Nor is this in the least exaggerated. When it became known that the claimant had no funds with which to prosecute his case, the suggestion of a public bond issue was made and promptly approved. Bonds, with no other backing than the promise to refund the advanced money when the claimant should come into possession of his property, were issued, and so extreme was the public confidence in the validity of the claim that they were bought up greedily. In addition, a number of wealthy individuals became so interested in the affair and so convinced of the rights of the stranger, that they made him large personal advances. One man, Mr. Guilford Onslow, M. P., is said to have lent as much as 75,000 pounds, while two ladies of the Onslow family advanced 30,000 pounds and Earl Rivers is believed to have wasted as much as 150,000 pounds on the impostor. Finally the civil trial of the suit took place. The proceedings began on the eleventh of May, 1871, and were not concluded until March, 1872. Sir John Coleridge, who defended for the Tichborne family and later became lord chief justice, cross-questioned the claimant for twenty-two days, and his speech in summing up is said to have been the longest ever delivered before a court in England. The actual taking of evidence required more than one hundred court days, and at least a hundred witnesses identified the claimant as Roger Tichborne. To quote from Major Arthur Griffiths’ account: “These witnesses included Lady Tichborne,[6] Roger’s mother, the family solicitor, one baronet, six magistrates, one general, three colonels, one major, thirty non-commissioned officers and men, four clergymen, seven Tichborne tenants, and sixteen servants of the family.” [6] A mistake, for the dowager Lady Tichborne died on March 12, 1868. Her damage had been done before the trial. On the other hand, the defense produced only seventeen witnesses against the claimant, but it piled up a great deal of dark-looking evidence, and, in the course of his long and terrible interrogation of the plaintiff, Coleridge was able to bring out so many contradictions, such appalling blanks of memory, and such an accumulation of ignorances and blunders that the jury gave evidence of its inclination. Thereupon Serjeant Ballantine, the claimant’s leading counsel, abandoned the case. On the order of the judge the claimant was immediately seized, charged with three counts of perjury, and remanded for criminal trial. This case was not called until April, 1873, and it proved a more formidable legal contest than the unprecedented civil action. The proceedings lasted more than a year, and it took the judge eighteen days to charge the jury; this in spite of the usual despatch of British trials. How long such a case might have hung on in the notoriously slow American courts is a matter for painful speculation.