THE CASE OF PRIESTMAN versus THOMAS.
THE case of "Priestman v. Thomas" has one plain moral, —do not presume on success. It seems probable that if Thomas had not forgotten this useful rule, he might still have been enjoying £17,000, instead of the prospect of being put on his trial for fraudulently manufacturing a will Down to a certain point, everything had gone fairly well with him. He had not been able to secure all that Whalley had apparently left him, but he had secured enough to give him that modest competence—that happy mean between poverty and riches— which in all ages the wisest of mankind have most desired for themselves. Out of £60,000, he had kept .217,000—not a bad fortune for an ex-railway porter, not wholly free from the sus- picion of having used undue influence to divert the testator's
bounty to himself. In an evil moment, he allowed his natural exultation to get the better of him, and waved a piece of blue paper at the plaintiff, as he drove by his window. It can hardly have seemed a very great imprudence, but it had serious consequences. There had once been—or Priestman thought there had—another will of Whalley's in existence, under which he would have taken some £45,000, and as soon as he saw this blue paper flourished by Thomas, he jumped to the conclusion that here was the missing will. That, too, had been written on blue paper, and what more likely than that Thomas, having succeeded in setting up a false will, should, when he thought himself safe from detection, have pointed in derision to the genuine document ? Priestman was thus set on the train of inquiry, which has ended in a verdict by which the will proved by Thomas is declared to be a forgery. Whether what Thomas waved from the window was really the " blue " will, or some quite unimportant piece of blue paper, is nothing to the purpose. The intention was arrogant, whatever the act might have been. There is some- thing finer, no doubt, in the conception of showing the genuine will, at what the possessor thought a safe distance, to the man who had just surrendered all claim to the bulk of the fortune he would have taken under it ; but even if it were nothing more than a piece of common blue paper that happened to lie handy, Thomas need not have brandished it in this un- pleasantly conspicuous manner. Brandish it, however, he did, and from that moment Priestman seems never to have wanted any aid that he could desire in the way of amateur detection.
In the first instance, the obstacles to be surmounted were very great. No doubt was ever thrown on the genuineness of the testator's signature to the " white " will. James Whalley had plainly put his name at the bottom, whether what went before it had been tampered with or not. Possibly, all the unprofessional ingenuity which was at work would have failed to get over these outworks of Thomas's case, had it not been for his own injudicious economy. He had made certain promises to the two men who had witnessed the " white " will, and had not kept them. Now, nobody cares to witness a forged will out of mere good-fellowship. If you consent to be partaker of another man's sin, you naturally look to be partaker of his profits. Thomas thought this expectation an unreasonable one, and he gave effect to his conviction by keeping back the witnesses' fee. From that moment every- thing went wrong with him. A great deal was told that he never meant to have been told, and what was told led up to much that was not told. In the long trial that ended on Tuesday, Priestman has established his contention to the satis- faction alike of the jury and of the judge.
Probably, Thomas's error lay in trusting too entirely to the effect of probate. If Whalley's will could once be safely de- posited in the Registry, Priestman might wonder as much as he liked. The law would have spoken, and his suspicions would worry no one but himself. But for this belief, he would have been at more pains to support the theory that Whalley had quarrelled with Priestman. If he had not quarrelled with him, the " white " will disposed of his money in a most unlikely way. Priestman was Whalley's natural son, and more than one will had been made in his favour ; why should he at the last moment have left the bulk of his property to another man? Thomas's attention, however, was so fixed upon getting a false will executed that he did not trouble him- self to account for the suddenness with which Whalley was alleged to have changed his mind. The device he adopted to get the will he wanted substituted for the will he did not want was exceedingly ingenious. He induced Whalley to dictate a pencil letter to Priestman, and then to write his name at the bottom in ink. Here, then, was the signature he wanted. He had now the most essential part of a will, and it only remained to add the incidental details relat- ing to the distribution of the property. The pencil writing was rubbed out, and what purported to be Whalley's last will written in ink above his signature. Possibly, Whalley thought that by not imitating the signature he was protecting himself against a charge of forgery; at all events, he knew that it would be the signature that would be most closely scrutinised, and if that was beyond doubt genuine, it was not likely that suspicion would go any further. Nor but for the quarrel with the witnesses—or rather, with one of the wit- nesses, for the other sided with Thomas—would it have gone any further. The theory that the signature to the " white " will had originally been affixed to a letter written in pencil, and that upon this letter, as on a palimpsest, the " white "
will had been written, rested, in the first instance, on the testimony of the repentant or dissatisfied accomplice. When once the theory had been set up, however, confirma- tory evidence was not long wanting. First, there was the will itself. Though the signature was beyond question, there were undoubtedly traces of pencil-marks underlying the ink in which the will was written, and these pencil-marks bore out the explanation given by the witness. They were in Thomas's handwriting, and the words that could be decyphered seemed to have formed part of a letter addressed to Priestman. Thomas seems to have thought that these very facts might bring him safety. Why should he have left this damning record against himself, when it was in his power to destroy it A man who is rubbing out pencil-marks as a preliminary to giving himself a fortune could hardly be so careless as to leave whole words still visible. The great difficulty in the way of this theory was the fact that the " white " will had never passed out of Thomas's own keeping, until it had been placed in the Registry of Wills at Hereford ; and under any circumstances, the Jury would probably have refused to believe that the will had been tampered with, and the suspicious pencil-traces intro- duced while the will was in official custody. As it turned out,how- ever, they were not left without a perfectly adequate explanation of the facts. Mr. Holmes, the Queen's Librarian, states that pencil-marks are not completely erased by bread-crumbs. What happens is that the fibres of the paper are raised up so as to cover them. After a time, they get smoothed down again, and then the concealed marks coma partially to light once more. Further and most complete corroboration to Priestman's case was furnished by a letter which his sister had received from Whalley, written a month after the date of the " white " will, and telling her that he had left all his money to Priestnaan, and none to her. Thomas maintained that this letter was forged, but in favour of this theory he had nothing to show, except that the letter had not been produced until late in the day. This, however, was explained in its turn by the fact that the letter contained a reference to an incident only known to Whalley and his daughter, which she would natur- ally desire to keep concealed. The whole story was thus unravelled, and the Jury had no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that the white" will was Thomas's composition, though the signature to it was Whalley's. It is not a pleasant story, for every one concerned in it seems to have been quite ready to suspect every one else of perjury and fraud, without apparently there being any antecedent improba- bility in the suspicion. But there is no reason to doubt that the verdict given by the jury describes with substantial accuracy what actually took place.
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