Arsenic and Lace: The Trial of the Yorkshire Witch

Pushkin. Rebecca Perago is in her forties. For decades now, she's been married to her beloved William. Together they've carved out a hard but happy life in their small village in the north of England. They work side by side as clothiers, beating, combing, dying and spinning the wool lay by at the market of all selling it on Alas.

As the factories grow in nearby Leeds, their little cottage industry is dwindling. But that's not all they've got to worry about. For some time now, Rebecca's been feeling an uncomfortable sensation in her breast whenever she lies down, She tells William, she feels her strange fluttering at her side and experiences a shortness of bread. It's eighteen o six.

Great advances are being made in medical science, but fancy doctors aren't for the likes of Rebeccah. Besides, she's already made her own diagnosis. The cause, she is certain, is an evil wish. As luck would have it, Rebecca's young niece is visiting her ailing aunt. She works as a servant in Leeds and has heard of a woman called Mary Bateman who can remove curses. The helpful niece visits Mary and yes she can help, but she'll need a flannel petticoat or any item worn next to the skin.

The dutiful William journeys to Leeds and delivers one of his wife's garments to Mary, who paws over it on the table of her grimy slum dwelling. She grimly confirms that Rebecca is indeed cursed. Mary can help, though she knows a woman in Scarborough who can lift spells. All the paragoes need to do is exactly what she says.

I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary Tales. The story of this mysterious healer features in a new book by Maddie Pelling, who's a historian and the co host of the after Dark podcast. Maddie, I'm afraid if I give people the title of your book, they they will know, particularly our.

Loyalists, a little bit of a giveaway.

Yeah, although this is cautionly tales, people know that there is trouble in store. So the full title of your book is Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment. So why did you want to write it? And what is it about this period of intellectual and cultural flourishing that was so fertile for hoaxes.

Well, I think the first thing to say about the period of Enlightenment, the eighteenth century is we think of it very much as a rational time, as a time of scientific progress, of superstition being banished. And you know, the term itself suggests that a light is being shone in the dark and people are moving forward, but of course that's not the case. And what I love as a historian of the eighteenth century is that it is a time of chaos, right, It's a time of revolution.

It's a time when the world has turned on its head. Monarchs are being decapitated, wars being fought on land and sea, and the hierarchies of this world that on the surface seem to be very strict, very straightforward, are actually being undermined constantly. And into this comes the hoaxer. And I think the eighteenth century and this specific period of a so called Enlightenment, this idea that everything is is kind of sensible. Really, I think it chimes with the moment we live in now, this very sort of confident moment in which we are technologically savvy, we're moving forward, we are proclaiming that we've worked out how everything works. We have artificial intelligence to aid us in our everyday life.

Everything is fine, Surely nothing's going to go wrong. And yet we also live in this post truth moment, right, We live in this world in which we cannot believe our own eyes. Everyone from politicians to journalist to writers to historians, everyone is struggling with what the truth is. It's become this fluid concept.

Are you suggesting that there are lessons that we can learn today from history?

I think there might be.

There was one particular hoaxer that I wanted to talk about before we get to the main event, because it's just so delightful, the bottle contract to tell me about the bottle conjurer.

Yeah, okay, so this is a hoax that I start the book with. So the term hoax itself really comes into play in the eighteenth century simply because there are so many hoaxes that take place, and it seems to come from hocus Pocus, which is this idea of the street conjurer or the magician that you might find on stage in a theater. And in the seventeen forties there is a magician like this who advertises across the city of London that he is going to arrive at Haymarket Theater on a certain night, that he is going to drink the contents of a wine bottle and then fit himself into the wine bottle. This is an ordinary wine bottle, and he's then going to sing to the audience and tell them their fortunes. So up until this point, there

is an understanding between magical performance like this and the audience, right that you are going to suspend your disbelief for the duration of this performance, that you know you're going to see something that is a trick. You're going to go home and you're not going to lie awake at.

