The Bank of England's own 1969 history does not corroborate a 1695 counterfeiting date, and a named secondary source dates the first forged note to 1758 instead

claim-bank-of-england-adopted-watermarked-banknote-paper-1697 rests on an American Banker trade feature stating the Bank's notes "were counterfeited in 1695," which prompted the paper's move to watermarked stock. A direct read of the Bank's own institutional history — the 1969 Quarterly Bulletin article "The Bank of England note: a short history," drawing on the standard Clapham and Acres scholarship — mentions forgery only in general terms, that later notes were "introduced for various reasons, not least so that forgery should be made more difficult." No year is attached, and no specific 1695 episode appears.

A different source narrows the gap in the opposite direction: Walter Thornbury's Old and New London, vol. 1 (1878; attribution corrected on audit 2026-07-24 — the capture credited Edward Walford, who wrote the series' later volumes), digitized by British History Online, states plainly that the first forged Bank of England note was presented by "Richard William Vaughan, a Stafford linendraper... in the year 1758" — eighty-one years after the Bank's founding, sixty-three years after the disputed 1695 date. The two claims cannot both describe "the first" forgery. Thornbury is Victorian antiquarian secondary work, Tier 3–4, so 1758 is recorded here as contested rather than adopted — but its existence is enough to show 1695 is not the settled fact the trade-press retelling implies.

Verification remains routed at question-verify-bank-of-england-1697-watermark-adoption-primary; the 1694 founding and the general forgery-prevention motive are the only pieces of this narrative that clear Tier 1 this session.