“You are the first,” said Baron Bramwell, “who has let daylight into the case.”  It will be seen presently what the simple story was which the learned counsel at last evolved from the lies and half-truths which had for so many years imposed upon a great number even of the intelligent and educated classes of the community.  And I would observe that until nearly the end of the trial the case was never safe or quite free from doubt; it was only what was elicited by Mr. Hawkins that made it so.  No Wonder the advocate said to Giffard, who was opposed to him on the first trial:  “If you and I had been together in that case in the first instance, we should have won it for the Claimant.”  Being on the other side, this is how the case stood when he had completed it:—­

The real heir to the family was a fairly well-formed, slender youth of medium height.  The personator of this youth was a man an inch and a half or two inches taller, and weighing five-and-twenty stone.  His hands were a great deal larger than those of Roger, and at least an inch longer; his feet were an inch and a half longer.  He was broader, deeper, thicker, and altogether of a different build.  The lobes of his ears, instead of being pendent like Roger’s, adhered to his cheeks.  But he was not more unlike in physical outline than in mental endowment, taste, character, pursuits, and sentiment, in manners and habits, in culture and education, connection and recollection.

Roger had been educated at Stonyhurst, with the education of a gentleman; this man had never had any education at all.  Roger had moved in the best English society; this man amongst slaughtermen, bushrangers, thieves, and highwaymen.  Roger had been engaged to a young lady, his cousin, Kate Doughty; this man had been engaged to a young woman of Wapping, of the name of Mary Ann Loader, a respectable girl in his own sphere of life.

Roger’s engagement to this young lady, his cousin, was disapproved of by the Tichborne family, and was the cause of his leaving England.  But before he went he gave her a writing, and deposited a copy of it with Mr. Gosford, the legal adviser of the family.

This document was one of the most important incidents in the history of the case, and upon it, if the cross-examination had been conducted by Mr. Hawkins in Chancery, the case would have been crushed at the outset.  It is not my task to show how, but to state what it all came to when the learned counsel left it to the jury to say whether the claimant was the Roger Tichborne he had sworn himself to be, or whether he was Arthur Orton, the butcher of Wapping, whom he swore he was not.

This document forms the subject of the “sealed packet” left with Mr. Gosford, and contained in effect these words:  “If God spares me to return and marry my beloved Kate within a year, I promise to build a church and dedicate it to my patron saint.”