In the 1860s, a heavyset butcher from the Australian outback announced that he was a slim, French speaking English aristocrat who had drowned at sea years before. His own grieving mother agreed.

The aristocrat was Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to one of the oldest Catholic fortunes in England. He was raised in Paris, spoke French as his first language, and was by every account slender and delicate. In 1854 his ship went down off the coast of Brazil, and Roger was presumed dead. Everyone accepted it. Everyone except his mother. The dowager Lady Tichborne could not let her boy go. For years she placed advertisements in newspapers around the world, offering a reward for any word of him. And in 1865, in a town called Wagga Wagga, in Australia, a reply came.

The man who answered was a butcher who went by the name Tom Castro. He could not speak a word of French. He knew almost nothing about Roger's school, his family, or his life. He had none of Roger's tattoos. And where Roger had been slim, this man weighed over twenty stone and was still growing, on his way to more than twice the dead heir's size. None of it mattered. In January 1867, in a dim hotel room in Paris, the grieving Lady Tichborne looked at his face and declared him her son. She gave him a thousand pounds a year. And much of England believed her. The working classes took up his cause as a poor man wronged by the rich, and tens of thousands rallied behind him.

It went to court, twice. The first trial, to claim the estate, he lost. The second, for lying under oath, ran a hundred and eighty eight days, the longest trial in English history at the time. It revealed the truth. The claimant was Arthur Orton, a butcher's son from Wapping. He got fourteen years. And yet, when he died, penniless, in 1898, five thousand people came to his funeral, and the real family let his coffin be marked with the name Sir Roger Tichborne. Some of them never stopped believing.

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