Wills and Will Making/6

by Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald

MORE OF WILLS AND WILL MAKING.

THE PANTON CASE.

The will, true to its character, seems to beget strange and exceptional spasms of inconsistency; in its mysterious presence men will delight to belie their own whole life, or steady course of love and affections. The annals of wills show that there is no security in a long course of love on one side, or of devotion on the other, between parent and child, husband or wife. The word "will" is suggestive; and, with a sort of devilish freak, all is reversed of a sudden, and at the moment of discovery the faithful and loving child finds herself defrauded and cast out.

In the year 1838, a most respectable Welsh gentleman, "Thomas Williams, Esq., of Bryncross Castle, near Carnarvon," was placed in the dock at the Central Criminal Court, charged with forging the will of his father-in-law, Mr. Panton, a wealthy Welsh proprietor. It was a most suspicious transaction, and when the case against the prisoner closed, no one in court could have a doubt of his guilt, as, indeed, no one could who reads through the next few paragraphs.

At a castle in Wales, near Carnarvon, there was living, in the year 1837, a wealthy old gentleman named Mr. Jones Panton. He was possessed of large estates, and many shares and stocks, and his son, Mr. Barton Panton, was high sheriff of the county. Knowing as we do the monotonous nomenclature of Wales, it is scarcely a surprise to learn that the son was married to the daughter of a Williams, or that another Williams had married a sister of the high sheriff. Both the gentlemen bearing that name were local solicitors, and some awkward circumstances made the marriage of Miss Lauretta Panton singularly unfortunate. When the wealthy owner of the castle found himself obliged to bring some charge concerning a diamond ring against his own son-in-law, no one could have been surprised to learn that a complete alienation had taken place between those branches of the family. But it naturally turned to the profit of the son, who had behaved as became him, and it was accepted that the unlucky business of the diamond ring had entirely cut off Lauretta and her solicitor husband from all chances of inheritance. And this seemed reasonable, for the theory that those need pardon who have done the wrong would, of course, be fortified in the case of one armed with the powers of a testator.

The position of the son was, besides, a strong one. From the day he left his cradle, to use his own words, to the death of his father, there was the most unbounded affection between them. When the son married, the father stipulated that both wife and son should come and live with him. He talked to other people of this attachment, and was known to dote upon his little grandchild. In due course of time he had prepared wills. In an early one, he had divided his property between his son and daughter; but after the diamond ring affair he had cut the latter off with a miserable two hundred pounds. In May, 1837, he pointed his wishes still more emphatically, and on one occasion, when his last sickness was on him, and in presence of an intimate friend, he handed over to his son, with great solemnity, a bundle which he said was his will, adding a sort of proclamation: "I give you all the money I have got in the house, with the arrears of rent now due, my canal shares, stocks, plate, books, pictures, wines, and farming stock." During the fortnight's illness that followed, the old gentleman received his medicines only from the hands of his son and daughter-in-law; and on the 24th of May he died. At the funeral it was noticed that the disinherited solicitor arrived very late; and, indeed, bearing in mind his old disagreeable associations with the deceased, any alacrity of attendance at the obsequies was scarcely to be expected. All the relatives and friends then assembled at the castle to hear the document read, which was to make Mr. Barton Panton the heir. This was a sort of local custom, but here, again, it was remarked that the solicitor of "diamond ring" notoriety, just as the recital was about to commence, left the room abruptly. This embarrassed the new owner, who, with some courtesy, put off the reading to another occasion. The behaviour of the solicitor grew more and more mysterious. He drove up one morning in his carriage, and asked his brother-in-law if he had any communication to make to him. It must have been a disagreeable surprise for the latter, though a solution of this doubtful conduct, when, having duly proved his will in all form, the solicitor came hesitatingly to the front, and, announcing that he was in possession of a later will, proceeded to enter a caveat. This faltering was suspicious in the extreme, but when the document itself was produced, these suspicions became very grave indeed. By this document the solicitor was named executor, the disinherited Lauretta residuary legatee. The body of the instrument was written in the solicitor's handwriting, and, though the signature was admittedly genuine, a close examination with strong glasses discovered some highly suspicious matters. Underneath the writing were pencil-marks, imperfectly rubbed out, of plans and names of streets, and the name "Hurlock" was distinctly made out. It was then recollected that some one of that name had been co-tenant with the deceased of some property in London, and that the solicitor had negotiated the matter; further, the witnesses were his own man, since dead, and his two maid-servants. Taking the whole circumstances together, no reasonable man could doubt but that this had very much the air of a clumsy forgery and a more clumsy plot.

