The Great Cat Massacre

by Gareth Rubin

  The very least he should have done was to keep his head down and stay indoors in order to continue evading justice. Instead, he decided to play detective and keep his enemies under his personal surveillance. Donning a fake beard, he took rooms in a house opposite Westminster Hall, where the Lords Appellant were meeting. In order to get a better view, he climbed onto the roof of an apothecary’s house, shinned down the gutter and hid, watching to see who came and went. Quite what he would do with the information and why he wanted to get it personally instead of asking someone else to keep watch, is unknown.

  What is known is that the Lords in the hall were wishing they could get their hands on Tresilian and wondering where he was, when one of them pointed out that he was on the other side of the road. After a couple of seconds, it was decided that a party should be sent over to arrest the fugitive. They scoured the house outside of which he had been seen, but could not find where Tresilian had gone. After a few threats, the house owner informed them that he was hiding under the table.

  Surprised by this stroke of luck, they marched their man back to the Hall, where the Lords ordered that he be taken to the Tower of London, whence he would be dragged by a horse to the execution ground. But as he was pushed towards the gallows, Tresilian scoffed at the Lords’ plan. For, he announced, he could not die. Then he dramatically tore open his clothes to reveal that he was covered in magic amulets that would protect him from death. The Lords quickly proved him wrong.

  THE ACCIDENTAL ABOLITIONIST – LUKE COLLINGWOOD ENDS THE SLAVE TRADE, 1782

  In 1782 Luke Collingwood put in a false insurance claim and accidentally ended the slave trade. It was a bit of a mistake for Collingwood, who was captain of a slave ship.

  The trade was a truly international affair. West Africans would capture rival tribesmen, who would be sold to Arab slave dealers. These would take the slaves to the coast, where European ships would transport them to the West Indies and America to work on plantations.

  Slaves were a valuable commodity, but the weak link in the chain from African villages to Jamaican sugar plantations was the sea voyage. The slaves were crammed into a tiny space below decks, often not much more 60cm high. The stench of the human waste and disease festering in these conditions meant that a slave ship could be identified just by its smell. Often the enslaved would throw themselves overboard through fear or misery. Many more simply died due to the appalling conditions.

  Although the slave trade was lucrative – indeed, Bristol grew fat on it – slavery itself was not something most Britons would have been happy about. Britain itself had long been a free society, with legal rights enjoyed by all. Slavery itself was probably illegal in Britain itself and certainly rarely practised. The trade was tolerated because slavery either in its most brutal form or in the sense of indentured servitude was common throughout the world and because the Church of England didn’t seem to mind it – the Church itself owned slaves at a plantation in the West Indies that it possessed. But, most of all, Britons tolerated it because they simply didn’t hear about it all that much. Luke Collingwood, as captain of the slave ship Zong, was about to change all that.

  In 1782 Collingwood was on his way from Africa to the Jamaican colonies, carrying 400 slaves. But he was an inexperienced trafficker and had overloaded his ship. Down in the hold, the cargo were dying so he decided to throw the ill slaves overboard. Of course, each one had a substantial monetary value, but he would be OK because they were all insured for £30 each – a few thousand pounds in today’s values. He would tell the insurers that he had had no choice because the ship was running out of water. The insurers might grumble, but they would pay out; 133 slaves were therefore thrown to their deaths.

  When he reached port in England, after dropping off his surviving cargo in the Caribbean, his ship’s owners put in their insurance claim for the dead slaves. But things didn’t go entirely to plan. The insurers were suspicious and took the case to court. Of course, no one was really concerned about the fate of the slaves other than as commodities and, the court eventually found for the Zong’s owners against the insurers, who were ordered to pay up.

  Like any other civil case, there was minor interest from the newspapers of the day, but it would soon have been forgotten had not one Olaudah Equiano caught sight of a report. Equiano was a freed slave, originally from modern-day Nigeria, where he had been captured at the age of 11. In 1783, he was 40 and working in London as a house servant when he spotted the news story about the Zong and had an idea. He took the report to Granville Sharp, a self-taught lawyer whom he thought would be the man to start a fire.

  For two decades, Sharp had been involved in the Abolitionist cause. His interest had begun in 1765 when a young black slave had been brought to the home of his brother, William, a doctor who would later become surgeon to the King.*

  The slave boy, Jonathan Strong, had been badly beaten and then abandoned by his owner. Once he was fit and well, Granville found him a job as footman to a pharmacist, but when Strong’s former master spotted him two years later he tried to kidnap his former possession. Granville went to court to stop him and had Strong legally declared a free man. Since then, Sharp had become something of a nuisance for slave owners, taking them to court over anything he could think of. He willingly agreed to help Equiano.

