Famous Imposters 24

Famous Imposters 24

The trial of this action lasted 102 days. Sergeant Ballantine led for

the Claimant; and Sir John Coleridge (afterwards Lord Chief-justice),

and Mr. Hawkins, Q. C. (afterwards Lord Brampton), for the trustees

of the estates of Tichborne. The cross-examination of the Claimant at

the hands of Sir John Coleridge lasted twenty-two days, during which

the colossal ignorance he displayed was only equalled by his boldness,

dexterity and the bull-dog tenacity with which he faced the ordeal.

To quote Sir John’s own words: “The first sixteen years of his life

he has absolutely forgotten; the few facts he had told the jury were

already proved, or would hereafter be shown, to be absolutely false and

fabricated. Of his college life he could recollect nothing. About his

amusements, his books, his music, his games, he could tell nothing.

Not a word of his family, of the people with whom he lived, their

habits, their persons, their very names. He had forgotten his mother’s

maiden name; he was ignorant of all particulars of the family estate;

he remembered nothing of Stonyhurst; and in military matters he was

equally deficient. Roger, born and educated in France, spoke and wrote

French like a native and his favourite reading was French literature;

but the Claimant knew nothing of French. Of the ‘sealed’ packet he

knew nothing and, when pressed, his interpretation of its contents

contained the foulest and blackest calumny of the cousin whom Roger had

so fondly loved. This was proved by Mr. Gosford, to whom the packet had

been originally entrusted, and by the production of the duplicate which

Roger had given to Miss Doughty herself. The physical discrepancy, too,

was no less remarkable; for, while Roger, who took after his mother was

slight and delicate, with narrow sloping shoulders, a long narrow face

and thin straight dark hair, the Claimant was of enormous bulk, scaling

over twenty-four stone, big-framed and burly, with a large round face

and an abundance of fair and rather wavy hair. And yet, curiously

enough, the Claimant undoubtedly possessed a strong likeness to several

male members of the Tichborne family.”

 

When questioned as to the impressive episode of Roger’s love for his

cousin, the Claimant showed himself hopelessly at sea. His answers

were confused and irreconcilable. Not only could he give no precise

dates, but even the broad outline of the story was beyond him. Yet,

for good reasons, the Solicitor-General persisted in pressing him as

to the contents of the sealed packet and compelled him to repeat the

slanderous version of the incident which he had long ago given when

interrogated on the point. Mrs. Radcliffe (she was not then Lady) sat

in court beside her husband, and thus had the satisfaction of seeing

the infamous charges brought against the fair fame of her girlhood

recoil on the head of the wretch who had resorted to such villainous

devices. Unfortunately, some years after Roger’s disappearance, Mr.

Gosford, feeling that he was neither justified in keeping the precious

packet, nor in handing it to any other person, had burnt it; but,

fortunately his testimony as to its contents was proved in the most

complete manner by the production of the duplicate which poor Roger had

given to his cousin on his last visit to Tichborne.

 

Where the case broke down most completely was in the matter of tattoo

marks. Roger had been freely tattooed. Among other marks he bore, on

his left arm, a cross, an anchor, and a heart which was testified to

by the persons who had pricked them in. Orton, too, it was found out,

had also been tattooed on his left arm with his initials, “A. O.,”

and, though neither remained, there was a mark which was sworn to be

the obliteration of those letters. Small wonder then that, on the top

of this damning piece of evidence, the jury declared they required to

hear nothing further, upon which the Claimant’s counsel, to avoid the

inevitable verdict for their opponents, elected to be nonsuited. But

these tactics did not save their client, for he was at once arrested,

on the judge’s warrant, on the charge of wilful and corrupt perjury,

and committed to Newgate where he remained until bail for £10,000 was

forthcoming.

 

A year later, on April 23, 1873, the Claimant was arraigned before

a special jury in the Court of Queen’s Bench. The proceedings were

of a most prolix and unusual character. Practically the same ground

was covered as in the civil trial, only the process was reversed:

the Claimant having now to defend instead of to attack. Many of

the better-class witnesses, including the majority of Roger’s

brother-officers, now forsook the Claimant. There was a deal of

cross-swearing. The climax of the long trial was the production by the

defence of a witness to support the Claimant’s account of his wreck

and rescue. This was a man who called himself Jean Luie and claimed

to be a Danish seaman. With a wealth of picturesque detail he told

how he was one of the crew of the _Osprey_ which had picked up a boat

of the shipwrecked _Bella_, in which was the claimant and some of the

crew, and how when the _Osprey_ arrived at Melbourne, in the height

of the gold fever, every man of the crew from the captain downwards

had deserted the ship and gone up country. According to his story from

that time forth he had seen nothing of any of the castaways; but having

come to England in search of his wife he had heard of the trial. When

Luie was first brought into the presence of the Claimant that astute

person immediately claimed him with the greeting in Spanish “_Como

esta, Luie?_”--“How are you, Luie?” The sailor with equal readiness

recognised Orton as the man he had helped to rescue years before. All

this sounded very convincing; but it would not stand investigation.