Nightgoing actually saw the Lady in Half exactly.

Yes, we all know that that is not what's happening. However, that contract is about to be broken, and this is absolutely the way into all of this chaos of the eighteenth century when all the contracts are being kind of ripped up and the rules being rewritten. And so what happens is hundreds of people come down to the Haymarket Theater on this night and there is a wine bottle on the table on the stage and as adverts as advertised, so far, so good, but nobody comes, and people start to get pissed off, as you can imagine, they've paid for these tickets, and people start shouting, throwing things onto the stage. Someone throws a lit candle, the curtain starts to go up in flames. Then it's an all out

riot and the soldiers have to be called to calm the crowds. And it's really a moment in which this society that is going into this moment of enlightenment and claiming that it is rational and sensible, realizes it's been duped.

I would be annoyed there because you don't respect me enough to even do an elaborate hoax.

Yes, it's just a simple scalm exactly. And what we get is, you know, this idea of the hoax or the trickster slipping suddenly from the stage where it's safe, we can see the trick we understand that it's fake, and suddenly they're in the audience amongst us. We don't know who they are, We never find out who the bottle coundra is or wasn't, And suddenly the trickster can be anyone, and the gloves are off, essentially, and this opens the gate for all kinds of chaos.

So that's funny. Less funny is Mary Bateman. So tell us about Mary Bateman? Where did she come from? What was she like growing up?

So she is one of three women hoaxes that I focus on in the book, and she is the one who I think is most psychologically interesting. And she's also the person who does commit pretty heinous acts. She's someone I suppose who traditionally would have slipped away out of the historical record were it not for the lies that she told and the crimes that she goes on to commit.

So we know an astonishing amount of detail about her early life for someone of her class. So she's born in a small village outside Thirsk in North Yorkshire, which I used to live in Thirsk very briefly, and this is how I kind of came across her story. And she has a really rural upbringing.

She her parents, she's born in seventeen sixty eight.

Yes, yes, So we're sort of in the middle of this quite flourishing you know, in cities like Edinburgh and London, hugely sort of international cosmopolitan places. Medicine is advancing, religion is being debated, and sort of giving way to the secular world. But in somewhere like rural North Yorkshire, there are still superstitions. There's an annual fair that comes to her village every year, and you have travelers who are coming in, you have horse sellers. It's this huge celebration.

And so Mary grows up in this with her siblings, and she would have seen at this fair magical tricks, a little bit like the bottle Conjurer, hopefully magical tricks to where they actually turn up. She's also crucially seeing people have their fortunes told, and this really seems to spark something in her mind, and this is something that she pursues and carries on throughout her life, this idea of reading someone, seeing what they require from you, and giving it to them. And it's a form of manipulation, certainly in Mary's case, that is going to shape the course of her life and the course of her victims' lives.

She also has these sort of strange moments in childhood. She has this strange incident we are told later on, involving some red shoes, and I think this tells us a lot about her. And we're taking this with a pinch of slightly skeptical salt. At one of these fairs, she steals a pair of red Morocco shoes, so red leather shoes, and she hides them in her father's barn on the farm in which she lives, and she secrets them away for several months until eventually she goes to her father and presents them and says, I've had these all along. And there's an interesting idea of Mary sort of taking some power from this, from taking an item of clothing from someone, and clothing is going to be incredibly important in her story. It seems to show some

kind of pathological proclivity towards I suppose, yes, lying, but also stealing, collecting, gathering things that aren't hers, that are yes, intimate objects to do with other people, and having that kind of dominion over them. And we're going to see that again and again.

Maybe she'll go out of it.

Spoiler alert.

No.

She works briefly as a servant in various households, and she cannot hold down a job because she just lies and lies and lies, and people feel very uneasy around her. She eventually makes her way from rural North Yorkshire to Leeds, which is this burgeoning industrial town at the time, and she meets John, she marries him and they have some children together.

So she marries John Bateman. She does, and then there is this incident where he is a hero and she takes advantage of his heroism.

