SPEAKER_00 0:03

If history has a margin, this is where it lives. I'm Wendell Marchant, and this is the footnote. London. The Court of Common Pleas. The morning of March the 6th, 1872, 103 sitting days into a civil suit so vast it has its own seating chart in the press gallery, counsel for the plaintiff rises and announces, calmly, the way you might announce a change in train platforms, that his client wishes to withdraw the cause. The jury, the day before, had said in plain terms that they had heard sufficient evidence on which to base a verdict. The plaintiff, sensing where that verdict was going, has decided not to wait for it. Opposing counsel rises in turn. He asks the Lord Chief Justice to issue a warrant. PERJUY. The plaintiff is not in the room. He has tried to leave the city. The New York Herald, reporting the next morning on March 7, 1872, says the police took him up before he could get far, and that night he slept in Newgate. Three hundred pounds of butcher, baronet by acclamation, in a cell. Let me back this up. How does a man end up in Newgate by way of Wagga Wagga? Roger Charles Titchborne was born in Paris on January 5, 1829, so says the Pacific Commercial Advertiser in a long retrospective dated December 23, 1884. The Alexandria Gazette of June 18th, that same year, gives the sixth. Pick one. The boy was born to a French mother and an English father, in the kind of mixed Catholic family that produced young men who spoke French better than they spoke English, which Roger did. He was, after his own father, heir to the title and estates of his uncle, Sir Edward Doughty Titchborne. The estate, the Pacific tells us, was worth above $120,000 a year at the time of the suit. Call it a small county's tax base. The parents had not been a happy marriage. The Charleston Daily News, in its long sketch of December 9, 1871, says Roger himself described his upbringing in the bleakest terms. A hell on earth, the punishment of being a small French-speaking Catholic boy caught between an English father and a French mother who could not stand the sight of one another. The same paper reports his education was entrusted to a Frenchman named Chatillon and grossly neglected. He went to school at Stonyhurst, the English Jesuit college, where his French upbringing kept him perpetually behind. He sat the army examination at Sandhurst, the Charleston says, and made a wretched showing. But the examiners were not particular, and he was passed. He went into the Carabineers in October of 49, stationed first at Canterbury, then in Dublin and other parts of Ireland. While in France as a boy, the New York Herald notes on March 7, 1872, he fell on his head and was left with a large mark. In the army, he had a serious fainting fit, and a surgeon bled him in the ankle. Both marks, the paper says, the claimant possessed, and the medical men in court would treat them as the kind of thing not easily forged. Roger was, in his army years, about five feet eight and a half inches tall. He made an offer of marriage to his cousin Kate Doughty in 1851 or two, was refused, sold his commission, and went to sea. Before he left, he sat down with a London solicitor named Hopkins and with the estate's steward, a Mr. Gosford, and made a will. He left in Gosford's hands a sealed packet, the contents of which were known to no one but himself. He sailed from Have on the 1st of March 1853 on a ship called the Pauline with a body servant named Moore. He landed at Valparaiso on June 19th. Moore fell ill at Santiago, and Roger left him there. He went to Melopia and stayed three weeks. He returned to Valparaiso. He sent home birds' feathers and skins, the kind of small souvenirs a young Englishman, two oceans from home, sends to a mother in Paris, because he has not yet learned that small things from far away are the only things that hurt. He took a coast voyage in the Pauline. He crossed the continent to Rio Janeiro. He left Rio on the twentieth of April, eighteen fifty-four, aboard a ship called the Bella, bound for New York. The Bella did not arrive. It was lost with all hands. So says the law. Roger's father succeeded to the baronetcy. Roger's younger brother Alfred succeeded the father. Alfred died in 1866, three months before the birth of his own son, who became the next baronet by the technicality of having been born at all. The estates settled into the quiet hands of trustees. The world, as the world tends to do, moved on. The world's mother did not. Lady Tichborne, Felicitay, the Dowager, the papers spell her name a dozen ways, and I will not pretend to settle it, refused to believe her son was dead. The Pacific Commercial Advertiser of December 23, 1884, puts it plainly. In 1865, she advertised for him in English and Australian papers. She placed the notice in the London Times. She paid, the New York Herald tells us, on March 7, 1872, for the placement of similar notices through one Cubitt of Sydney, a man who ran a clearinghouse of sorts for absconded relatives, of which the Australian colonies had then a brisk and quite legitimate trade. In her own letter, the Herald notes, the dowager described her son and suggested that he might have married or changed his name. A grieving mother. An advertisement in a colonial paper. A man in a colonial town who reads it. In Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, in 1866, a butcher, then calling himself Thomas Castro, saw or was told of Lady Titchborne's advertisement. He employed