The Tichborne Claimant

The case

On Christmas Day 1866 a heavily built man stepped ashore at Tilbury with a wife, two small daughters and an elderly Jamaican servant, announcing himself as Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to one of the oldest Catholic baronetcies in Hampshire. Within days he had made a curious detour to Wapping, in the East End, to ask after a family called Orton. Nobody thought much of it at the time. Seven years later it would be the hinge of the longest criminal trial England had yet seen.

The real Roger Tichborne had been raised mostly in Paris, spoke English with a French accent, and left England in 1853 after a thwarted romance with his cousin Katherine Doughty. In April 1854 he sailed from Rio de Janeiro on the Bella, bound for Jamaica. Days later a capsized boat bearing the ship's name was found off the Brazilian coast. No one from the Bella was heard of again, and the family accepted that Roger had drowned. His mother never did. Henriette, Lady Tichborne, advertised for news of him for years, and in 1865 a Sydney agency spread her notices through Australian newspapers, promising a liberal reward.

The answer came from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. A local lawyer reported that a bankrupt butcher called Thomas Castro had spoken of an English inheritance and a shipwreck, and eventually admitted that he was the missing heir. His letters to Lady Tichborne were vague and full of errors, yet she wanted to believe them. When the two met in a Paris hotel in January 1867, she accepted him on sight and settled £1,000 a year on him. The rest of the family took one look and called him an impostor. He was far heavier than the slender Roger, could not speak French, and fumbled questions about relatives and places Roger had known since childhood.

Even so he gathered a remarkable following. Old soldiers from Roger's regiment, the family solicitor and doctor, and Andrew Bogle, a former servant of the Tichbornes who had sailed with him from Sydney, all swore he was genuine. Against them, an agent sent to Australia found station records showing that a man named Arthur Orton, a butcher's son from Wapping, had worked in Gippsland in the 1850s and then vanished. The Claimant said he had known Orton. In Chile, where he insisted he had stayed as Roger, villagers remembered only a young English sailor they called Arturo. Lady Tichborne's death in March 1868 cost him his chief protector, and his supporters began funding him through public subscriptions and a bond issue.

His civil action, Tichborne v. Lushington, opened at Westminster in May 1871. On the stand he could not say who Virgil was, confused Latin with Greek, and claimed that he had seduced his cousin Katherine, by then a respected married woman. The defence lined up more than 200 witnesses; it barely needed them. When a school friend testified that Roger had carried tattoos the Claimant lacked, the jury said in March 1872 that it had heard enough. The judge had the Claimant arrested for perjury.

Out on bail, he toured the country, speaking at packed meetings in an accent that reporters heard as pure London. The criminal trial, Regina v. Castro, ran from April 1873 to February 1874. His counsel, Edward Kenealy, turned it into a running war with the bench, portraying his client as the victim of a plot by the Jesuits, the government and the legal establishment. The prosecution traced the ship that the Claimant said had rescued him, the Osprey, and found that names he gave for its crew belonged to the vessel that had carried Orton to Tasmania. A sailor who swore to the rescue turned out to be a fraud himself and was jailed for perjury.

On 28 February 1874 the jury took about half an hour to find that the defendant was not Roger Tichborne, had not seduced Katherine Doughty, and was Arthur Orton. He received two consecutive seven-year sentences. The jury added a rebuke of Kenealy, whose career at the bar ended within the year.