There is a vast fire at a mill, and you know, we're talking early Industrial Revolution, there is no health and safety. Children, you know, as younger sort of seven and eight, maybe sometimes younger, are working in these mills. And there's this huge fire and everyone in the community rushes to put it out, including her husband who works on the fire team essentially, and Mary, who is heavily pregnant at this point.

And I think that's really key. She's always interested in presenting herself a certain way and playing on people's assumptions, and who doesn't trust a heavily pregnant lady. She goes around knocking on people's doors, saying, do you have any bandages to spare for the hospital for these poor people who were injured. She gathers together all the cloth for the hospital. She then goes to the other side of town and sells it on.

Yeah pretty low. Did she need the money? Was she desperate for money?

So John is a wheelwright, and he has this job for most of his life. He also joins the local militia and trains with them.

An income.

He has an income, He has a trade, a respectable trade. There isn't really a need for her to do this.

Is this about power? Then?

It is about power. It's about power that she likes to have over other people. And I think a lot of the time she's not someone who wants to exhibit this power necessarily. She doesn't want people to know what she's doing. This is a private kind of manipulation, which I think is so frightening about her.

How does she move from thievery to witchcraft?

So she does eventually train what she gets to leads around the time of her marriage as a dressmaker's assistant, and this is how she has access to the women of the town of all different ranks. And this all seems like a sort of magical spell to her. She becomes interested in people's bodies and how she might create things like ill wishes or well wishes, which are objects that can be sewn into clothing that are essentially spells that can protect you from evil, that can undo a curse that's been put on you. These are people who've come from the countryside, who are bringing their beliefs with them, and when they are faced with the stark reality of industry, it's bright lights, it's grind, it's exhaustive and exhausting nature.

They want a little bit of magic. And she works this out and she offers them this. So she eventually moves from being a servant to being a dressmaker to being a witch.

So she's selling clothes, but she's selling.

She sells all kinds. She's selling magic. Yeah, she does it with a woman on one occasion where the woman is convinced her husband is in love with someone else, and Mary says, oh, yes, it's missed such and such from two streets down. I know her, and she's about to run off with your husband. They're going to a lope tonight, actually, And if you put these two calls on her doorstep, she will see them and unquestioningly take them into her house, put them on her fire, and that night, when she lays out her brand new outfit with which she is going to wear an elope with your husband, the dress will catch fire and in the morning she will have nothing to wear and she won't be able to run away. With your husband. And there

is no woman with the dress who's going to run away. This is entirely made up. And this poor lady is so afraid of being left, you know, in a society in which the man is the main income of your household and she needs his support.

So manipulative, it's so manipulative. It's a very it's very cruel.

Yes, she is cruel. She doesn't seem to feel the pain that she inflicts, or that she is messing with these people's lives and giving them advice, and interestingly advice that they follow, because she has this ability to read them and see what they need from her, and then she completely destroys them. And that's her pattern.

And we will find out more after the break. We're back. I'm Tim Harford and I am talking to Maddie Pelling. She is the co host of the after Dark podcast, which you can find in all the usual pod places. She's also the author of a wonderful new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment. We have described this character of Mary Bateman. She is up to no good, over and over and over again. Tell me about the Kitchen Sisters.

Yes, so, Mary befriends, manipulates, finds her way into the world of the Kitchen Sisters. These are two spinster sisters living together. They have a shop. She it seems to be acting as some kind of partial living servant for them.

I would not want this woman in my house.

You wouldn't want her cleaning your windows, let alone stepping over the threshold. Now, the Kitchen Sisters, there's some debate on whether she's offering them magical services. Maybe she's reading their fortunes. They seem to be very interested in that side of her. And what we do know is that Mary is at some point solely responsible for preparing the food in their household. Now they become ill, the two sisters, and they die in quick succession. Not only this, but their mother comes from just outside Leeds to tend to them.

She eats the food in the household, and she also does eventually die. So we have pretty strange circumstances enough to be raising some red flags.

