The Tichborne Claimant

In 1854 the ship Bella went down off the coast of Brazil, and with it, presumably, a young English gentleman named Roger Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and a considerable estate. His mother, Lady Tichborne, refused to believe him dead. For years she placed advertisements in newspapers across the world seeking word of her lost son, promising a reward. In 1866 the world answered.

From the town of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales came a stout butcher, known locally as Thomas Castro, who claimed to be the missing heir. The claim strained credulity from the first. Roger Tichborne had been a slender, French-speaking young man of refined manners; the Claimant was enormously fat, spoke no French, and knew little of the family he professed to head. Yet Lady Tichborne, meeting him in Paris, embraced him at once as her son, and her conviction gave the imposture a foothold no evidence could easily dislodge.

The matter reached the courts and stayed there for years. The civil suit to establish his identity collapsed after more than a hundred days of testimony. The Claimant was then tried for perjury in one of the longest criminal trials of the Victorian age, running some 188 days. The jury needed little time to convict, and he was sentenced to fourteen years.

He was, the court concluded, one Arthur Orton, a butcher’s son from Wapping. Yet the case had become a popular cause; working men who distrusted the aristocracy rallied to him in their thousands, seeing a common fellow crushed by wealth and law. Released early, he later confessed to the fraud for money, then retracted, and died in poverty.

Provenance: England and New South Wales; the perjury trial concluded at the Court of Queen’s Bench, London, 1874.