  Based on Collingwood’s insurance claim, which included an admission of having thrown many men to their death, Sharp attempted to have Collingwood and the ship owners prosecuted for murder. The attempt failed but the resulting publicity gained him more supporters among the growing political classes and from the Quakers, without doubt the most radically political of the Christian denominations of the time. On 22 May 1787, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was born, consisting of nine Quakers and three Anglicans, including Sharp. Together they set about documenting the treatment of slaves and even brought examples of shackles and punishment devices to London, so the citizens could see how innocent men were being treated as – at best – criminals. It became the first public civil rights campaign. The Society regularly wrote to newspapers and organised public meetings and petitions to end the slave trade – one was signed by a fifth of the population of Manchester, which illustrates how deep and wide the campaign permeated.

  As the spirit of the day turned to the Abolitionist cause, they recruited William Wilberforce MP, who offered to introduce a bill to Parliament to abolish the slave trade. It wasn’t until 1807 that Wilberforce managed to get a bill through but it did happen. And 15 years later a bill was passed to abolish slavery itself in most parts of the British Empire. Soon the Royal Navy was actively destroying the slave trade wherever it could find it.

  Collingwood’s attempt at insurance fraud had had global effects.

  BUT DID HE DO IT? – THE DEATH OF LORD CASTLEREAGH, 1822

  Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was a controversial fellow. For decades he was one of the most influential men in Europe – and therefore the world. His reputation rested on his position as Britain’s Foreign Secretary, which allowed him to build the European system of diplomacy that delivered peaceful but conservative government across the continent. He was also hated by poets.

  For example, after the 1819 Peterloo Massacre of political radicals, blamed on the reactionary Cabinet of which Castlereagh was a leading member, Shelley wrote:

  I met murder on the way

  He had a masque like Castlereagh

  Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

  Seven bloodhounds followed him

  All were fat; and well they might

  Be in admirable plight,

  For one by one, and two by two,

  He tossed them human hearts to chew

  Which from his wide cloak he drew.

  Shelley died in July 1822. Had he lived another month he might have perked up a little to hear that Castlereagh had been acting distinctly oddly. In an interview with George IV, the minister told the King that he was being watched by a mysterious servant. His ominous words w
ere: ‘I am accused of the same crime as the Bishop of Clogher.’

  The Bishop, Percy Jocelyn, had, the previous month, been defrocked and prosecuted after he was found in the back room of the White Lion in Haymarket with his trousers and a Grenadier Guardsman around his ankles. Sensibly, Jocelyn ran away to Scotland, to become a butler. A popular ditty of the time described the tale:

  The Devil to prove the Church was a farce

  Went out to fish for a Bugger.

  He baited his hook with a Soldier’s arse

  And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.

  It is uncertain, however, whether Castlereagh (a) really had been foolish enough to do it with a Grenadier Guardsman and was being blackmailed, (b) had not been foolish enough to do it with a Grenadier Guardsman but was being blackmailed anyway or (c) was completely mad.

  The King, very concerned, told him to speak to a doctor. Perhaps he was worried that Castlereagh had picked up a dose of something he wanted to get rid of, or maybe he thought the minister was one seat short of an overall majority. Certainly, the Duke of Wellington, a chum of the Foreign Secretary, believed it was the latter and wrote to Castlereagh’s physician, asking him to see his patient as soon as possible.

  Castlereagh, in a state of agitation, retired to his home in Kent, where his wife, Amelia, took away all the razors to stop him killing himself. Ever resourceful, however, on 12 August 1822 he managed to find a letter opener and cut his own throat. His doctor found him bleeding and recorded his dying words: ‘Bankhead, let me fall upon your arm. Tis all over.’ It put an unambiguous end to an exceptional career.*

  Yet, even after dying, Castlereagh managed to influence legislation. An inquiry into his death was held a few days later and ruled that he was mentally ill at the time. This was a charitable judgment because had the ruling been ‘suicide’, he would have had a stake driven through his heart and been buried in unconsecrated ground – possibly at a crossroads in order to prevent his ghost from haunting anyone who lived nearby (crossroads were known to confuse ghosts, who wouldn’t know which way to go).

  At the time, many people compared the fact that Lord Castlereagh was buried with full rites in Westminster Abbey 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 crimin
al 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 after 10pm, as his train steamed through London, things became very Agatha Christie-like. A lady in a neighbouring carriage was understandably perturbed to notice blood flying through the open window and spattering her dress. Another passenger heard ‘a horrid howling’ but presumed it was a dog.