The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-31 00:00:00

THERMOMETER.

This morning
This day at Two o'clock 6B
Barometer-29.80.
Wind—S. W. ; fresh, and showery.

tijit 04,0)*--*N utt,

LONDON, MONDAY, AUGUST 31, 1863,

The extraordinary trial which during this last
week so engaged public attention, came on Saturday
to an abrupt close, immediately after the comple-
tion of the summing up, upon the whole case, by
the learned judge before whom it was conducted,
The decision of the jury was instant and unhEsitat-
ing. They took no time whatever for deliberation.
And this, for the one sufficient reason—that, by the
time the evidence for the defence had been given
in, in its entirety, it had became perfectly obvious
to everybody in court that the cause ought never
to have come on for trial at all. Anything like a
detailed recapitulation of the case bele, and at this
moment, would be worse than superfluous, would be
nothing less than tedious under the circumstances.
The particulars have from first to last been
so carefully and accurately reported that
a recapitulation of them has been rendered
altogether unnecessary. Nor is the case, whatever
may be thought upon the matter by others, in any
way so complicated as to render this recapitulation
of it, in detail, requisite, in order to make it compre-
hensible. Our principal contemporary, it is true,
has apparently thought quite otherwise. For, not
content with giving the most admirably exact report
of the whole five days' proceedirgs, it has prefaced
each day's record with a more and mere carefully
elaborated summary of the whole matter in dis-
pute—a summary that this morning surpasses in
lucidity of argument, and in general completeness,
the rival speeches of Mr. BovILL and Mr.Lusn, to-
gether with the summing up of the learned Judge,
Baron BRAMWELL.

Stripped of all unnecessary detail, the case re-
cently under discussion stands thus. The house-
holder of that beautiful old Elizabethan mansion,
known out at the old court suburb of Kensington
during the last two hundred and fifty years as
Campden House—once the house of the First Vis-
count CAMPDEN, for a while the residence of Queen
ANNE when Princess—the householder, and as
such, of course, the virtual owner of Campden
House, having been burnt out of that dwelling of
his, in the spring of 1862, in the autumn of 1863
brings an action against an insurance office for the
recovery of one out of several sums of money in
which he stood insured up to the time of the fire,
for house, furniture, fittings, pictures, &c., &c,, in
that and in two other insurance offices—sums
amounting in the aggregate to noless than close upon
£30,000 sterling. The principle insurance actually
in dispute was to no •greater extent, it is true,
than the sum of £4,000. The cause as it has stood
during these five days of last week was between
Mr. W. F. WOOLLEY as the plaintiff and the
officials of the Sun Fire Office as the defendants.
But the other two fire-offices implicated in this ex-
traordinary affair, the Argus and the Hand-in-
Hand, are hardly less seriously affected than the
Sun Fire Office by the decision of the jury down at
Croydon. The meaning of the defence was
avowedly that the plaintiff had set fire to
the building himself, assisted in so doing
by his valet, CROZIER. It constituted, therefore,
a distinct charge of fraud and arson, involving
not merely, if made good against the plaintiff, Et
refusal to hand over to him one of the various
sums in which he stood insured up to the night of
the conflagration, sums amounting, as we have said,
to an aggregate of very nearly £30,000 in all, but
subjecting him beyond that to the very imminent
risk of penal servitude for life as a felon convicted
of a crime that a few years back would have led to
his execution upon the scaffold. Instead of all
which calamities befalling him at the close
of this extraordinary trial, we find the
plaintiff receiving an instant, unconditional,
and unhesitating verdict in his favour from
the jury down at Croydon on Saturday after-
noon. This verdict being
one, moreover, that we
hesitate not to insert at once, will give universal
satisfaction wherever it is heard of. And, for the
simple reason that the defence set up on behalf of
the Sun Fire office was, from first to last, flagrantly
extravagance.
ivadmissable because of its very
For the defence there was really, and in truth,
no evidence whatever of any value or impor-
tance. There was a singular cruelty, moreover,
in the raking up of all the plaintiff's antecedents.
Painful though the eclaircissemen; very probably is,
however, to the plaintiff individually—it leaves him,
alter all has been raid and done, with
nothing whatever to blush for. Granted
that twenty years ago he was a clerk somewhere
in Regent-street, with a miserable stipend, that he
was a waiter, or something like a waiter, in a
London hotel; that be was a strolling player, or a
hanger-on of a company of actors down in Hamp-
shire ; that he was a literary hack, as a chance
translator ; that, in one word, he was an adven-
turer, living at the beginning of his career purely
by his Wits—so far as the evidence for
the defence has gone to prove anything
in relation to Mr. WoDurr, he was so living in
the literal meaning of the word, purely. What-
ever his antecedents may have been, they never
appear to have been in any way dishonourable.
His eventually marrying, several years back, a lady
bringing him a forme of 435,000, was a lucky