Vox Meditantis

What book are you reading right now?

Wednesday, 15th November 1780

May it please your Worships, and all assembled here this Wednesday the fifteenth day of November, in this year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and fourscore – I stand before you, a poor woman, worn down by the very passage of time itself, and I do most humbly throw myself upon your mercy and your good judgement.

You see before you, sirs, not a hardened wretch, but one who has been ensnared – yes, ensnared as surely as a sparrow in a fowler’s net – by necessity and by the cruel spinning of Fortune’s wheel. I am eight-and-thirty years of age, your Worships, and I confess freely that the bloom of youth has long since fled from these cheeks. Time, that great leveller, has dealt harshly with me, and I have felt the weight of every passing year, every turn of the season, every chime of the clock that brings me closer to – well, to whatever end awaits us all.

They say I am a coiner, a maker of false shillings and base guineas. They say I have clipped the King’s good money and passed counterfeit notes with a brazen face. And I will not lie to your Worships – for what would be the use of lies now, when Truth herself stands as my only possible advocate? – I have done these things. But consider, I beseech you, how a woman of my years, without husband or protector, without trade or inheritance, is to sustain herself in these changing times. The price of bread rises, the cost of coals increases, and what was sufficient ten years ago will scarce buy a loaf today. Everything shifts and alters; nothing remains constant save our need for sustenance.

I have read much in my time, your Worships, though I know it may surprise you to hear it. A woman in my station is not always illiterate, though many assume we must be. There is a small book – a chapbook, rather – that has been ever before my eyes these past months. ‘Tis called The Malefactor’s Register, a sorry catalogue of those who have stood where I stand now. I purchased it for tuppence from a hawker in Holborn, and I have pored over its pages by candlelight, reading of those who were caught in the same net as I. Each tale is a mirror held up to my own folly. Each confession echoes my own predicament. I read it still, even now, though it brings me no comfort – only the cold knowledge that I am not the first to weave such a web, nor shall I be the last to be caught fast within it.

For that is what we do, is it not, your Worships? We weavers of deceit, we spinners of false metal and fraudulent paper – we cast our webs wide, thinking ourselves clever spiders who shall catch prosperity and escape notice. But the web we weave becomes our own snare. The net we cast for others entangles our own limbs. I thought myself cunning, I confess it freely. I thought I could alter the very substance of things – base metal into silver, common paper into valuable notes – and that time itself would not catch up with me. But time catches all of us, does it not? Time and justice, working together like warp and weft.

I do not ask your Worships to excuse my crimes. I know full well the gravity of what I have done. The coinage of the realm is sacred; to debase it is to strike at the very foundation of trade and trust. I have injured not merely the Crown, but every honest tradesman, every goodwife who receives a false coin in payment, every labourer who finds his wages diminished by the admixture of base metal in the currency. I have been a canker in the body politic, a worm in the fruit. This I acknowledge with a contrite heart.

But consider, your Worships – and here I throw myself entirely upon your compassion and your wisdom – consider how the times have changed. What was once a thriving household is now reduced to penury. What was once a modest competence is now insufficient. I have seen friends reduced to beggary, neighbours turned into the street, honest folk driven to desperate expedients. The old certainties have crumbled away like ancient parchment, and we must all adapt or perish. I adapted poorly, I confess it. I chose the crooked path when I ought to have chosen the straight, however hard and thorny it might be.

Your Worships, I have been thinking much upon time and change in the days since my apprehension. How swift the hours pass when one is awaiting judgement! How slow they crawl when one is confined! I have counted every chime of the church bells, every footfall in the corridor outside my cell. Time, which once seemed my servant – for I thought I had time to profit from my schemes, time to cease my wicked trade before discovery – time has proved my master after all. And now I have so little of it left, perhaps, that every moment becomes precious.

I speak to you thus humbly, thus ingratiating myself as best I can, because I know that my fate rests in your hands. I am like one caught in a net, struggling only to entangle myself more thoroughly. Every word I speak may serve to tighten the web about me. Yet I must speak, for silence would be worse than speech, and I must hope – I must dare to hope – that somewhere in your breasts there beats a heart that can feel pity for a woman who has erred grievously, but who is not beyond all redemption.

The clock strikes even now, your Worships. Do you hear it? Each stroke is like the beating of my own heart, marking the passage of the moments that remain to me. I have lived eight-and-thirty years, and I have wasted too many of them in wickedness. If your Worships see fit to extend mercy – if you judge that I might yet have time to mend my ways, to live honestly, to make such poor reparation as lies within my power – then I swear to you, I swear by all that is sacred, that I shall spend every remaining hour in honest labour and in contrition for my sins.

But I know that justice must be served, and I know that mercy is a gift, not a right. I have cast my net and been caught in it. I have woven my web and been trapped by my own design. The change I sought to bring about – turning base into precious, false into true – has brought about instead the change in my own fortune, from liberty to captivity, from hope to fear. Time has had its revenge upon me for thinking I could cheat it, for thinking I could prosper by fraud whilst the honest world toiled honourably.

I have said what I came to say, your Worships. I am in your hands, as I am in the hands of that greater Judge who sees all hearts and knows all secrets. I ask only that you remember I am human, subject to all the frailties of flesh, and that the passage of years has already begun to exact its own punishment upon this mortal frame. Time changes all things, and perhaps – if I am granted time – it might change even me, from a maker of false coin into one who deals truly with her fellows.

I thank your Worships for your patience in hearing me, and I await your judgement with such fortitude as I can muster.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.