Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  *

  While Pook, Norman, and Davy awaited trial, the case of the century continued its apparently endless—but also endlessly captivating—way along in two courtrooms in Westminster Hall, both of them far too small to contain the daily floods of would-be spectators. The two trials of the Tichborne Claimant, the first—this one—civil and the second criminal, would, taken together, hold the record for the longest-lasting legal case in British history until the end of the twentieth century.*7 Measured by its ability to generate newspaper column-inches beyond count, its ability to generate limitless discussion and debate—in drawing rooms and servants’ quarters, in the clubs and the public houses—and in its ability to generate a full-fledged popular movement that endured for well over a decade, the Tichborne saga was indisputably the legal sensation of the Victorian era. And although no one realized it as the civil case of Tichborne v. Lushington that gripped public attention in May and June, that case was in July to intersect dramatically with the criminal case of R v. Pook.

  The Tichborne Claimant had first come to the attention of the public five years before, at the end of 1866, when newspapers reported that that bulky, mysterious personage was nearing the end of his voyage from Australia to England, returning to make good his claim that he was Sir Roger Charles Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and the Tichborne estates. From the first, he and his claim were controversial. “Great numbers of persons believe that the Tichborne family have been imposed upon by some clever schemer in Australia,” the Daily News reported in November 1866, adding that “a few days, however, will decide the matter.” Actually, it would be seven years before the matter was decided in the courtroom. For many, doubts would linger for years after that, and for some, they would never die.

  The last time that the indisputable Roger Charles Tichborne had been seen alive was in April 1854, when he—then a slender and delicate man with light-brown hair—embarked in Rio de Janeiro upon the sailing ship Bella for Kingston, Jamaica. That ship was never seen again; everyone presumed Roger Tichborne dead. Everyone, that is, except his mother, the dowager Lady Tichborne, a temperamental—many thought unbalanced—Frenchwoman who refused to relinquish the hope that he had somehow been saved. When her husband died in 1862, she was free to indulge in her obsession, and placed advertisements in the Times and then in Australian newspapers, promising “A handsome reward” for any information about her son. This enticing appeal was bound to get a response, and it did, in a letter from a butcher from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, who called himself Thomas Castro, and who represented himself as the dowager’s son. After the butcher convinced a couple of former retainers to the Tichbornes that he was actually the baronet, and after obtaining the financial backing of a number of Sydneyites, the Tichborne Claimant set sail with his family and landed in London on Christmas Day 1866. From there, he traveled to Paris where, as he lay sick in bed in a dark room, the dowager Lady Tichborne recognized him, and acknowledged him as her son.

  The rest of the Tichbornes were far less credulous than the dowager about his claim. Almost without exception, and after several of them had had uncomfortable meetings with the Claimant, they concluded that he was a vulgar imposter bent upon stealing the Tichborne title and fortune from its rightful possessor, Roger’s infant nephew Henry Tichborne. The Claimant, they believed, had nothing of Roger Tichborne’s manners or attainments, and he could not speak a word of French, although the true Roger Tichborne had been born and had lived his first sixteen years in Paris. They quickly instituted an investigation of the Claimant, engaging in particular the services of the well-known detective Jonathan Whicher. Whicher turned up a great deal of evidence to suggest that the Claimant was Arthur Orton, the son of a Wapping butcher, who had sailed from England as a young man and who had eventually disappeared into Australia.

  A courtroom battle for the claim was inevitable, and became pressing for the Claimant with the death of the dowager Lady Tichborne and the loss of her financial support, in 1868. While almost every member of the Tichborne family would swear that the Claimant was not Roger Tichborne, a great many outside the family—particularly among the servants to the family, among Tichborne locals, and among the soldiers with whom Roger had served—were more than willing to swear that he was. Moreover, for what it was worth—and in the long run, it proved to be worth a great deal—the Claimant found greater and greater support among the public, and particularly among the working-class public. For, curiously, they saw the Claimant as one of them—or, more specifically, as one who chose to be one of them, a man who turned his back on the effete and genteel life of an English aristocrat for the rough-and-tumble life of a workingman in Australia. He was an underdog, against whom the full forces of the rich and powerful were arrayed.

