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away the web of mystery and imposture which for five years had shrouded the Tichborne case. The public were for the first time in possession of the facts; they were pro- vided with the clue which led through the tangled maze, and at length the whole conspiracy stood revealed before them. As day by day, from the 15th of January to the 21st of February, the speaker laid bare the story in all its ramifications, the scales fell from the eyes of those whose patience, and whose mental endowments, permitted them to follow it. More than one of the witnesses who, before Christmas, had testified to their honest belief in the claimant, wrote to his solicitors to ask that their evidence might be withdrawn, and to Messrs. Dobinson and Geare to say that they now considered he was not the man he professed to be. And during the course of the speech a topic was made public property which had for some time been bruited about in whispers. The partners of the great firm of Baxter, Rose, and Norton had separated; Mr. Rose, one of the senior partners, and a man of profound experience, both of the world and of his profession, had found it impossible to concur with his colleagues in con- tinuing to act for the claimant; together with his son he retired from the case, as a preliminary to a dissolution of the partnership, and the claimant's counsel received fresh retainers from the other members of the firm.l It:was indeed against a routed and disorganised host 1 I may, perhaps, be pardoned for quoting the: once hackneyed lines which appeared originally in Punch :-- `The firm of Baxter, Rose, and Norton,Mr. Rose, afterwards Sir Philip, was, as will be remembered, the confidential friend and adviser of Lord Beaconsfield. that the Attorney-General had henceforward to contend; and it was obvious that if his witnesses only bore out a tithe of the case which he had opened to the jury, the matter could have but one end, and that a speedy one. The first witness called was Lord Bellew, who described how when he and Roger were at Stonyhurst together ` in philosophy,' the latter had one day bared his left forearm and shown him a heart, an anchor, and a cross tattooed there, and had instructed him how to add the initials R. C. T. lower down on the same arm. The operation was carried out by means of needles fastened to a small piece of wood and dipped in Indian ink, and inserted under the skin. It was his first attempt at tattooing, and the letters were done in a line very badly. As a reward Roger tattooed an anchor on Lord Bellew's own arm, which he showed to the jury. Independently of the tattooing, he did not believe the claimant was his old schoolfellow. Serjeant Ballantine cross-examined rigorously, but without effect. The two Mr. Seymours were called, and both concurred in saying that the claimant was not and could not be their nephew. Mr. Henry Danby Seymour gave his account of the meeting at Mr. Hopkins' house in direct contradiction to what the claimant had sworn; Mr. Alfred Seymour remembered the tattoo marks on Roger's arm. Then came Mrs. Radcliffe, to whom the opportunity of contradicting her slanderer face to face had at last. been granted. She; said there was not one word of truth in what the claimant had sworn of his intimacy with her; it was completely and absolutely false. She detailed: the history of her relations with her cousin, and mentioned certain presents given to her by Roger, amongst which was no such article as a gold crucifix, which the claimant had specified; and she repudiated having ever given Roger a certain rosary, which the claimant had produced and sworn to. ' No,' she said, ' it never belonged to me.' On the 22nd of June 1852 Roger left Tichborne for the last time, having given her on that day a paper in which he pro- mised to build a church to the Holy Virgin if he married her within three years. She bad kept the paper and produced it; she had never seen him since. `This I solemnly swear.' She minutely described the appearance and habits of Roger Tichborne, and perfectly well remembered seeing the tattoo marks on his arm when he was boating and fishing and gathering water-lilies on the lake. Serjeant Ballantine performed the difficult task of cross-examination with delicacy and discretion, but she did not waver for a moment in her certainty that the claimant was not Roger. Lady Doughty was equally positive, and so was Mrs. Nangle. The latter gave a graphic account of the family interview with the claimant. She mimicked his mispro- nunciation of French; and said that when he got angry at being cross-questioned at the meeting all the foreign accent departed from his speech, and `it was quite British.' She also remembered the tattoo marks. Asked finally, ` Is that your nephew ?' she replied, ` Gracious, no.' Then came a string of witnesses from Paris : Chatillon and his wife, the Abbé Salis, and Jules Berrault, Roger's servant when he went on board the Bella. The Chatillons both recollected the tattoo marks, and the husband said that when he last saw Roger in March 1853 his French had not in the least deteriorated. Asked as to the identity, he exclaimed, `Never Roger Tichborne, never, never!' On Monday, the 5th of March, the 102nd day of the Trial, while Abbé Salis was in the box, the foreman of the jury rose and made an announcement which could hardly have taken any one by surprise. ` We have heard the evidence regarding the tattoo marks ; and subject to your Lordship's directions, and to the hearing of any further evidence that counsel may