In my researches on another book I have strayed onto the wonderful and bizarre world of the Tirchborne Trial, the scandal of the Victorian age. But while looking into this case in other books, I found a wonderful account of other imposters over time, the list is so endless I thought it would make a wonderful (if short and off topic) blog.
And without referring to the very recent Tichborne trial, in which no less than eighty-five witnesses under the most rigorous and vigorous cross-examination that possibly the world has ever seen-maintained positively that a certain Englishman was Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, a baronet, while a corresponding number were equally unshaken in their conviction that he was Arthur Orton, a Wapping butcher.
The books are full of puzzles of this nature. Jack Cade, the pretended Mortimer; Lambert Simnel, the false Earl of Warwick; Perkin War-beck, the sham Duke of York; the various personators of Don Sebastian, the lost King of Portu-gal; Jemeljan Pugatscheff, the sham Peter III; Padre Ottoman, the supposed heir of the Sultan Ibrahim; Mahommed Bey, the counterfeit Viscount de Cigala; the case in 1748, of the false Prince of Modena; the monk Otrefief, claiming to be Prince Dimitri; Joseph, the pretended Count Solar; John, claiming to be the Earl of Crawford; John, claiming to be Sir William Courtenay; James Annesley, calling himself Earl of Anglesea; Hans, claiming to be Earl of Huntingdon; Rebok, the counterfeit Voldemar, Elector of Bradenburgh; Arnold Du Tihl (or Dutille) the pretended Martin Guerre, who successfully deceived the living wife so far as to live with her three years, surrounded by four sisters and two brothers-in-law, and beget two children before his discovery, and whose case came before the Parliament of Toulouse in 1560, wherein forty witnesses on each side swore to his personality; Pierre Mege, the fictitious DeCaille; Michael Feydy, the sham Claude de Verre; the claimants to the Banbury and Douglass Peerages; James Percy, calling himself Earl of Northumberland; Alexander Humphreys, the pretended Earl of Stirling: William George Howard, the false Earl of Wicklow; the numerous so-called heirs of the Stuarts; John Hatfield, claiming to be the Hon. Alexander Hope; Thomas Provis, calling himself Sir Richard Smythe; Lavinia Jannetta Horton Byves, who is now, or was within a few months living in England, calling herself Princess of Cumberland; Amelia Radcliffe, pre-tending to be Countess of Derwentwater.”
A Treatise on the Law of Identification by George E. Harris