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defendants began by alluding to the enormous advantage enjoyed by the claimant's counsel in having the first word. `The statement made by the claimant is so long, so strange, here and there asking for explanation, and yet not in itself suggesting what the explanation is to be, containing now and then in itself coincidences which, if they were true, would no doubt be startling, and which would be far more startling if they could, as they cannot, be woven into anything like an argumentative connection.' It might well be that some of the jury had been brought to believe that the Roger Charles Tichborne of 1854 and the slaughterman of Wagga Wagga were one and the same. His duty was to show that this was not and could not be, and that Lady Tichborne was not to see her little child bereft of his inheritance by the ' cunning and odious scheme of a conspirator, a perjurer, a forger, an impostor, a villain.' He was about to lay before them hundreds of facts, each undisputed, each conclusive, each inconsistent with the story told by the claimant, and convicting him of a fraud, of a lie, of a crime on a scale and depth of wickedness hitherto unexampled. He. did not ask the jury to believe in the existence of any huge multitudinous conspiracy, but rather of a monstrous imposture, to the accidental and temporary success of which a great many persons in various ways and degrees had contributed, of whom few indeed could be branded as conscious con- spirators. What were the circumstances, and who were the actors l First was the fact that owing to Sir Alfred's extravagance the family fortunes were at a low ebb, Upton House and Tichborne both in the hands of strangers, and the family feeling and influence in abey- ance. Then the dramatis personae. The Dowager Lady Tichborne, who had never given up the hope of her son's return, and was ready for the acceptance of any scheme which should be put forward by a determined and audacious schemer. Baigent, ` a clever but unscrupulous man, who was hostile to some members of the family,' and prepared to use the large information which he possessed in a sense hostile to them.' Mr. Hopkins, now dead and gone, whose honour counsel did not impugn, but who was undoubtedly unfriendly to many of the Tichbornes.2 Miss Braine, another very clever person. Bogle, a man who knew an immense deal, as far as a servant can know of the concerns of the Tichborne family. Dr. Lipscombe, who had attended on Roger. Carter, a thorough rascal, but who was able to communicate an enormous amount of information about Roger Tichborne's army career and his friends and intimates there. The jury had heard the claimant's story set out by himself, by his counsel, and his witnesses; supported chiefly by his own oath; partly by the oaths of a few honest, upright, honourable men who had been deceived under influences which would have misled any person of ordinary average intelligence ; partly by those of a number of persons who were the mere dupes of the ordinary methods of imposture; and based, moreover, upon a supposed resemblance to the real Roger Charles Tich- borne. What were the difficulties in connection with the case as thus stated ? 1 See p. 204 supra. 2 Ibid. The first sixteen years of his life he had absolutely forgotten; the few facts he had told the jury were already proved, or would hereafter be shown to be absolutely false and fabricated. Of his college life he could recollect nothing, and the demonstrable falsity of his statements regarding it precluded the possibility of his ever having been at Stonyhurst. About his amusements, his books, his music, his games, he could tell nothing. Not a word of his family, of the people with whom he lived, their habits, their persons, their very names. Nothing about the army, or nothing that was not false, nothing of his drill, nothing of his best friends, nothing in relation to his life there which Carter and M'Cann could not have told him in three or four days. Of his life with the Doughty family his statements were partly an infamous lie, partly total and absolute ignorance. Of his voyage in the Pauline he knew nothing but a tissue of mistakes. Of his life in Chili and South America he knew nothing, with one exception, beyond what was in the letters from Roger Tichborne preserved by his mother. That exception was Melipilla, which was not in Roger's letters, and at which place it could be demonstrated from those letters that Roger never was, but where the claimant undoubtedly resided for the best part of three years. The details of the wreck of the Belle were too ridiculous even for examination. And as for his wanderings in Australia, his adventures, his poverty, his illiterate appeals for small loans when he had a balance at Glynns and Huths, they were too preposterous. When he reappears in 1865 he has undergone a physical and a moral miracle; a slight, delicate, undersized youth has developed into an enormous mass of flesh ; and an officer, a man of honour, an associate of men of rank and character, has with nothing to compel him, nothing in the slightest degree to explain it, sunk into the low ruffian and the associate of low ruffians. His truth is gone, his education is gone, his feelings are gone, his mother's name is gone, all are gone. Still more extraordinary is his conduct in England. So far from going to his friends and relatives, with not one of whom had he the slightest quarrel, he proceeds on Christmas Day to the Globe Inn at Wapping, asking questions about the Orton family, and putting himself in communication with them. He goes down to Alresford muffled in disguise; he does not even know the house at Tichborne, of which he was the heir, and where he had spent so many happy days. To his mother, with whom he had always lived on affectionate terms, and whom he had not seen for thirteen years, he goes, not alone, not with an old family lawyer, but accompanied by a strange attorney and a chance acquaintance picked up in a hotel billiard-room. When identified by his mother, how had he proceeded to obtain recognition? Had he freely sought appointments, challenged inquiry, courted examination ? There was not one single witness whom he had seen alone, without an attorney, without a man taking notes. Lastly came the letters, the real letters of Roger Tichborne, which would be placed before them in great detail, and which were