Imprisoned for debt

A seemingly trivial news item in the Kentish and Surrey Mercury for Tuesday January 5, 1847, attracted my attention because it was firstly about the recently demolished Red Lion Inn at Smitham Bottom, now called Coulsdon, and secondly about William Cobbett. He was, however, not the famous author of Rural Rides but his eldest son.

Here is the news item:

Smitham Bottom
Mrs Blaney Cobbett, the wife of Mr William Cobbett, the eldest son of the late Mr Cobbett, was brought before the magistrates, together with a boy called Sims on a charge of stealing an iron shutter bar, the property of Mr Jesse Oldfield, the landlord of the Red Lion Inn, Smitham Bottom. It may be necessary to state that Mr Oldfield was one of the executors of the late Mr Cobbett, and, in consequence of certain proceedings in the Court of Chancery, a great deal of ill-feeling has existed between the parties. According to the statement of Mr Oldfield it appeared that the boy entered his house and enquired for him, and Mr Oldfield, imagining that his object was to serve a process, left the room and entered the parlour. Presently he heard Mrs Cobbett say 'she would not be done' and an attempt was made to break open the door, which he resisted, and then he heard a cry of murder and police, and on making his appearance, Mrs Cobbett and the lad had vanished. Mrs Cobbett told a different story. She said the boy was engaged to serve a writ, when Mr Oldfield entered the room in a towering passion, armed with the shutter bar, with which he made a rush at her, and in the confusion the bar fell, and she was struck on the heel. She directed the boy, whom she accompanied, to point out Mr Oldfield to take up the bar in order that it might be produced in evidence against the complainant, and not with any view of stealing it. The magistrates, having listened attentively to the case, dismissed it, and the parties retired.

It may be worth mentioning that the better known father, William Cobbett, makes no mention of Smitham Bottom in Rural Rides but he often stayed or passed through Reigate on his way to and from his home in Kensington. He travelled more often via Sutton than via Croydon, and he mentions Colonel Jolliffe's land at Merstham. He also mentions Godstone and Bletchingly. These journeys took place in the 1820s and 1830s.

Famous though he was, Cobbett went bankrupt and kept borrowing money. As his debts grew, the more he relied on Jesse Oldfield, his agent and intermediary, to sort out his affairs, but his involvement with Cobbett went further: he printed and published Cobbett's books, some rather than all, and Cobbett in his will assigned him the copyright of most of his books, possession of the remaining stock and also his seed business at Barnes.

By the time of Cobbett's death in 1835, at his farm at Ash in Surrey, he had fallen out with his wife and children, though William alone was allowed to visit him shortly before his death, especially, no doubt, because he was the other executor. Immediately after his father's death he disputed the will by bringing a suit against Oldfield until the courts forbade him from meddling with his father's assets. All to no avail as fresh suits followed, concerning the disputed copyright, the sums of money involved and debts not being paid. He was then imprisoned in a lock-up house in Cursitor Street off Chancery Lane apparently for contempt of court.

The matter might have rested there but it didn't. The governor of the lock-up house had William transferred to the debtors' prison in Whitecross Street, where the Barbican now stands. William claimed that the law on habeas corpus had been broken as he had been removed by force without any writ of habeas corpus being issued. A writ of habeas corpus, and I quote from Halsbury's Laws of England, 'consists of a mandatory order by the court or judge to any person who is alleged to have another person unlawfully in his custody, requiring him to have the body of such a person before the court or judge.' It is designed to secure immediate release so that the judge can ascertain whether or not the prisoner has been wrongfully imprisoned.

The Times Index refers to the case of Oldfield v. Cobbett dozens of times over the ensuing years, principally between 1840 and 1849, during which time William was still in debtors' prisons. His imprisonment explains why it was his wife who secured a writ against Oldfield in 1847, twelve years after he had contested his father's will. Cobbett was not content to pursue Oldfield alone. As a dispute about habeas corpus, it became, in 1849 and 1850, Cobbett v. Grey, and this Grey was none other than the Home Secretary. Eventually it was the Lord Chancellor, Lord Truro, who finally passed judgement against Cobbett in 1852, deciding that there were insufficient grounds to suggest a miscarriage of justice. In Cobbett v. Hudson in 1850 the right of the wife to plead for her husband was established but only in exceptional circumstances, where great inconvenience would be caused.