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.

 

THE BRIDGEWATER CASE.

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 certainly since the beginning of the Avorld no one ever paid so dearly for a simple ejaculation of impatience. The baronet was coming home one night, attended by a groom of the duke's, and fell into one of the duke's dykes. As he was helped out, after a thorough ducking, he said impatiently "D—n these canals," or, as solicitors write, words to that effect. The groom reported the incautious burst, and the duke, resenting an insult to what was the hobby of his life, struck the utterer out of his will.

The dukedom, however, disappeared, and a lesser Marquis of Bridgewater inherited, but to the Marquis there was no one of the name to succeed, and this fine and honourably-won estate, whose value was estimated at nearly two millions, seemed likely to ramble in the loose lineage of distant collaterals, chosen perhaps arbitrarily, rather than enjoy the steady and more magnificent descent of hereditary succession.

In this extremity the owner resolved to make an effort to create, if he could not find. He accordingly made an arrangement by which all this vast property was to pass to the Lord Alford of the time, then a mere child; but on this strict condition, that if within five years after his becoming Earl of Brownlow, he did not succeed in obtaining the rank of Marquis or Duke of Bridgewater, the estates were to pass from him to a younger brother. The latter, also, was allowed the same mystic time, to make the same attempt, and in case of failure incurred the same forfeiture. In 1849, Lord Alford succeeded to the estates, and in about two years later died without having become Lord Brownlow, and, of course, without having entered on the term of probation. Then arose some very nice law points. To whom were the estates to pass? To Lord Alford's infant son? No, it was urged this would utterly deprive the brother of his chance of the reversion. To the brother? No. For the deceased had not entered on his term of probation, and had therefore not forfeited it. This part of the case turned on the point, whether there was a condition precedent, as it is called, and is purely technical. So it may be laid aside here; but a greater question loomed behind, and about it the real battle was fought. A great nightmare for courts and ancient judges, is any act or theory bearing "against public policy," which is certain to invest the question with an awful and preternatural horror. Thus any well-meant check by a parent upon his children's marriage, though otherwise harmless enough, is at once blighted by the anathema "against public policy."

The great cause—for it became a great one—lumbered upwards, in the usual way, through the various courts, halting before the vice-chancellor. The arguments on this point are excessively ingenious, and quite intelligible to the unprofessional hearer. It was urged that as an impossibilty is always void, it was here impossible that any man should by his own act become a marquis or a duke. But it was replied that this would be true if the party were called upon to create any one earl or marquis, which would be an impossibility. It was then objected that there was here a hint of corruption, and that it was extremely improbable that within a limited term of five years a man should have done public services, or found opportunity for them exactly proportioned to such a splendid reward. But then there was quoted, in reply, the well-known family arrangement of bequeathing a living to a son if he should enter holy orders. The vice-chancellor, on the whole, took the public policy side, and pronounced the arrangement void. The cause, of course, drifted past him contemptuously, and was drawn by legal tugs into the House of Lords. It was precisely a question to bring out most dramatically the tone and temper of those remarkable men, Lyndhurst, Brougham, St. Leonard's, Truro. All spoke with warmth, as on a great constitutional question. Lord Brougham put it very happily. He gave the testator credit, no doubt, for meaning that this title was to be won by honourable means; but, supposing he had been asked whether he imagined that a dukedom was to be obtained merely by an exemplary life, he would naturally think he was being turned into ridicule. The real danger, he said, would be the temptation to try and influence those who acted for the crown, not in the shape of coarse, naked bribery; but there were many ways of reaching the same end. Lord Truro took the same line, and Lord St. Leonard's, with very great heat, denounced it as an insult and indignity to the crown, for, he acutely added, the subject pointed out a particular title and rank which he required to be obtained. In a sort of constitutional tremor, which recals the old disrespectful speaking of the Equator, he said it was a fearful issue, and one from which he recoiled.

All these strong and influential opinions being against this arrangement, the careless outsider would naturally suppose they were equally against the interest of the person they most nearly affected. If the conditions were void by which Lord Alford was to benefit, his prospects were also void. But not so. There is a wonderful and erratic uncertainty in the ways of the law. These adverse opinions operated against the testator merely. The Lords, as it were, took up the will, and drew their pen across the obnoxious clause, and then returned it to the young lord. He, therefore, possibly to his own surprise, received his vast estates, discharged from this inconvenient condition, and without having his conscience burdened with any sins against public policy or the sovereign's prerogative.