Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 11.pdf/484

 1eaves from an English Solicitor's Note-Book.

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LEAVES FROM AN ENGLISH SOLICITOR'S NOTE-BOOK. Br Baxter Borret. I. THE STORY OF A CLAIM TO A PEERAGE. ABOUT thirty years since, a retired cap tain in the English navy asked me if I would take up his claim to an extinct Irish peerage. Being young and not overbur dened with work at the time, and being greatly taken with the appearance and charming manners of my would-be client, I readily agreed to read up his case, and, if it seemed capable of proof, to carry it in to the House of Lords for him. The incidents attending my own investi gation of his claim were so extraordinary that I think they will form a story interest ing to the readers of

I shall call the old captain " the claim ant"; for obvious reasons I suppress the real title of the peerage, and substitute fic titious names for the various parties to the history. The claimant was no base-born impostor; at our first interview he proved to demon stration, with certificates of births, mar riages, and deaths, that he was the eldest lineal grandson of an old man who died in the Fleet prison, London, in the year 1820, at the age of eighty. The sole question was, who was the old Fleet prisoner? The claimant told me that he had spent many happy hours with the old man in his room in the Fleet; who had, time after time, told him he was entitled to be called Lord X, but that, for reasons connected with his former life, he was precluded from doing so; but whenever he should die, the claimant, as his grandson,' ought to make good his claim; he would find all the neces sary proofs in a pocket-book which the old man carried in his breast by day, and put under his pillow at night. The old man

also told the claimant that he had been committed to prison for contempt of court, Lord Eldon having once ordered him to pay over some money to some person who, he thought, was not entitled to it; and he had snapped his fingers in the face of the learned Lord Chancellor, and told his lord ship he would see him d d first, where upon he had been ordered into custody, and had remained in the prison ever since. He was visited in the prison by members of the aristocracy, and had every comfort supplied to him, and seemed always to have plenty of money. As to his early life, the old Fleet prisoner told his grandson, the claimant, that he had no recollection whatever of his mother, and only a very faint memory of his father, who had married a second wife; and he, the claimant, never could get on with his stepmother, who was not a lady by birth; when he was a young lad his father had got him into the Royal Navy as a midshipman, he had been guilty of some serious offense on board ship, for which he had been sentenced to be shot, but the admiral of the fleet, to save his life, contrived that he should be secretly landed at some foreign port, and had sup plied him with money to take him back to England; from that time he had led a life of adventure, and had not returned to England till long after his father's death, and it was only quite late in life he had learned he was the real heir to the peerage. This was the history of the old Fleet pris oner as told by him to his grandson the claimant, and told by the claimant to myself. The old Fleet prisoner, his son (the claim ant's father) and the claimant himself bore