Famous Impostors

Bram Stoker spent his last years collecting history's great frauds: pretenders to thrones, alchemists and witch-finders, the Tichborne Claimant — and the strange Cotswold legend that Queen Elizabeth was really a boy.

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The Rogues’ Gallery

The best frauds in a book written by the man who invented Dracula.

Bram Stoker spent his last years on real monsters instead of invented ones. These are the strangest true things in the file — each one linking to the case it came from.

  1. The Tichborne Claimant's cross-examination alone lasted twenty-two days, and the trial 102 — a butcher from Wagga Wagga holding the witness box against the future Lord Chief Justice.Read it: Arthur Orton: Claimant
  2. The Claimant's whole case rested on a shipwreck: the Bella sailed from Rio on 20 April 1854, and six days later another ship found her capsized long-boat floating with the name still on it. Everyone aboard was presumed drowned — which is exactly what made the role available.Read it: Arthur Orton: Bella
  3. Stoker's verdict on Doctor Dee, Queen Elizabeth's astrologer and the most notorious wizard in England: “more sinned against than sinning.” But for a few crooked bye-paths, he writes, Dee would rank among the sincerest scientists of his age.Read it: Doctor Dee
  4. Dee was fifty-four when he met Edward Kelley, twenty-eight years his junior — and every occult longing he had held in check for a lifetime promptly found expression. It ruined him.Read it: Doctor Dee: Kelley
  5. The Chevalier d'Éon was exiled by France yet paid for it: Louis XV granted him a pension of 12,000 livres and explained that the exile existed only to disguise the protection.Read it: Chevalier D'Eon: D'Eon
  6. When d'Éon's friends negotiated his return to France, the ministers attached one condition — that he come home in women's clothes. He refused, twice, in 1770 and 1772.Read it: Chevalier D'Eon: England
  7. Cagliostro was born Joseph Balsamo, to poor parents in Palermo, in 1743. Stoker's diagnosis of the career that followed: luck supplied what talent lacked, “and such luck had to be paid for at the devil's usual price.”Read it: Cagliostro
  8. Cagliostro let it be understood that he had entered Mecca and Medina disguised as an Oriental prince — one of the few claims in his repertoire nobody could conveniently check.Read it: Cagliostro: Althotas
  9. The Diamond Necklace affair ended with Jeanne de la Motte sentenced to be whipped, branded with a V on both shoulders, and imprisoned for life. The scandal is often blamed for helping bring down the French monarchy.Read it: Cagliostro: Rohan
  10. Mesmer took roughly 340,000 livres from his subscribers — over a million in Stoker's own day — for a treatment whose apparatus was advertised as having magic properties.Read it: Mesmer: Government
  11. Mesmer's society had house rules: a member had to be twenty-five, of honest state and good name, pay sixty francs a year, and not smoke tobacco.Read it: Mesmer: Government
  12. Stoker includes Mesmer among the impostors while conceding his discovery was real — the fraud was in the staging, not the science.Read it: Mesmer
  13. Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-Finder General, is the one man in the book Stoker cannot forgive: worse than any witch, because his was “oppression in the guise of good” — a living made from manufactured suspicion.Read it: Matthew Hopkins
  14. Hannah Snell put on men's clothes in 1743 to hunt for the sailor husband who had deserted her, and ended up serving as a marine — wounds, pension and all.Read it: Hannah Snell
  15. The Bisley Boy tradition holds that the child Elizabeth died at Bisley and a boy was substituted — and that the boy reigned forty-five years as the Virgin Queen. Stoker gives it his entire final chapter and does not laugh it off.Read it: Bisley
  16. Bisley's other claim on history: it was a centre of scarlet dyeing, and produced Giles Gobelin, whose family name still hangs on the Gobelin tapestries.Read it: Bisley: Henry
  17. Thomas Seymour — brother of the Lord Protector — had designs on marrying the young Princess Elizabeth. He lost his head in 1549; the episode shadows the whole Bisley story.Read it: Bisley: Thomas
  18. The Tichborne family claimed to have held their manor two hundred years before the Norman Conquest. The documented line begins with one Walter de Tichborne, about 1135.Read it: Arthur Orton: Tichborne
  19. Burglars who broke into a house on a tip about a strongbox got away clean with their prize, opened it, and found a lump of lead. The intended victim had been expecting them.Read it: Hoaxed Burglars
  20. The bogus-sausage hoax ended with frying pans out all along a row of railway houses and a sizzling that, Stoker notes drily, never should have been heard.Read it: Bogus Sausages
  21. Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin has a real woman behind it — a singer, duellist and abductor of nuns whose actual career Stoker thought needed no embellishment at all.Read it: La Maupin
  22. La Voisin's fortune-telling business was uncannily accurate about which husbands would die soon — a mystery the Chambre Ardente, France's Star Chamber, eventually solved. She was burned in 1680.Read it: La Voisin: Madame
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