those of an educated, high-minded English gentleman, a man competent to deal with his subject, and to write letters that were no discredit to any person filling the rank in society which Roger Tichborne filled. They had also before them the letters of the claimant, the letters of a low blackguard -- blackguard in thoughts, black- guard in expressions, blackguard in the whole connection. After this uncompromising exordium the Attorney- General proceeded to sketch the career and surroundings of Roger Tichborne, dispelling for the first time the cloud of misrepresentation and obscurity in which they had been enveloped. He described the family circle, and gave a picture of the young man as he was on entering the army: slight, dark, and pale, with a soft, melancholy smile; thin, straight hair, very dark brown, almost black; large, bony hands; standing about five feet eight, and strongly though slightly made. Then he told of his early life in Paris and his neglected education; little learned at home, and what was acquired at Stonyhurst perfunc- tory and far from thorough; and during his school-days, and for long after, he spoke and wrote French in prefer- ence to English. Dealing lightly with his career in the army, with the resettlement of the family estates, and the correspondence with Mr. Hopkins, he passed on to the relations of the real Roger Tichborne with his cousin, Miss Catherine Doughty; their early affection, the little tokens that passed between them, the scruples of her parents, the restrictions imposed upon them, their tem- porary removal, Sir Edward's renewed refusal to any fixed engagement, the last parting, and the written vow handed by Roger to his cousin. The date of this paper was June 22nd, 1852, which Mrs. Radcliffe would swear was the last time they ever met, and she would add that her cousin told her there was a duplicate of it which had been given some months previously to Mr. Gosford. `He had been in truth denied the great object of his life. His cousin had been to him the one piece of imagination and passion which had coloured his not very happy existence.' And the Attorney-General paused to sum up the general impression he had formed of the Roger Tichborne who went down in the Bella. A shy man, very gentle, very affectionate, fond of the society of women, perfectly equal to bearing his part in the society of ladies and persons of his own rank and station in life, getting on extremely well with people to whom he stood in rather delicate relation, and towards whom it required the feelings, manners, and tact of a gentleman to get on well. The surviving members of the family would come before the jury and tell them ' that with all his faults there was a great deal to like and a great deal to admire, and that he was a person certainly not below the average in his capacities and tastes, although his education had been neglected, and in many of the little things we learn at school he was deficient.' It had been suggested by Serjeant Ballantine that Roger had been an idle, indolent, care-nothing, do-nothing sort of man. His letters show no sign of indolence, but of an activity of body far beyond the average, and of a man always reading and writing letters when not engaged in field sports, a most constant and habitual letter-writer. Having thus disposed of Roger Tichborne, the Attorney- General turned to the claim in Australia, the genesis of which was to be found in the advertisements published by the Dowager in the Australian papers. But before doing so he indulged in a lengthy digression, pointing out that while it was no part of his case to do more than demonstrate that the claimant was not Roger Tichborne, he had a vast amount of witnesses who would pledge their oaths that he was Arthur Orton; and he was prepared to show that the claimant, by the witnesses he had called, by his own conduct, by his own language, by his own letters, had fixed himself hopelessly, irretrievably, abso- lutely under his own hand as being Arthur Orton. Through the Australian story from the discovery by Gibbes to the claimant's departure for England we need not follow him in detail, except with regard to the Brighton card case, given as a proof of identity in the claimant's first letter to Lady Tichborne. It so happened that in the autumn of 1852 a curious swindle had taken place at Brighton, in which a young man named Hamp had been robbed of £1500 by the two Broomes and others througli the means of marked cards. This was the sum which the claimant had sworn he had lost to the same men. The case had been the subject of a criminal prosecution, to which wide publicity had been given by the press; and it would be proved not only that Arthur Orton was in England at the time, but that Roger Tich- borne, though in England, was nowhere near Brighton, and could not possibly have been the victim. The claimant had sworn that Lady Tichborne had given him £500 to get out of the scrape, but her means were then very narrow; she must have borrowed the money, and the transaction would have left some traces behind it. No information or corroboration was forthcoming, and no member of the family knew anything about it. The suggestion was also thrown out that there might have been in the claimant some transient and fugitive likeness to some member of the Tichborne family which a man from Hampshire, who knew that part of the county, might have observed in the claimant. The claimant had sworn that his attention had been first drawn to the advertisement by a Hampshire man named Slate, and Slate might well have put into his head the first idea of putting forward the claim, or might merely have remarked that the heir of the Tichbornes had dis- appeared, and inquiries were being made up and down Australia for him. The first overt act was the ' Richardson letter' of April 1865, written to ascertain how far the coast was clear down Wapping way. And why, asked the Attorney- General, should Castro write to Wapping for information about Arthur Orton if, as was opined by Serjeant Ballan- tine, the latter was at his elbow in Australia ? Then followed the long correspondence between the Dowager and Gibbes and Cubitt and the claimant, a set of most suspicious documents -- documents which on the face of them showed that there were others which had either been destroyed or kept back, which abounded in injunc- tions to secrecy, and allusions to the necessity of