Finally the civil trial of the suit took place. The proceedings began on the eleventh of May, 1871, and were not concluded until March, 1872. Sir John Coleridge, who defended for the Tichborne family and later became lord chief justice, cross-questioned the claimant for twenty-two days, and his speech in summing up is said to have been the longest ever delivered before a court in England. The actual taking of evidence required more than one hundred court days, and at least a hundred witnesses identified the claimant as Roger Tichborne. To quote from Major Arthur Griffiths’ account:
“These witnesses included Lady Tichborne,[6] Roger’s mother, the family solicitor, one baronet, six magistrates, one general, three colonels, one major, thirty non-commissioned officers and men, four clergymen, seven Tichborne tenants, and sixteen servants of the family.”
[6] A mistake, for the dowager Lady Tichborne died on March 12, 1868. Her damage had been done before the trial.
On the other hand, the defense produced only seventeen witnesses against the claimant, but it piled up a great deal of dark-looking evidence, and, in the course of his long and terrible interrogation of the plaintiff, Coleridge was able to bring out so many contradictions, such appalling blanks of memory, and such an accumulation of ignorances and blunders that the jury gave evidence of its inclination. Thereupon Serjeant Ballantine, the claimant’s leading counsel, abandoned the case.
On the order of the judge the claimant was immediately seized, charged with three counts of perjury, and remanded for criminal trial. This case was not called until April, 1873, and it proved a more formidable legal contest than the unprecedented civil action. The proceedings lasted more than a year, and it took the judge eighteen days to charge the jury; this in spite of the usual despatch of British trials. How long such a case might have hung on in the notoriously slow American courts is a matter for painful speculation.
This long and dramatic trial, full of emotional scenes and stirring incidents, moving slowly along to the accompaniment of popular unrest and violent partisanship in the newspapers, ended as did the civil action. The claimant was convicted of having impersonated Roger Tichborne, of having sullied the name of Miss Kate Doughty, and of having denied his true identity as Arthur Orton, the son of a Wapping butcher. The infant nephew of the real Roger Tichborne was, by this verdict, confirmed in his rights, and the claimant was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment. Thus ended one of the most magnificent impostures ever attempted. Lady Tichborne did not live to witness this collapse of the fraud, or the humiliation of the man she had so freely accepted as her own son. The poor lady was shown to be a monomaniac, whose judgment had been unseated by the shipwreck of her beloved eldest boy.
I have purposely reserved the story, as brought out in the two trials, for direct narration, since it embraces the major romance connected with this celebrated case and needs to be told with regard to chronology and climax.
Arthur Orton, the true name of the claimant, was born to a Wapping butcher, at 69 High Street, in June, 1834, and was thus nearly five years younger than Roger Tichborne. He had been afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance as a boy and had been delinquent. As a result of this, he had been sent from home when fourteen years old, and he had taken a sea voyage which landed him, by a strange coincidence, at Valparaiso, Chile, in 1848, five years before Tichborne reached that port. Orton remained in Chile for several years, living with a family named Castro, at the small inland city of Melipillo, until 1851, when he returned to England and visited his parents at Wapping. In the following year he sailed for Tasmania and settled at Hobart Town.
Copyright, Maull & Fox