the university. To protect the secret, they cut themselves off from friends and family. Only the conspirators knew who they were. From then on, Margaret always wore an overcoat and lied about her age to avoid questions about her smooth chin and high voice. Her graduation in 1812, though no one suspected it at the time, made her the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain.
As for the question of her baby, it seems likely that it was conceived as a result of her relationship with Lord Charles Somerset, governor of the Cape Colony. Their close friendship had given rise to rumors of a gay affair at the time, and Barry made an unexplained excursion to Mauritius for several months where it is possible she gave birth. No record of the fate of the child has survived and her mother, of course, never even so much as hinted at its existence.
It’s barely credible that such a successful and public individual managed to conceal the secret of her sex for more than sixty years. The pressure to keep up appearances must have been extraordinary, and her aggressive demeanor part of that front. Once dismissed as a transvestite, or some sort of intersexual freak, neither description does justice to this astonishing person. Man enough to flirt with women, and feminine enough to give birth to her lover’s child, James Barry must rank as the most successful impostor of all time.
A single change of identity was enough to last Margaret Bulkley for a lifetime, but Ignacz Trebitsch Lincoln (1879–1943) seems to have suffered from multiple personality disorder. He was variously an actor, arms dealer, post-office worker, oil speculator, British Liberal MP, vicar, and German spy. His spiritual loyalties were even looser than those of Titus Oates, veering from Judaism to Presbyterianism, working as an Anglican missionary, and finally ending up as a Buddhist monk. Like Oates, he combined a desperate desire for recognition with a breathtaking dishonesty. Unlike Oates, he was also highly intelligent and immensely likable.
Ignacz Trebitsch was born in the small town of Paks in central Hungary, one of at least fourteen children. The scant attention he received no doubt explains much of his future behavior. In 1895, his family moved to Budapest and the sixteen-year-old Trebitsch enrolled at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Dramatic Art. He lied to get in and dropped out after a year. Falsehood and inability to stick to one course were to be the hallmarks of his career. At eighteen, pursued by the police for stealing a gold watch, Trebitsch fled abroad. He spent almost no time in his homeland again. As his biographer Bernard Wasserstein put it: “Travel for Trebitsch was not a source of amusement or of intellectual enrichment; it was a disease.”
In London, he met the Reverend Lypshytz of the Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews. Trebitsch had been raised as an Orthodox Jew and was woefully short of cash, so he knew at once what to do. The prospect of a regular income as a Presbyterian missionary was easily enough to induce him to convert to Christianity. Sent to Montreal, Canada, he squandered large amounts of the society’s money without denting the religious persuasion of anyone. In 1901 he married Margarethe Kahlor, the daughter of a German sea captain, and brought her back to England, where she had four sons and he spent her inheritance. He served briefly as an Anglican curate in Appledore in Kent—just forty miles from Bobbing, where the Reverend Oates had enraged his flock—adding the word
In 1904 I. T. T. Lincoln, as he now styled himself, failed the exams for the priesthood and started casting around for gainful employment. His eye fell on Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, Quaker philanthropist, Liberal grandee, and confectionery magnate. Expertly charming his way into Rowntree’s affections, Trebitsch Lincoln got himself appointed as his research assistant for a book he was planning on poverty in Belgium. The work involved frequent visits to the Continent and the linguistically gifted Trebitsch was ideal. He set to the task with alacrity, using Rowntree’s name, money, and access to British embassies around Europe to live life to the full, and supplementing his already generous income (or so he later claimed) by moonlighting as a German double agent.
