AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED by the RABID ANTI-CATHOLIC REVEREND WILLIAM K. HOYT to the editor of the Police Gazette regarding accusations of "swindling". by Hoyt, Reverend William K - 1850.

An anti-Catholic Protestant minister in New York, the Reverend William K. Hoyt published sensationalistic claims made by Maria Monk in a nativist periodical, the "American Protestant Vindicator". Several of the stories were probably fabricated by Hoyt. They were subsequently published in a book entitled "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk", a work supposedly written by her. A young prostitute, Maria Monk had been confined in the Charitable Institution for Female Penitents by her mother. Her behavior having led to her expulsion, Maria ran off to the United States with the Reverend Hoyt. The book, supposedly narrated by Maria Monk to the Reverend John Jay Slocum, claimed she'd been a nun at the Hotel-Dieu convent in Montreal. According to the book and stories, Maria supposedly claimed that nuns were forced to have intercourse with priests and she had witnessed a nun being killed for resisting a priest's advances and that babies born to the nuns were strangled and buried in the convent's basement. Pregnant when she arrived in New York, which was not a surprising condition for a prostitute in the 19th Century, the book claimed that the father was the Abbe Patrick Phelan. The stories played into the anti-Catholic nativist's convictions of the period. The appearance of another supposed nun who was said to have also fled from the convent, drew even more attention. The tales of secret passages, scandalous behavior and crimes at the Hotel-Dieu convent came under investigation by journalists, including the American journalist William Leete Stone, who very quickly recognized the lie after gaining access to the convent. Stone wrote that "After 10 minutes the imposture had become as plain as day. I now declare more openly than ever that neither Maria Monk nor Francis Partridge have ever set foot in the convent of Hotel Dieu". Meanwhile, the Reverend Hoyt and his cohorts had pocketed most of the profits from the best seller and additional sensational books which supposedly related Maria's experiences as a nun were published. Interest in the Monk affair finally declined after a Protestant organization was given permission to visit the Hotel-Dieu and Iles des Soeurs. In 1849 Maria Monk was arrested in a "house of ill repute" for stealing from her "client" and, incarcerated in a New York prison. She died there that Summer.

A rare letter from one of the 19th century's most notorious charlatans.