The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-12-02 00:00:00

MB. JOHN BRIGHT ON PEACE AND

WAR.

At a Peace Conference recently held at Philadelphia, the
following fetter from Mr. John Bright was rd
Dear Friend Daniel Hill,—l cannot come to your
c-nference, and I do not feel that I can 'nine anything
that wiik be of service. There seems nothing cheerful
to write on the subj.et of pence or war, except this,
that the inflnences in favour of peace are now t-Fcoine
so strong that with millions of inen in aims in Enron()
still peace is the rule, and nations are not so much in
the hands of monarchs and Ministers as they have been
in past times. When the boundaries of nations and
*races are well iv-To-tea, and when the hindrai eye to
trade created-by imetile tariffs are removed, I think the
time will have come when the intelligenceand Chr:stian
feeling and the_true interests of nations will overcome
the motives and passions which lead to war. We may
hope that in Europe there wail arise a monarch or a
stateemin of sufficient authority and influence to lad
his own country, and to induce other countries, to
unite in some resolute effort for a great reduction of
armaments. We may hope, too, that as dueling is
gradually 1-•eing condemned for the adjustment 0;
differences between private persons, so war may be
condemned as a practice fitted only for savage nations,
and wholly disgraceful and iefatnous when waged by
nations preteu,A. g to civilization and profeesiog the
religion of the Prince of /face. I whin your Con-
ference a good reoult, alth•rugh I am not able to take
any part in am, &c., JOHN BRIGHT.
BASthdale, Ninth Month 22, 1873.
E1111:010Yraent 16 110 scarce that large numbers of
young men are taking the shilling from tazo peaulooft.
Eargoank • - •

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THE VANE BARONETCY CASE.

Judgment was delivered by Vice-Chancellor Malin' on
Saturday in the Vane Baronetcy case.—The Times, in a
leader, givea the following outline of this remarkable case :

