The Chronicles of Newgate (Vol. 1&2). Griffiths Arthur
and he himself, accompanied by the Duke of Monmouth and others, made a close search, which ended in the arrest of Vratz in the house of a Swedish doctor, in Leicester Fields. His accomplices were also soon taken, and all three were examined by the King in Council, when they confessed that they had done the deed at the instigation of Count Konigsmark, “who was lately in England.”[75] At the same time a Monsieur Foubert, who kept an “Academy” in London, which a younger brother of Count Konigsmark attended, was arrested as being privy to the murder, admitted that the elder brother had “arrived incognito ten days before the said murder, and lay disguised till it was committed, which gave great cause to suspect that the Count was at the bottom of the whole bloody affair.”[76] The King despatched Sir John Reresby to seize Konigsmark, “but the bird had flown; he went away betimes, on the morning of the day after the deed was perpetrated.”[77] He went down the river to Deptford, then to Greenwich, and the day after to Gravesend, where he was taken by two King’s messengers, accompanied by “Mr. Gibbons, servant to the Duke of Monmouth, and Mr. Kidd, gentleman to Mr. Thynne.” He was dressed “in a very mean habit, under which he carried a naked sword.” When seized he gave a sudden start, so that his wig fell off, and the fact that he wore a wig, instead of his own hair as usual, was remembered against him at his trial, as an attempt at disguise. The Count was carried to an inn in Gravesend, where he expressed very great concern when he heard that his men had confessed; declaring that it (the murder) was a stain upon his blood, “although one good action in the wars, or lodging on a counterscarp, would wash all that away.” His captors received the £200 reward, promised in the Gazette, and in addition the £500 offered by Sir Thomas Thynne, Mr. Thynne’s heir.
They carried him at once to London, before the King in Council, where he was examined, but the Council being unwilling to meddle on account of his quality, as connected with the kingdom of Sweden, he was then taken before Chief Justice Pemberton, who could, if he thought fit, send him to gaol. He was examined again till eleven at night, and at last, “much against the Count’s desire,” committed him to Newgate. He stood upon his innocency, and confessed nothing, yet “people are well satisfied that he is taken.”[78] While in Newgate, Count Konigsmark was lodged in the governor’s house, and was daily visited by persons of quality. Great efforts were now made to obtain his release. The M. Foubert, already mentioned, came to Sir John Reresby, and offered him any money to withdraw from the prosecution, but the overtures were stoutly rejected, and his emissary was warned to be cautious “how he made any offers to pervert justice.” A more effectual attempt at bribery was probably made on the jury, of whom the prisoner challenged eighteen. He had their names on a list, and knew beforehand whom he could or could not trust. The Judge, Lord Chief Justice Pemberton, was also clearly in his favour. The defence set up was that Vratz had taken upon himself to avenge an affront offered by Mr. Thynne to his master, and Count Konigsmark denied all knowledge of his follower’s action. The Count tried to explain the privacy in which he lived, and his sudden flight. But the counsel for the prosecution laid great stress on the intimacy between him and the murderers; the absence of any object on the part of the latter, unless instigated by the former. The Chief Justice, however, summed up for the Count, assuring the jury that a master could not be held responsible for the acts of his servants, if ignorant of them, and that if they thought the Count knew nothing of the murder till after it was done, they must acquit him. Which they did, “to the no small wonder of the auditory,” as Luttrell says, “as more than probable good store of guineas went amongst them.” Konigsmark was set at liberty at the end of the trial, but before his discharge he was bound in heavy securities, in £2000 himself, and £2000 from two friends, to appear at the King’s Bench bar the first day of the following term. “Yet notwithstanding, the Count is gone into France, and it is much doubted whether he will return to save his bail.”[79] After his departure he was challenged by Lord Cavendish and Lord Mordaunt, but no duel came off, Konigsmark declaring that he never received the cartel till too late. His agents or accomplices, or whatever they may be called, were convicted and executed.[80]
Count Konigsmark did not long survive Mr. Thynne, nor did he succeed in winning Lady Ogle’s hand. That doubly widowed yet virgin wife presently married the Duke of Somerset, by whom she had two sons. As for Konigsmark, according to the ‘Amsterdam Historical Dictionary,’ quoted in Chambers’ ‘Book of Days,’ he resumed the career of arms, and was wounded at Cambray in 1683. He afterwards went to Spain with his regiment, and distinguished himself on several occasions; after that he accompanied an uncle Otto William to the Morea, where he was present at the battle of Argas. In this action he so overheated himself that he was seized with pleurisy, and died at the early age of twenty-seven, within little more than four years of the murder of Mr. Thynne. It was another Count Konigsmark, near relative of this, Count Philip, whose guilty intrigue with Sophia Dorothea, wife of George I., when Elector of Hanover, led to his assassination in the Electoral palace.