From the beginning to end the thing was an invention; an examination

of shipping records failed to find the _Osprey_ so that she must have

escaped the notice of the authorities in every port she had entered

from the day she was launched! Of “Sailor” Luie, however, a very

complete record was established. Not only were the police able to prove

that, at the time he swore he was a seaman on board the _Osprey_,

he was actually employed by a firm at Hull; that he had never been

a seaman at all; but that he was a well-known habitual criminal and

convict only recently released on a ticket-of-leave. This made things

very awkward for the defence who made every effort to shake free from

the taint of such perjured evidence. Dr. Kenealy, seeing his dilemma,

contended that it had been concocted by Luie himself. But the damning

and unanswerable fact remained--that, by his recognition of the man,

the Claimant had acknowledged a previous acquaintance with him which he

could only have had by being privy to the fraud.

 

On February 28, 1874, the one hundred and eighty-eighth day of the

trial, the jury after half-an-hour’s deliberation returned their

verdict. They found that the defendant was not Roger Charles

Tichborne; that he was Arthur Orton; and finally that the charges made

against Miss Catherine Doughty were not supported by the slightest

evidence. Orton was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude which,

assuredly, was none too heavy for offences so enormous. The trial

was remarkable, not only for its inordinate length, but also for the

extraordinary scenes by which it was characterised and for which Dr.

Kenealy, leading counsel for the defence, was primarily responsible.

His conduct was sternly denounced by the Lord Chief Justice in his

summing up as: “the torrent of undisguised and unlimited abuse in which

the learned counsel for the defence has thought fit to indulge,” and

he declared that “there never was in the history of jurisprudence a

case in which such an amount of imputation and invective had been used

before.” After the trial was over, Dr. Kenealy tried to turn the case

into a national question through the medium of a virulent paper he

started with the title of the _Englishman_; and undeterred by being

disbarred for his flagrant breaches of professional etiquette, he went

about the country delivering the most extravagant speeches concerning

the trial. He was elected Member of Parliament for Stoke, and, on April

23, 1875, moved for a royal commission of inquiry into the conduct of

the Tichborne Case; but his motion was defeated by 433 votes to 1.

 

The verdict and sentence created enormous excitement throughout the

country, for all classes, more or less, had subscribed to the defence

fund. But, by the time Orton was released, in 1884, practically

all interest had died away, and his effort to resuscitate it was a

miserable failure. In the sworn confession which he published in the

_People_, in 1895, he told the whole story of the fraud from its

inception to its final denouement. Orton survived his release from

prison for fourteen years, but gradually sinking into poverty, he died

in obscure lodgings in Shouldham Street, Marylebone, on April 1, 1898.

To the end he was a fraud and impostor for, before his death, he is

said to have recanted his sworn confession, which nevertheless bore the

stamp of truth and was in perfect accord with the information obtained

by the prosecution, while his coffin bore the lying inscription: “Sir

Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne; born 5th January, 1829; died 1st

April, 1898.”

 

 

 

 

VII. WOMEN AS MEN

 

 

A. THE MOTIVE FOR DISGUISE

 

One of the commonest forms of imposture--so common that it seems rooted

in a phase of human nature--is that of women who disguise themselves

as men. It is not to be wondered at that such attempts are made; or

that they were made more often formerly when social advancement had not

enlarged the scope of work available for women. The legal and economic

disabilities of the gentler sex stood then so fixedly in the way of

working opportunity that women desirous of making an honest livelihood

took desperate chances to achieve their object. We have read of very

many cases in the past; and even now the hum-drum of life is broken by

the fact or the echo of some startling revelation of the kind. Only

very lately the death of a person who had for many years occupied a

worthy though humble position in London caused a post-mortem sensation

by the discovery that the deceased individual, though looked on for

about a quarter of a century as a man, a widower, and the father of

a grown-up daughter, was in reality a woman. She was actually buried

under the name of the man she had professed to be, Harry Lloyd.

 

It is not to be wondered at that in more strenuous times, when the

spirit of adventure was less curbed, and initial difficulties were

less deadened by convention, cases of concealment of sex were far more

numerous and more easily prolonged. In an age of foreign wars, many

existing barriers against success in this respect were removed by

general laxity of social conditions. Perhaps I may be allowed to say at

the outset that, for my own part, my mind refuses absolutely to accept

that which is generally alleged in each case, that the male comrades

of women concealing their proper sex were, all through, ignorant of

the true facts. Human nature is opposed to such a supposition, and

experience bears out the shrewdness of nature. On occasions, or even

for a time, it is possible to make such successful concealments. But

when we are told that a woman has gone through a whole campaign or a

prolonged voyage in all the overcrowded intimacy of tent and bivouac

or of cabin and forecastle, without such a secret being suspected or