keeping things concealed, and which left no doubt that the claimant, at any rate, was conscious that he was putting forward an unjust claim, and backing it up by means which he knew to be fraudulent. And there were expres- sions in them which showed that the notion of coming to England and going through a lengthened legal investiga- tion, with its attendant cross-examination, had not origin- ally entered into his imagination, and that he seemed to suppose he had merely to get himself acknowledged by the Dowager, whether with an interview or without one, and that he would walk into the estates without difficulty, and enjoy their revenues in the colonies. Turning next to the Wagga Wagga will, which, on the claimant's own showing, was an attempt to obtain money under false pretences, he demonstrated that it was in every respect an Orton will; ` it proves that he knew nothing whatever about the Tichborne estates and the Tichborne people at that time; it shows that he did know all about the Orton localities and the Orton people; and if he him- self is not Arthur Orton, it is most wonderful and mysteri- ous how he came to have all this knowledge,' so wonderful that even Baigent could suggest no explanation. Then he laid before the jury a very remarkable pocket book, containing entries in the claimant's handwriting, the existence of which had been unknown at the time of his cross-examination, and which had been unearthed in Australia during the long vacation. The jottings in it were very various in their nature, and dated back to an early period in the prosecution of the claim:--'R. C. T., Hampshire, England.' ` Thomas Castro, Wagga Wagga,' `Roger Charles Tichborne, Tichborne Hall, Surrey.' `Rodger Charles Tichborne, Bart., some day I hope.' ` Richard Neville Slate.' ` La Bella, R. C. Tichborne, arrived at Hobart Town, July 4th, 1854.' ` Mary Ann Loder, 7 Russell's Buildings, High St., Wapping, London.1 From Wagga Wagga he followed the claimant to Sydney, where he was no longer in the same condition of hopeless ignorance. There was a Baronetage at his hotel, he had the Dowager's letters, and knew that much he had told Gibbes was untrue. He now first learned of Guilfoyle ; and though the latter had repudiated him, he might have been impressed by some scraps or lines of 1The book also contained the famous phrase, 'Some men has plenty money and no brains, and some men has plenty brains and no money. Surely men with plenty money and no brains were made for men withlenty brains and no money.' It is a reminiscence of a phrase in Aurora Floyd, but the Attorney- General's acquaintance with the classics did not extend so far. knowledge, and himself, in the very act of repudiation, have unwittingly supplied useful information. ' Going thence to Bogle, armed with the information which he had got from Lady Tichborne and picked out of Guilfoyle, he had it in his power to turn the conversa- tion with Bogle upon subjects which might seem astonish- ing to him, and which might, for aught I know, in the first instance have been honestly believed by Bogle as instances of knowledge which could come from no one but Roger Tichborne.' Bogle was by far the most important witness in the case, but the extent of his acquaintance with Roger, though considerable, had been exaggerated. His original belief might have been bona fide, but it was impossible to think that he still believed, and clear that in the box he had told a falsehood in denying that the claimant had pumped him for information. From the moment that his son had lent money to the claimant, and his own little annuity was stopped by Lady Doughty, he stood irretriev- ably committed. Having brought the claimant to England, he placed before the jury for the first time in their integrity the visits to Wapping and the beginnings of the Orton story, and then described the descent on Alresford in disguise. ` If you are not the real man, and want to have some knowledge of Tichborne and the neighbourhood for the sake of imposing upon an unfortunate lady, whom you are going to make the dupe of a gross imposture, then I can understand your not going straight to her and your going round to pick up all bits of information, trying to under stand something about the localities of Tichborne.' This brought Hopkins and Baigent again upon the scene, and the Attorney-General clearly established that Roger had been by no means on the friendly terms with Mr. Hopkins which Serjeant Ballantine had represented. He had never been an intimate friend, and Roger had no liking for him. Mr. Hopkins was mistaken in swearing that he had acted for him in the resettlement, for it was Mr. Slaughter who had advised Roger, and in his draft affidavit he had admitted that he had no recollection of Roger's features. Moreover, he had died in 1868; he never knew the Orton case, nor the truth about the Stephens letters or the Chilian Commission. The matters which are supposed to have influenced him could not have affected him in the plenitude of his powers and if his mind had not been inclined to be made up before they were put before him. Baigent again had known compara- tively little of Roger Tichborne ; he had only seen him three times since 1849 ; he did not know his handwriting, nor did his earlier acquaintance entitle him to speak with confidence or accuracy upon Roger's person or habits; and he himself had placed on record his entire disbelief in the sagacity of that `poor, flighty' woman,' as he called the Dowager. ` He may have been something other than a conscious conspirator, but he kept his eyes shut against the light, against proofs which should have opened them. He may have been deceived, but he was the willing victim of his own self-deceit.' And as to the circumstances which finally convinced Hopkins and Baigent of his identity, he pointed out that they recognised the claimant not by his person, but first of all on a letter which no man in his sound senses would have paid the slightest heed to, and next by a conversa- tion which was transparently insufficient to draw any conclusions from. They had not asked a question about ;he shipwreck; they did not ask about any matter as to which they could directly test him upon the spot. When any subject came up as to which his knowledge was at fault they dropped it, and did not pursue it, for fear it should be painful. He himself turned the conversation on to the deeds, and it was