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A DEMONSTRATION by “THE CLAIMANT.’

The person who unsuccessfully attempted to sustain his claim to the Tichborne estates, and against whom several criminal charges are now pending, invited the London public to meet him in St. James's Hall last night, “for the benefit of the Defence Fund,” the tickets of admission being respectively one, two, and three shillings. It was announced that “two demonstrations only” would take place; and there was, perhaps, some special appropriateness in their being held in the week of the fat cattle show. By the hour fixed for the commencement of the proceedings the hall was about three-fourths full, the greater part of the audience belonging, apparently, to the middle classes.

There was boisterous applause when the Claimant made his appearance in company of Mr. Whalley, M.P., Mr. G. Onslow, M.P., and about a score of other persons, none of whom were known. The chair was taken by the member for Peterborough, who led off the speeches by a few observations to the effect that he had espoused the cause of the Claimant because he was himself as “firmly convinced as it was possible for a person to be of anything, that the Claimant was Sir Roger Tichborne,” and because he thought that, whether he was or was not Sir Roger, he was entitled to a fair trial, which there was no chance of his obtaining unless the British public interposed in his behalf. He had addressed scores of meetings in all the large towns of the kingdom, and everywhere the reception that he and Sir Roger had met with had been of the most gratifying character.

Mr. Onslow, M.P., next came forward and dwelt for more than an hour upon the wrongs and virtues of the Claimant, and the cruel injustice that he had been exposed to. Premising that all they wanted was fair play, he observed that at all the various meetings they had held persons had been invited to come on to the platform, and to state any reasonable objections they might feel to Sir Roger; but no one had ever accepted the challenge except one old woman, who said nothing, but shook her fist in a very expressive manner at him (a laugh). Mr. Onslow grounded his assertions that Sir Roger had been denied fair play on a variety of matters, such as that the jury had listened for three weeks to the speech of the Attorney General, but had not heard Serjeant Ballantine in reply, who, if he had had the opportunity, would undoubtedly have entirely converted them to his own way of thinking. The long delay in the trial on the criminal charges was another cause of complaint, as well as the “loathsome dungeon of Newgate” into which Sir Roger was flung, and where he was detained for fifty-two days; and the neglect of the Attorney General (whose name was hissed with great heartiness) to move for a trial at bar last year, which he might have done as easily as this year. Then the speaker contrasted the case with which the present Lord Aberdeen was allowed to assume the title and estates compared with the difficulties that had been thrown in the way of Sir Roger, though his mother had recognised him, besides a host of other witnesses. It had been said that Lady Tichborne was an imbecile, “but,” exclaimed the speaker, “I appeal to you, is there a mother even in Bedlam that would not recognise her own son?” The meeting cheered this view of the matter, and confidently responded to the appeal in the negative, especially when it was clinched by the quotation—with an appealing glance at the Claimant—of a passage from Scripture expressive of the tenderness of a mother for her “sucking child.” The difficulty as to the Claimant's entire ignorance of French and of most other things was met by the 0002 statement that at Stonyhurst his education had been wholly neglected; and a letter was received from a gentleman said to have been lately in the Foreign Office, and described to be “the best French scholar in England after Lord Granville,” who pronounced that several of the Claimant's letters (both in French and English) which had been shown to him, and which were written when he left this country, suggested the idea that “he had never been taught any grammar at all” (cheers). Upon another topic—the sealed packet—Mr. Onslow said a good deal, which we must decline to reproduce, unless it be given in the form of evidence in a court of law. The drift of his contention was that the Claimant held back his statement about his cousin, Miss Doughty, as long as he possibly could; that his own counsel, in consultation, declared they would throw up their briefs and leave the court if he refused to answer the next question on the subject that the Attorney General put to him, to which the Claimant replied, “You may get up and leave the court, but I will not consent to vilify the character of my cousin;” and that it was only under irresistible pressure from the bench that he at last made the statement in question, when the only alternative before him was a prison for himself and the workhouse for his wife and children. “What British father—what British husband would not have done the same?” asked Mr. Onslow. And if the reponsive applause of the audience meant anything, it must have meant that at any rate the British husbands and fathers then present would have acted as the Claimant did. The next hit in Mr. Onslow's speech deserves a rather fuller description to open all the letters addressed to him—for he had nothing to conceal or to hide; all was open and aboveboard—he proceeded to say that one of the letters which he thus opened turned out to be from a person now living in Australia (the name, as far as we could catch it, was Pallier), who, addressing the claimant as “Honoured Sir,” informed him that ten years ago he was driving along one of the highways one day when he saw a man's collar lying in the road; that he picked it up and saw on it the words “R. C. Tichborne;” and that he now enclosed this collar, thinking it might be a slight bit of useful evidence in the case. “And here,” said Mr. Onslow, producing a very ragged-looking article—“here, ladies and gentlemen, is the collar (a Voice: “Try it on, Sir Roger”); here is the name ‘R. C. Tichborne,’ which the valet Moore will swear to be in the handwriting of the real Sir Roger; here is the City mark of the maker of the collar, and the size, 16, which Sir Roger always used; and when I showed this collar to the Claimant he exclaimed, ‘That is the identical collar I was saved in from the wreck of the Bella” (infinite cheering followed this episode, several of the audience seeming anxious to possess a thread or scrap of this famous collar, which has so miraculously come to light after ten years of oblivion) Mr. Onslow added that when he showed it to Mr. Baigent, that gentleman at once recognised the handwriting; it would be sworn to in the witness-box, and they must remember that it was picked up in 1862, many years after Sir Roger was supposed to have gone down in the Bella. Nothing else that Mr. Onslow said came up to the dramatic effect produced by this linen collar. But two other points may be just mentioned. Many of the facts spoken to at the trial are, no doubt, already forgotten by the public. But it will probably be remembered that there was a daguerreotype, admitted to be one of the real Sir Rober when a young man, and that photographic copies of this daguerreotype had been taken. It was a much-contested point whether there was any resemblance between that portrait and the Claimant: one half the witnesses said that there was, the other half that there was not. Then a happy thought struck Mr. Onslow. He went to a “clever artist” with one of the photographic copies of the daguerreotype and said to him, “Can't you age this portrait for me? Don't alter the face, but add whiskers, lengthen the hair, raise the shoulders; in short, let it be the portrait of the same man, but with 20 years added to him.” The “clever artist” 0003 undertook to do this; and he has done it in a manner very creditable to his cleverness. The portrait has grown into a most speaking likeness of the Claimant; and we will only add that if this artist should be put in the witness-box at the approaching trial, his cross-examination by Mr. Hawkins will probably yield some amusement to the public. The last good point of Mr. Onslow's speech was not a very refined one, but it tickled his hearers and set them into a roar that lasted some minutes. He had been running over the list of different persons whom, as he alleged, the Claimant had at one time or another been taken for—Arthur Orton, Moore, Smith, Coles, the illegitimate son of this or that member of the family; it had even once been said he was the illegitimate son of his own legitimate parent; and “really,” said the speaker, “I should not be surprised if he should at last be accused of being own brother to Hawkins by the Attorney General, out of Mischief.” In conclusion, Mr. Onslow said that if the Claimant was, as he firmly believed, the real man, he had been most cruelly abused and ill-treated; and even if he was an impostor, he deserved to be acquitted, for in that case he was the very cleverest impostor that had ever been known. When the speaker sat down, a gentleman from the middle of the hall asked him how many Tichborne bonds he held. Mr. Onslow promptly replied that he not only held none, but he would give half-a-crown to any person who would show him one, for he had never seen one in his whole life.

