They Hanged My Saintly Billy by Robert Graves

Author:Robert Graves
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Novel
ISBN: 9780099060703
Publisher: London Arrow Books Ltd 1972
Published: 2003-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Gentlemen, it seems that as early as the year 1853, Palmer had got into pecuniary difficulties—he began to raise money on bills. In the year 1854, his circumstances became worse, and he was at that time indebted to different persons in a large sum of money. He then had recourse to an expedient which I shall have to bring before you, because it has an important bearing on this case. Gentlemen, let me make a preliminary observation. I must detail to you transactions involving fraud and, what is graver, forgery— circumstances and transactions reflecting the greatest discredit on those connected with them. Yet while I feel it absolutely necessary to bring these circumstances to your notice for the elucidation of the truth, I am anxious that they should not have more than their fair and legitimate effect. You must not allow them to prejudice your minds against the prisoner as regards the real matter of inquiry here today. A man may be guilty of fraud, he may be guilty of forgery; it does not follow that he should be guilty of murder.

Among the bills on which Palmer raised money, in the course of the year 1854, was one for two thousand pounds, which he discounted with Mr Padwick. That bill bore upon it the acceptance of Palmer's mother, Mrs Sarah Palmer. She is a woman of considerable wealth; and her acceptance, being believed to be genuine, was a security on which money would be readily advanced. Palmer forged that acceptance, and got money upon it; which was, if not the first, at least one of the earlier transactions of that nature—for there are a large series of them—in which money was obtained from bills discounted by Palmer, with his mother's acceptances forged upon them. I shall show you, presently, how this practice involved him in a state of such peril and emergency, that—as we suggest, but it is for you to form your own conclusions—he had recourse to a desperate expedient in order to avoid the imminent consequences.

By the summer of 1854, he owed a very large sum of money. On the 29th of September his wife died; he had an insurance on her life to the amount of thirteen thousand pounds—and the proceeds of that insurance were realized. Palmer used the thirteen thousand pounds to pay off some of his most pressing liabilities. With regard to a part of these liabilities, he employed as his agent a gentleman named Pratt, a solicitor in London, who is in the habit of discounting bills, and whose name will be largely mixed up with the subsequent transactions I shall detail to you. Mr Pratt received from him a sum of eight thousand pounds, and disposed of it in the payment of various liabilities on bills which were in the hands of his own clients. Mr Wright, a solicitor of Birmingham, who had also advanced money to the prisoner, received five thousand more, and thus thirteen thousand of debt was disposed of; but that still left Palmer with considerable liabilities.

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