Protestant Exiles from France/Book First - Chapter 15 - Du Moulin
Du Moulin.
Among the notes of one of Charles II.’s Crown Counsel was found the case of a French refugee, Jacques du Moulin, who was sentenced to death, and would have been executed if proof of his innocence had been withheld for a very few days. One of a gang of coiners, in the disguise of a footman out of place, called on Du Moulin, who was a family man and a dealer in Custom-house goods; and he was forthwith hired as a servant. This man purchased a key, by means of which he frequently opened Du Moulin’s drawers, took some of the gold, and replaced it with pieces of his own coinage. Whenever Du Moulin discovered counterfeit money in his repositories he took it to his customers; and remembering where he had laid each sum when paid to him, he insisted that he had received the rejected pieces from them. They had no alternative but to replace them with good money, but made loud and severe complaints, which spread so widely that Du Moulin raised an action against a customer for defamation. The defendant retorting by a criminal information, Du Moulin was apprehended. The footman, knowing that the officers would make a search, introduced some of his coins and coining apparatus into his master’s drawers, where they were seized, and further search was deemed unnecessary. Upon this evidence Du Moulin was convicted; but while he was in the condemned cell the wife of one of the coiners, being at the point of death, betrayed the gang, one of whom thereupon became king’s evidence, and saved Du Moulin’s life and character. (Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. xxiv., p. 404.)