V

V

THE LOST HEIR OF TICHBORNE

On the afternoon of the twentieth of April, 1854, the schoonerBellacast off her moorings at the Gamboa wharves in Rio, worked her way down the bay, and stood out to sea, bound for her home port, New York. She was partly in ballast, because of slack commerce, and carried a single passenger. About the name and fate of this solitary voyager grew up a strange mystery and a stranger history.

When the last glint of theBella’ssails was seen from Rio’s island anchorages, that vessel passed forever out of worldly cognizance. She never reached any port save the ultimate, and of those that rode in her, nothing came back but rumor and doubt. Her end and theirs was veiled in a storm and hidden among unknown waters. The epitaph was written at Lloyd’s in the familiar syllables: “Foundered with all hands.”

Of theBella’smaster, or the forty members of her crew, there is no surviving memory, and only a grimy hunt through the old shipping records could avail in the discovery of anything concerning them. But the lone passenger happened to be the son of a British baronet and heir to a great estate—Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne. The succession and the inheritance of the Tichborne wealth depended upon the proof of this young man’s death. There was, accordingly, some formal inquiry as to theBellaand her wreck. The required months were allowed to pass; the usual reports from all ports were scanned. On account of the insistence of the Tichborne family, some additional care was taken. But in July, 1855, the young aristocrat was formally declared lost at sea, his insurance paid, and the question of succession taken before the court in chancery, which determined such matters.

Here, no doubt, the question as to the fate of young Tichborne would have ended, had it not been for the peculiar insistence of his mother. Lady Tichborne would not, and probably could not, bring herself to believe that her beloved elder son had met his end in this dark and mysterious manner. In the absence of human witnesses to his death and objective proofs of the end, she clung obstinately to hope and continued to advertise for the “lost” young man for many years after the courts had solved the problem—or believed they had.

There had already been the cloud of pathos about the head of Roger Tichborne, whose detailed story is necessary to an understanding of subsequent events. Born in Paris on January 5, 1829—his mother being the natural daughter of Henry Seymour of Knoyle, Wiltshire, and a beautiful French woman—Roger was the descendant of very ancient Hampshire stock. His father, the tenth baronet, was Sir James Tichborne and his grandfather was the once-celebrated Sir Edward of that line.

Because of her antipathy to her husband’s country, Lady Tichborne decided that her son should be reared as a Frenchman, and the lad spent the first fourteen years of his life in France, with the result that he never afterward became quite a Briton. Indeed, his brief English schooling at Stonyhurst never went far enough to get the young man out of the habit of thinking in French and translating his Gallic idioms into English, a fault that appears in his letters to the very end, and one that caused him considerable suffering as a boy in England.

Roger Tichborne left Stonyhurst in 1849 and joined the Sixth Dragoon 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 theBellafor 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 inThe Timesand 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 theBella, 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.

[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~~ ARTHUR ORTON ~~

Copyright, Maull & Fox~~ ARTHUR ORTON ~~

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.

[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.

The feat of substitution this man almost succeeded in accomplishing was palpably an enormous one. He went to England, familiarized himself with the places Roger Tichborne had visited, studied French without managing to learn it, practiced the handwriting of the young Tichborne heir till it deceived even the experts, and likewise learned, in spite of his own lack of schooling, to imitate the English of Tichborne, and to misspell just those words on which the original Roger was weak. He crammed his memory with incidents and details picked up at every hand. He learned to talk almost like a gentleman. He worked with his voice until he got out of it most of the earthy harshness that belonged to it by nature. He cultivated good manners, courtly behavior, gentle ways, and a certain charming deference which went far toward convincing those who took him seriously and gave him their support. In short, he was able to perform an absolute prodigy of adaptiveness, but he could not, with all his talent, quite project himself into the personality and mentality of another and very different man. That, perhaps, is a simulation beyond human capacity.

So Arthur Orton, after all, the hero of this magnificent impersonation, went to prison for fourteen years, having made quite too grand a gesture and much too sad a failure. He served nearly eleven years and was then released in view of good conduct. Thereafter he wrote several confessions and retracted them all in turn. Finally, toward the end of his life, he changed his mind once more and prepared a final and fairly complete account of his life and misdeeds, from which some of the facts here used have been taken. He died in April, 1898.

The extent to which he had moved the public may be judged from an incident the year following Orton’s conviction and imprisonment. His chief counsel at the criminal trial had been Doctor Edward Kenealy, who was himself scathingly denounced by the court in connection with a misdirected attempt to have Orton identified as a castaway from theBellaby a seaman who swore he had performed the rescue, but was shown to be a perjurer. After the trial Doctor Kenealy was elected to Parliament, so great was his popularity and that of his client. When Kenealy, soon after taking his seat, moved that the Tichborne case be referred to a royal commission, the House of Commons rejected the motion unanimously. This action inflamed the populace. There were angry street meetings, inflammatory speeches, and symptoms of a general riot. The troops had to be called and kept in readiness for instant action. Fortunately the sight of the soldiers sobered the mob, and the matter passed off with only minor bloodshed.

But ten years later, when Orton emerged from prison, there was almost no one to greet him. The fickle public, that had once been ready to storm the Houses of Parliament for him, had utterly forgotten the man. Nor was there any sign of public interest, when he died in obscurity and poverty fourteen years later. A few of his persistent followers gave him honorable burial as “Sir Roger Tichborne.”

The original enigma of the fate of Roger Tichborne, upon which this colossal structure of fraud and legal intricacy was founded, received, to be sure, not the slightest clarification from all the pother and feverish investigating. If ever there had been any good reason to doubt that the young Hampshire aristocrat went helplessly down with the strickenBellaand her fated crew, none remained after the trials and the stupendous publicity they invoked.

Back to IndexNext