The innocent Rowntree was impressed by his energy, and it occurred to him he was just the sort of person Britain needed as an MP. He used his influence with the Liberal Party to take him on as candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Darlington: The only Hungarian citizen ever to be formally adopted by a major British political party. Hurriedly securing British naturalization, Mr. Ignatius Lincoln stood in the general election of January 1910. Endorsed by his fellow Liberals Churchill and Lloyd George, and delivering his speeches in a thick Hungarian accent, he ridiculed his opponent’s trade policy by claiming it was forcing Germans to eat their own dogs. To everybody’s amazement, he won. Though by only the slender margin of twenty-nine votes, it was an astounding achievement: The sitting Unionist MP was Herbert Pike Pease, a prominent local figure whose family had founded the Stockton and Darlington railway and who basically owned the town. Lincoln’s victory earned him a cartoon in
This freed him to concentrate on a more straightforward career as a fraudster. With financial backing from the unsuspecting Rowntree, he floated a series of public corporations to exploit oil wells in central Europe, raising large amounts of investment on the stock market, not repaying borrowed money, and ruining the shareholders in the companies he started, all of which collapsed. Desperate, he resorted to forgery to obtain further loans, but by 1914 he was bankrupt again.
When World War I broke out, Trebitsch Lincoln, as a former Austro-Hungarian citizen with a German wife, found himself in an awkward situation. He was also fearful of arrest, lest his forgeries be discovered. Never one to take the easy option, he decided he would become a spy—ideally as a double agent in a neutral country.
He didn’t mind who took him on. He offered his services to the British first, but they ignored him. He then went to Holland and tried the Germans. The Germans were dubious, but decided to give him a go. So he returned to England and promptly offered to sell German secret codes (that he didn’t have) to the British. While he was getting nowhere with them, his past caught up with him (as he had feared it would) and he had to leave in a hurry for the United States to avoid arrest for fraud. Here he sold his story to the papers: the British MP turned German master spy.
Infuriated by his antics, the British government sought his extradition, and Trebitsch was arrested by the Americans and packed off back to London. While in prison awaiting trial, he was given a job in the censor’s office at Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, reading mail written in German. He was taken there and back each day in a prison van. Making friends with his guards, on the way home one evening, he somehow persuaded them it would be a good idea if they all stopped off for a drink. So while the guards went to the bar, Trebitsch went to the bathroom and escaped out of the window.
He went on the run, making his way back to the States and supporting himself by writing yet more brazen (and largely fictitious) accounts of his spying career for the newspapers. The British, after much difficulty and a series of fiascos involving the U.S. federal police and the Pinkerton detective agency, managed to track him down and extradite him a second time. He stood trial and was sentenced to three years for fraud, which he served in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. In 1919, having done his time, he was stripped of his British citizenship and deported to mainland Europe.
He headed for Germany, where the extreme right-wing journalist Wolfgang Kapp and a cadre of anti-Semitic former German army officers were plotting the overthrow of the Weimar Republic. Trebitsch, with his effortless ability to get on with absolutely anybody, was appointed press officer to the group, in which capacity he met the young Hitler. With his fellow Nazi Dietrich Eckart, Hitler had flown to Berlin intending to join the coup. But on catching sight of Trebitsch’s distinctly Jewish physiognomy, so the tale goes, the deal was off. “Come on, Adolf,” said Eckart. “We have no further business here.” Another version casts Trebitsch in an even more pivotal historic role: It is said that he saved Hitler’s life by bundling him onto a plane as he was about to be arrested.
The putsch took place in 1920, when Kapp and six thousand German naval commandos under General Walther von Luttwitz marched on Berlin. The occupation was short-lived (the rebels were brought down in less than a week by a general strike) but, for a brief glorious moment, Mr. Ignatius Lincoln was minister of information—the only former British MP ever to serve as a member of a German government. The revolt having failed, Trebitsch went south and took refuge in Munich, the heartland of fascism. There he devoted himself to Byzantine intrigues with extreme right-wingers in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In Budapest he became involved with a loose alliance of rabid monarchists and fervent anticommunists known as the White International. Many of its members were so murderously anti-Semitic that they preferred to avoid delegation and personally kill Jews, but Trebitsch, as ever, charmed them all. After which, true to form, he betrayed them, selling their secret plans to the Czechoslovak government. Because of his reputation, no one but the Czechs believed that the (for once) genuine documents were