Maybe there was some infectious illness that all three of them caught. Do you think she killed them?

We are talking about an incredibly crowded environment in an industrial city in which disease was rife. However, given what we know about Mary so far and what she's going to go on to do, I think there is a very good chance that she has poisoned these sisters.

There was a doctor at the time who thinks that's true because they died so quickly.

Yes, they die very very rapidly, and very close together as well.

I am curious as to why people didn't cotton on. Leeds is not it's not a rural community where everyone knows everyone. It's a big city. But still she's living in this city and there are problems over and over again. Do people not start to join the dots?

It is truly remarkable, and I think it is testament to the way the society operates and how impersonal it was becoming and how disconnected. As early as eighteen oh three, she does a particularly strange hoax that I always find remarkable for the fact that people don't cotton on at this point. Right, she announces to the city that the apocalypse is coming. It really is, and it's bizarre that this isn't sort of called out earlier. So she takes the eggs that her chickens are laying in her yard.

She boils them. She writes on them in vinegar. Christ is coming. She misspells Christ, puts Christ, which she knows a bit.

Telling, So Christ is coming.

Christ is coming. She reinserts these eggs back into the chickens, and she charges people to come and see them being laid, and then she peels the shell off, and the writing, of course is on the boiled egg. And people do pay in their droves to come and see this.

Better tricks than the bottle contra.

There's something to look at, sure, But of course the apocalypse never does happen. And this is eighteen oh three, and the Kitchen Syster is a much later than this, And so why is she not being discovered a woman who is claiming the apocalypse is coming, who people go to because they believe she has magical powers. Eventually, you're going to be called out if the things that you're promising aren't materializing.

You would think. Let's go back to Rebecca Perigo. We met her in the introduction. She is worried that she has fallen under an evil wish.

Yeah, I mean, poor Rebecca and William Perago. They really have such a hard time. So, as you mentioned in the opening, Rebecca is feeling unwell. She has this strange feeling in her in her chest, and they go to Mary in the hope that she can help them. And immediately Mary positions herself as an intermediary with this character called miss Blythe, and there are various from Scarborough. There are various characters that she invents along her career, but miss Blythe really sticks. And the idea is that miss Blythe is sort of a witch on a slightly higher level than Mary. Mary is just doing the groundwork in Leeds, but miss Blythe has real power. And so if Rebecca gives her things like her petticoat or you know, gold

coins or this list is endless, you know, it becomes things like a round of cheese or a leg of ham. It's at one point it's a new bed with all new bedding. If these things are given to Mary, she will transport them to Scarborough and then miss Blythe will do magic and say Rebecca. And this goes on for months, and they give all their worldly goods and it really is almost everything they have over to Mary. You know, these are not wealthy people, and Rebecca is not cured. Eventually, the decision is made by Mary that she needs to put an end to this because William is starting to ask some questions. Now, I mean he's given over everything he has. There's nothing, yeah, and Rebecca is not getting any kind of improvement. And so Mary says, okay, right,

miss blythe has given me the ultimate answer. You need to eat a pie, and I'm going to provide you with some honey as well. Now, the pie is not going to taste very nice, but you must eat all of it. And because it didn't taste very nice, you must then eat the honey afterwards, just to sweeten it. You know, it'll all be fine, and then you'll feel better, both of you. All your problems will be solved, You'll be wealthy again, all these goods will come back to you.

And Rebecca and William bake the as instructed, and Mary's given them a powder to put into it, and they sit down to eat it. Now. Rebecca manages a few mouthfuls and William manages only one because it's such a bitter taste, and within minutes they are on the floor writhing in agony. Rebecca is vomiting everywhere. It takes days for Rebecca to die. She dies in hideous circumstances. Her mouth swells up her tongue swells up and turns black.

A neighbor at one point comes into their house to see what's happening because they're these screams of pain, and she describes the smell as absolutely abhorrent. Rebecca's dying in the most awful pain. William does survive. He's not well at all. He had a little bite, he only has a tiny bit, but he comes close to death.