an attorney, a man named Gibbs, the Herald names him plainly, the man the claimant would later describe as his best friend, who composed for him a letter. The Pacific calls him simply Arthur Orton, butcher of Wagga Wagga. The Charleston Daily News, in a New York World correspondence letter of December 9, 1871, gives him a sharper sketch. Arthur Orton, the Charleston writes, was the butcher type of whopping, meaning the East End of London, meaning Orton was a Londoner, not a French-raised Catholic gentleman, meaning that any educated ear listening to him for 30 seconds would know which. His first letter to Lady Titchborne was dated, the Herald tells us, the 17th of January, 1866, from Wagga Wagga. The previous letter from Roger had been written in April of 54. In it he referenced two circumstances known only to mother and son. She replied that this was not yet proof. He wrote again, giving further particulars, among them, the Charleston tells us, that he had been recognized by Bogle, the family's black servant, a man the defense later in court would name as the most likely source of Orton's secondhand knowledge of how Tichborns spoke, walked, drank, and remembered one another. He sailed for England in 1866. In January of 1867 in Paris, his mother met him. She professed to recognize him. That is the Pacific's phrasing, and it carries the whole story in it. This is the part where everyone who has ever loved someone they couldn't bear to lose has to sit still for a moment. The Dowager, from that day forward, treated him as her long lost and restored son. The Pacific's plain language. She died, depending on the paper, in March of 1868 or 1871. The Alexandria Gazette gives March twelfth, eighteen seventy one. The Pacific gives March twelfth, eighteen sixty-eight. The newspapers cannot agree, but the relevant fact is that she went into the ground believing her son had come home. She did not live to see the suit collapse. The civil action began in May of 1871. The plaintiff's lead counsel was Sergeant Ballantyne, sergeant, in the older English sense, the senior trial bar. And the case was opened, the Charleston Daily News writes, on December 9, 1871, with a kind of theatrical fanfare. The same paper described a cartoon then circulating in the comic weeklies. John Bull carrying the old man of the sea on his shoulders, finding the burden as hard to shake as Sinbad had. That was the joke of that English winter. Titchborne was the old man. Tichborne was on everybody's shoulders. Englishmen love a Sinbad. They love it more when the old man is theirs. The trial sat for forty days before the long vacation, resumed in November, and the plaintiff was on the stand for four days direct, and then for twenty three days under cross examination by Sir John Duke Coleridge, the Solicitor General of England. Twenty-three days, which is to say the better part of a month, in a courtroom in Victorian London, with a man whose entire professional life had been the dismantling of liars under oath. The Herald lays out the indignity in a single line on March 7, 1872. He was examined four days, cross-examined twenty-three, and re-examined for two more. He held it together. He could not be made to fall apart. The Pacific, looking back twelve years later, calls him a pleasant-looking man, gentle in his manners and discourse, with an air of refinement difficult to account for, and reports him to have endured the cross-examination without once breaking down. You can see, can't you, why so many believed. What the cross-examination found, slowly, piece by piece, was an absence. Roger Tichborne had been raised in France. The claimant could not speak French. Roger Tichborne had left, with the estate's steward Mr. Gosford, a sealed packet. The Herald mentions it on March 7, 1872, the contents of which were known only to Roger. The claimant, asked what was inside, gave answers that did not match. He had also, the Pacific notes, immediately on his return to England, sought out the family of Arthur Orton in Wapping, sent them his photograph, addressed himself to them as one of their own, which is not a thing the long-lost heir of a Hampshire baronetcy ordinarily does. And then there were the bodies. Two bodies, side by side in the imagination of the jury. The Pacific, in its retrospective of December twenty third, eighteen eighty-four, lays out what convinced the twelve men at last. They were convinced that the prisoner Arthur Orton was five years younger than Roger Charles Titchborne, that he was born June first, eighteen thirty four, son of George Orton, that his name was Arthur. They found a difference of one inch in the men's height. They found the men's ears shaped very unlike the paper's own words, and they found the absence of tattoo marks on the claimant, where Roger, the same paper tells us in the same sentence, had been marked in his youth. An inch of height, the shape of an ear, a small blue mark from a boy's afternoon with a needle. This is what an estate of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year turns on in the end. Not the romance. The forearm. He withdrew the case on march sixth, eighteen seventy two. We have been to the room. He was arrested in Newgate that night. That should have been the end of it. It was not. The British public, having spent the winter of seventy one and seventy two, reading every word of the civil suit, were not done with the man. They were, in fact, just getting started. The Crown indicted