Anna Anderson and the Tichborne Claimant: A Jury, Then DNA

What did the 1874 jury decide about the Tichborne Claimant?

Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne was born in 1829, the elder son of a Hampshire baronet. In 1854 he sailed from Rio in the Bella, a ship never heard of again, and his will was proved in July 1855 (Exhibit D). Only his mother kept advertising for him. In November 1865 she heard through an agency in Sydney of a man at Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, who fitted the description.

That man reached London on Christmas Day 1866. Roger’s mother said she recognised him as her son at their first meeting, in Paris in January 1867. The rest of the family called him an impostor (Exhibit D). A newspaper history printed in 1874 reports her saying that “the back of his head was like his father’s” (Exhibit A, p. x).

The trustees of the family estates fought his claim in a civil trial that ran 102 days, from May 11, 1871, to March 5, 1872. A witness swore that he had tattooed Roger at Stonyhurst, and the Claimant’s arm showed no marks. After several of Roger’s relatives testified, the jury said it needed no more evidence; his counsel accepted a nonsuit, ending the case, and he was arrested for perjury (Exhibit D).

The criminal trial opened on April 23, 1873, before three judges and a special jury (Exhibit A; Exhibit B). The indictment named him “Thomas Castro, alias Orton, alias Tichborne” (Exhibit A). On February 28, 1874, the jury came back after less than half an hour with a verdict of “Guilty on all the counts” (Exhibit A, p. 285). Asked by the Lord Chief Justice, the foreman said the defendant was not Roger Tichborne and was Arthur Orton (pp. 285–286), a butcher’s son born at Wapping (Exhibit D).

The Tichborne Trial, an oil painting of the packed courtroom by Frederick Sargent, dated between 1873 and 1899. It is a painter’s view of the scene, not a record of what was said there.

Mr. Justice Mellor then gave him two terms of seven years’ penal servitude, the second to begin when the first ended: 14 years in all (Exhibit A, pp. 286–287). The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) put the verdict on the 188th day of the trial (Exhibit D). In the end the question of who he was went to twelve jurors, the jury that replaced the ordeal in England, here asked to settle a man’s identity.

What evidence did the judges point to?

Mellor told the Claimant why the court agreed with the jury. “The testimony of individuals, however numerous or respectable they may be, to your personal identity with either Arthur Orton or Roger Tichborne is comparatively of little worth after so great a lapse of time,” he said, “except in the instances in which there existed special interest to observe and remember you” (Exhibit A, p. 286). The evidence of Roger’s family and of two other witnesses who had known one man or the other, he added, was “of great importance”. He also set out the Claimant’s “entire ignorance of the native tongue of Roger Tichborne”, who had spent his early years in Paris (Exhibit D), the tattoo marks “proved to have existed on the arm of the undoubted Roger Tichborne”, the two men’s letters, and his visit to Wapping under a false name (Exhibit A, p. 286).

The indictment shows how the Crown built its case. It charged 33 separate false statements, called assignments of perjury: 23 from his evidence in the 1871 civil trial and 10 from a sworn statement he made in the Court of Chancery in 1868 (Exhibit A, front matter). Of the 23, twelve concerned Roger’s life, such as his years in Paris and at Stonyhurst College. Eleven concerned Arthur Orton’s, such as a voyage to Valparaiso in 1848 and a stay at Melipilla in Chile.

The 33 false statements charged in the indictment, one square each, numbered as in the 1874 printing of the case (Exhibit A). Drawn from the table published with this page.

The 33 assignments of perjury, one row each (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: The Tichborne Trial: The Summing-up by the Lord Chief Justice of England (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1874), front matter

The newspaper history printed with the summing-up put the method in one line. A claimant is to be judged, it said, “not by a man’s knowledge of what he might have learnt, but by his ignorance of what he must have known if he were the true man” (Exhibit A, p. xv). The Claimant had learned a great deal. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he took into his employment two old soldiers of Roger’s regiment who had been Roger’s servants, and more than a dozen of Roger’s fellow officers came to accept him (Exhibit D).

The hidden part of this case was a name, not a body. Another page here retries the Mechanical Turk, a claim with a living player hidden behind it.

What did DNA show about Anna Anderson?

Anna Anderson’s claim belongs to a different century and a different kind of record. By August 1928 a newspaper in Champion, Alberta, was reporting the dispute over a woman in the United States “known as Madame Tchaikovsky”, who was said to be Anastasia (Exhibit C). The German National Library lists Tschaikovsky among her other names and gives her life dates as 1896 to 1984 (Exhibit F).

The Romanov family was shot early on July 17, 1918, according to historical reports cited by Coble and colleagues (Exhibit E). “The most famous claimant was Anna Anderson,” they wrote in 2009, “a Polish peasant who convinced many that she was Anastasia” (Exhibit E). They also reported that more than 200 people have claimed since 1918 to be one of the five Romanov children.

The test came after the first grave was found. A larger grave was officially found in 1991, and DNA confirmed the remains of the Tsar, the Tsarina and three of their daughters, in work published by Peter Gill and colleagues in 1994 (Exhibit E; Exhibit H). “With the discovery of the first grave, and subsequent DNA testing, Anna Anderson was exposed as an imposter,” Coble’s team wrote (Exhibit E), citing a 1995 paper by Gill and colleagues (Exhibit G). That 1995 paper was read here only as a bibliographic entry, so this page does not say which samples were compared.

Both claims to scale. The jury ruled in the Claimant’s lifetime; the DNA finding was published after Anderson’s death. Drawn from the table published with this page.

She had died in 1984, so the answer came after her death (Exhibit F). The German National Library’s record states that genetic analysis excluded kinship with the Russian imperial family and that she was probably Franziska Schanzkowski, a Polish farm worker (translated by Hoax and Hindsight; Exhibit F). In 2009 Coble’s team reported DNA from a second grave, found in 2007 about 70 metres from the first, and concluded that “none of the family survived the execution” (Exhibit E).

Where do a jury and a DNA test differ?

Both cases asked whether a person was who he or she claimed to be. They answered with different tools. The table sets the two side by side.

The two kinds of proof, row by row; the same text is in the table above. Drawn from the table published with this page.

The two kinds of proof, one row per point, with sources (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: The Tichborne Trial: The Summing-up by the Lord Chief Justice of England (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1874); Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement, vol. 3 (London, 1901), pp. 236-238, s.v. Orton, Arthur; Michael D. Coble and others, PLoS ONE 4, no. 3 (2009): e4838 (CC0); Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, GND authority record 12278216X, Anderson, Anna; Peter Gill and others, Nature Genetics 9 (1995): 9-10, and 6 (1994): 130-135 (bibliographic entries only)

The jury’s finding rested on many kinds of evidence weighed together. The sentencing judge trusted recognition after so many years only from witnesses with special reason to remember the man. The DNA finding rested on a comparison of genetic material, not of memories. The record read here reports it only at second hand, through Coble’s team and the library record.

Neither side’s record is neutral. One long report of the criminal trial, The Trial at Bar, was edited by the Claimant’s own lead counsel, Edward Kenealy, and printed at the office of the Englishman; its first-day report promised readers they would see “plot within plot to secure the nefarious ends of an alien Church and a corrupt Government” (Exhibit B). The 1874 volume used here for the verdict reprints a Daily News history that treats him as an impostor (Exhibit A). Ending in a criminal court also links this case to Han van Meegeren, another deception that ended at trial.