Guards at Dublin, as a subaltern. But in 1852 he sold out his
commission and went home. His peculiarities of manner and appearance,
his accent and strange idioms and a temperamental unfitness for
soldiering had made him miserable in the army. The constant cruel, if
thoughtless, jibes and mimicries of his fellows found him a sensitive
mark.
But the unhappy termination of the young man’s military career
was only a minor factor in an almost desperate state of mind that
possessed him at this time. He had fallen in love with his cousin,
Kate Doughty, afterward Lady Radcliffe, and she had found herself
unable to reciprocate. After many pleadings and storms the young heir
of the Tichbornes set sail from Havre in March, 1853, and reached
Valparaiso, Chile, about three months later, evidently determined to
seek forgetfulness in stranger latitudes. In the course of the southern
summer he crossed the Andes to Brazil and reached Rio in March or
early April. Here he embarked on the _Bella_ for New York, as recited,
his further plans remaining unknown. In letters to his mother he had,
however, spoken vaguely of an intention to go to Australia, a hint upon
which much of the following romance was erected.
When, in the following year, the insurance was paid, and the will
proved, the Tichbornes accepted the death of the traveler as
practically beyond question. But not so his mother. She began, after an
interval, to advertise in many parts of the world for trace of her son.
Such notices appeared in the leading British, American, Continental,
and Australian journals without effect. Only one thing is to be
learned from them, the appearance of the lost heir. He is described
as being rather undersized, delicate, with sharp features, dark eyes,
and straight black hair. These personal specifications will prove of
importance later on.
In 1862 Roger Tichborne’s father died, and a younger son succeeded
to the baronetcy and estates. This event stirred the dowager Lady
Tichborne to fresh activities, and her advertisements began to appear
again in newspapers and shipping journals over half the world. As
a result of these injudicious clamorings for information, many a
seaspawned adventurer was received by the grieving mother at Tichborne
House, and many a common liar imposed on her for money and other
favors. Repeated misadventures of this sort might have been considered
sufficient experience to cause the dowager to desist from her folly,
but nothing seemed to move her from her fixed idea, and the fantastic
reports and rumors brought her by every wandering sharper had the
effect of strengthening her in her fond belief.
Lady Tichborne’s pertinacity, while it had failed to restore her
son, had not been without its collateral effects. Among them was the
wide dissemination of a romantic story and the enlistment of public
sympathy. A large part of the newspaper-reading British populace soon
came to look upon the lady as a high example of motherly devotion,
to sympathize with her point of view, and gradually to conclude that
she was right, and that Roger Tichborne was indeed alive, somewhere
in the antipodes. This belief was not entirely confined to emotional
strangers, as appears from the fact that Kate Doughty, the object of
the young nobleman’s bootless love, refused various offers of marriage
and steadfastly remained single, pending a termination of all doubt as
to the fate of her hapless lover.
Thus, in one way and another, a great legend grew up. The Tichborne
case came to be looked upon in some quarters as another of the great
mysteries of disappearance. In various distant lands volunteer seekers
took up the quest for Roger Tichborne, impelled sometimes by the
fascinating powers of mystery, but more often by the hope of reward.
In 1865 a man named Cubitt started a missing friends’ bureau in Sydney,
New South Wales, a fact which he advertised in the London newspapers.
Lady Tichborne, still far from satisfied of her son’s death, saw the
notice in _The Times_ and communicated with Cubitt. As a result of this
contact, Lady Tichborne was notified, in November, 1865, that a man
had been discovered who answered the description of her missing “boy.”
This fellow had been found keeping a small butcher shop in the town of
Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, and was there known by the name of Thomas
Castro, which he admitted to be assumed.
Lady Tichborne, excited and elated, communicated at once and did not
fail to give the impression that the discovery and return of her eldest
son would be a feat to earn a very high reward, since he was the heir
to a large property, and since she was herself “most anxious to hear.”
Australia was then, to be sure, much farther away than to-day. There
were no cables and only occasional steamers. It often took months for
a letter to pass back and forth. Thus, after painful delays, Lady
Tichborne received a second communication in which she was told that
there could be little doubt about the identification, as the butcher of
Wagga Wagga had owned to several persons that he was indeed not Thomas
Castro, but a British “nobleman” in disguise, and to at least one
person that he was none other than Roger Tichborne.