  Tichborne v. Lushington commenced in the tiny Court of Common Pleas, in Westminster Hall, on May 10.*8 As the Claimant brought the action to eject the current tenant from the Tichborne family seat, he was ostensibly the plaintiff. In a larger sense, he was the defendant, defending his entire claim. The trial promised to be one of unprecedented duration, with a hundred or so witnesses prepared to testify in favor of the Claimant’s claim, and more than 250 prepared to testify against it. But key to the case was a single witness: the Claimant himself. If he could convince the jury that he was Roger Tichborne, with Tichborne’s experience and Tichborne’s memories, he would likely win the great prize. If, on the other hand, the barristers representing the Tichborne family could break him down and expose his testimony as the inventions of an opportunistic imposter, they could destroy his claim once and for all. Public interest in the case intensified on May 30—the day, incidentally, that Edmund Pook was committed to Newgate—as the Claimant lugubriously made his way to the witness box. And it soared three days later, when the great legal duel of his cross-examination began.

  The Tichborne’s Claimant’s epic antagonist—his grand inquisitor and chief tormentor—was John Duke Coleridge. When Tichborne v. Lushington began, Coleridge was solicitor general of England and Wales; before the case was done, he would be attorney general. Although he was acting privately and not for the government in this case, the fact that such a high government official led the case against him only contributed to the popular feeling that the mighty were leagued to bring the Claimant down. John Duke Coleridge, son of a noted judge and grand-nephew of the more-noted poet, was known as an advocate of superhuman industry who had an ambition to match. He would eventually rise to the heights of his profession; both his prodigious talents and his political connections—he was a Liberal MP and a very good friend of Prime Minister William Gladstone—would eventually gain him the Lord Chief Justiceship of England. Coleridge’s oratorical ability was legendary, his speeches saturated with classical and literary allusion and heavy with sentiment: “he would pull at the organ stop labelled ‘pathos,’ as readily as the one labelled ‘moral indignation,’” notes one chronicler of this trial. Though his parliamentary foe, Benjamin Disraeli, dismissed his speechifying as “a stream of silvery mediocrity,” it would certainly serve him well in this case, in the record-setting twenty-one-day opening speech for the defense he would later give.

  Coleridge’s cross-examination of the Claimant established a record for length, as well. For a full twenty-two days Coleridge sought to wear down the Claimant, forcing him beyond his relentless protestations of “I don’t know” and “I have forgotten” to commit himself to assertions that he could either instantly or in time prove to be patently false. Prefacing his queries with a belittling “would it surprise you to know,” words that quickly became the popular catchphrase of 1871, Coleridge laid bare the “ruffian’s ignorance,” as he put it in his diary. Although as a boy Roger Tichborne had studied Latin and Greek at Stonyhurst, an English public school, the Claimant could not tell him whether Caesar wrote in Latin or Greek; Greek, he thought. And he made a similar mistake when shown a page of Virgil: “It appears to me to be Greek,” he told Coleridge. “It is Greek to you, anyhow,” Coler
idge replied, to laughter. On June 5, the Claimant made the most sensational claim of all, concerning sealed instructions that Roger Tichborne had left with his steward when he had sailed from England in 1852. Those instructions, the Claimant testified, provided for the care of Roger Tichborne’s cousin and then-fiancée, Katherine Doughty, if she was pregnant.

  “Do you mean to swear before the Judge and jury,” Coleridge asked him, “that you seduced this lady?”

  “I most solemnly to my God swear I did.”

  Tichborne’s cousin—now Lady Radcliffe—was present in the courtroom, sitting beside her husband, and Coleridge pointed her out. “This Lady?”

  “Yes, that Lady.”

