Forgery: Modus operandi (British History)

[Mick Harper]

Jaundiced viewers of The $50 Million Art Swindle (BBC2) will have spotted two swindles the TV programme makers omitted. The first was, I hope, themselves being duped by the hilarious story of the prison escape. When someone's inside for a $50 million swindle, and they escape thanks to a lax prison van and is then spirited to Brazil, I think the three things may be linked other than by the art-forger's derring-do. Unless he was a part-time Navy Seal and was too modest to mention it. Yes, that's probably it. I do apologise.

The second swindle went unmentioned because it was the programme-makers swindling us. "We finally tracked him down to his home in the French countryside." No you didn't. He came to you with a programme proposal for which you paid him quite a lot of money. Hence he was shown in such a favourable light and such little light was shed on his methodology. There was no secret about where he was living, he was on Social Security at the time.

An interesting factette though (if true): French citizens cannot be deported to America. Saved him the rigours of Israel, I suppose. (Jewishness definitely played a part in his success.) Though to be fair, it was very difficult summoning up much sympathy for his victims. Whether they were more or less crooked than him I cannot rightly say.

[Hatty]

One interesting aspect to come out of it is how the swindler, Michel Cohen, came 'from nowhere' and apparently had no credentials in art dealing -- he didn't even like art! He did have the twin advantages of being both French ('cultured') and Jewish ('one of us') and became a trusted intermediary in the international art market. His clientele may not, perhaps, have regarded him as an expert but that didn't seem to stop them handing him cheques for massive amounts as reserves on works of art. There seemed to be no reason for his high-end art dealing to end except he'd switched to trading in the stock market about which he was equally ignorant.

At any rate the programme demonstrated how a swindler accepted as an actual expert, such as Sir Augustus Franks, the British Museum's Keeper of British and Medieval Antiquities, can carry on duping everyone... in Franks' case, for thirty years.

[Hatty]

[Mick Harper]

This is truly important from our point of view. I think it all started when ten thousand (was it?) ancient coins were dug up on Jersey. This, we concluded, definitely couldn't be a case of forgery though, typically, the archaeo's were too busy with the coins to start thinking about the wider meaning of ten thousand ancient coins being found on Jersey in the first place. It even took me a little while to realise that the Channel Islands must have been a major pre-historic entrepôt.

Given the ease (and profit) of single coin forgery, the shabbiness of the historical record including stone inscriptions and the chronic subjectivity of archaeological digs, it meant such coin hoards were our only secure historical source before (say) 1000 AD. But they have cottoned on to this and suddenly 'hoards' are all the rage.

Personally, I find two objects found together more suspect than one since losing or burying a single object is a more likely scenario than two. But of course the worst example is the finding of one, then later another one, then later... A very common occurrence in the forgery racket since not only do you know what the market will take but apparently experts (even entire nations) like stuff to come from 'known' sources. People always lose/bury things a bit aways from one another, don't they?

[Hatty]

[Hatty]

The British Library is blogging about a letter on treason from the Earl of Northampton, a leading Catholic

[Boreades]

'ere, Mick 'n' 'atty, I got a nice little earner for yer. Nip over to Amsterdam and pick up a few tonnes of this [strike]scrap[/strike] valuable material.

[Boreades]

Talking of old stonework:

[Hatty]

There appears to be no catalogue details, never mind provenance, for the British Library's copy of A New and Perfecte Relation of the whole proceedings against the late most barbarous Traytors. They merely give the title, the year of publication (1606) and a summary of the contents.

The book was printed by Richard Barker, the King's Printer (a post previously held/bought by his father who'd had close family 'connections' to Walsingham, Cecil's predecessor) and in 1606 he was Master of the Stationers' Company.

[Boreades]

^
1606?

Ah yes, I remember it well.

24th January – Gunpowder Plot: The trial of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators begins.
31st January – Guy Fawkes is executed.

No hanging around for appeals that his human rights had been infringed. Well, no hanging around, full stop...

[Mick Harper]

We must consider the possibility that the entire Gunpowder Plot was a fiction. The general background is certainly perplexing. It was officially Catholics vs King James but this hardly makes sense. James was not only himself a crypto-Catholic, like all the Stuarts, but he was following a determinedly Catholic foreign policy, making peace with Spain and France and distancing himself from the various Protestant powers. Who did the Catholic plotters think they would get if they offed him?

The usual explanation is that the Catholics had been 'disappointed' by James but since he had hardly got his feet under the English table when the plot was being put together and, as far as anyone is aware, he had made no promises to the Catholics -- he could not have made many if he wanted to accede to the English throne -- this explanation is frankly barmy. But that doesn't seem to have put historians off so we shall have to do our usual and look for more forensic clues.

[Boreades]

Have you considered the possibility that it was a "False Flag" operation, or a pre-emptive strike, to flush out any extremists in the Catholic camp?

[Hatty]

It was widely believed and not just by Catholics, at the time and later, that the plot was a government i.e. Cecil fabrication to bring Catholics, particularly Jesuits, into disrepute, e.g..

Richard Broughton in English Protestants' Plea (1621)

[Mick Harper]

It would certainly be understandable statecraft for a new and uncertain regime to wish to flush out the disaffected but the trouble with these kinds of 'false flag' scenarios is that, from James' point of view, the Catholics were the least of his troubles. After all they had been dying in droves already plotting on behalf of his mother and while the religion was technically different, he was a bit of a sleeping-dogs-lie sort of chap, or at any rate it would be absurd for Catholics to die in droves getting rid of him just in case he wasn't.

Robert Cecil, they say, had an interest in fomenting/discovering plots to buttress his position which was in danger from Scotch and local mountebanks, but this all seems absurdly extravagant, not to say perilous, for a bureaucrat. But perhaps that's the clue, and one Hatty has seized on. If we assume some fairly low level plot -- surely endemic at the time -- which was uncovered and found to be seriously underpowered then we might construct a plot-upon-a-plot whereby a few of the usual suspects were rounded up, gunpowder added in for the tabloids, show trials to follow and everyone lives happily ever after.

And speaking of gunpowder under the Commons wouldn't this be the first time that rank and file gentry would feel the personal heat, and they had been causing Elizabeth all sorts of trouble during the 1590's. No harm in reminding them the price of eternal vigilance.

[Mick Harper]

I know it's the British Library and you don't expect either rigorous scholarship or intellectual curiosity from that quarter but surely someone might note the more glaring discrepancies