Another one of our fantastic mutual cousins was the “Earl of Durham.” I
ought to say that Mark Twain and I grew up on old wives’ tales of
estates and titles, which, maybe due to a kindred sense of humor in
both of us, we treated with shocking irreverence. It happened some
fifty years ago that there turned up, first upon the plains and
afterward in New York and Washington, a lineal descendant of the oldest
of the Virginia Lamptons—he had somehow gotten hold of or had
fabricated a bundle of documents—who was what a certain famous American
would have called a “corker.” He wore a sombrero with a rattlesnake for
a band, and a belt with a couple of six-shooters, and described himself
and claimed to be the Earl of Durham.
“He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever saw him,” drawled
Mark to me, “and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up,
whenever he’s around, with punctuality and regularity.”
The “Earl” was indeed a terror, especially when he had been drinking.
His belief in his peerage was as absolute as Colonel Sellers’ in his
millions. All he wanted was money enough “to get over there” and “state
his case.” During the Tichborne trial Mark Twain and I were in London,
and one day he said to me:
“I have investigated this Durham business down at the Herald’s office.
There’s nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out of the Demesne of Durham
a hundred years ago. They had long before dissipated the estates.
Whatever the title, it lapsed. The present earldom is a new creation,
not the same family at all. But, I tell you what, if you’ll put up five
hundred dollars I’ll put up five hundred more, we’ll fetch our chap
across and set him in as a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy’s fat
boy won’t be a marker to him!”
He was so pleased with his conceit that later along he wrote a novel
and called it The Claimant. It is the only one of his books, though I
never told him so, that I could not enjoy. Many years after, I happened
to see upon a hotel register in Rome these entries: “The Earl of
Durham,” and in the same handwriting just below it, “Lady Anne Lambton”
and “The Hon. Reginald Lambton.” So the Lambtons—they spelled it with a
b instead of a p—were yet in the peerage. A Lambton was Earl of Durham.
The next time I saw Mark I rated him on his deception. He did not
defend himself, said something about its being necessary to perfect the
joke.
“Did you ever meet this present peer and possible usurper?” I asked.
“No,” he answered, “I never did, but if he had called on me, I would
have had him come up.”