  A “sensation,” as the newspapers put it, erupted in the courtroom. In an instant, the Claimant had revealed himself to be a churl if he wasn’t an outright liar, and had rendered the case more than a battle for title and property, but also one for a lady’s honor. Moreover, Lady Radcliffe knew this claim to be untrue, and would in time swear to that. And Coleridge had the facts to prove that Roger Tichborne was nowhere near Katherine Doughty when this seduction was alleged to have taken place. In this despicable claim-within-a-claim lay the seeds of the Claimant’s destruction.

  For the few lucky spectators in the courtroom, and for the hundreds of thousands who followed the case in the newspapers, it was all pure entertainment, real-life sensation beyond the prodigious talents of Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon. For the Claimant and the solicitor general, however, it was exhausting and debilitating combat. The Claimant, sickly and morbidly obese*9 when his ordeal began, only deteriorated under the strain, relentlessly pleading for, and usually obtaining, recesses and early adjournments. For Coleridge the cross involved perpetual study of a mountain of evidence. One morning Coleridge informed the court that he had been working on the case until four that morning. “I pity you, Mr. Solicitor,” the judge, William Bovill, told him. “The labor devolving upon you is almost beyond human endurance.” “He will kill me before I do him,” Coleridge wrote about the Claimant four weeks into the cross. “I am seriously wearing out and getting ill.”

  Sir William Bovill, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, suffered under the strain of this case as well. When he died in 1873, at the relatively young—for a judge—age of fifty-nine, public consensus held that this trial helped kill him. In spite of his elevated position on the bench, Bovill was hardly a great judge at the best of times, and the Tichborne trial brought out his worst qualities. “On the whole,” the Law Times noted in his obituary, “the honest opinion of lawyers concerning the lamented judge must be, that he was not great, or profoundly learned.” He was notorious, for one thing, for his partiality and for his habit of premature adjudication—leaping to conclusions far ahead of the evidence. That was apparent when, in the midst of the cross-examination, Bovill gave a speech at a Lord Mayor’s dinner that suggested that the Claimant’s claim might be a fiction. Bovill was known as well to be querulous and irritable on the bench, with a “patent want of sympathy with the Bar”; this showed itself in his habit of interrupting and even badgering counsel in mid-examination. The marathon Tichborne v. Lushington demanded judicial patience, and Bovill had little.

  Moreover, the incredible public fascination in the case placed its own pressures on the chief justice. In one sense, Bovill enjoyed the attention: he controlled the seating about him on the bench, and allotted these to the highest and mightiest of spectators—the Prince and Princess of Wales sat by him on one day, the emperor of Brazil on another—and to a flock of society ladies, with whom he was often seen to chat during examinations. The rest of the seats in the courtroom, however, he had no control over, even though he faced relentless pressure to allot them. “I have not a moment’s peace of mind from morning till night, on account of the hundreds of applications sent to me by persons who wish to hear the proceedings. From the time I left this court on Friday until I came on the bench this morning I was completely inundated with applications,” he complained in the courtroom. The Claimant’s chief counsel actually theorized that Bovill’s health suffered not so much because of judicial strain but because of “the arduous and unaccustomed duties of master of the ceremonies.” The intense public scrutiny, which only grew as the trial proceeded, proved to be a greater and greater psychological burden to him as the case tarnished his reputation. “It weighs upon me,” he would later say about Tichborne v. Lushington.

  Bovill’s health, then, unsound when the trial began, only deteriorated as it proceeded. He made it known that he was continuing only with the assistance of doctors, and that he desperately needed a recess, or, as he put it, “I am only enabled to attend to this case by going down to Brighton to get a little fresh air.” The law favored his desire; at the time the Court of Common Pleas could not legally sit between the end of July and the first week in November. But while judge and counsel desperately looked forward to a break, the sensation-loving public absolutely did not want a several-month suspension of the great entertainment, and the Tichborne family certainly did not want any delay whatsoever in responding to the Claimant’s claims: Lady Radcliffe in particular desired to defend her honor as soon as possible. The family, then, used their mighty connections to introduce bills into both Lords and Commons to abolish the mandatory recess—bills that actually passed into law.

