Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur OrtonAnonymous
History
Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton
Anonymous
Impostors and imposture -- Biography
and, while giving due weight to the testimony in his favour, exposing
hundreds of examples of the falsity of his statements made upon oath.
The verdict of Guilty had been anticipated by all who paid attention
to the evidence. The foreman publicly declared that there was no doubt
in the mind of any juryman that the man who has for eight years
assumed the name and title of the gentleman whose unhappy story is
recorded in these pages is an impostor who has added slander of the
wickedest kind to his many other crimes. But not only were they
satisfied of this; they were equally agreed as to his being Arthur
Orton. The sentence of fourteen years' penal servitude followed, and
was assuredly not too heavy a punishment for offences so enormous. Yet
there are others still at large, who, having aided the impostor with
advice and money, should not be allowed to escape, while the more
clumsy scoundrel suffers the award of detected infamy.
Thus ended the great Tichborne impersonation case, the most remarkable
feature in which was, not that a rude ignorant butcher should proclaim
himself a baronet, but that thousands of persons sane in every other
respect should have gone crazy about him, and should, despite the
evidence given--sufficient many hundreds of times told, or for any
reasonable being--even now persist that Roger Tichborne still lives,
and is the victim of a gross conspiracy. What need is there to point
out the idiotcy of such ravings? What necessity ever to contradict
statements which contradict themselves?
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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