him for perjury. The criminal trial began on april twenty third, eighteen seventy three. The Alexandria Gazette on june eighteenth, eighteen eighty four, gives the figure I keep coming back to one hundred and eighty eight days duration. He was convicted on february twenty eighth, eighteen seventy four. Sir Alexander Coburn sentenced him to fourteen years penal servitude. The same paper, the same column. One hundred and eighty-eight days. Think about that. A standard English murder trial in eighteen seventy four took, on average, a part of a single afternoon. The Titchborne perjury case took most of a calendar year of court time. It outlasted births, deaths, harvests. It outlasted three sessions of Parliament. It outlasted, very nearly, the Franco-Prussian piece settling itself into Europe's bones. Sir Alexander Coburn, who summed up the case for the jury, took weeks to do it. The jurors, the Charleston Daily News notes in its December 9, 1871 piece, written before the criminal trial but anticipating it, had begun, half jokingly, to make preparations against the possibility of dying before the verdict. And throughout it all, the Pacific tells us, legions of his friends, that is the paper's noun, and I will use it in the lower case, assisted him with gifts of money and by buying bonds payable from the proceeds of the Titchborne estate when he should become its owner. The estate, of course, that he had just legally failed to obtain. The bonds, payable on a contingency that was now mathematically nil. People bought them anyway. This is the part that interests me. Not the trial, not the imposter. The bonds. A bond payable from the Titchborne estate on the day the claimant inherited was, by March of 1872, a bond payable on the day a particular London butcher became a French-speaking Hampshire baronet. Which is to say, never. And yet people bought them. The Pacific uses that noun, legions, and the noun is not journalism. It is a kind of admission. Educated people, solvent people, people who had read every day's testimony in the morning paper and watched the inch of height, the ear, the tattoo, settle the matter against the man, and who then opened their wallets. Why? I have a theory, but it is only a theory, and Wendell Marchant's theories should be taken in the spirit of a high school English teacher at the end of a long afternoon. People did not buy the bonds because they thought he was Roger Tichborne. They bought them because they wanted a world in which a whopping butcher could become Sir Roger Tichborne. They bought them as a wager not on the man, but on the principal. The Khan was not, in the end, a financial product. It was a small, expensive ticket to a story about themselves. The Pacific, looking back from Honolulu twelve years on, calls all of this a kind of good natured credulity and means it kindly. I am less kind. I think credulity is rarely good natured. I think credulity is what we call belief when we have stopped being asked to defend it. The prisons came next. The Pacific names them in order, with what I take to be quiet contempt for how well behaved he proved to be throughout. Millbank, then Dartmoor, then Portsea, and at the last, Pentonville. Close enough to where it started that the symmetry would have impressed a Victorian novelist. The paper notes he was of uniformly good conduct, and his time shortened accordingly. Ten years, dragged out as quietly as a decade can drag. He walked out of Pentonville in 1884, ten years almost to the day from his conviction. An admirer, the Pacific tells us, on December 23rd of that year, had settled on him an annuity of a hundred pounds a year. He had been offered an engagement on the stage. He could, if he chose, the paper observed, become an innkeeper, and as an innkeeper, what was left of his ambition would be abundantly gratified. That is, I think, the meanest sentence I have read in any newspaper of the period. The paper does not raise its voice. It does not call him names. It simply notes that, having reached for an English baronetcy and missed by an inch of height and the wrong ear, the man might find adequate scope for his ambitions behind a public house bar. There is more contempt in that sentence than in a hundred editorials. He did not go on the stage. He did not become an innkeeper, not for long. He died in obscurity in the 1890s, in conditions the obituarists were too tired to make much of. The estate, meanwhile, passed quietly to the small posthumous son who had inherited it in the first place, Sir Henry Alfred Joseph Doughty Titchborne, the Alexandria Gazette gives the full name on June 18, 1884, born May 28, 1866. He had been an infant through the civil suit, a schoolboy through the criminal one, and a young man by the time the claimant emerged from Pentonville. The estate, the title, the Hampshire house, all of it remained where the law had said it remained from the start. But here is what I keep returning to. The thing that has kept me reading on this story for ten years. Lady Titchborne was right, not factually. Factually she was as wrong as a person can be. The man she met in Paris in January of 1867 was not her son. Her son was at the bottom of the South Atlantic, had been since April of 54, would be forever. The papers, even the credulous ones, settled that point. She was right in the deeper way the Khan relied on. She was right that a mother does not stop. She was right that the world is wider than the law lets it be. She was