Do we know what was in the pie? We have any idea?

So William goes to the authorities once he is buried wife, and he is absolutely heartbroken, and he comes up with an idea to catch Mary. So he gets two constables of the law to come with him.

He's finally woken up.

Yeah, he's woken up. Yes, And once he's physically well enough to confront Mary, he decides to do so. So he says that he's going to meet her on one of the canals in Leeds, and he brings these two constables and they are sort of hiding in a bush down the way and he meets her and he says, you poisoned us, You've killed my wife. You must have put some poison in it. What is it? And she says, no, no, no, no, it's just magical powder. Here's some more of it, and she has a vial of it, and she tries to sell him some more, and he calls on the constables and they come out and they arrest her, and she's holding this bottle, and even in that moment, she says, help me, help me. This man's trying to sell me

arsenic and he's like, sorry, what. And it turns out that it is in fact arsenic that she has on her person. Not only this, The two constables and William then go to her house. They drag her to the house, and inside the house they find the goods that she's taken off multiple victims, including pretty much everything the Paragos had given. She's arrested for the murder, for the possession of the arsenic and the fact that she's clearly used it on William and Rebecca, and she has taken to York jail, where she's kept over the winter, and it's an incredibly bleak winter. She's still breastfeeding one of her children who is in prison with her for this winter, and she is going to be taken to trial.

Is her husband thought to be culpable or her children. Is she thought to have acted alone or do they do some of the blame land on him.

I think because of the time that this takes place, because of the gendered expectations, there is a feeling that Mary must take the forebront of it. She is a manipulative woman.

Given what you've told me.

I mean, she's definitely not in a sense I'm not exactly. I think he must have really loved her to the extent where he is blind to a lot of her crimes. I don't think there's a world in which he didn't know what was going on, but I think he is possibly naive to it, and she is very good at keeping these things private, and that's why she is able to act for as long as she does.

So that's what you think. What do the authorities think?

John is arrested, he is put on trial, and he is found to be innocent. He is respectable enough, he's been in the militia, he's contributed to society, and also somebody has got to go home and look after the children, and Mary cannot be allowed to walk free. So he is released within days of his arrest and sent back to Leeds. But Mary has no such luck. And she really Eddi's testament to her commitment to her bit. I think that she tries to lie to the very end.

So in her trial, when there are thousands of people literally pressing into the courthouse at York, she stands up. William has given his explosive evidence, and part of the sort of damning thing that he says is that every time she wrote to him explaining what magic would be done or what they must give her, she would request that he burnt the letters. Crucially, he doesn't burn them, and so he presents the court with the evidence of her crimes. They get multiple doctors to come and test the remains of the pie, the vomit, all of these things.

Such is the pressure on everyone involved in this trial. One of the doctors who is involved in doing these tests actually he's swaying in the court room and he actually has a heart attack and dies days later. Everyone involved in this it's just so on edge.

I'm blaming Magic.

I think it's Mary clearly cursed him. Yeah, absolutely, she denies everything. And the jury, however, I mean, they can see her for what she is. There's no way that Mary is going to walk away from this, and so they pass the worst judgment. She is sentenced to be executed. So when the judge passes this sentence and says you are going to be taken from here and hanged, she pleads the belly. She says, no, wait, you can't. I'm pregnant, and don't forget she's still been feeding a baby in prison this whole time. There's a gasp that goes around the room. The judge immediately orders all the doors must be closed in the courthouse. This news must not get out to the street, and he asks for female volunteers

in the crowd to come forward and check whether or not she's pregnant. And so there's a sort of pause, and then all these women start to come forward of all different classes who've squeezed in there. And she's taken off to a side room and inspected. We don't know the nature of that inspection or the qualification of these women to make this judgment. They come back and say, no, there's no sign she's not pregnant. She can go straight to the gallows. We don't know if she was pregnant or not. She might very well have been pregnant, but it's not going to help her. And so she's taken back to her cell. There is a really moving piece of testimony actually from one of the prison guards who talks about the morning of her death, when she feeds

her baby for the final time, she puts him down on the bed in the prison cell. Her husband is then ushered into the room to take the child away, and she just places this baby down and walks away from him to the gallows, knowing she's going to die. And I often, as a new mom myself, I just think about that moment, and to me, that's the closest we can get to her humanity. I think she's a deeply inhumane person actually, and deeply cruel, and yet I have a flash of a real human There's a very.