desire to place before them, the jury do not require further evidence.' Mr. Giffard was away on circuit, and Serjeant Ballantine asked for an adjourn- ment in order to consult him on the course to be pursued. This was granted, and on the following Wednesday the Serjeant rose and asked whether the jury meant to convey that they had satisfied themselves solely upon that portion of the case which was known as the tattoo marks, or had they formed their opinion in relation to the evidence set forth in the entire case. The jury retired for half an hour, and then the foreman stated that their decision was based upon the entire evidence as well as upon that which related to the tattooing. Whereupon Serjeant Ballantine said that with the consent of his client and the approval of his learned friends he elected to be non-suited.1 The Lord Chief Justice expressed his entire concurrence with the course taken by the jury, and stated that in his opinion the claimant had been guilty of wilful and corrupt perjury, and that there was reasonable ground for direct- ing him to be prosecuted on that charge. He therefore committed the claimant to be detained in the Common Gaol until the next session of the Central Criminal Court unless he should find bail to the amount of £10,000.2 1 I have it on the highest authority that Mr. Giffard at any rate did not concur in this course, and was of opinion that in the event of a hostile verdict a new trial might have been obtained on the ground of the Chief Justice's ruling as to several disputed questions of evidence. 2 It is scarcely credible that in Serjeant Ballantine's reminis- cences, published ten years after the date, he should have represented himself as 'And,' he added, 'there is one other subject to which I would refer. I think it right to express my entire belief in the evidence of Mrs. Radcliffe, not depending upon her own testimony alone, but confirmed by testi- mony, letters, correspondence, and all other evidence in the case.' The claimant had been absent from Court during the latter days of the Trial, and was spending the morning in a sitting-room at the Waterloo Hotel, Jermyn Street, which he had occupied throughout the case, and where many of the witnesses had been interviewed by himself and his advisers. Hither the police officers were ushered; they declared their mission, an announcement which the claimant bore with composure, and not without dignity, simply remarking, `Well, it is very unfortunate, as it will put me to considerable personal inconvenience if I am arrested now.' The carriage which had so often driven him to Westminster was ordered round, the claimant and his unwelcome visitors entered it, and after a short drive the walls of Newgate were reached. Here he remained until the 26th of April. Heavy as was the required bail, there was no difficulty in procuring it; and had perjury, which as a misde- meanour is bailable of right, been the only offence with which he was charged, he would have regained his liberty at a much earlier date; but the Treasury, on whom the conduct of the prosecution had of course devolved, determined to prefer an additional indict- accepting a non-suit entirely on his own initiative. He not only omits all mention of the intervention of the jury, but says: 'Whatever may have been the opinion of the jury, the course 1 took prevented them expressing any, and therefore it appears to me that the judge had no precedent what ever for the course he pursued in ordering the claimant into custody.' ment for forgery in connection with the issue of the ' Tichborne Bonds.' Bills were found on both charges at the April sittings of the Central Criminal Court, and were immediately removed on the application of the Crown into the Court of Queen's Bench, and before that tribunal Serjeant Ballantine moved for bail. The Attor- ney-General, in showing cause against the rule, intimated that the case could not come on before November, as wit- nesses would have to be brought over from Melipilla and Australia. The Court, on consideration of this fact, and the necessity for the claimant to have unrestrained com- munication with his advisers, granted the application. Four securities were found in £1250 each, including Lord Rivers and Mr. Guildford Onslow, M.P.; and the claimant having entered into his own recognisances in the sum of £5000, was once more a free man. Nor was it until a year had expired that he was called upon to take his trial. When November came an order was made that the Trial should be at Bar before the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench and two of his puisnes, but it was not until the 23rd of April 1873 that the curtain rose on the final act of the drama. During these twelve months the claimant and his friends had been far from idle. He was crushed down by a weight of indebtedness which many years' enjoyment of the Tich- borne rent-roll could not have removed. An undischarged bankrupt at the commencement of the former trial, the funds raised in such devious ways had long since given out, and during its later stages his counsel had foregone their refreshers. There was a large sum owing to his solicitors, in addition to which he was liable for the taxed costs of the defendants, estimated at over £40,000. He was dependent for the daily bread of himself and his family on the charity of his supporters; but a number of ardent believers, amongst whom Lord Rivers, Mr. Guild- ford Onslow, Mr. Whalley, M.P., and Mr. Skipworth were the most prominent, contributed to his wants; and an appeal was made to popular