The case of "Vane v. Vane," on which Sir Richard
Malins gave judgment on Saturday, is one of those
storied which sometimes make the Court of Chancery
the best school even for the most ingenious masters of
romance. All the materials of an exciting three-
volume novel lie ready in the prosaic records of the
trial which have appeared from day to day in our
columns. Irregular connexions in a well-known county
family, whispers of illegitimacy against the heir of a
fine estate, family qnarrels and a rich crop of family
scandals, charges of fraud to keep the rightful heir out
of his eossesaime, reports of what might be termed
death-bed confessions—all this chain of circumstances,
extending over three-quarters of a century, forms a
tale which needs no embellishment from fancy. It is
true that the attempt to prove the charge of fraud '
Ignominiously failed; but none the less vividly does
the story bring out the errors, the suspicions,
and the resentments which are Jometioaes the
price of coveted possessions. ;The narrative
takes us back to the last.; century, when Sir
Frederick Fletcher Vales became the heir of the
entailed estates in Cumberland left ,by his father,
Sir Lionel Fletcher. Sir Frederick had formed an ,
Intimacy with a woman below him in life, Hannah
Bowerbank, by whom he bad two children. In
1797 she .gave birth to a third child, and on the 9th of.
\leech in the Pelee year Sir Ftederick married her.
The main question before the Court waa-whether that
child was burn before or efter the marriage. Accord-
ing to the plaintiff, the birth happened before that
event; according to the defendant, the date of it was
the 29th of March, or about three weeks after the
marriage. The child was baptized on the 18th of
*April under the name of Francis Fletcher, and the
register contains the statement that he was born on the
29th of March; but these words are written in different
ink horn the rest of the record, and the theory of
the plaintiff was that, after the register of the baptism,
they bad been added with a fraudulent intent. Some
time after the marriage the parents went to live at the
family rent in Cumberland, and, since the illegitimacy
of their two eldest-children was a matter of notoriety,
Sir Frederick sought means, as far back as 1802, to
put the legitimacy of his son Francis beyond dispute
by filing a bill in Chancery. The evidence of the
nurse and the doctor who had been present at the
birth, as well as of other witnesses, was placed in one
of those "sealed packets" without which ro case of
a 'disputed succession would be complete. In 1807
Lady Vane had another son, Frederick Henry, who
was the plaintiff in the suit before the Court. But
his elder brother, Francis, was always treated as
the heir. When Francis came of age, in 1818, he
joined with his father in the resettlement of the
estates, and he was described in the deed as the "son
cfd heir apparent" of Sir Frederick. A private Act
Parliament having been required in the name year to
authorize the sale of a part of the estates, a certificate
,hat Francis was legitimate came before the House of
rds, and it was deemed satisfactory. In 1823 he
arried Mies Diana Beauclerk, and again his legiti-
macy was assumed in the marriage settlement. Know-
ing, however, that two of Sir Frederick's children had
been born out of wedlock, Miss Beauclerk's father
rpaturally wished to have the legttimaey of his _
- "r's husband made as clear as possible, and hence, .
Is suppoeed, the fact that eight days after the marriage
-Sir Frederick Vane fern:l6lly entered- the ate of his
eon's birth at the Herald's College. On two_ occasions
his mother aho attested Mutt- he ,had been ;born
after her marriage. One was in 1833, when a
part of the family estates was sold, tied the pur-
chaser required some further evidence of birth than the
entry in the register of baptism. Lady Vane then gave
the requisite evidence on oath. On the eve of her son's
forty-third birthday she confirmed that testimony in a
letter to himself. At the death of his father, in 1832,
he succeeded to the title and the property without
having to encounter a single challenge. In 1842 he
himself died, and he was peacefully succeeded by his
son, Sir Henry Ralph Vane, the present owner. As
tbe Statute of Limitations makes twenty years of
possession a sufficient title to ownership, unless rival
claimants have been minors or married women, or the
tenure has been vitiated by fraud, the family might
seem to have long outlived any of the fears which lie in
a writ of ejectment.,
But a wonderful charge of fraud was brought by Mr.
Frederick Vane, the younger brother of the late Sir
Francis, and therefore the uncle of the present baronet.
The Dowager Lady Vane, who long survived her hus-
band, and who died at the age of nieety-three, had said
to several persons that her son iteancis was born before
the marriage, She had said so years after he had succeeded
to the estate. Iu 1866 the same admission waa eup-
posed to have been made by Diana Lady Vane, the
widow of Sir Francis, in a conversation with the plain-
tiffs wife, who had asked her what she knew about the
date of her deceased husband's birth. Showing signs
of alarm, she admitted that there had been family
irregularities; hut, she added, "My husband was all
right." However, she also, it was said, acknowledged,
not only that he was illegitimate, hut thatehe and her
father knew of the fact at the time of her marriage.
Armed with these reports' Mr. Frederick Vane searched
for further evidence, and he gathered a good deal of the
scandalous goiniip which always floats about those
couatry houses that are supposed to have skeletons in
the closet. He then made a claim for the reeonery of
the estates; and, as his nephew declined to give them
up, the case came before the Court of Chancery in 1872.
It either the plaintiff or the defendant had then.agreed
to open the "sealed packet" cotaining the evidence
taken in 1802, it is possible there might at once have
been an end of the suit; but, unfortunately, first one
of the parties and then the other objected, and hence a
rich array of family scandals has been the theme of .
vulgar curiosity. Fortified by the researches of several_
years, the plaintiff came before the Court with an
elaborate theory. His brother, he contended, was
illeeitimate, and he strove to prove that assumption not
only by the admissions of his mother and his sister in-
law,- but, by an incident which occurred on his
brother's 'twenty-first birthday. ihe plaint;ff, who
was then eleven years of age, saw him coming out
of his father's study in
_a violent fit of grief. He
bad no suspicion of the cause at the time, but, by
the light of later revelations, be infers that his father
had made known to him the flaw in the succession,
The gravity of the plaintiff's counsel, Mr. Glasse and
Serjeant Ballantine, must have been severely tried by
the necessity of deducing such a conclueion from such
promisees. Sir Frederick Vane, we are also told, strongly
objected to the marriage of his son Francis, and on two
occasions prevented him from uniting himself to ladies
of whom he had gained the affections. We are invited
to infer that Sir Frederick, although determined to per-
petrate an injustice by making an il'egitimate son hi
bait% also wished to lessen the wrong by keeping Francis
unmarried, and thus leaving the reversion of the estate;
to Frederick, Unfortunately for that theory, Francis
did marry, with his father's consent, at the not exces-
sively late age of twenty-six years. Even .had e 1
these theories been accompanied by inconteatabi
proofs, the plaintiff would still Lave been put
out of court by the legal fact that the de-
fendant and his father had poseessed the estate
unchallenged for more than twenty years. But an
,attempt was made to overleap that difficulty by one of
'the most-complicated charges of fraud ever set before a
Conrt of Justice. That Sir Frederick and Lady Vane
had been guilty of fraud, not once, but many titres,
was assumed, of course, in the mere charge of illegiti-
macy. It was equally evident that the grossest fraud
must have been committed by the doctor, the nurse,:
the solicitor, and the other persons whose evidence
was laid before the Court of Chancery in 1802. As
the Attorney-General said, they must all hai'e borne
false witness with the rope round their necks. The
same guilt must have been incurred in every suc-
eessive resettlement of the family estate. The
plaintiff's brother, Francis, was accused of fraud
on the supposition that he knew himself to be illegiti-
mate when he agreed to the resettlement of the estates,' '
Mr. Beauclerk and Mies Beauclerk were likewise,
charged with fraud; on the presumption that they.
were made acquainted with the date of Francis Vane's
birth before the marriage. Mr. Beauclerk, a man of
high character, had, it was argued,' sanctiL,_
the marriage of his daughter with a gentleman whok
he knew to be illegitimate and who might he turned
out of the estate by a youneer brother. He had, it
was assumed, looked carefully after marriage settle-
ments which a word from Sir Frederick Vane, or Lady
Vedpianonkgee,nofin angerl or any other of several witnessee—a word
l aobr l
e remorseimpulses—would
make t h
at theeidbieldst-
of formalities.