demonstrable that he had access to the contents of these deeds through various old Chancery suits, the proceedings in which were matters of public record. It could be proved that he had got them up, got them up in writing, and got them up wrong. He did not know anything accurately about the real arrangement, and what he did know he got from sources not open to the real Roger Tichborne, because the things had not been done in Roger's lifetime, and Mr. Hopkins and Baigent seemed never even to have inquired into his accuracy or suspected the sources of his information. Then came the recognition by Lady Tichborne. `The interview of the long lost child and the long parted mother, at which the child is not certain whether the mother was affected, but says he believes she was. He cannot give the smallest account of what passed between them, and all that can be screwed out of him is that she did not express any doubt. He vouches the other persons who may give a better account, but he does not call them. The Dowager is dead; the claimant himself goes for nothing ; he does not call the attorney and the friend of ten days' standing, who apparently went over as witnesses.' The information obtained from the visit to Tichborne and from Rous might well have imposed upon the Dowager, a woman morbidly anxious to recognise her son, whose character stands revealed in her letters, and who was undeterred by the frightful blunders made in his letters from Wagga Wagga and Sydney. It was obvious she did not take the ordinary and reasonable means of bringing to light the real truth. Of what passed between them there was no account, nor of her motives, her feelings, what actuated her, how she was influenced, what was upon her mind. And it was only fair to her to say that she also died apparently in ignorance of the whole Wapping story; that the claimant went out of his way to deceive her with regard to Arthur Orton; and that she knew nothing of those matters which later on produced so unfavourable an impression on the mind of Mr. Holmes. Next came the military witnesses. Until the appear- ance on the scene of Carter on the 26th of February, Baigent had admitted that he never heard the claimant say one word about military men or military matters. Up to this time the army had been a sealed book; he had not even known the name of his regiment; he could not recall a single officer, or the accoutrements, or anything con- nected with it; and he had given as a reason that he had enlisted for a spree, and had only been thirteen days in the regiment before he was bought out. But once having got hold of a man like Carter, who knew the regiment from end to end, he would get from him all sorts of little pieces of information; he would have appointments care- fully made beforehand with the names given him of the persons whom he was going to see; and he would see them, and spring on them this or that or the other piece of information which he thought would astonish them, and which in most cases did astonish them. And the Attorney- General pointed out how the topics were used up over and over again, and how very limited was the extent of the information which did duty for the capture of so many witnesses, a large number of whom were brought over not by some private piece of knowledge, but by some bit of information derived from a traceable source, and used on different sets of people at different places. They were little scraps of information easily got from these different men, who would have their brains picked without being aware of it, and which would produce on uneducated, honourable minds a very disproportionate effect. They were scraps of information that an impostor could get up, but the real subjects of military life and the real relations to people in the regiment were things which an impostor could not get up to save his soul. For a cavalry officer, for a man who had been three years in a cavalry regiment not to know the difference between a troop and a squadron, or between close and open order, or to suppose that the Carabineers were a thousand strong, was an utter impossibility. The officers who had recognised him were chiefly gentle- men who had not known very much of Roger; they were impressed by the recognition on the part of Lady Tichborne and Mr. Hopkins; they did not know the sources from which he obtained his knowledge; they took for granted a great deal; and finding he knew a number of things about the regiment, they came to a conclusion in his favour. Major Norbury had admitted that the claimant had told him nothing he might not have learned from a servant in the regiment. The incident of the runaway horse, which had converted Colonel Sawyer, had already been filed in an affidavit months previously; and another circumstance which had impressed this officer, the march of the Carabineers from Herne's Bay to Canterbury, was known to the claimant through the papers procured from the War Office. He had been invited to meet the Carabineers at dinner, but no power on earth could get him to face these gentlemen in a body, and he could never be got to the Carabineers' mess. When the officers who supported the claimant gave their affidavits and their oral evidence they had not seen the claimant under cross-examination; they did not know what the case against him was; and they had never seen him but at a carefully arranged interview, in which the topics were chosen by himself. There was hardly a single respectable and unbiassed witness who had not been dealt with before meeting the claimant, and from whom consciously or unconsciously information had not been extracted. Mr. Biddulph, before he went down to see him at Croydon, had had long conversations with the Dowager's solicitor, in whose bill there was a charge for an interview, in which ` he explained all the circumstances of the case to him.' Every word on which Mr. Scott had been converted was now demon- strated to be a falsehood; but Mr. Scott never dreamt that a man would come before him and tell a pack of things without a vestige of truth in them, so he took them all for Gospel, and never inquired into them. Above all, he had been allowed to give his evidence to the jury under the impression that the claimant had not written the `Stephens' letters nor had any connection with the Orton family. The claimant had started on his expedition to Burton-Constable primed with information derived from the