sympathy to raise the funds for his defence. The speech of the Attorney-General, the evidence for the defendants, and the intervention of the jury had carried conviction to the vast majority of educated per- sons that whoever the claimant might be, he was not Sir Roger Tichborne, and that he had been guilty of perjury in its most cruel and most aggravated form. But with a considerable section of the public, with those especially who had not followed the case, or whose training and habits of mind rendered them incapable of appreciating the weight of circumstantial or cumulative evidence, it was far otherwise. To them, the mother's recognition far outbalanced all the contradictions and im- possibilities of the claimant's story; they had neither the time to read nor the power to appreciate the closely reasoned but terribly lengthy address of the Attorney General; the fact that the claimant had called over 100 witnesses as against the 17 who were heard for the defendants, was not affected in their mind by the cir- cumstance that the jury had held them sufficient without calling on the 263 whom the Attorney-General declared that he had in reserve. And, above all, the idea was being sedulously promulgated that it was an issue between the classes and the masses, that all the power of wealth and position and political influence had for some unknown and unconjecturable reason been exerted against the claimant. The existence of a vast Jesuit conspiracy was asserted, in spite of the fact that the claimant professed himself a Roman Catholic, and all the elements of a great uprising of popular feeling were in existence. The proceedings of the claimant soon fanned them into a flame. A series of popular meetings was arranged, commencing at Alresford itself, which neighbourhood remained unshaken in its loyalty to the fallen cause. ' Tichborne Defence Funds' were organised throughout the country, and the claimant proceeded from town to town delivering addresses to enthusiastic gatherings, or sometimes taking part in pigeon-shooting matches, where his prowess with the gun was an incontestable proof of his identity in the eyes of the sporting fraternity. Not the least important of these meetings were those holden in the east end of London, where numbers of the in- habitants of Wapping attended and testified to admiring crowds the dissimilarity between the claimant and the Arthur Orton whose boyish career they had known and followed. By these means and the liberality of his friends the claimant was in a position, when the day of trial came, to be professionally represented, though the insinuation was not wanting that more than a necessary share of the money so collected had been expended over the brandy bottle and in general riotous living. The retaining of counsel had been an anxious and difficult task. Serjeant Ballantine made his last appear- ance for the claimant in a forlorn application to the Court of Common Pleas in May 1872, when all further proceed- ings in the ejectment action for the recovery of the Doughty estates were ordered to be stayed unless the defendant's costs in Tichborne v. Lushington were paid within six months. The claimant professed to be dis- satisfied with the Serjeant's conduct of that action, but it may be doubted whether the mundane question of fees may not have been a more determining factor. At any rate he was not retained, and the case was next intrusted to Serjeant Sleigh, who appeared for the claimant in various interlocutory matters, but his death terminated the engage- ment, and finally, only. a few weeks before the trial, Lord Rivers, who had made himself responsible for the remunera- tion of counsel, secured the services of Dr. Kenealy, Q. C. Edward Vaughan Kenealy was an Irishman who had achieved a fair amount of success both in London and on the Oxford Circuit. Called to the Bar in 1847, he had practised principally on the criminal side, and though without any particular pretensions to knowledge of law, was the master of a tremendous flow of words, and of the gift which in Irishmen is sometimes eloquence, in Englishmen invariably bathos. He was possessed of great pertinacity, of complete disregard for the feelings of those opposed to him, and of an absolute recklessness of statement. These qualities do not invariably bring success at the bar, but they are no insuperable obstacle, and in a certain class of case they had stood the doctor in good stead. It would be affectation, however, to pretend that his reputation was high among his fellow-barristers. He had with consider- able difficulty obtained admission to his circuit mess, while a regrettable incident in his private life, in which it was generally felt that he had received harsh treatment from the judges of the Queen's Bench, had materially retarded him in his profession. It should be added that he had obtained some political notoriety as an advanced Radical, and was favourably known as a writer of verse and a contributor to periodical literature. A further claim was made on his behalf to a sort of general omniscience, and he certainly made a great parade of learning ; he was, however, undoubtedly a scholar and linguist of considerable attain- ments. With him were associated as juniors Mr. Patrick M'Mahon, an Irish member of Parliament, and at a later stage of the proceedings .Mr. Cooper Wyld. Of the character and accomplishments of Sir Alexander Cockburn, whose lot it became to preside over the trial, it is not for me to say a word. Equally distinguished at the bar, in the House of Commons, and on the bench, he is