dq41.011
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toned
rhOni

That was the plaintiff's case. The Vice• Chancellor
said that it was one of the most hopeless ever laid
Wore his Curt, ad that he wouti have decided
against the plaintiff immediately after hearing his
argument if he had not been anxious to stop the posA-
bility of further dispute. The plaintiff had to prove,
in the first place, that his brother was born out of wed-
lock. He could not offer one tittle of evidence for that
cardinal assumption except the loose words spoken by
his mother in her dotage. But it was shown that
when she denied the legitimacy of her son Francis in
a gossipping way, she had partly lost her memory,
and that she believed herself to have been
unjustly dealt with in the settlements of the
estate. She seems to have borne some grudge against
her son Francis. The loose evidence of her old age
was also contradicted by the testimony which she gave
on oath in 1833, and by her own letter to her son..
The attempt to use the evidence of Diana Lady Vane
against her own husband must be set aside both
because it is ambiguous even as cited by the plain-
tiff and because her own direct testimony is a
clear denial that the knew him to be illegitimate,
tvi,iet,ce remains? A little loose countrl
slip. An e,tate worth 1:8,0O0 a year And carrying a
Lula is, we admit, a kinptiug toaae-esien, The sen4a-
of persona l wrorg is also difficult .to en.dure. If the.
Plaintiff had possessed absolute proof that be wasAie
legitimate heir, he would doubtless have been strongly
induced to urge his claims. Yet even in such a CfPti he
might also have been held back by the fact that, as his
nephew had no children, he himself was the presump-
tive heir; that his nephew at least VIM guiltless of any
fraud; and that the title could be made good only at
the expense of branding his own father and mother
with fraud. Few men, we trust, would colae.nt to
pay such a price even for a baronetcy and £B,OOO a
year.