Oldfield himself having died in 1853, William issued a writ against his widow as Oldfield's representative. William himself was still in prison, the debts still unpaid, and it was his wife who appeared again on his behalf in 1858 to plead that the writ of habeas corpus be allowed so that her husband could defend himself in person, but this was not allowed.

When William secured his release I do not know, but he was far from being finished with the law about habeas corpus. His interest in the law was necessarily personal but it was also, in part at least, professional. It is claimed that, like his brothers, he was a barrister, but, though he entered Lincoln's Inn to qualify as a barrister, he either did not stay the course, or he was later disqualified because of his imprisonment. Here, however, we must jump ahead a decade to 1867, by which time he was a free man, his debts, we must assume, having been settled, possibly by his more successful brothers.

This was the time of the Tichborne Claimant. The name refers to Sir Roger Tichborne, a member of the Hampshire gentry, who stood to inherit a fortune, but who appeared to have died at sea, in 1854, in a shipwreck off the coast of South America where he had gone to seek adventure and solace. His French mother, devoutly Catholic and highly strung, clung to the hope that he had been saved. Eventually she had an advert placed in newspapers, including one in Australia, offering a substantial reward, and indeed someone came forward in 1865 claiming to be Sir Roger. That someone was the Tichborne Claimant and he came to Europe, first to Paris to meet the mother, then to England. Despite not being the lean and well educated bi-lingual Sir Roger, the Claimant, sixteen stone and soon to nearly double in weight, was accepted as Sir Roger by his mother and by some of Sir Roger's neighbouring gentry and former servants. The rest of the family denied the Claimant's identity. A civil and then a criminal trial ensued, their progress followed by an enthralled press and public, his identity finally being unmasked as Thomas Castro otherwise known as Arthur Orton, a former butcher.

The Tichborne Claimant concerns us now just for two reasons. The first, curiously enough and the less significant, is that he lived in Croydon for some months in 1867, soon after coming to England, as his first solicitor was a John Holmes who, living in Croydon himself in Sydenham road, found accommodation for the Claimant, first at Essex Lodge in London Road and then at 2 Wellesley Villas in Wellesley Road. He then moved to a village in Hampshire which he found cheaper than Croydon where he had been pursued by his creditors and from where he had written regularly to Lady Tichborne in Paris asking for more money to pay bills.

More significant is that the Tichborne Claimant engaged William's attention. Not so much because of the celebrity status the Claimant enjoyed but because of the criminal trial, Regina v. Castro, brought against him by the Crown which engaged six prominent defence lawyers. Since the Claimant had to pay for his own defence, he only had the less prominent Dr Edward Vaughan Kenealy, as his senior counsel and a junior. The criminal trial began in April 1873 and concluded the following February. He was sentence on two charges of perjury for a total of fourteen years and was released in 1884. Kenealy himself was debarred from the legal profession. Many, very many, including William, believed the trial was unfair because Castro could not afford a proper defence and because the prosecution was unduly biased against Castro on account of his class and origins. Kenealy organised a popular movement that held meetings throughout the county, including one to be held in Croydon but which was, apparently indefinitely, postponed. It was a mass movement which had its own local associations, newspapers, petitions and ideology. Kenealy edited one newspaper called the Englishman and was even elected as an M.P. for Stoke-upon-Trent in 1875. The movement maintained that Castro was Sir Roger and the Claimant himself continued to maintain that identity after he was released and until he died in 1898.

William's interest was primarily legal as he sought a writ of habeas corpus on the Claimant's behalf and brought an action against the governor of Millbank prison where the Claimant was serving his sentence. William followed this up with another action against the government for alleged conspiracy against the Claimant. William was still seeking redress for the Claimant in 1878 when he collapsed and died in the entrance hall of the House of Commons in January.

The Illustrated London News briefly reported his death, mentioning the 'fanciful grievances' he pursued, and indeed there were some. Unlike some of the followers of Kenealy, William was not a republican or a revolutionary; on the contrary he seems to have believed that the Crown should be free of all restraints on its power. He is not wholly forgotten as the cases he brought figure in Halsbury's Laws of England as examples by which case law has modified the application of habeas corpus.

Brian Lancaster

[This article owes much to George Slater's standard biography of William Cobbett (1972), Douglas Woodruff's The Tichborne Claimant (1957) and to Michael Roe's Kenealy and the Tichborne Claimant (1974).]

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