Dowager, who was in correspondence with Sir Talbot, and from Roger's old diaries and letters; it was mainly on Lady Tichborne's assurance that Sir Talbot's recognition was based. ` Upon his mother's writing to me I had no doubt: And why on earth did the claimant go down there, accompanied as far as Hull by Rous, Baigent, and two attorneys R The Attorney-General now passed to a new topic. Was there any physical resemblance between the claimant and Roger Tichborne ? And he dilated on famous historical impostures, such as Smerdis and Perkin Warbeck, and the false Demetrius, and the case of Martin Guerre, popularised by Dumas in Les deux Dianes. It might be; he admitted, that there was some passing and fugitive resemblance of expression, or something, between the two, and Slate, the Hampshire man, might have observed it to the claimant; but all those witnesses who had recognised him were open to the observation that the road had been carefully made for them, that they had come prepared to see a particular man. Apart from general resemblance it became a question of detail, of individual features, of physical peculiarities and marks. The jury had heard the evidence, seen the photographs, and seen the claimant's naked body, and he was prepared to satisfy them of the impossibility of the two men being the same. First, there was the much paraded assertion that Roger's old Carabineer helmet fitted the claimant to a T. It had now been proved that even if it had been a fit, it was the commonest shape and size; that the helmet had been too large for the original wearer; and that even after taking out the newspaper with which it was padded it was a tight fit for the claimant. He was prepared to prove, from the regimental measurements, that Roger Tichborne when he left the army was an inch shorter than the claimant. The lobes of Roger's ears adhered to his cheeks, while those of the claimant were non-adherent, and the uncontradicted evidence showed that the one class of ear never could become the other class. During the voyage on the Pauline Roger had had a fish hook run through his eyelid, causing a scar, but his own medical witnesses had failed to discover any hole or mark in the eyelid of the claimant, and had transferred the scar to the eyebrow, where the fish-hook had never been. Roger Tichborne had been bled on both ankles while in the regiment, and there were scars on both the claimant's ankles; but in neither foot were they on the saphena vein, where the incision is always made. And the traces of bleeding, which are absolutely ineradicable, were not to be found there, or in any part of the body, though Roger had been frequently bled in the arms and elsewhere. The claimant had sworn that he had had a seton put into his shoulder when a boy, and there was now a scar on the place; but it would be proved that this scar was not and could not have been produced by a seton, and that the sore in the little Roger's arm had been created not by a seton, but by an issue, of the existence of which there were no traces on the claimant. Then, again, there was a scar on the top of the claimant's head, which he asserted to be due to a fall on the rocks at Pornic when there as a boy with Chatillon. Chatillon would tell them that the accident had caused a bump, not a scar; and the scar in question was not one which could have been caused by a rock, but by a clean-cutting instrument, such as a razor or a knife. On the claimant's left forearm was a very strange mark, about the size of a shilling, forming an indelible scar. The claimant could give no account of how it came there, but it was admitted that it might have been caused by cautery ; and the Attorney-General said he had a mass of evidence to prove that Orton was tattooed on the left forearm with the letters A. 0. Was it not possible that the claimant had burnt out these initials whose existence would have been so fatal to his case ? And it was remarkable that nearly all these distinctive marks were on the left side, and could have been made upon himself by his own right hand. They had heard the claimant swear that he was not and never had been tattooed; but he was about to prove to them that Roger had been tattooed on the left arm on two separate occasions by two separate people. One of these operators could not be produced, but his handiwork would be sworn to by nine or ten people; and Lord Bellew would be called to tell them that when a fellow student with Roger at Stonyhurst they had tattooed one another in a rough, unskilful way. The early tattooing had been done by a sailor, and was a representation of Faith, Hope, and Charity under the emblems of a cross, an anchor, and a heart. To these Lord Bellew had added the initials R. C. T., and Lady Doughty, her daughter, and a dozen others, including Chatillon, would swear to having seen them; and several of these witnesses had, independently, made drawings of them from memory, which showed a substantial agreement, with trifling dis- crepancies. If the jury were convinced that the recollec- tion of those witnesses was accurate, the case was at an end; and while the claimant was wanting in almost every one of the physical peculiarities of Roger, he possessed one undoubted congenital mark, the brown spot, which no one but himself had ever suggested was on the person of Roger Tichborne. Then the Attorney-General proceeded in great detail to sum up the result of his cross-examination of the claimant. His object throughout, he said, had been that 'of giving him no information, not contradicting him on the spot by reading letters which, if they contradicted him on one point, would give him information on twenty; not convicting him of lies on the spot; not giving him any information on the spot, but getting him to state as many falsehoods as possible. To go through the story of his life from the materials under my hand, and to get from him as far as I could his account of matters of which I had a true account, but not at the same time to let him know what the true account was. The time had not then come to show what was the object of the question and what was the real merit of the answer, and enlightened critics no doubt thought it extremely ineffective.' After pointing out that as regards Roger's life in Paris the claimant's mind was a total blank, he suggested the explanation. The claimant was only in Paris a very short time, not long enough to enable