Moving moment in your book where you describe the fact that her shift must have been soaked in milk.

Yes, absolutely, for.

This baby who she will never see again.

Yeah, exactly. And her baby is held in her husband's arms and he's surrounded by her other children as she's taken to the gallows. She's hanged. There is a sort of audible gasp again when she's hanged, because there is this belief that she is a witch and that she's going to maybe transform and fly away. Even in the early nineteenth century, the people of Yorkshire are slightly concerned that she is going to survive this.

She does not survive. She doesn't survive because she is not a witch.

Yeah, because she's a person. She's a human being. For all her deviancy and cruelty, she is an ordinary person.

So there is a lot about this story which is very distinctively of its time. But I'm curious, this is caution me tales. After all, what are the lessons that we can learn that are still relevant to us today.

I think one of the lessons comes very much from what happens to her body after she is killed. So she's taken from York to Leeds. She's placed in a rough wooden coffin on the back of a cart, and hundreds and hundreds of people line the route. And when she gets to Leads, she's taken to the anatomy school there, and the lead anatomist, William Hay, who is a bit of a showman himself and has made a career anatomizing you know, the great and good and they're not so good of leads in the surrounding area. For a fee, he over three days, places her on the slab and basically takes her apart, and it is a show. You know.

He does things like he cuts her womb out and holds it up and says, there wasn't a baby in here after all, and he takes her heart out and someone in the audience shouts, you know, oh, it's not black then, And there's real kind of dehumanizing of this person despite her crimes. You know, she is absolutely reduced to these body parts, and she is then boiled down and her bones are put on display, and those bones remained on display in Leads for what became the Thackeray Museum until twenty fifteen. I think it's remarkable that she's kept on display for as long as she was, and I think there was a power attributed to her bones.

We know that when William Hay has finished on the slab with her at the end of these three days, a lot of people in the audience shuffle up to the table and touch her remains because they are worried that she is going to come back and meet out her revenge on the people of Leads, because they still believe that she has some power. And I think this story tells us so much about people's fear. Especially in the modern world, when things are changing so fast, people look for alternative answers. It's going to give them an exit strategy and out, an excuse or some comfort in the harshness of what they're experiencing. And I think Mary offers that, and in that way she feels very modernly.

You know, she's very much akin to a lot of modern scammers today, really that she reads people. She finds what they need, what their weaknesses are, what their desires are, and she promises to deliver on that and sometimes she does deliver, right, So she's offering some kind of sucker and solace to people, but also she takes things arguably quite far, and you know, ultimately that crosses over into heinous crime. Really, so she I think she feels unusually modern despite the specific context in which we find her.

And I think the fact that she is utterly destroyed says something about the instability of that modern system that was being born in that moment, the capitalism that demands so much of everyone, that she upset that system. She undermined it, She undermined the powers of it, the hierarchy of it. She was able to make a living actively working against it, and for that she is taken apart and destroyed and obliterated. She could have just been hanged and then taken to the cemetery and interred, but she wasn't.

They had to destroy her.

They hadn't quite finished with her. Yeah, and Maddie, I'm afraid we have not quite finished with you, because our Cautionary Tales listeners have questions now that you are an expert on hoaxes, and we're going to answer them. After the break, we're back. I'm joined by Maddie Pelling, who is the co host of the after Dark podcast strongly recommended and also the author of a new book called Hoax. Maddie, with all this in mind, your hoax expertise, we've asked our listeners to send in questions. Are you ready to answer a few?

