call upon him
for that reason.
I told him he did absolutely right, in my opinion. I said
that General Butler was then Governor of the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, and that an eminent person, holding a high
official character, from a foreign country, could not undertake
to question the personal character, or the title to be considered
gentlemen, of the men whom the American people put into their
high places.
Lord Coleridge said he received fifty guineas every morning
for his services in the Tichborne trial. "But," he added,
"my general practice in my profession was so much interrupted
by it that I could not have got along that year but for my
salary as Attorney-General."
He spoke with great pride of his cross-examination of the
Claimant. He said one of the papers had complained that
his cross-examination did no good to his case whatever. "But
I made him admit that he sent his photograph to some person,
as the photograph of Arthur Orton." He said the common people
in England still held to the belief that the Claimant was
the genuine Sir Roger Tichborne, and, by a curious contradiction,
this feeling was inspired largely by their sympathy with him
as a man of humble birth. I said, "Yes, I think that is true.
I heard somebody, a little while ago, say that they heard
two people talking in the cars, and one of them said to the
other, 'They wouldn't give him the estate, because he was
the son of a poor butcher.'" This very much amused the Lord
Chief Justice.
I asked him about the story I had heard and had verified
some time before, of the connection, in the person of Lady
Rolle, between two quite remote periods. Lady Rolle was
alive until 1887, maintaining her health so that she gave
dinner parties in that year, shortly before she died. She was
the widow of Mr. Rolle, afterward Lord Rolle, who made a
violent attack on Charles James Fox in 1783. He was then
thirty-two years old. From him the famous satire, the Rolliad,
took its name. When he went to pay his homage to Queen Victoria
at her Coronation in Westminster Abbey, he was quite feeble,
and rolled down the steps of the throne. The young Queen
showed her kindness of heart by jumping up and going to help
him in person. Some of the English told the foreigners present
at the ceremonial that that was part of the ceremony, and
that the Rolles held their lands on the tenure of going through
that performance at every coronation. Lady Rolle was married
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