The Tichborne case was a legal cause célèbre that captivated Victorian England in the 1860s and 1870s. It concerned the claims by a man sometimes referred to as Thomas Castro or as Arthur Orton, but usually termed ‘the Claimant’ He failed to convince the courts, was convicted of perjury and served a long prison sentence. Some analysts believe that an element of doubt remains as to his true identity and that, conceivably, he was Roger Tchborne.
About Tichborne case in brief
The Tichborne case was a legal cause célèbre that captivated Victorian England in the 1860s and 1870s. It concerned the claims by a man sometimes referred to as Thomas Castro or as Arthur Orton, but usually termed ‘the Claimant’ He failed to convince the courts, was convicted of perjury and served a long prison sentence. Some analysts believe that an element of doubt remains as to his true identity and that, conceivably, he was Roger Tchborne. The Tichbornes were an old English Catholic family who had been prominent in the area since before the Norman Conquest. After the Reformation in the 16th century, one of their number was hanged, drawn and quartered for complicity in the Babington Plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I. The family in general remained loyal to the Crown, and in 1621 Benjamin Tachborne was created a baronet for services to King James I. In 1803 the seventh baronet, Sir Henry Tich borne, was captured by the French in Verdun during the Napoleonic Wars and detained as a civil prisoner for some years. His fourth son, James, and a nobly born Englishman, Henry Seymour of Knoyle, had a daughter, Henriette Felicité, in about 1807. Years later, when Henriette had passed her 20th birthday and remained unmarried, Seymour thought his former companion James Tichbourne might make a suitable husband—although James was close to his own age and was physically unprepossessing.
On 5 January 1829 Henriette gave birth to a son, Roger Charles Doughty Tich Osborne. As the family’s fortunes had been greatly augmented by the Doughty bequest, this was a considerable material prospect. After Roger’s birth, James and Henriette spent much time apart in Paris with Roger, and the couple had three more children: two daughters who died in infancy and a second son, Alfred, born in 1839. As baronetcy is inherited by males, when Henry died in 1845 the immediate heir had assumed the only surname of Doughty, so James became next in line to the baronetborne line. The couple were married in August 1827; on 5 January 2018, Roger died in a car crash in Australia. The Claimant was declared to be Arthur Oron and a criminal court jury decided that he was not Roger Titchborne and declared him to beArthur Orton. In 1895, the Claimant confessed to being Orton only to recant almost immediately. He lived generally in poverty for the rest of his life and was destitute at the time of his death in 1898, and he had no dealings with the Magna Charta Association when he was released in 1884, and was not a member of it. The claimant’s counsel, Edward Kenealy, was subsequently disbarred because of his conduct. He was elected to Parliament in 1875 as a radical independent but was not an effective parliamentarian.
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This page is based on the article Tichborne case published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 20, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