him to get it up himself geographically, and during the early stages of the pro- ceedings he was fully occupied with the soldiers in coach- ing himself in Roger's military career. He must have intended to have got the requisite information as far as he could from Lady Tichborne, but by her unexpected death Paris and the first sixteen years of his life became a sealed book to him. For the early part of Roger's life in England there were materials which he could get from Bogle, and from various people who knew a good deal about the ins and outs of the Tichborne family and the general outline of his life. Therefore for that period of his career he was not so much at fault. `Of Stonyhurst he knew almost nothing; he had never been there since his return to England, and all be knew must have been got up at second or third hand. The Dowager could not help him, because she was never there; Rous could not help him, Baigent could not help him, and he never ventured to go there himself though urged to do so . . . . Can you believe that Roger, who had been there for three years and passed through the ordinary Stonyhurst course, would have had the slightest difficulty in giving you something like an account of the place; something like an account of the external view of it, and the internal discipline and so forth, instead of giving hundreds of answers which on the face of them are absurd, and which show a total hopeless ignorance not only of the subjects, but of all the facts and circumstances about Stonyhurst which a man must have recollected if he had been there?' Passing on to the Melipilla story, the Attorney-General summed it up as follows:-- ' I have proved that the claimant says he was three weeks at Melipilla, and formed the acquaintance of fifteen or sixteen people there; that he knew Castro, stayed with him, and subsequently adopted his name. Before the examiner in Chancery and by his counsel on the Chili Commission he had maintained that the visit was made in the winter, on his return from Peru on the journey from Valparaiso to Santiago; but on being brought into touch with Moore, and learning from him that Roger's journey on this occasion from Valparaiso to Santiago was made in a single night, he had altered his story and in- structed Serjeant Ballantine to tell the jury that he had gone on his first arrival in Chili from Santiago to Val- paraiso, from Valparaiso to Melipilla, and thence back to Valparaiso before going north to Peru. Lastly, in the box he had given yet another version: that he had gone to Santiago from Valparaiso, started from Santiago to return thither, had been met on the road by the news that his ship would not leave as early as was expected, and had in consequence passed three weeks at Melipilla and got to know the Castros.' The letters and diaries of Roger Tichborne and of Moore not only did not contain a word about Melipilla, but by their dates rendered it physically impossible that Roger could have been there at any of the times sworn to by the claimant, or at all. If the jury were convinced that Roger was never at Melipilla, the case was gone; and, apart from this documentary evidence, negative and posi- tive, the depositions of the Chilian witnesses proved beyond all doubt that Roger never was there, but that Orton was. `They prove that the whole of them never knew Roger Charles Tichborne at all; they prove that none of them recognised the Santiago photograph of Roger; they prove that a boy of the name of Arthur Orton was there from 1848 to 1851, that he knew all the persons mentioned in the claimant's letters, and that they were in the relations with Arthur Orton which the claimant in his letters states they were with him. And one after the other they authenticate the story that Orton was there from 1848 to 1851, and that no Englishman was there in 1853 and 1854, and that none of them knew a person called Roger Charles Tichborne.' And it was fully admitted that when the letter signed `R. C. D. Tichborne' was first received at Melipilla, it was universally felt that the writer could be none other than `the boy Arthur.' Then, turning to the shipwreck and the rescue, he said that the claimant's story of Roger Tichborne going on board tipsy would be contradicted by Captain Oates, a friend of the Bella's captain, and by Roger's servant Jules Berrault. As for the sinking of the Bella, the sudden discovery that there were 12 foot of water in the hold of a ship only drawing 14½, the two boats with the officers, provisions, and compasses in one, and nothing in the other but the passenger and eight men, all alike was ludicrous and impossible, to say nothing of the variant versions given by the claimant. And with regard to the Osprey, matters were even more obscure. From those eight alleged survivors of the Bella, from the whole crew and passengers of the Osprey, not one single syllable had been heard; it was past belief that all these persons should have disappeared or vanished into space. It was true the claimant had given sundry names of sailors on board the Bella, but the ships' list preserved at Lloyd's and elsewhere showed that they were not only false names in that connection, but were the genuine names of persons who had sailed on board the Jessie Miller and the Middleton, of whose existence Roger Tichborne could not possibly have been aware. `And,' said the Attorney-General, `he has had three ships since he came to England. He has had an English Osprey, he has had an English Themis, and he has reverted to an American Osprey. I will show you where he got them all from, and how we dispose of them all, but it should be remembered that the name originally given to Mr. Gibbes at Wagga Wagga was the Jessie Miller.' The speaker was as good as his word, and at great length elaborated the genesis and abandonment of these vessels, and wound up:-- 'If this was a question of insurance, or seaworthiness, or what not, what would be said of a case which is put forward in such a shape with such manifest, transparent, repeated falsehoods ? Next came the reading of the evidence taken before the Australian Commission, where twenty-five witnesses had been called on behalf of the claimant and eighty-five against him... The initial point was made that as the claimant, if he were Roger Tichborne, could never have been in Australia prior to July 1854, it would follow that if any single witness indubitably recognised him