THE BAGOT WILL CASE.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1377, 15 July 1878, Page 3

THE BAGOT WILL CASE.

[“ Times,” May 22.] After a trial which has lasted for twentyI wo days (he Bagot case has ended in a verdict which sets aside a will and hands a great property to a disinherited child. It is a long time since so extraordinary a case Ims come before any court of law ; and novelists will do injustice to their craft if they should not go to it for the materials of an exciting tale. Much of the story is as boisterous as the wildest fictions of Lever, and far more incredible. The conflict of motives and the passion of the players on each side would have delighted the* genius of Balzac. And the contradictions of the witnesses were such as can bo explained only by a marvellous amount of hard swearing, or by some such theory of forgetfulness and misunderstanding as students of the human mind have still to invent. The object of the trial was to set aside the will of Christopher Neville Bagot, who died on the 23rd of May last year. The youngest son an Irish country gentleman who lived in Roscommon, he emigrated to Australia in 1844, and becoming a grazier, ho amassed a great fortune. Returning to his native country a few years ago, he bought a large estate for more than a hundred thousand pounds. His family connexions as well as his wealth brought him into good society. Ho was also a man of exceptionally vigorous intellect, and, in spite of his toilsome life in Australia, he retained the cultivated tastes of his youth. On the other hand, he had, it is said, met with some accidents during his work in the bush ; his personal habits were not favourable to health; he certainly drank very hard after he returned to this country, and, at all events, ho was crippled and paralytic. During a visit to London in July, 1873, he met at dinner Miss Alice Emily Yerner, the eldest daughter of the late Sir William Yerner, of Churchhill, in the county of Armagh. She was twenty-two years of ago when she met Mr Bagot, and he was fifty. He was so charmed with her that, we are told, he asked her to marry him a week after they had met. She did not give him a definite answer at the time, but she says that she was attached to him in spite of his enfeebled state. During the courtship he became intimate with her family. He went to the Continent with them. She drove about, with him, received presents from him, and, in company with her sister, attended supper parties which he gave at his hotel in London. That part of the story is somewhat boisterous. It throws a curious light on the social possibilities of the West-end. case for the defence cast darker insinuations and imputations on the life of the lady, but they were supported by no proof. Thus the friendship went on till the July of 1874, when Miss Yerner says that she agreed to marry Mr Neville Bagot. He wished however to be married privately, and she gives a strange account of the manner and the place in which the ceremony was conducted. Meeting him by appointment in the streets, she drove with him in a close carriage for half an hour to some part of the town which she cannot identify, and went to a kind of office on the first lloor of some house, whore she found two men, whe made her and her companion sign (heir names in a book. That was the “ preliminary” part of the ceremony. Making another appointment with those persons, Mr Neville Bagot brought her back again, and one of the men read a very small part of the marriage service out of the Prayer-book, asked some questions, and thus completed the marriage ceremony. Mrs Bagot believed the place to be a registrar’s offioe, but she cannot find it, and there is no record of such a marriage in any of the registrar’s books. Some time afterwards she was alarmed, she says, by hearing Mr Neville Bagot say, in a fit of drunken raving, that there had been no marriage at all; and, as she was soon to give birth to a child, she was anxious to put the legality of the union beyond a doubt. He agreed that they should he married by special licence ; he gave her £3O to pay for it, and, after she had attempted to carry her application direct to the Archbishop of Canterbury, tbe license was obtained on the Bth of August, 1875. She was married the same night, between nine and ten, at the house of her family, in Eaton square. The legality of that union is not disputed. On the 22nd of October, or little more than two months after the wedding, she gave birth, at Tunbridge Wells, to the son whose claims have been the subject of the litigation in Dublin, That child was afterwards virtually disinherited on the ground that Mr Neville Bagot was not his father, and, as the Bagot family had profited by his loss, it was all imnortant for them to make good that contention. One of them, Mr Bernard Bagot, declared that, his brother, the testator, had emphatically denied that there had been any private marriage—the inference being that the lady had been the mistress of Mr Neville Bagot, and that if she had been the mistress of one man she might have been the mistress of more. But it is very difficult to reconcile such a denial with a statement made by Mr Neville Bagot himself in more than one of the letters which he wrote immediately after the public ceremony. He said that the marriage had taken place some time before, and had for family reasons been concealed at the wish of Miss Yerner. The defendants tried to show, by means of some extraordinary conditions which she had signed on the eve of the public marriage, that Mr Neville Bagot had doubted her purity. She unquestionably did sign a written stipulation that she would lead a quiet life in the country and abroad, that she would always accompany her husband, that she would keep no secrets from him, that she would “ give up and cut” all her “ fast and tipsy acquaintances and lovers and admirers,” that she would cease to write to them and to receive letters or presents from them. Such a document docs show that her ways had not been altogether pleasant to her husband. But it is incredible, as the Judge said, that Mr Neville Bagot would have married a lady who was soon to become a mother if he had not believed himself to be the father of the child. Medical evidence respecting his state of health was adduced on both sides, but it was so contradictory that it may be safely disregarded. We need not, however, go to conjecture for proof that be believed the child to be Ids, since the evidence showed beyond a doubt that bo was overjoyed when it was born, th it he was proud of the likeness which observers traced between it and himself, and that he mate it the heir of his estates. On the 16f,h of August, 1875, two months before the child was born, he made a will, leaving to it his landed property. At this stage begins one of the darkest parts of the whole story, and sometimes we can do little else than grope for the truth amid a dense cloud of sworn contradictions. Down to the 13th of March, 1878, or for about five months after the birth of the child, Mr Neville Bagot believed it to bo Ins; but only four days later ho displavod a sudden change of conviction. In two wills, one elated the loth of April and the other the 7th of September, 1876, he expressed that change by bequeathing his estates to his brother, John Bagot, and by directing that no more than firs