Not long afterward Lady Tichborne received her first letter from
her missing “son”. He addressed her as “Dear Mama,” misspelled the
Tichborne name by inserting a “t” after the “i,” spelled common
words abominably, and handled the English language with a fine show
of ignorance. Finally he referred to a birthmark and an incident at
Brighton, of which Lady Tichborne had not the slightest recollection.
At first she was considerably damped by these discrepancies and
mistakes of the claimant, as the man in Wagga Wagga came shortly to be
termed. But Lady Tichborne soon rallied from her doubts and asserted
her absolute confidence in the genuineness of the far-away pretender to
the baronetcy.
Her stand in the matter was not inexplicable, even when it is recalled
that subsequent letters from Australia revealed the claimant to be
ignorant of common family traditions and totally confused about
himself, even going so far as to say that he had been a common soldier
in the carabineers, when Roger Tichborne had been an officer, and
referring to his schooling at Winchester, whereas the Roman Catholic
Tichbornes had, of course, sent their son to Stonyhurst. Lady Tichborne
apparently ascribed such lapses to the “terrible ordeal” her boy
had suffered, and she was not the only one to recognize that Roger
Tichborne had himself, because of his early French training and the
meagerness of his subsequent education, misspelled just such words as
appeared incorrectly in the letters, and he had misused his English in
a very similar fashion.
These details are interesting rather than important. Whatever their
final significance, Lady Tichborne sent money to Australia to pay for
the claimant’s passage home. He arrived in England, unannounced, in the
last month of 1866, and visited several localities, among them Wapping,
a London district which played a vital part in what was to come. He
also visited the vicinity of Tichborne Park and made numerous inquiries
there. Only after these preliminaries did he cross to Paris, where he
summoned Lady Tichborne to meet him. When she called at his hotel she
found him in bed complaining of a bad cold. The room was dimly lighted,
and she recounted afterward that he kept his face turned to the wall
most of the time she spent with him.
What were the lady’s feelings on first beholding this man is an
interesting matter for speculation. She had sent away, thirteen
years before, a slight, delicate, poetic aristocrat, whose chief
characteristic was an excessive refinement that made him quite unfit
for the common stresses of life. In his stead there came back a short,
gross, enormously fat plebeian, with the lingual faults and vocal
solecisms of the cockney. In the place of the young man who knew his
French and did not know his English, here was a fellow who could speak
not a word of the Gallic tongue and used his English abominably.
None of these things appeared to make any difference to Lady Tichborne.
She received the claimant without reservation, said publicly that she
had recovered her darling boy, and went so far as to announce her
reasons for accepting him as her son.
The return of Roger Tichborne was, to be sure, an exciting topic
of the newspapers of the time, with the result that the romantic
story of his voyage, the shipwreck of the _Bella_, his rescue, his
wanderings, his final discovery at Wagga Wagga, and his happy return
to his mother’s arms became known to millions of people, many of whom
accepted the legend for its charm and color alone, without reference to
its probability. Indeed, the tale had all the elements that make for
popularity and credibility. The opening incident of unrequited love,
the journey in quest of forgetfulness, the crossing of the Andes, the
ordeal of shipwreck, the adventures in the Australian bush, and the
intervention of the hand of Providence to drag him back to his native
land, his title and his inheritance! Was there lacking any element of
pathetic grace?
