Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/772

 IMPOSTORS

702

IMPOSTORS

mouth and claimed miraculous gifts of healing, with Stephen Dugdaie, William Bedloe, Edward Turber- ville, and Rol)ert Bolron, were the most conspicuous. Dates soon after became discredited, and in 1685, under James II, he was convicted of perjury and punished by floggings of unexampled severity, hut under Will- iam and Mary his sentence was reversed, and in spite of fresh malpractices he received a large pension from the Government, which he drew until his death in 170.3. With Dates in his later years was associated William Fuller (1670-1717), seemingly the inventor of the "warming-pan story" (concerning the birth of .lames, the Old Preteniler) and concocter of fictitious Jacobite plots. He published letters of Mary of Modena but was convicted and pilloried.

Another swindler who tried to make money out of the fabrication of pretended Jacobite plots was Robert Young. He succeeded for a while, during that age of intrigue and mistrust, in imposing upon the popular credulity, but he was in the end detected. He was afterwards convicted of coining and executed (1700). Robert Ware the forger, the author of "Foxes and Firebrands ", who has of late years been so thoroughly exposed by Father Bridgett, traded upon the same prejudices. His more public career began contem- poraneously with that of Dates in 1678, and by shelter- ing himself behind the high reputation of his dead father. Sir James Ware, amongst whose manuscripts he pretended to discover all kinds of compromising papers, he olitained currency for his forgeries, remain- ing almost undetected until modern times. Many foul aspersions upon the character of individual popes, Jesuits, and other Catholics, and also upon some Puri- tans, which have found their way into the pages of respectable historians, are due to the fabrications of " this literary skunk ", as Fr. Bridgett not unjustifiably calls him (see Bridgett, "Blunders and Forgeries", pp. 209-296). Some other vindictive and unprinci- pled scoundrels whose impostures for the most part took a literary form may also be mentioned here, though without any hope of exhausting the list. Fore- most among them comes the Ahh6 Zahorowski, a Jesuit expelled from his order in which as a young scholastic he had been guilty of certain mean and discredital)le tricks. In revenge for his expulsion he contrived to write and publish the notorious " Monita Secreta", which, as a code of secret instructions issued by author- ity, pretended to la^\' bare the shameless and Machia- vellian policy followed by the Society of Jesus. That the " Monita Secreta " are a forgery is now universally admitted even by opponents, and since the publication of the memoirs of Father Wielewicki (Script ores Re- rum Polonicarum, vols. VII, X, XIV) no doubt remains that Zahorowski was the author (.see Duhr, " Jesuiten- fabeln" No. .5; Brou, " Les Jesuites de la Legende", I, 281). Hardly less dear to the no-popery champion than the "Monita Secreta" is the fictitious "Hunga- rian Confession" or " Fluchformular". It is a pro- fession of faith supposed to have been exacted of converts to the Church in Hungary (c. 1676), by which among other things they were required to de- clare that the pope ought to receive Divine honours, and that the Blessed Virgin ought to be held higher than Christ himself. The forgery seems to have been traced to the door of George Lani, an Evangelical minister, sent to the galleys for political intrigues against the Ciovernment in Hungary, who first pul> lished it in a work called "Captivitas Papistica". Whether it was his own fabrication is not, however, certain. He may possibly have adopted, seriou-sly and in good faith, some satirical composition in circulation at the time (see Duhr, " Jesuitenfabeln ", Xo. 7, and S. F. Smith in "The Month", July-August, 1S96).

Such satirical compositions have often been taken seriously. An example is the "Letter of the Three Bishops", which, though written by an apostate of infamous character, Peter Paul Vergerius (1554), and

professing to be a letter of advice given by three bish- ops to the pope to help to strengthen the power of the papacy, is obviously a skit rather than a forgery. But his letter has been quoted as authentic by hun- dreds of Protestant controversialists from Crashaw downwards (see Lewis "The Letter of the Three Bish- ops"). Df the same type is an indulgence supposed to have been granted by Tetzel to remit sin unrepented of, a document really derived from a burlesque Latin drama (see "The Month", July, 1905, p. 96); but forgery of the most flagrant type was often usetl, as, for example, by the ex-Capuchin Father Norbert Parisot, later called Platel, who in the time of Benedict XIV wrote a book of memoirs on the Jesuit mi.ssions, profes- sing to incorporate authentic documents, for the most part fabricated by himself. He afterwards left his order, went to Holland and to Portugal, and is sus- pected to have fabricated the rehgious effusions which were made the pretext for burning Father Walafrida as a heretic in 1761 (see Brou, "Les J{5suites de la Legende", II, 82).

In the encouragement of the crowd of impostors who flourished at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- tury many leading members of the .\nglican episcopate, notably Archbishop Tenison, Bishops Compton of London and White Kennett of Peterborough, were conspicuous. A whole tribe of Huguenots and French "proselytes" (i.e. seceders from Catholicism) were welcomed in England with open arms; but the frauds and immoralities of these men, many of which were brought to light in the recriminations of the famous " Bangor Controversy " (a name derived from Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, the patron of de la Pilloniere, an ex-Jesuit who plaved a principal part in the fray), would suffice to fill a volume. It seems plain that such converts to Protestantism as Malard, Rouire, and Fournier, despite the eminence of their ecclesia.stical patrons, were thorough-going scoundrels (see Thurs- ton, "Weeds from the Pope's Garden", in "The Month", Feb., 1897). For example, the la.st named, obtaining Bishop Iloadly's signature on a scrap of paper, wrote over it a promissory note for t'SOOO and svied the bishop for the money. When the claim was resisted, Fournier, an ex-priest, impudently declared that the bishop when in his cups had signed the note and given it to him in payment of a debt. But even at this stage, Fournier, strong in his denunciations of popery, found supporters against the bishop. The same was conspicuously the case with the ex-Jesuit, Archibald Bower, who published in 1743 a most scur- rilous " History of the Popes" and mendaciously cal- umniated his former co-religionists. He was ardently taken up by eminent Protestant ecclesiastics and statesmen, V>ut his insincerity in the end became so patent that he was exposed and denounced by the .\nglican, John Douglas, afterwards Bishop of Salis- bury (see Pollen in "The Month", Sept., 1908). More nearly corresponding to the ordinary type of impostor was the famous IValmanazar (1679-176.3), a French- man, educated in childhood by the Dominicans, who coming to England pretended to be a pagan from Formosa, and professed himself a convert to Anglican- ism, winning favour by abusing the Jesuits, lie was warmly encouraged by Bishop Compton, to whom he presented a Catechism in " Formo.san ", a purely ficti- tious language. Afterwards he fell into poverty and disrepute, confessed the fraud, and is said to have been sincerely repentant, being visited by Dr. Johnson in his last days. His accomplice and mentor Innes, an Anglican clergyman, before the cheat was detected was rewarded by being made chaplain-general of the English forces in Portugal.

Passing over a certain number of religious enthusi- asts who may in various degrees have l)een self- convinced and who range from the crazy hallucina- tions of Joanna Southcott (il. 1814), who lielieved she was to bring forth the Messiah, or of Richard Brothers,