as being there or in Tasmania before that date, the case was at an end. And the general result of the depositions of some fifty or sixty people amounted to this:-- The same photographs, or at least undoubted photo- graphs of the claimant, had been put to them all, and their story, uncontradicted and in many cases not cross- examined to, was as follows. That there was a man called Arthur Orton in Tasmania from 1853 till about 1855 ; that in 1855 or thereabouts he went to a Mr. Johnstone's at Mewburn Park, in Australia; that from Mewburn Park he passed to Mr. Foster's at Boisdale in 1856 ; that he was at Boisdale, at Dargo, and at Boisdale again until about 1858 ; that in 1858 he was at Flodden Creek and at Sale, that thence he went to Reedy Creek until the end of 1859, that there was a warrant out against him there for stealing horses, and that he disappeared from Reedy Creek. With the single exception of Kemmis, who was now undergoing imprisonment for bigamy, no one had ever known the claimant except as Arthur Orton; and after his disappear- ance from Reedy Creek, which place was never mentioned in any of the claimant's own voluntary statements, he had reappeared at Deniliquin about six months later as Castro. From that time forward nobody had ever known, and no witness on either side had been produced to show, that anybody calling himself Arthur Orton ever appeared in Australia; but witnesses had proved that the man whom they had known at one time as Orton, they saw at a subsequent date in another part of Australia as Castro, and that that man was the claimant. And more than this, the evidence contained remarkable statements con- necting the claimant with a butcher called Schotler, connecting him with the butchering trade, connecting him in a variety of ways with the real history of Arthur Orton. In the witness-box the claimant had committed him- self to the specific statement that at Castlemaine, towards the end of 1859, Arthur Orton and himself -- Arthur under his own name, the claimant under that of Castro-- had been charged together before the magistrate with stealing a horse. During the Long Vacation Mr. Purcell had been sent out by the defendants to investigate this story; the Court records of Castlemaine had been searched, and every single word found absolutely untrue. Castro, it appeared, had never been charged at Castle- maine, but about the date given by the claimant Orton had been indicted at Sale for horse-stealing at Reedy Creek, jointly with a man named Aleck. The warrant had never been executed, for Orton had disappeared, reappearing six months afterwards at Deniliquin as Castro. And the Attorney-General urged that when the claimant made this statement he had no idea that the case would be adjourned over the Long Vacation, and that evidence would be sought 14,000 miles away from Westminster. The Australian evidence, with the clues obtained out there, led to the Orton story and to the history of how the Wapping connection was first discovered. This is already sufficiently familiar to the reader ; but, coming towards the end of the speech, and for the first time in a connected form, its effect was most crushing. And a dramatic addition was given to it by the production and reading of the letter signed Arthur Orton, and dated June 16, 1866, which the claimant had given Mrs. Pardon to give Mrs. Tredgett on his visit to Wapping. Its existence, though suspected, was not known for certain till a chance rumour and a subpoena served on Mr. Holmes brought it to light, when the Attorney-General's speech was more than half-way through. Then for the question of handwriting. There were three sets of letters ; (1) Those undoubtedly, written by Roger; (2) those written by Orton; (3) those written by the claimant. Did (3) resemble most closely (1) or (2) ? Baigent himself had been struck by the marvellous similarity between the writing of the claimant and the writing of Arthur; and the Attorney-General insisted that the dissimilarity between the general character of the writing of the claimant and Roger was equally marvellous. The hand of the latter, he said, was wonderfully consistent from his schoolboy days to his death, a very difficult hand, full of character, and the reverse of commonplace. And he contended that the claimant's hand had under gone a good deal of change since he had been in England and had had access to so much of Roger's writing; he had at any rate been able to make a very passable imita- tion of his signature and of some of his more salient peculiarities. With regard to the mistakes in spelling and grammar, he pointed out that Roger was a man of imperfect educa- tion, especially in English, and that there were many errors of spelling in his handwriting. There were also errors in the claimant's letters and in Orton's ; but there was this peculiarity, that while some of Roger's mis- spellings were found in the claimant's letters and vice versa, yet there were something like fourteen or fifteen words in the few undisputed Orton documents and letters which were misspelt, and all these fourteen or fifteen words were similarly misspelt in the claimant's letters, but never misspelt in Roger's, though occurring over and over and over again. ` Receved' ; ` fue,' for few; `lick,' for like ; ` anythink' ; ` ware,' for were ; ` chilldren' ; ` weather,' for whether; ` sined,' for signed; ` Elizaberth' ; ` agoing' ; ` except,' for accept; ` frinds' ; ` nothink.' And after drawing attention to the general similarity and the similarity of particular letters in the one case, the general dissimilarity and the dissimilarity of particular letters in the others, the misspellings, the peculiar ex- pressions, the wrong grammar, all making up a chain of evidence of enormous strength, he insisted that even stronger was the difference between the composition, as a production of the mind, of the set of letters from Roger Charles Tichborne, and the set of letters the production of Arthur Orton and the claimant. The one set were those of an educated gentleman, the other those of a low born, low-thinking man, without the feelings, manners, expressions, or ideas of a gentleman; and it was utterly incredible that one man could have turned into the other between 1854 and 1865, when the man professed to re- appear at Wagga Wagga. It was one of the common fallacies of the case, he said, to explain these and other deficiencies by