Roger Tichborne

Roger Tichborne

Roger Tichborne ( January 5, 1829 , † April 1854 ) was a British gentleman . He was the eldest son and apparent marriage of the British nobleman Sir James Doughty-Tichbornes, 10th Baronet (1784-1862).

Life

The Tichbornes, who lived in Tichborne, a village in Hampshire in southern England, before the Norman conquest , were among the few aristocratic families who had held onto their Catholic faith after the Reformation . His mother, Lady Tichborne, was half French (she came from a branch of the Bourbons ). Her marriage to Sir James was unhappy and she hated life in England. She wanted her son Roger to grow up in France, but his father sent him to Stonyhurst , a then well-known and elitist, Jesuit-run Catholic public school . After a brief career in the army and an unhappy love affair with his cousin, Katherine Doughty , Roger wanted to immigrate to South America. In April 1854 he set out on the "Bella" from Rio de Janeiro to Kingston (Jamaica). The ship never arrived; it was believed to have sunk and there were no survivors.

After death

Lady Tichborne refused to accept her son's death. She believed rumors that another ship had taken survivors of the "Bella" on board and brought them to Australia. After her husband's death in 1862, she began advertising in newspapers for information about her son's fate. In May 1865 she came into contact with Arthur Cubitt, the owner of an Australian agency that looked after missing people. The banishment of criminals to Australia had not ended until the 1850s, and the country was full of people trying to hide their identities. Lady Tichborne hired the agency to look for her son. Since Tichborne had an annual income of £ 20,000, it was an invitation for impostors. A butcher named Arthur Orton (born March 20, 1834 in Wapping , London , † April 1, 1898) from New South Wales immediately declared that he was in truth Roger Tichborne and had survived the sinking of the "Bella".

In January 1866, the "aspirant," as he was now commonly known, wrote his first letter to Lady Tichborne. It resembled an illiterate person's attempts to write, whereas Roger Tichborne had been an educated man twelve years earlier. However, when Orton came to Sydney, some wanted to recognize the candidate as Roger Tichborne, including an old black servant of the Tichborne family. Those who wanted to believe him also attached importance to the fact that he had only revealed his true identity under pressure from Agent Cubitt and Gibbes, a lawyer engaged.

Even before Lady Tichborne had sent the money for his crossing, the candidate had embarked with his wife and children for England, where he arrived at Christmas 1866. From there he traveled on to Paris, where he met Lady Tichborne, who confirmed him as her son. She died the following year.

Now the story hit the headlines. It was spread across countless newspaper pages and evoked strong but conflicting emotions. The rest of the family rejected the candidate as an impostor without seeing him. For many, material interests played a role, as it threatened their inheritance claims.

But regardless of that, they did not want to accept the crude and uneducated journeyman from the Australian outback as a relative. Within two years of arriving in England, it weighed 180 kilograms; the real Roger Tichborne, on the other hand, had been a slender, elegant man. Opponents of the candidate also pointed out that apart from his eccentric mother, no one from the Tichborne family recognized him. And his followers could have given him enough family history by now to allow the fraud to continue.

The following Orton / Tichborn trial caused a sensation in 19th century England. As a result of the numerous, far-fetched protection and accusations witnesses and the tricks of the lawyers, he dragged on for a long time and cost the Orton supporters around 60,000 English pounds, but Orton was declared a fraud in 1872 and sentenced in 1874 to 14 years in prison for double perjury .

Meyers Konversationslexikon from 1888 wrote: “Although at the court hearings the Tichborne pretender turned out to be very dissimilar to the missing person, and moreover crude and uneducated, the agitation continued for him for some time after his conviction both in Tichborne meetings and newspaper articles as also continued in parliament. But when Orton was released from prison in 1884, interest in him was extinguished. "

literature

• Robyn Annear: The Man Who Lost Himself , Constable and Robinson, 2003 ISBN 1-84119-799-8 .
• Rohan McWilliam: The Tichborne Claimant. A Victorian Sensation , Humbledon Continuum, London 2007 ISBN 1-85285-478-2 .
• Percival Serle: Orton, Arthur . In: Dictionary of Australian Biography. Angus and Robertson. Sydney 1949.
• Edgar Feuchtwanger: Invitation to Fraud - The Tichborne Case , In: Damals. Story to hear. Sherlock Holmes & Co. Crimes in Victorian England , Munich 2007 ISBN 978-3-939606-81-9 .

Web links

• The Tichborne Trial (English)