For those who saw in his ignorance of Tichborne family affairs
and his sad illiteracy sober objections to the pretensions of the
claimant, there was triple evidence of identification. Not only had
Lady Tichborne recognized this wanderer as her son, but two old
Tichborne servants had preceded her in their approval. It happened
that one Bogle, an old negro servant, who had been intimate with
Roger Tichborne as a boy, was living in New South Wales when the first
claim was put forward by the man at Wagga Wagga. At the request of
the dowager this man went to see the pretender and talked with him at
length, first in the presence of those who were pressing the claim
and later alone. The servant and the claimant reviewed a number of
incidents in Roger Tichborne’s early life, and Bogle reported that he
was satisfied. He became “Sir Roger’s” body servant and subsequently
accompanied him to England. Later a former Tichborne gardener,
Grillefoyle by name, who also had gone out to Australia, was sent
to interview the Wagga Wagga butcher. The result was the same. He
reported favorably to his former mistress, and it seems to have been
mainly on the opinion of these two men that Lady Tichborne based her
decision to disregard the difficulties inherent in the letters and to
finance the return of the man to England. Their testimony, backed by
the enduring hunger of her own heart, no doubt swayed her to credence
when she finally stood face to face with the improbable apparition that
pretended to be her son.
The claimant, though he had arrived in England in December, 1866,
made various claims and went to court once or twice but did not make
the definitive legal move to establish his position or to retrieve
the baronetcy and estates until more than three years later. Suit was
finally entered toward the end of 1870, and the trial came on before
the court of common pleas in London on the eleventh of May, 1871. This
was the beginning of one of the most intricate and remarkable law-trial
dramas to be found in the records of modern nations.
The Tichborne pretender had used the years of delay for the purpose
of gathering evidence and consolidating his case. He had sought out
and won over to his side the trusted servants of the house, the family
solicitor, students at Stonyhurst, officers of the carabineers and many
others. The school, the officers’ mess, the Tichborne seat, and many
other localities connected with the youth and young manhood of Roger
Tichborne had all been visited. In addition, the obese claimant had
further cultivated Lady Tichborne, who came to have more and more faith
in him. Originally she had written:
“He confuses everything as if in a dream, but it will not prevent me
from recognizing him, though his statements differ from mine.”
Before the suit was filed, and the case came to be tried, his memory
improved remarkably; he corrected the many errors in his earlier
statements, and his recollection quickly assimilated itself to that
of Lady Tichborne. After he had been in England for a time even his
handwriting grew to be unmistakably like that revealed in the letters
written by Roger Tichborne before his disappearance.
There was, accordingly, a very palpable stuff of evidence in favor
of the man from Australia. I have already said that the public
accepted the stranger. It needs to be recorded that every new shred
of similarity or circumstance that could be brought out only added to
the conviction of the people. This was unquestionably Roger Tichborne
and none other. Some elements asserted their opinion with a passion
that was not far from violence, and the public generally regarded the
hostile attitude of the Tichborne family as based on selfish motives.
Naturally the other Tichbornes did not want to be dispossessed in favor
of a man who had been confidently and perhaps jubilantly counted among
the dead for more than fifteen years. The man in the street regarded
the family position as natural, but reprehensible. How, it was asked,
could there be any doubt when the boy’s mother was so certain? Was
there anything surer than a mother’s instinct? To doubt seemed almost
monstrous. Accordingly, the butcher of Wagga Wagga became a public
idol, and the Tichborne family an object of aversion.
Nor is this in the least exaggerated. When it became known that the
claimant had no funds with which to prosecute his case, the suggestion
of a public bond issue was made and promptly approved. Bonds, with no
other backing than the promise to refund the advanced money when the
claimant should come into possession of his property, were issued,
and so extreme was the public confidence in the validity of the claim
that they were bought up greedily. In addition, a number of wealthy
individuals became so interested in the affair and so convinced of the
rights of the stranger, that they made him large personal advances. One
man, Mr. Guilford Onslow, M. P., is said to have lent as much as 75,000
pounds, while two ladies of the Onslow family advanced 30,000 pounds
and Earl Rivers is believed to have wasted as much as 150,000 pounds on
the impostor.
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.
[Illustration:
_Copyright, Maull & Fox_
~~ ARTHUR ORTON ~~]
He operated a butcher shop in that place for some years, but made a
failure of business and “disappeared into the brush,” owing every one.
Trace of his movements then grew vague, but it is known that he was
suspected of complicity in several highway robberies, which were staged
in New South Wales a few years afterward, and he was certainly charged
with horse stealing on one occasion. Later he appeared in Wagga Wagga
and opened a small butcher shop under the name of Thomas Castro, which
he had adopted from the family in Chile.