representing that the claimant had been living in the bush away from the society of his fellow-men. He had done nothing of the sort; and with the exception of a few solitary months at up-country stations, he had been living in towns of considerable population, mixing with all sorts of people, with shops, books, and other things about him that would keep to its full pitch any such education as he had ever possessed. The last stage was now reached, and the Attorney General embarked on the story of the sealed packet, tracing back its first beginning to the meeting at the Grosvenor Palace Hotel, and to the cross-examination of Gosford, which revealed the fact that he had destroyed it. The claimant had been unaware of the existence of a duplicate of Roger's vow; and the document committed by him to writing on the 2nd of August 1867; which was thoroughly incredible on the face of it, would be contra- dicted on oath by Mrs. Radcliffe, and would be met by a mass of evidence and a series of correspondence which was absolutely conclusive that the story was a wicked and abominable fabrication, made with the object of blasting her reputation and destroying her credit before she appeared in the box against him. During the period at which the claimant had fixed the seduction the Attorney-General was prepared to satisfy the jury from the dates of Roger's correspondence that from the 26th of June 1852 to the 28th of February 1853 there could not have been a time at which it was possible for him to have been present at Tichborne and have been guilty of the wickedness which the claimant had imputed to him. The latter had first put it as occurring in Nov- ember or December 1852 ; but finding that date would not do, he brought it back by some months, and said the seduc- tion of his cousin took place at Tichborne some time in July or August, about ten days before the engagement was broken off. Now, Roger had never been there after the 22nd of June 1852, and he read to the jury a long series of his letters, now brought before them for the first time, and running from the 26th of June to the day of his leaving Havre for Valparaiso, not one of them consistent with a single day or a single hour spent at Tichborne. `This part of the case, like every other part, when it comes to be examined at length, when it comes to be laid bare, and the story is taken to pieces, and sifted by the evidence which is in our possession, and brought to the test of documents which cannot deceive you, and facts which cannot be misrepresented, this part of the case d-is appears as far as Kate Doughty is concerned, it disappears as far as the house of Tichborne is concerned, but it could not and ought not to disappear for its effects on every right-minded man and on the jury. Serjeant Ballantine had said he felt it to be a crucial matter, had dared the defendants to go into it, and admitted that if the claimant were confuted on it, he was not only stamped as a .rascal, but branded as an impostor. The challenge had been accepted, the matter gone into from beginning to end, shown to be utterly baseless, and contradicted by all, the evidence.' And, in conclusion, the Attorney-General dealt in scath- ing terms with the manner in which the case was prepared and presented. Referring to the claimant's examination in chief, he complained that the matters put to him, as tests of memory, with the air of being produced for the first time, had, or at least the majority of them, been known to him for five years past, and had been laid before Mr. Locock Webb in 1867. He further reminded the jury that they were trying the case in the dark; that there were many matters known to exist, known to be important, which they had tried in vain to get at, and which were systematically kept back. The early Australian corre- spondence was hopelessly mutilated, though even so it was sufficiently damaging and instructive, and there must be a vast deal more either in possession of the claimant and kept back by him, or else wilfully destroyed. There was one man who could, if he had been called, have let in a whole flood of light on the early part of the case. That man was Mr. Holmes, and the claimant's advisers had studiously refrained from calling him, though over and over again during the trial they had pledged themselves to do so. They had pledged themselves.to close the case with him up till the time that Baigent was in the box; and after the famous letter about the consequences of filing Mr. Holmes' bill they had, early in December, withdrawn the pledge. He passed in brief review all those persons whose testi- mony had in any way been opposed to the claimant, and whom he had aspersed in the most foul and reckless manner. And of all people in this case whom he has most maligned, the man whom he has worst of all maligned is Roger Charles Tichborne himself, that gallant and generous and tender-hearted young man, whose life was melancholy, whose love was unrequited, who lies now still and cold, far away from these conflicts, no longer unquiet, and who has found the peace which he was denied in this world under the waves of the Atlantic. It was said that the claimant knew what Roger Tich- borne only could have known. Now if by that is meant that he knows what a number of persons who knew Roger Tichborne could have told him, it is perfectly true; and we have either tracked directly, or have suggested, with rea- sonable probability, indirectly, the sources of all this infor- mation, which has been the only real difficulty in the case. We have shown you that both here and in Australia there was at first an absolute ignorance upon matters which Roger Tichborne could not but have known. We have shown that upon material circumstances, which Roger Tichborne could not have forgotten, he, was not only ignorant, but made statements which were utterly untrue. We have shown that after a time there came to him a glimmering knowledge that increased from day to day, as from hour to hour, and from person to person, and place to place he picked up information; and I have given you the clue to the persons, the places, and the means which he employed to build up that modicum of information which at last he possesses: Then with a few eloquent but simple words, expressing his confidence in the justice of his cause, and in the verdict of the jury, Sir John Coleridge concluded the longest address ever made to an English jury. |
