Before I accepted the candidature of Barnstaple, a friend of mine said he had been making inquiries as to how the little borough of Totnes could be won, and that the lowest figure required as an instalment to commence with was £7,000.
After this I had no more to do with electioneering in the sense of being a candidate, but a good deal to do with it in every other.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE TICHBORNE CASE.
[The greatest of all chapters in the life of Mr. Hawkins was the prosecution of the impostor Arthur Orton for perjury, and yet the story of the Tichborne case is one of the simplest and most romantic. The heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and estates was shipwrecked while on board the Bella and drowned in 1854. In 1865 a butcher at Wagga Wagga in Australia assumed the title and claimed the estates. But the story is not related in these reminiscences on account of its romantic incidents, but as an incident in the life of Lord Brampton. It is so great that there is nothing in the annals of our ordinary courts of justice comparable with it, either in its magnitude or its advocacy. I speak particularly of the trial for perjury, in which Mr. Hawkins led for the prosecution, and not of the preceding trial, in which he was junior to Sir John Coleridge.
It is impossible to give more than the points of this strange story as they were made, and the real facts as they were elicited in cross-examination and pieced together in his opening speech and his reply in the case for the Crown. What rendered the task the more difficult was that his predecessors had so bungled the cross-examination in many ways that they not only had not elicited what they might have done, but actually, by many questions, furnished information to the Claimant which enabled him to carry on his imposture.]
The Tichborne trials demand a few words by way of introduction, for although there were two trials, they were of a different character, the first being an ordinary action of ejectment in which the Claimant sought to dispossess the youthful heir, whose title he had already assumed, under circumstances of the most extraordinary nature.
The action of ejectment was tried before Chief Justice Bovill at the Common Pleas, Westminster. Ballantine and Giffard (now Lord Halsbury) led for the plaintiff, the butcher, while on behalf of the trustees of the estate (that is, the real heir) were the Solicitor-General Coleridge, myself, Bowen (afterwards Lord Bowen), and Chapman Barber, an equity counsel.
I must explain how it was that I, having been retained to lead
Coleridge, was afterwards compelled to be led by him; and it is an
interesting event in the history of the Bar as well as of the Judicial
Bench.
The action was really a Western Circuit case, although the venue was laid in London. Coleridge led that circuit and was retained. I belonged to the Home Circuit, and had no idea of being engaged at all for that side. I had been retained for the Claimant, but the solicitor, with great kindness, withdrew his retainer at my request.