In a confession which Orton wrote and sold to a London newspaper[7]
years after his release from prison in 1884, he gives an account of
the origin of the fraud. He says that some time before Cubitt, of the
missing-friends bureau, found him and induced him to write to Lady
Tichborne, he and his chum at Wagga Wagga, one Slade, had seen some of
the advertisements which the distraught lady was having published in
antipodean newspapers. Orton soon adopted the pose of superior station,
told Slade that he was, in fact, a nobleman incognito, and finally let
his friends understand that he was Roger Tichborne. The whole thing
had been begun in a spirit of innocent acting, for the purpose of
noting the effect of such a revelation upon his friend. In view of
what followed we cannot escape the conclusion that the swinishly fat
butcher undertook this adventure because he was mentally disturbed, in
the sense of being a pathological liar. A talent for impersonation and
imposture is one of the marked characteristics displayed by this common
type of mental defective, and Orton certainly possessed it, almost to
the point of genius.
[7] _The People_, 1898.
Whatever the explanation of Orton’s original motive, the fact remains
that his friend Slade was impressed by the butcher’s tale and thus
encouraged Orton to proceed with the fraud, as did a lawyer to whom
Orton-Castro was in debt. He soon went swaggering about, trying to
talk like a gentleman and giving what must have been a most painful
imitation of the manners of a lord. His rude neighbors can have had no
better discrimination in such matters than the British public and Lady
Tichborne herself, so it was not a difficult feat to play upon local
credulity.
In the last month of 1865, when Cubitt sent an agent to Wagga Wagga,
as a result of his correspondence with Lady Tichborne, the legend of
Orton’s identity as Roger Tichborne was already firmly established in
the minds of his townspeople, and the rumor thus gained its initial
confirmation. The reader is asked to remember that Orton was known as
Castro, and that his identification as Orton was a difficult feat,
which remained unperformed until the final trial, more than eight years
later.
Lady Tichborne herself supplied Castro and his backers in Australia
with their first vital information. In seeking to identify her son
she quite guilelessly wrote to Cubitt and others many details of her
son’s appearance, history, education, and peculiarities. She also
mentioned a number of intimate happenings. All these were seized upon
by the butcher and used in framing his letters to the dowager. In spite
of this fact, he made the many stupid blunders already referred to.
Lady Tichborne saw the discrepancies, as has been remarked, but her
monomania urged her to credence, and she sent the ex-servants, Bogle
and Grillefoyle to investigate. How Orton-Castro managed to win them
over is not easy to determine. For a time it was suspected that perhaps
these men had been corrupted by those interested in having the claimant
recognized; but the facts seem to discountenance any such belief.
One of the outstanding characteristics of Orton was his ability to
make friends and gain their confidence, of which fact there can be no
more eloquent testimony than the long list of witnesses who appeared
for him at his trials. The man who was able to persuade a mother,
a sharp-witted solicitor, half a dozen higher army officers, six
magistrates, and numberless soldiers and tenants who had known Roger
Tichborne well, to accept and support him in his preposterous claim,
did not need money to befool an old gardener and a negro valet.
Indeed, it was this personal gift, backed by the man’s abnormal
histrionic bent and capacity for mimicry, that carried him so far and
won him the support of so many individuals and almost the solid public.
How far he was able to carry things has been suggested, but the details
are so remarkable as to demand recounting.
Orton had almost no schooling. He quite naturally misspelled the
commonest words and was normally guilty of the most appalling
grammatical and rhetorical solecisms. He knew not a word of French,
Latin, or of any other language, save a smattering of Spanish, picked
up from the Castros while at Melipillo. He had never associated with
any one who remotely approached the position of a gentleman, and the
best imitation he can have contrived, must have been patterned after
performances witnessed on the stages of cheap variety houses. Moreover
he knew absolutely nothing about the Tichbornes, not even the fact that
they were Catholics. He did not know where their estates were, nor
where Roger had gone to school; yet he carried his imposture within an
inch of success. Indeed, it was the opinion of disinterested observers
at the trial of his civil action that he must have won the case had he
stayed off the stand himself.