right that the Bella might have left two boats, and one One of them might have made Australia, and one of her boys might have spent a decade among strangers under the name of a schoolfriend. None of that is impossible. The Charleston Daily News of December 9, 1871 gives the claimant's own version in plain language. Two boats left the ship. One of them was lost. From the other, he was picked up by an American bark in a state the Charleston says bordering on insanity, carried to Melbourne in July of 1853. The same paper notes that once in Australia, the man calling himself Castro attracted the attention of a Mr. Foster, counsel to the Attorney General of the colony, by his riding, an accomplishment of which, the Charleston observes, he had been master before leaving England. A butcher who rides like a cavalry officer is the sort of detail a Victorian jury was always going to want explained. Bordering on insanity. Carried to Melbourne, riding like an officer. A man with no memory of who he had been, taking the name of a Chilean acquaintance, going into the cattle trade. That is not the structure of an impossibility. That is the structure of a Victorian novel. And Lady Titchborne, who had read Victorian novels, recognized her son in the shape of one. The conviction did not punish her. She had been years in the ground by the day Sir John Coleridge began the cross-examination that ran twenty three days. The conviction punished Arthur Orton, and it punished the strangers who had pawned their savings for a bond payable on the day a butcher became a baronet, and it left the dowager's belief intact, because nothing the law does ever touches what a woman believed about her son. I find this kindlier than my usual reading of these cases. I have not been able to make myself unkind about Lady Titchborne. The papers of the time were not unkind about her either. The Pacific Commercial Advertiser of December 23, 1884, writing twelve years after the fact, with no political stake left in the question, describes her error without reproach. She refused to believe that her son was dead. She advertised for him. She received him. She professed to recognize him. The verbs are quiet. The paper does not patronize her. It is the strangers I find harder to forgive, the ones who bought the bonds. The stranger's belief was not love, it was something thinner, the willingness of an Englishman in 1872 to put a guinea on the proposition that the established order was a trick, and that a Hampshire butcher, given enough rope and enough press, could yank the rope hard enough to make a baronet fall out the other end. That was the wager. That was always the wager. The papers of the period are full of letters from clerks and small shopkeepers explaining in patient prose why the differences in height and the unmatched ears and the absent tattoo were establishment fabrications, while the recognizing mother and the friendly servant Bogle, a man the Charleston Daily News identifies as the family's black servant who had recognized the claimant in Paris were the true witnesses. The fact that an inch of height is, in actuarial terms, decisive evidence of two different men did not matter. None of it mattered, because the bond buyers were not betting on a man. They were betting on a story in which the worst fed of them had a chance at the largest house. The mark wants the con to be true, not because he is stupid, but because the world the con describes is the world he wishes he lived in. Arthur Orton, fat and confident and badly educated, walking into Titchborne Park and being addressed as Sir Roger by the gardeners, that is the wish. You cannot scrape the swindle off without dragging the wish along with it. What stays with me is not the verdict. It is the calendar. 103 days of civil suit, 23 days of cross-examination, 188 days of perjury trial, ten years across four English prisons, from the Bella's loss in April of 54 to the claimant's last walk out of Pentonville in 1884, 30 years between the wreck and the release. A mother dead a decade before the question of her son's identity was finally settled. A small boy made baronet at three months old, who became a baronet again, properly at eight, and then again, ratified by a jury, at nearly eighteen. At every point along that calendar, somebody who could have stopped it chose instead to believe. The mother chose to believe because she could not bear the alternative. The whopping butcher chose to believe in his own performance because the role was worth more than the truth. The bond buyers chose to believe because the bond was cheaper than the wish. The newspapers chose to believe in the story of the case, which is not quite the same thing as believing in the claim, but which kept the columns filled and the wires hot for as long as anybody on either side could draw breath. The jurors, in the end, were the only people in the entire affair whose belief was constrained, by an oath, by a courtroom, by an inch of height and the shape of an ear. And we, reading the OCR of those columns a hundred and fifty years later, choose to believe what? I think we choose to believe that we would have been on the jury, that we would have noticed the French. That we would have asked about the tattoo. That the bonds would have struck us, as they should have struck anyone, as a bet on a butcher. I am not sure I believe it. I think most of us would have bought one. They collapse when the wish becomes too expensive to keep.