with the fact that one Abel Griffiths, a 22-year-old law student who killed himself soon after Castlereagh, was buried in ‘drawers, socks and a winding sheet’ at the intersection of Eaton Street, the King’s Road and Grosvenor Place in London. (At least, according to The Annual Register, a record of the year’s political and social events, which has been published continually since 1758, ‘the disgusting part of the ceremony of throwing lime over the body and driving a stake through it was dispensed with’.) The result of the public outrage was an 1823 law banning crossroad burials altogether, so much good came from his death.
On the other hand, Shelley’s friend Byron wrote:
Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh
Stop, traveller, and piss.
CLASS WAR BREAKS OUT IN THE COURTS – THE TICHBORNE CLAIMANT, 1862
Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne was due to become Sir Roger Doughty-Tichborne, baronet, upon the demise of his father in 1862. The only barrier to his assumption of the title was that he was dead too. Still, that didn’t prevent him from claiming it. Or, to be more precise, it didn’t prevent an obese butcher from the Australian outback claiming it, and demanding the inheritance.
Roger had rather shot himself in the foot a decade beforehand when he decided his cousin, Katherine, was the girl for him. But, as in a tale by Shakespeare, the two families were less than overjoyed with the prospect. There was nothing wrong with cousins marrying – a little bit of ‘keeping it in the family’ was quite normal with the aristocracy and most of the royals were so inbred it was a surprise when one turned out to look almost normal – it was the fact that he was usually so drunk he could hardly see.
In 1852 Roger therefore sold his army commission and went travelling in the Americas until he had dried out enough to stand up unaided, at which point his uncle and aunt might relent and hand over their offspring. On his travels, he saw all the normal sights – the Andes, Rio – and was on his way to Jamaica in 1854 when his ship sank to the bottom of the sea.
News reached Britain and he was legally declared dead. But his excitable French mother, Henriette Felicite, refused to believe he was gone.
When his father fell off the twig in 1862, the heir presumptive to his title became Roger’s little brother, Alfred, who spent money like it was going out of fashion and nearly bankrupted himself. But Henriette Felicite, convinced for no apparent reason that her son was still breathing, began placing adverts in newspapers across the globe, asking for news of him.
In 1865 the reply came from a lawyer in New South Wales. Her son was alive and well – and masquerading as a fat butcher in Wagga Wagga. His name was now Tomas Castro.
Castro was not the natural choice as the alter ego of Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne. Roger had been slim, whereas Tomas weighed 27 stone. Having lived in France until he was 16, Roger had spoken fluent French, whereas Tomas had mysteriously forgotten every word. Interestingly, Roger’s mother had brought him up in France because he had a rare genital malformation and in France boys were dressed in girls’ clothes until the age of five so it was felt that wearing knickerbockers would give his nether regions more space to develop normally. This is more important to the story than you might think.
Castro’s genitals were the ace up his sleeve – because they were coincidentally misshapen in the way that Roger’s had been. Reports of his organ therefore had Henriette Felicite convinced and she sent Castro the money to return to her bosom. When he arrived, Castro ‘revealed’ that after being shipwrecked he had been rescued by a passing ship bound for Australia. On arrival, he had decided to discard his comfortable life as a member of the aristocracy to start a new one as a petty criminal. From there, he worked his way up to butchery, so he informed her.
Henriette Felicite was so overjoyed that her son had returned to her that she overlooked the fact that he was now an obese tradesman with a criminal record. In the Paris hotel where she met him, she ‘recognised’ him instantly – which must have come as a surprise to anyone else there who had ever clapped eyes on Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne and was now presented with a man who looked as if he had eaten a town.
Her family, in fact, pointed out that the man in front of them was no more Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne than she was. Nonsense, she told them, as she handed him £1,000 – worth perhaps £100,000 today – and promised the same sum each year.
It was only after she too died, in 1868, that things got a bit tricky for the man who was to become known as the Tichborne Claimant. The family, knowing he was a ringer, began civil legal action to strip him of the wealth he had got his ham-like hands on. It became the trial of the decade, lasting nearly a year and calling more than 350 witnesses, some attesting that this was the Roger they had known since childhood, others saying if he was Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne they were chimpanzees.
During the trial, more facts began to emerge that cast doubt on the Claimant’s case. His first act upon arrival in England, for instance, had been to visit Wapping in east London and enquire about a local family by the name of Orton. It didn’t take a genius to connect this to the fact that a former employee in Australia had identified him as one Arthur Orton. In addition, his English ex-girlfriend confirmed he was Arthur Orton and in Chile a young sailor by that name was identified.
The Claimant explained that he knew Arthur Orton because they had worked together and his former employee and ex-girlfriend must be bizarrely confused. Orton, he said, was a criminal and had disappeared.
What ultimately sank the case, however, was the testimony of Lord Bellow, an old school chum of Roger’s. He testified that when they were at school he had tattooed Roger’s thigh. The lack of such a mark scuppered the Claimant’s case.
From then on, it was a criminal matter. In 1873, Arthur Orton was tried for perjury – again the trial lasted ten months and the judge spent four weeks simply summing up the case. The defendant – a claimant no more – became a convict sentenced to 14 years of hard labour. And his barrister was disbarred for annoying the judge.
The case affected the whole of England. It became a cause célèbre as the increasingly confident and vocal middle classes saw it as a battle against the toffs who were banding together to keep all the wealth to themselves. They believed poor Roger was being denied the family silver just because he couldn’t remember which knife to eat peas with and the courts were in on it, denying ordinary working men justice in the face of money and influence. Incredibly, the Claimant’s cause became the greatest mass political movement since the Chartists had demanded universal male suffrage in the 1840s and Britain didn’t see such a movement again until the formation of the Labour Party, around the turn of the century. Henriette Felicite’s mistake had changed the political landscape.
Orton was released after ten years. He attempted to make a living on the music hall circuit but died in poverty on April Fool’s Day, 1898. Five thousand mourners attended his funeral. By permission of the Tichborne family, his grave was marked: ‘Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne’.
THE WRONG HAT – FRANZ MULLER STARTS A TREND, 1864
Franz Muller, a German tailor living in Britain, was a murderer. But not just any murderer, he was a Moriarty-like master criminal who had got away with it. Or so he thought…
Just before 10pm on 9 July 1864, a City clerk, Thomas Briggs, was in a first-class carriage on his way back to his home in Hackney, east London. Just
