Surely you will remember Bernie
Madoff, the perpetrator of the world’s most audacious Ponzi scheme. He’s now in the hoosegow in North Carolina
serving out the early years of a sentence of a hundred and fifty years. Quite a few greedy rich people got snookered,
but there were unfortunately more serious consequences as well. The lives of various colleagues and family
members lie in ruins. One of his sons was
driven to suicide. Under these
circumstances you may not be persuaded that Mr. Madoff got off easy; but
history might suggest otherwise.
When to the sessions of sweet silent
thought
I summon up remembrance of things
past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I
sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear
time's waste…
I have in mind the sadder fate of the
Rev. Dr. William Dodd (1729-1777), generally known to historians, to the degree
he is known, as “the unfortunate Dr.
Dodd”. It was concerning this unctuous
malefactor that Dr. Johnson made one of his most acute, if usually misquoted,
apothegms: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be
hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
The
white collar of Dodd’s crime was clerical.
He was a celebrity clergyman with his own private chapel of ease
frequented by urban gentlefolk, especially the female of the species. The Anglican Church of his age was rarely
overtly concerned with religion. The
great historian Lecky describes it as a kind of vague ethical improvements
society and an admirable extension of the police force. Though he was a popular sentimental preacher,
Dodd’s greatest achievement was his celebrated Beauties of Shakespeare.
Unfortunately, he developed a liking for the good life, the expensive
life.
Already
by the 1760s Dodd was known in some circles as “the macaroni parson.” Macaroni
is a great word. It means (1) an
Italian pasta; and (2) in adjectival
form, a literary composition combining vernacular and Latin, as in “macaronic
verse”. Its most interesting
eighteenth-century usage has disappeared, though it is preserved in a well-known
popular satirical song, “Yankee Doodle":
Yankee
Doodle went to town, riding on a pony;
He
stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.
Here “macaroni” means foppishness, the acme
of high fashion, the imagined quintessence of the cool, the latest style of
dress or speech—something along those lines.
It suggests foreign affectation.
The “macaroni parson” was the Apostle to the Fashionable, the Comforter
of the Unafflicted. To conduct
convincing field work among the affluent demanded a lavish life style. And
though he anticipated some of our own celebrity evangelists in doing indubitably
well by doing dubious good, he always needed more. Among the plums of his early clerical
employment had been a stint as tutor to the Earl of Chesterfield—big money there. When in 1777 he found himself in debt, Dodd,
in an apparently mad moment, forged Chesterfield’s name on a bond of
£4200. He apparently acted with an
insouciance similar to that impelling Madoff, a legitimate multi-millionaire,
to lust for felonious billions. Like
many notable crimes, Dodd’s peculation was discovered more or less by accident,
but it was a fatal accident. Even
adjusted for inflation, forty-two hundred pounds was less than Madoff’s fictive
billions, but it was way more than enough to get Dodd arraigned, tried, and
sentenced to death in the twinkling of an eye.
Remember, these were the days in England when a man could be hanged for
stealing a sheep. And the forgery of
financial instruments was a crime of nearly infinitely greater import than
that. The King, in solidarity
with his principal legal officers, was utterly unyielding. They knew that British prosperity was founded
in commerce, and took the view that in a
commercial country few crimes could be more serious than financial fraud. Therefor the sentence of death must stand.
the Macaroni Parson in more
fortunate days
Dodd did
have sympathetic friends, quite a few indeed.
Dr. Johnson rallied to his cause out of Christian charity and simple
sympathy. He had barely known the man,
and of course acknowledged his folly and guilt.
He raised no theoretical objection to the capital sentence, but he was a
man of great heart. His biographer,
Boswell, has several lively pages on the episode, which is doubtless why the
case is still remembered so well and why we know that the prospect of hanging
wonderfully concentrates the mind.
What Dodd’s
mind so wonderfully concentrated on, of course, was how to stay alive. Desperate circumstances invite desperate
measures. When it finally became clear
that despite popular petitions, tear-jerking letters to the authorities, and
the formidable eloquence of Samuel Johnson, Dr. Dodd was certainly going to
swing, a new plan was required. Since he
could not avoid hanging, he had to find a way to survive hanging. Now there’s a real challenge, and it gave birth to an epic crackpot scheme. It is impossible now to know the degree to
which various parts of the scheme were real as opposed to legendary. But essentially the plot was for a group of
conspirators, including a prominent medical man, to secure a safe apartment in
a building near the site of execution at Tyburn Prison. Dodd himself, as he approached the gallows,
may or may not have been supposed to secret some kind of breathing tube into
his mouth and throat, thus adding to the uncertain pleasures of pendulation
those of a simultaneous endoscopy. The
idea seems to have been that death by hanging is not quick but rather
leisurely. Immediately upon the
completion of the hanging, Dodd’s friends, waiting at the side of the scaffold
with a horse-drawn carriage, were to take possession of the inert body and
transport it swiftly the short distance to the safe house. There the doctor and his assistants would
revive the (only apparently) dead divine.
Quite apart from any inadequacies
of medical theory underlying their ingenious initiative, the conspirators had
failed to anticipate the problem of traffic control. Public executions were popular events in
eighteenth-century London, and celebrity executions were huge popular events.
Thousands of hyped-up idlers and proletarians, not a few of them
inebriated, surrounded the scene on all sides.
Every avenue was blocked. The
makeshift hearse could have more easily speeded through the Holland Tunnel at 5
p.m. So the unfortunate Doctor Dodd
stayed dead.
Family fun at the Tyburn Tree
An enterprising doctoral student
should take up a study of the desperations of debt and its criminal
consequences in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. The title of the dissertation
could be “Economic Crime and Punishment.”
The ubiquitous high-born lowlifes who never pay their tailors in timely
fashion, if indeed at all, are only the beginning. The pages of the English novel are
practically crawling with deadbeats and ne’er-do-wells fleeing the bailiffs,
dodging debtor’s prison, or being hauled off to some sordid
“sponging-house”. Conspicuous among such
crawlers is Rawdon Crawley of Vanity Fair,
a great novel set in the period of the Napoleonic wars. Rawdon escapes with mere misery and an
ignominious death; but there are worse things.
The last Englishman I know of who was hanged for forgery was a banker,
Henry Fauntleroy (1784 –1824),
whose extravagant embezzlements actually destroyed one of London’s old
financial houses. Forgery ceased to be a
capital crime in 1836, Reform being (as the historians put it) “in the air.”