I'm ready, far away right.

So Stewart got in touch. He had a story about his aunt who bore what he calls a magic healing box. I think he had that firmly in quotation marks. So it was supposed to emit some healing energy to heal your DNA. In fact, well, when he looked at it, it's just a low budget PC which scrolls colorful text up and down, so probably cost a couple of hundred dollars to make. Stuart's aunt was charged fifteen thousand dollars, and Stuart says his aunt thought it must be good because if it costs fifteen thousand dollars, it must be good.

So Stuart asks, this is all about the importance of the story. He asks, what are the most impactful parts of a scammer's story? What is it about the story that really fools us?

I think it's got to be that it offers people hope. Right, There's this sense that if you go down this road, something good will happen that you cannot materialize elsewhere in your life. You need this one person, the thing that they're offering. And I think that's what's so powerful about Mary Bateman and a lot of the other people in my book actually is that they look at what is missing in the world around them and in the lives of people around them, and they offer that exact thing, whether it's entertainment, whether it's a route out of a dire situation, whatever it is. As is the case with Mary, really that there's a pretense of expertise of authority of you know, if something cost enough, it is therefore going

to be legitimate. There's a legitimacy there, and I think it's always hard to distinguish. And I think it certainly is in the period that I look at, when the very idea of knowledge is being developed constantly, and who gets to be knowledgeable and who is not knowledgeable or authoritative is changing. And I think that's true in our modern time as well, right, you know, with the Internet, with you know, how people present themselves, the people that can become online in particular coped to in real life.

I think there is a lot of danger in the sort of impersonation of authority and expertise. Actually, I have a question for you, Tim from Elane, and she says, are there any stories about scammers or hoaxes who redeem themselves They pull a scammer hoax and then they later rethink their actions. Can you think of anyone like that?

So, definitely stories about scammers who are redeemed by others, who become heroes. So one is the Captain of Kopenick, one of our very first cautionary tales. He became a folk hero. He steals a lot of money and he terrifies a bunch of people, but everybody just thinks of him as an amiable scoundrel. I think he served some time, but then he was forgiven by the Kaiser and it just became this folk hero and this idea of somebody who'd punctured authority, and it kind of deserved to be punctured.

Another one that we covered in Cautionary Tales is han Van Meg. So he was an art forger and he forged vermires. But when he was caught, he was arrested at the end of the war and he was charged with selling a vermire to the Nazis to Gurring, and this is basically treason. You sold the Dutch treasure to the Nazis. And the Dutch has kind of not really they're not really in the mood nineteen forty five. They've had a rough time and there's a lot of kind of scores being settled, and he says to Goring it was a forgery, it was a vun magran. And so there's this grand trial where he proves that he's that he's forged all these paintings, and he's he's forced to paint more of them to and he just plays everybody

like a violin and he's he's basically in the end he's convicted of forgery. I mean he he's effectively conned people out of an awful lot of money, include and not just Nazis. He was the most popular man in the Netherlands. And then he died of a heart attack before he served jail time. But Jonathan Lopez, who worked it's amazing biography of Van Megrn, It's like, all of that, that's the real contract. That story is the contract. Van Megran was a Nazi. There's a there's a book, a von Megrn book in Hitler's library dedicated to my beloved fura Han van Meglen. He's like, oh, someone must have forged that. Yeah, right, a very very unpleasant character who spent all this money turring parties for Nazi officials, hiring

lots of prostitutes at a time when the people of Amsterdam were starving. So it's more common, I think for hoaxes to have their reputations redeemed when in fact the hoax of themselves is not redeemed. I got on for you, okay. So Kazwin, who is a member of our Cautionary Club and thus rightly deserves priority. Absolutely a case when got in touch via Patreon to ask when Thomas Jefferson had his ex vice president, Aaron Burr prosecuted for conspiracy. The main evidence in the case was a letter that later proved to have been forged. So what other forgeries or scams have been employed in cutthroat, top level politics and did they work well?