The Claimant next stood up and addressed the meeting. There were one or two preliminary rows, apparently by a few persons who took an unfavourable view of him; but they were in such a small minority as to be of no account at all, and they were either hustled out of the place or menaced into silence. It should be stated, however, that the chairman, while reasonably objecting to interruptions, invited to the platform any dissident who was willing to step on to it. The Claimant's speech may be dismissed in a few words. He could not, by any stretch of courtesy, be said to have uttered a single argument that would hold water for a moment; he indulged plentifully in strong language; his statements of facts were singularly exaggerated; his sentences were not seldom ungrammatical, and his pronunciation was decidedly peculiar: “anything” became “anythink;” he spoke of two witnesses who were told “they was not wanted;” and it was difficult for a moment to understand that when the Claimant talked of “ketching a minner,” he was referring to the harmless amusement of catching a minnow; thus he held that the Attorney General deserved to be insulted by every soldier he met in the street for having said that the evidence of soldiers could be had for a glass of beer; that Lord Bellew's evidence was not entitled to credit; that the testimony as to the tattoo marks proved that the witnesses were not speaking truly; and that only the want of moral courage and common sense had made the jury stop the trial, whereby he estimated that he should be put to an expense of 300,000l.; for the preparation of his case had cost him 120,000l. He had been told that he would have to pay the defendants 46,000. before he could begin another action and it would take another 120,000l. to conduct that second action to the point at which the jury stopped the first one. He spoke with much bitterness of the intention of the Attorney General not to appear in the prosecution against him, arguing that that learned gentleman was “bound in fairness” not to back out of the case; and he appeared to think the government had a special grudge against him, and that the House of Commons had passed an ex post facto law in order to enable the Chief Justice to commit him for trial on the charge of perjury by a bench warrant; the Attorney General was declared to have used language that would “shock the ears of a Billingsgate fishwoman.” He knew on the highest authority that the agents for the prosecution had bought up lots of Wapping witnesses for a pot of beer each, &c Ex pede, Herculem. The above will be sufficient specimens of the Claimant's style. After he had finished the audience began rapidly to melt away, and in a few minutes a resolution was unanimously carried condemning the prosecution of the Claimant. Thanks to the chairman were moved by that person, who added a finishing touch to what he he had before said by observing of a gentleman in the middle of the hall that he knew him: he was one of those who were engaged in serving injunctions on him; but he could promise that gentleman that he (the Claimant) would make an injunction of him before he had done with him.