  But in the end it was Bovill and not Parliament upon whom the decision to adjourn devolved. Bovill could not continue; on July 7 he declared himself “utterly exhausted”—and was sure that the lawyers in the case were “equally if not more fatigued than myself.” He did suggest a compromise—adjourning for a few weeks and reconvening in August rather than November. But the lawyers would not hear of it; a couple threatened to quit altogether if that were the case. And so Bovill adjourned the trial that day, to recommence in November. All of the remaining sensational events of the case, then—Coleridge’s triumphant opening for the defense, the collapse of the Claimant’s case, and the Claimant’s subsequent arrest, trial, and conviction for perjury—were therefore delayed.

  Before Chief Justice Bovill could escape to breathe the salubrious air of Brighton, however, he had another judicial duty to perform. He was committed to sitting during the July sessions of the Central Criminal Court. As the most prominent judge, he would naturally take on the most prominent case. Also committed to serve at the July sessions, in his official capacity as solicitor general, was John Duke Coleridge. He, too, was assigned to the most prominent case; Harry Poland, previously in charge, would still attend, but only to support Coleridge. And that is how a fatigued William Bovill and a fatigued John Duke Coleridge, having both fatigued themselves further for five days by studying the accumulated evidence in the matter of the murder of Jane Clouson, found themselves—surely now sick to death of the sight of each other—jumping together from one sensational case to another: R v. Pook.

  *1 Today more commonly termed a tonic-clonic epileptic seizure.

  *2 Sittings or sessions at the Old Bailey of the Central Criminal Court were in 1871 held every month of the year.

  *3 The enormity of the crowd at Kidbrooke Lane was attributable, in part, to the fact that Parliament had just passed the Bank Holidays Act, and Whit-Monday 1871 was thus the very first legal bank holiday in England, Ireland, and Wales.

  *4 Indeed, a penny dreadful—one, admittedly, atrociously written penny dreadful—appeared to capitalize upon the murder of Jane Clouson. Its title: Pretty Jane: or, the Viper of Kidbrook Lane.

  *5 The Republic admitted to killing 17,000 Parisians. Doubtless many more than that died. [Christiansen 366.]

  *6 Specifically, true bills for the murder of Tommy and Minnie Milner, John Stuart Taylor, and Jessie Jane Beer. For some reason, Norman was never charged with the murder of James Alexander Gardner.

  *7 The Tichborne case endured for 291 days (103 days for the civil trial and 291 for the criminal). The McLibel trial, which eventually ended in 1997 after 313 days, finally eclipsed in length th
e Tichborne case.

  *8 Applications to view the trial proved so persistent and powerful that the judge was able to move the trial, for a time, across the hall to the larger Court of Queen’s Bench. This did little to relieve the crush and the disappointment of would-be spectators.

  *9 Over 28 stone, or nearly 400 pounds. [McWilliam 26].

  5

  Tally-Ho

  The usual chaos that attended the beginning of a notable murder trial prevailed outside of the Old Bailey on the morning of July 12, as hundreds clamored for the Old Court’s few public seats. But the undersheriffs of London and the City police had dealt with these crowds before, and, according to one reporter, their arrangements were as “excellent as the utterly inadequate accommodation of the Court will permit.” To be admitted, respectability was key: those inside the courtroom were discernibly better dressed than those outside—and, incidentally, they were disproportionately female. Among those admitted was a man whose name would have been recognized by many, even if his portly and florid face was recognized by none. While Newton Crosland made his living as a wine merchant in the City, his wife made her living and her name as a novelist of some renown. Once she had published as Camilla Toulmin, but since the two had married, twenty-three years before, she published exclusively and prolifically as “Mrs. Newton Crosland.” The Croslands lived across Greenwich Park from the Pooks, in Blackheath, and Newton Crosland, captivated by the murder that had occurred so close to his home, had diligently followed reports of the case from the start. Something more than this, however, had brought him to the Old Court—although exactly what, Newton Crosland was not sure.