I mean, the eighteenth century is just full of fraud and forgeries at every level. There's certainly in the Court of Georgia. Third, there's constant forgeries going on where people are sort of claiming, you know, oh, this minister has said this about me or said this about the king and then say no, no, no, I never wrote that. And there's a great case which I'm not I think it's a Swedish case in the eighteenth century called the X Y Z case, and it's basically referring to three spies known as X, Y and Z, who all are they sort of accused of each other of various nefarious goings on, and their correspondence is all forged. And it's this thing you're sort of talking about there in the previous question

about when there is a lie built on a lie, built on a lie, and the hoax that then we'll say, well, this wasn't true, and this was true, and I did this, and I did that, and the layers of that become so complicated.

It's like scam movies.

Yes, and then at the end there'll be just a little twist and you're like, oh, it was all fake along, oh it was all true or something, you know. And I think there's so much of that. I would wager that there are forgeries to be found at the highest levels of government throughout history. Surely I have a question for you. Okay, this is from Jared. He says, I'm a fan of cautionary tales and After Dark, which is lovely like a crossover. You've been spending your time in the right way. Jared, absolutely, yes, excellent taste. He says, it seems that our fascination with past hoaxes contains a certain amount of schadenfreuder. We like to hear about others who got fooled, while we assure ourselves we were never have

been taken in What did Tim and Maddie think? Tim, would you have fallen for Mary Bateman?

It's easy to say no, right, it's easy to say no. I think that one of the reasons why I find these stories of hoaxes so interesting is because they do tell us what it is that people fall for, what parts of the story that people fall for. So with the Captain of Kerpenick, it's the it's the uniform, it's the time pressure, like there was someone in a uniform shouting at you you don't have time.

The appearance of authority.

Yeah, at other times it's wishful thinking. So with Han von Megalon, he approached an art critic called Abraham Bradius, who had his entire life he had a theory that Vermiir had gone to Italy, had seen Caravaggio's paintings, had been influenced by them, and had a religious phase. There wasn't that much, ever for any of this, but Van Magrin painted a Caravaggio inspired for Mia. So when he showed this to Gradius, he wasn't just showing him a painting and saying, you know, do you think this is a real vermir He was showing Bradius that the old man had been right his entire life. And that's very powerful.

So I hope that when people look at these stories. They realize what buttons have been pressed and what levers have been pulled. But I agree with Jared's question that it is very easy to just go well, there's something about like it's like watching somebody slip on a banana skin, right, there is that comedy of someone.

Else's Yeah, we're glad it's not us.

You, We're glad it's not us. But you have to realize, yeah, if you had been there and you had stepped, you would also have slipped on the banana skin.

We are all products of our own context and our own ignorances and will will be taken in by something I think.

Thank you so much, Maddie. It's been so good to have you on the show. I've been speaking to Maddie pelling. Her new book is Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment. Maddie, that's been brilliant. You're obviously a natural at podcasting. Tell us about your podcast after Dinner.

Yes, I have done it before. Yes, I am the co host of After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, which is a history hit podcast that I do with doctor Anthony Delaney, and we cover all kinds of dark histories, mysteries from the past. We love a ghost story, we love a shipwreck, but we crucially bring a historical, rigorous lens to look at some of these strange occurrences.

Definite overlap with the interests of course Newtaiales listeners. So if you many of you will will have already subscribed to after Dark, but if not, do subscribe as an added inducement. If it is an added inducement, I have just recorded an episode with Anthony and Maddie of After Dark talking about one of my very very favorite episodes of cause.

Oh it's such a good story.

So subscribe, tune in you'll hear it round about the same time that this conversation is released. Maddie, thank you again.

Thank you. Tim.

Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio and Dan Jackson. Bend A. Daf Haffrey edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and reviews make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only newsletter every month. Why not join the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club. That's Patreon, p A, t R, e o N dot com Slash Cautionary Club

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