one of the two or three most striking personalities in the legal history of the century. It was freely charged against him at a later date that he had entered upon the case with his mind made up, and some injudicious words he was said to have used in conversation with a Yorkshire lady of rank were twisted and misrepresented: but none save the most reckless and unscrupulous partisans hinted that anything outside the evidence and what transpired in Court before him was allowed to influence his mind. His colleagues, Mr. Justice Mellor and Mr. Justice Lush, occupied a rank second to none amongst the Common Law judges. The indictment, a voluminous document extending over many hundred feet of parchment, charged 'Thomas Castro, otherwise called Arthur Orton,' with wilful and corrupt perjury.1 The first count charged perjury in his examina- tion on the trial of the action in the Common Pleas, and contained twenty-three separate `assignments' or charges, 1 The charge of forgery was not proceeded with, possibly on the ground that being felony it would have been then imposs- ible for the jury to separate during the continuance of the trial. each one of which was sufficient to sustain the indictment.1 These assignments related in about equal proportion to the Tichborne and Orton parts of the case, and it will be sufficient to say that they practically covered the whole story, and that several of them were directed to the claimant's alleged relations with Miss Doughty. The second count charged perjury committed in statements contained in one of his affidavits in Chancery in 1868, and contained ten assign- ments similar to the main assignments in the first count so far as they related to the Tichborne part of the case. The Crown was represented on this occasion by Mr. Hawkins, Q.C., who pulled the leading oar in place of the Attorney-General, Mr. Serjeant Parry, Mr. J. C. Mathew, now the doyen of the Queen's Bench judges, and then enjoying one of the largest practices ever held by a stuff gownsman, together with Mr. Chapman Barber, and Mr. Bowen. Sir George Honeyman had become a puisne judge of the Common Pleas, where, long before the termination of the trial, Sir John Coleridge was to become his chief. The opening speech of Mr. Hawkins, a masterpiece of succinct and dramatic narration, travelled over the ground covered by the Attorney-General fifteen months before, but was of course greatly compressed in comparison with that famous effort. The circumstances were absolutely changed; it was no longer a private family standing at bay and de- fending its property and reputation, but the voice of justice calmly reviewing a great fraud and calling for punishment on the perpetrator. The first business after he sat down 1E.g. (1) In swearing that he was Roger Tichborne; (6) in swearing that he had been an officer in the army; (12) in swearing that he hadnever been to Lloyd's rooms; (14) in swearing that he had never been at Wapping before 1866 ; (22) in swearing that he had not seen any of Orton's sisters more than once before the trial. was the reading and proving of the affidavit, and of the whole of the examination and cross-examination upon which the assignments of perjury were founded. This necessitated the reading of a vast amount of correspondence and other documents, and the net result of it was to make every thing that transpired during the period from the 30th of May 1871 to the 7th of July, while the claimant was in the box, evidence in the criminal trial. When this was ended there commenced the examination of a list of some two hundred and fifteen witnesses, called to bear out the narrative which we have already learnt from the lips of Sir John. Coleridge, but which had been cut short by the interposition of the jury in the Common Pleas, and left unfinished like ' the story of Cambuscan bold.' I should be only wearying my readers if I at tempted to do more than point out some of the salient points in their evidence. First came the whole of the Tichborne and Seymour families, as vouched for by Sir John, with the exception of Lady Doughty, who was dead, but whose evidence had been taken on commission, and was available. Lady Radcliffe, as she had now become on the death of her father-in-law, repeated the evidence she had given at the former trial, and a large number of the relatives swore to the existence of the tattoo marks as being a subject of general knowledge in the family. Lady Dormer in particular asserted that it was a common trick of Roger's to pull up his sleeve and horrify herself and her sisters with the sight of them. She also made the interesting assertion that Roger was a remarkably ugly likeness of his mother, and did not in the least resemble his father or any of the Tichbornes. This, if true, was a curious commentary on the way in which the Tichborne villagers and others had identified the claimant, not from his like- ness to Roger, but from his unmistakable Tichborne features. Gosford and Mrs. Gosford were both of them most emphatic in repudiating the claimant's identity, and the former was able to relate not only the circumstances of Roger's unhappy courtship and of the making of his vow, but to place before the jury a complete picture of his life in England, of his physical peculiarities, and his general disposition and idiosyncrasies. Chatillon and a number of other French witnesses filled up that gap in the Paris life of Roger on which the claimant's mind was a complete blank, and the Stony- hurst Fathers and fellow-students and college servants covered the three years during