page_title: Arthur Orton
section_title: Recognition, doubt and legal process
hierarchical_section_title: Arthur Orton / Recognition, doubt and legal process
caption_attribution_description: English: Caricature of 'The Tichborne Claimant' (Arthur Orton). Caption read "Baronet or butcher".
context_page_description: Arthur Orton was a man that has generally been identified by legal historians and commentators as the "Tichborne Claimant", who in two celebrated court cases both fascinated and shocked Victorian society in the 1860s and 1870s.
  The son of a London butcher, Orton went to sea as a boy, spent a year in Chile, and worked as a butcher and stockman for squatters in Australia in the middle-to-late 1850s. In 1866 Thomas Castro, a butcher from Wagga Wagga in Australia, claimed to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to the Tichborne estates and baronetcy who had been declared lost at sea in 1854. During the protracted court proceedings that followed Castro's claim, evidence was produced that Castro might in fact be Arthur Orton, attempting to secure the Tichborne fortunes by imposture. The verdict of the jury in Regina versus Castro was that Castro was not Roger Tichborne, and that he was Arthur Orton. He was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment for perjury. After his release he lived in great poverty, still insisting that he was Tichborne. In 1895 he confessed to being Orton, but retracted almost immediately.
context_section_description: The Scotland Yard detective Jack Whicher discovered that immediately  on his arrival in England in December 1866  the Claimant visited Wapping and made enquiries about the Orton family. When this visit was made public during the legal processes, it was presented as strong evidence that the Claimant was indeed Arthur Orton.  However, Lady Tichborne recognised him as her son with complete certainty; he was likewise accepted as Roger by numerous family servants and professional advisers. In his analysis of the affair, Rohan McWilliam considers the extent of recognition remarkable, given the physical bulk and unrefined manners of the Claimant, as compared with the Roger Tichborne of 1854. Almost all the rest of the Tichborne family considered the Claimant an imposter. Nevertheless, he obtained much financial support for the prosecution of his claim, which went ahead despite the death of Lady Tichborne in 1868. After a lengthy civil hearing the jury dismissed the Claimant's case to be Sir Roger; he was then arrested and tried for perjury under the name of Thomas Castro. In the trial that followed the jury declared that he was not Roger Tichborne and identified him on the evidence as Arthur Orton. He was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment, of which he served 10 before his release on licence in 1884.
caption: Orton as portrayed in Vanity Fair  by ''Ape' June 1871
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