Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/585

 Mr. Williams, the well-known solicitor, was placed in the dock with his two maid-servants to stand their trial. It lasted live days, and threw the whole neighbourhood into a fever of excitement. The prosecution seemed to make the cause yet more conclusive. A respectable gentleman, collector of the district, proved emphatically that on the 7th of May—the date of the forged will, he had scarcely quitted the side of the testator a moment. Various servants of the household swore that the solicitor had not been near the house on that day. Indeed, taking the whole case for the prosecution together, and recalling the awkward diamond ring incident, the reasonable dislike of the deceased, the affection for the son, and the strange behaviour of the accused, the Welsh jury could hardly have hesitated, and the present jury of readers must heartily endorse such a view. Yet the prisoner seems to have been innocent, and was triumphantly acquitted!

Even during the course, of the prosecution, a fact or two had dropped out that seemed to point in the same direction. The old testator had been heard to speak affectionately of his absent daughter Lauretta, uttering a wish that he could bare her two thousand pounds instead of two hundred; but when the defence was opened, the obscurities began to clear away. Nothing could be more convincing. A brother clergyman stated solemnly that the old man had expressed a wish to him to make the solicitor his executor, because he was sure he would take care of his poor daughter. He had repeated this remark to the prisoner, on whom it seemed to come as no surprise; it was by his advice, he explained, that the prisoner had studiously kept back the will; through fear, it would seem, that the scandal and awkwardness that would follow from two being produced together. Then appeared a coachman, who, in the most explicit terms, swore not only to the driving of his master to the castle on the day when the last will was executed, but that they had met the prosecutor and a friend coming away from the castle. Finally, the two attesting witnesses, the maid-servants, were brought up, and in that satisfactory way which is so hard to describe, but which carries conviction to the minds of judge, jury, lawyers, and perhaps a crowd, detailed the whole circumstance of the execution of the will, and the result was the breaking-down of the charge, and acquittal of the prisoner. A curious feature in this ease is the perfect surprise; for, as was before noticed, when the prosecution had closed, the conviction seemed a certain and foregone conclusion; and the jury might have turned round, as the phrase runs, in their box. though equity would of course have coerced them barely to tolerate a hopeless defence. The outraged solicitor, who, indeed, could not have had solicitor's flesh and blood had he acted otherwise, at once brought his action for a malicious prosecution, and the judge tried, by anticipation, to check any eagerness of the jury in his favour, by warning them that they must consider whether the prosecutor had not most reasonable inducement to act as he did. They found a verdict for three hundred pounds damages.

Sir Bernard Burke, in the latest edition of his agreeable Vicissitudes, has touched on some of those oddities of the more remarkable will-makers. One instance given by him shows in what a freak, and at the same time what a vicious freak, the will-maker can indulge himself, solely to convey the idea of his power. He thinks if he should allow his property to go in the regular course that he makes no figure; but, with a stroke of his pen to give away an estate, that is a sort of omnipotence. Thus the last Earl of Harcourt, when settling his affairs, did not think of charity or hospital, but turned to some old chronicle, where he found that his ancestors had broken away from the old French tree of Harcourt, about seven hundred years before. The English sapling would grow no more; and he deliberately sought out the influential Marquis D'Harcourt, in France, seeking a most substantial bond to reunite the two houses, separated since the twelfth century. The French nobleman must have been amazed to hear that he had been selected as heir to a noble estate at Windsor, with a bonus of some eighty thousand pounds to buy an addition.

Will making furnishes us with yet another reflection, namely, that gigantic disposers of property, with the best professional aid that money can procure, miscarry in their intentions much more frequently than less ambitious distributors. It may be that the great booty to be disposed of causes an excess of care and precaution, or that its very size invites a contest. It is to be considered also that the man who has "made his money," the millionnaire, is inclined to become lofty, and arrogant almost, in forecasting the future. As he has done so much alive, he wishes to project his behests into the future, and after his death, direct very despotically what he has earned so hardly. Hence he is betrayed into mistakes, and the courts seem to take pleasure in passing a slight on the impotent efforts of one who, they think, ought to have now done with the world. The Thellusson case was a good instance of this checkmating; and the Bridgewater arrangement, after drifting about among the boulders and rocks of law, had very nearly been broken up.

The well-known Duke of Bridgewater, who, with such noble perseverance and energy. assisted also by the genius of Brindley, made his canal, lived to reap his reward in a splendid income. This was supposed to amount to nearly one hundred thousand a year, and at the least, to seventy or eighty thousand. As the duke grew old there were many speculations as to who was chosen as the fortunate heir, and it was believed that one had recommended himself to the duke, and been selected for the happy distinction. This was Sir Tatton Sykes. Sir B. Burke mentions how this gentleman lost the prospect of such good fortune; and