the only one of five condemned men at that Sessions not to be reprieved and that Ann was the only one out of the six men and three women at the January 1804 Sessions not to get a reprieve. Non-murderers normally had a period of two to three weeks before execution at this time and Ann’s execution was set for Wednesday, the 8th of February..

For reasons that are unclear, the normal “New Drop” style gallows at Newgate was not to be used for these two hangings. A simple gallows was erected at the top of the Old Bailey, near to St. Sepulchre's Church.

On the morning of execution, Ann and Spalding were brought from their cells and pinioned in the Press Room. They were then taken out into the yard and loaded into a horse drawn cart covered in a black cloth which emerged from the prison at about 8.10 a.m. for the short ride to the gallows. The cart was backed under the beam and the two prisoners were allowed to pray with Ordinary and make their last statements. Ann was dressed in a mourning gown and wore a white cap. She made no address to the multitude who had come to see her die but prayed fervently with the Ordinary for five minutes or so. William Brunskill, the hangman for London & Middlesex, placed the rope around her neck and when she had finished praying, pulled the white cap down over her face. The cart was now drawn away leaving them both suspended. It was recorded that Ann let out a scream as the cart moved and that she struggled hard for two to three minutes before becoming still, her hands were observed to move repeatedly towards her throat and her un-pinioned legs kicked and padded the air. No doubt the eyes of the crowd were riveted on her poor writhing form. After hanging for the customary hour, they were taken down and returned inside Newgate from where they could be claimed by relatives for burial.

An angry letter appeared in The Times newspaper the following week castigating the authorities for the execution on the grounds of cruelty compared with the New Drop and the difficulty in seeing the prisoners and thus taking a moral lesson from their demise. It was alleged in the letter that the reason for the change of gallows was that the Newgate staff were too lazy to assemble the New Drop gallows. Whether this was true or whether the drop mechanism had become defective we will never know, but it was returned to service for the next execution, that of Providence Hansard for the same crime on the 5th of July 1805.

It seems surprising looking back two centuries that Ann, acting alone, would have devised such an ambitious plan to obtain this large sum of money. However, no evidence was offered at her trial to show that anyone else was involved, other than perhaps James Innes on the periphery of the crime. It must have taken quite some time to think through and make the necessary contacts, such as George Francillon, who would be able to obtain the power of attorney for her. It is hard to believe she was not aware of the risk of failure and the deadly consequences that would follow it. In the period 1800 - 1829, an amazing 218 people were to die for forgery in England and Wales. Another two women were to follow Ann to the gallows outside Newgate over the next two years, Providence Hansard mentioned earlier and Mary Parnell on the 13th of November 1805. Forgery ceased to be a capital crime in 1832 and the last execution for it took place on the 31st of December 1829, when Thomas Maynard was hanged at Newgate. Over two centuries attitudes have altered, had a modern day Ann committed the crime in the 21st century, she would have got somewhere between four and five years in prison and have been released on licence half way through this sentence.

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