Instead of this man going away after he had given his evidence, he remained until two gentlemen from the City, seeing his portrait in the Stereoscopic Company's window in Regent Street, identified him as a dishonest servant of theirs, who was undergoing a sentence of penal servitude at the time he swore he picked Roger up. He received five years' penal servitude for his evidence.
I had pledged myself to the task, which extended over many months more than I ever anticipated. At every sacrifice, however, I was bound to devote myself to the case, and did so, although I had to relinquish a very large portion of my professional income.
What made things worse, there was not only no effort made to curtail the business, but advantage was taken of every circumstance to prolong it. The longer it was dragged out the better chance there was of an acquittal. Had a juryman died after months of the trial had passed, the Government must have abandoned the prosecution. It would have been impossible to commence again. This was the last hope of the defence.
[The trial before Bovill ended at last, as it ought to have done months before, in a verdict for the defendants and the order for the prosecution of the Claimant for perjury. It was this prosecution that occupied the attention of the court and of the world for 188 days, extending over portions of two years.
There is no doubt that Coleridge would a second time have deprived the country of Mr. Hawkins's services, but higher influences than his prevailed, and the distinguished counsel was appointed to lead for the Crown, with Mr. Serjeant Parry as his leading junior. It is not too much to say that no one knew the case so well as Mr. Hawkins, and none could have done it so well. Bowen and Mathews were also his juniors.
The whole case, from the commencement of the Chancery proceedings down to the commencement of this trial, had been a comedy of blunders. The very claim was an absurdity, every step in the great fraud was an absurdity, and every proceeding had some ridiculous absurdity to accompany it. It was not until the cross-examination of Baigent by Mr. Hawkins that the undoubted truth began to appear.
"You are the first," said Baron Bramwell, "who has let daylight into the case." It will be seen presently what the simple story was which the learned counsel at last evolved from the lies and half-truths which had for so many years imposed upon a great number even of the intelligent and educated classes of the community. And I would observe that until nearly the end of the trial the case was never safe or quite free from doubt; it was only what was elicited by Mr. Hawkins that made it so. No Wonder the advocate said to Giffard, who was opposed to him on the first trial: "If you and I had been together in that case in the first instance, we should have won it for the Claimant." Being on the other side, this is how the case stood when he had completed it:—
The real heir to the family was a fairly well-formed, slender youth of medium height. The personator of this youth was a man an inch and a half or two inches taller, and weighing five-and-twenty stone. His hands were a great deal larger than those of Roger, and at least an inch longer; his feet were an inch and a half longer. He was broader, deeper, thicker, and altogether of a different build. The lobes of his ears, instead of being pendent like Roger's, adhered to his cheeks. But he was not more unlike in physical outline than in mental endowment, taste, character, pursuits, and sentiment, in manners and habits, in culture and education, connection and recollection.
Roger had been educated at Stonyhurst, with the education of a gentleman; this man had never had any education at all. Roger had moved in the best English society; this man amongst slaughtermen, bushrangers, thieves, and highwaymen. Roger had been engaged to a young lady, his cousin, Kate Doughty; this man had been engaged to a young woman of Wapping, of the name of Mary Ann Loader, a respectable girl in his own sphere of life.
Roger's engagement to this young lady, his cousin, was disapproved of by the Tichborne family, and was the cause of his leaving England. But before he went he gave her a writing, and deposited a copy of it with Mr. Gosford, the legal adviser of the family.