which Roger was `a philosopher,' enabling the jury to gauge the profundity of the claimant's ignorance in this direction also. Mr. Bowker was called to corroborate the Seymour family as to the dowager's frame of mind previous to her recognition of the claimant, and the precaution which she took to dismiss him on the eve of her first interview; and Coyne, her Irish man-servant, gave in rich Milesian accents the only account of the meeting between mother and son which it has ever been possible to compare with the claimant's, and which I have followed in a former page.1 Lord Bellew repeated his evidence on the tattoo marks; Chabot, the famous handwriting expert, compared the letters and signatures of Roger, Arthur Orton, and the claimant, enforcing the similarity of the two latter and the want of resemblance between both of them and the first. A long list of officers in the Carabineers and a respectable number of old troopers swore that their comrades were mistaken, and that many of the specific incidents recorded by the claimant were a confused jumble of circumstances picked up at second or third hand. Captain Manders was absolutely certain that he re- collected the tattoo marks on Roger; but perhaps the strongest evidence was that of Captain Fraser, who had risen from the ranks, and had had Cornet Tichborne under his hands for drill. Not only this, but subsequently as a commissioned officer he had known him in the mess and had tried to protect him from some of the chaff, degenerating into bullying, which the unlucky Frenchman had undergone. Some account of this circumstance and of a snuffbox with which Roger, in a fit of maudlin gratitude, had sought to recompense him, had trickled out through the mess waiters; but the claimant in an interview with Captain Fraser had given such a ludicrous réchauffé of the incident as to convince the latter of the imposture. With these witnesses may be reckoned a Mr. Store Smith, who, as a relative of one of the officers, had been thrown a great deal into Roger's society on his visits to the regi- ment in Ireland. In an interview with the claimant he had failed to find a single trace of his old companion, and as a despairing effort tried to recall a trick of Roger's, which used to consist in stupefying house-flies under a wine-glass by means of tobacco smoke, and gradually restoring them to consciousness. The only clue he gave was the word ` flies,' and the claimant, after first denying all recollection, finally said he used to eat them. Captain Oates, a merchant seaman holding office under the Board of Trade, who had been at Rio in 1854, and was a friend of Captain Birkett of the Bella, remembered all the circumstances connected with Roger's embarkation on that vessel, and flatly contradicted the claimant on several important points. Then the Melipilla case was gone into : here the prosecution had to rely principally on the home-letters of Roger and the correspondence of the claimant with Pedro Castro, for the evidence taken on commission for the former trial was not available here, and the attendance of many of the witnesses could not be procured. The original Tomas Castro had been brought over, but his old insanity had broken out again, and it was found impossible to call him. One witness, however, did present herself, Dona Hayley, the wife of the English doctor in whose house the boy Arthur had first been received, and her narrative was conclusive enough, though slightly defective as to some of the dates. Still, it must be allowed that this part of the indictment did not show up in the crushing force with which the Chilian Commission had armed Sir John Coleridge. The Australian Commission was, of course, equally inadmissible; but a good number of the most important witnesses had been brought over, including Mr. Gibbes and a Mr. M'Arthur, the solicitor to the Joint Stock Bank at Sydney. Mr. Gibbes was a troubled man, who said that this abominable affair had given him no peace for the last seven years, and he gave his evidence with profound disgust, being apparently still unwilling to believe that he had been utterly duped. He supplied, however, invaluable evidence as to the state of the claimant's knowledge in the early Wagga Wagga days, and both he and M'Arthur agreed as to the furious excitement into which he had been thrown when they learnt from Lady Tichborne that Roger had been in the army. How he had sworn he had never been an officer, and that his mother must be mad to say so, and that he had a damned good mind not to go near her at all. An even more significant remark had been made to them by the claimant to the effect that he had written home, and `it had risen a greater row than I thought.' Mr. Gibbes had not had the pleasure of meeting any one of the name of Arthur Orton at Wagga Wagga or elsewhere, but he testified that, so far as he knew, Castro was a quiet, well-conducted man. On the Orton case, apart from the claimant's own conduct and letters, the prosecution had a strong, if not an overwhelming body of witnesses from Wapping and the neighbourhood, some of them belonging to the families mentioned by the claimant on his visit to the Globe Tavern, who swore that the claimant was Arthur Orton and none other, and some of whom remembered the famous brown mark on his side. I shall merely content myself with mentioning Mary Ann Loder, Arthur's sweet heart when a boy, whose address was found in Castro's Australian pocket-book, and whose testimony to the identity of the claimant with her old lover stood the test of a vigorous cross-examination. |
