I’m knee-deep in newspapers again.
Only this time, it’s not Vicomtesse Mina who’s dancing in the spotlight, it’s Charles Ruinart de Brimont – brother of Vicomte Edgar, and the future father-inlaw of my 2x great-aunt Catherine.
And curiously, it seems Charles played a minor role in one of the most notorious causes célèbres of the 19th century…
Now, most family historians also tend to be mad about history in general, so you may well have heard of the Tichborne case. The story went right round the world and has been the subject of numerous books and films – Bram Stoker wrote about it, Anthony Trollope based a novel on it, and it’s the subject of Zadie Smith’s latest.
To cut a very, very long story short, in 1853, a slight, tattooed young man named Sir Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne,
