After this I had no more to do with electioneering in the sense of
being a candidate, but a good deal to do with it in every other.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE TICHBORNE CASE.
[The greatest of all chapters in the life of Mr. Hawkins was the
prosecution of the impostor Arthur Orton for perjury, and yet the
story of the Tichborne case is one of the simplest and most romantic.
The heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and estates was shipwrecked while
on board the _Bella_ and drowned in 1854. In 1865 a butcher at Wagga
Wagga in Australia assumed the title and claimed the estates. But the
story is not related in these reminiscences on account of its romantic
incidents, but as an incident in the life of Lord Brampton. It is so
great that there is nothing in the annals of our ordinary courts of
justice comparable with it, either in its magnitude or its advocacy. I
speak particularly of the trial for perjury, in which Mr. Hawkins led
for the prosecution, and not of the preceding trial, in which he was
junior to Sir John Coleridge.
It is impossible to give more than the _points_ of this strange story
as they were made, and the real _facts_ as they were elicited in
cross-examination and pieced together in his opening speech and his
reply in the case for the Crown. What rendered the task the
more difficult was that his predecessors had so bungled the
cross-examination in many ways that they not only had not elicited
what they might have done, but actually, by many questions, furnished
information to the Claimant which enabled him to carry on his
imposture.
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