In the foregoing the softer sex were either victims or the innocent incentives to crime. In the case of that clever and unscrupulous impostor Mary Moders, otherwise Carelton, commonly called the German Princess, it was exactly the opposite. The daughter of a chorister in Canterbury Cathedral, she married first a shoemaker; then, dissatisfied with her lot, ran off to Dover and committed bigamy with a doctor. She was apprehended for this, tried, and acquitted for want of evidence. She next passed over into Holland, and went the round of the German spas, at one of which she encountered a foolish old gentleman of large estate, who fell in love with her and offered marriage. She accepted his proposals and presents; but having cajoled him into intrusting her with a large sum to make preparations for the wedding, she absconded to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, where she took ship and came over to London. Alighting at the Exchange Tavern, kept by a Mr. King, she assumed the state and title of a princess, giving herself out as the ill-used child of Count Henry Van Wolway, a sovereign prince of the empire. John Carelton, a brother-in-law of her landlord’s, at once, “in the most dutiful and submissive manner,” paid his addresses to her, and she at last condescended to marry him. Carelton was presently undeceived by an anonymous letter, which proved his wife to be a cheat and impostor. The princess was arrested, committed to Newgate, and tried for polygamy at the Old Bailey, but was a second time acquitted. On her release, deserted by Carelton, she took to the stage, and gained some reputation, especially in a piece written for her entitled the ‘German Princess.’ Her fame spread through the town, and she was courted by numberless admirers, two of whom she played off against each other; and having fleeced both of several hundred pounds, flouted them for presuming to make love to a princess. Another victim to her wiles was an elderly man, “worth about £400 per annum,” who loaded her with gifts; he was “continually gratifying her with some costly present or another, which she took care to receive with an appearance of being ashamed he should heap so many obligations on her, telling him she was not worthy of so many favours.”[81] One night when her lover came home in liquor, she got him to bed, and when he was asleep rifled his pockets, securing his keys and a bill on a goldsmith for a hundred pounds. Opening all his escritoires and drawers, she stole everything, gold pieces, watches, seals, and several pieces of plate, and then made off. After this she led a life of vagabondage, moving her lodgings constantly, and laying her hands on all she could steal. She was adroit in deceiving tradesmen, and swindled first one and then another out of goods. At last she was arrested for stealing a silver tankard in Covent Garden, and committed again to Newgate. This time she was found guilty and cast for death, but the sentence was commuted to transportation. She was sent in due course to Jamaica, but within a couple of years escaped from the plantations, and reappeared in England. By some means she managed to pass off as a rich heiress, and inveigled a rich apothecary into marriage, but presently robbed him of above £300 and left him. Her next trick was to take a lodging in the same house with a watchmaker. One night she invited the landlady and the watchmaker to go to the play, leaving her maid, who was a confederate, alone in the house. The maid lost no time in breaking open the watchmaker’s coffers, and stole therefrom thirty watches, with about two hundred pounds in cash, which she carried off to a secure place in another part of the town. Meanwhile the “princess” had invited her dupes to supper at the Green Dragon Tavern in Fleet Street, where she managed to give them the slip and joined her maid. This was one of the last of her robberies. Soon afterwards fate overtook her quite by accident. The keeper of the Marshalsea, in search of some stolen property, came to the house where she lodged, in New Spring Gardens, and saw her “walking in the two-pair-of-stairs room