£2OO a. year and then £450 should be allotted for the support of Mrs Bugot’s son till he should reach the age of thirty, when ho should receive £IO,OOO. Mrs Bagot herself was to have £IOOO a year. What was the cause of the sudden and extraordinary change of bdief which led him to set aside the old will ? Was it justified by any fact which had come to his own knowledge? No evidence of the slightest value was adduced to sho w that he had been deceived by Mrs Bagot, and the Judge rightly presumed that the paternity of the child was beyond reasonable doubt. Was Mr Neville Bagot, then, likely to be the victim of a delusion ? That ho was naturally a man of vigorous intellect is certain ; bn. Sir Richard Graves McDonnell testified that, although he had a clear head when dealing with public affairs, he was liable to extravagant personal antipathies. He was apt to lose self-control when talking about parsons. His habits were also such ns would weaken the strongest intellect in the world and cloud the clearest brain. Although paralytic and forced to wheel himself from one room to J another, ho would, if wo may trust the evidence of a waiter at one of the hotels where he stayed, drink a pint of iced champagne in the forenoon, have sherry, and sometimes another pint of champagne at lunch ; sherry every day before he drove out, champagne and sherry at dinner, and whisky and hot water before he went to bed. Another witness said that he was always drunk. It was no wonder that he was subject to wild fits of rage and fury. Thus enfeebled by disease and drink, ho could easily be misled by stronger minds than his own ; and the contention of the plaintiff was that the delusion as to the paternity of the child was planted in the first place by his brother, Bernard Bagot. That gentleman is the central figure of one very dramatic scene. Ho had come to visit Neville Bagot after the drawing up of the will which gave the estates to the child. At an hotel after dinner he was seen, if we may trust one of the witnesses, to take a paper off the chimney piece of an adjoining bedroom, axid place it on the top of a jug of hot water in order to open the seal with the steam. Then he read the enclosed documents and sealed them again. Presently Mr Neville Bagot came in and asked for his will. Mr Bernard Bagot answered that it was in the bedroom, and he pretended to go for it; but the witness saw him take it out of his side pocket and bring it to his brother, who locked it in a tin box. The inference of the plaintiff was that Mr Bernard had opened the will to ascertain its contents, and that, on finding all the landed property left to her son, he had deliberately tried to make his brother repudiate the paternity of the child. Mr Bernard Bigot himself, of course, tells a very different story. Ho knew what the will contained, and he opened it merely to give his brother an opportunity of completing some forgotten formality. Be the truth what it may, Mr Neville Bagot’s household was speedily disturbed by scandalous scones. He denied that the child was his, and called the mother opprobrious names. She retorted by demanding the authority for his accusations, and, when he would not give it, she called him a “ liar.” Her theory is that her husband’s mind was poisoned by the letters which he received from Bernard and John Bagot, and by their talk with him when they were his guests. She says that she was sometimes kept away from him, and that she was not allowed to enter his room, and that she would remain crying in the passage outside. On one occasion, she adds, when the vigilance of the brothers had been relaxed, she got into the sick man’s room through the window, and he then said it was not he who had shut her out. A nurse who tended him in his last hours declared that he made exclamations implying that lie had wronged both his wife and child. The defendants retort by making accusations against Mrs Bagot. They say that she neglected, disobeyed, and insulted her husband. She enraged him, they assert, by lier extravagance, and by going about with men whom he did not know. Nay, an attempt was made to show that her conduct was open to the worst construction when she and her sister dined with two officers at an hotel in Chester. The climax of the insinuations was that she had tried to poison her husband. The attempt to substantiate those charges, however, conspicuously failed ; and we cannot congratulate the counsel for the defence on the discretion which admitted them into their arguments. The choice of them was the more unwise because, oven if they had been proved, they would not have justified the belief of Mr Neville Bagot that the child was not his. On the other hand, they must have tended to make the jury believe the plaintiff’s plea that she had been calumniated by Mr Bernard and Mr John Bagot, persecuted by them, and at last driven from the house by their efforts. The result of the quarrels with her husband was a deed of separation from him, drawn up at his desire ; and, when she went to ask him why ho wanted her to go away, Mr John Bagot, she says, gave her a push, knocked her down with her head against the fender, and then, with the help of a doctor who was present, dragged her out of the room so violently as to tear the sleeves from her dress. At another time, she declares, he showed her a photograph, and remarked, “ That is your successor.” She adds that he setspies to watch her, and that he himself dogged her footsteps to find evidence against her. A good deal of that evidence was irrelevant or unproved, and some of it was directly met by sworn denials; but, to a certain extent, it did tend to show’ that an attempt had been made to oust her from the household for reasons which could not be substantiated. The real question for the jury, however, was whether Mr Neville Bagot had been the victim of a delusion, practically amounting to insanity, in so far as he believed that Mrs Bagot’s child was not his. If that question was to be answered in the affirmative, it was of comparatively little importance to trace the origin of the delusion. The jury might hold either that it had sprung from Mr Neville Bagot’s own excited mind, or that, in good or bad faith, it had been implanted by others. The jury hare affirmed that he did show himself incapable of making a will in so far as ho fancied that he was not the father of his wife’s child. That verdict must have been confidently expected by most calm readers of the evidence, and it commands the agreement of the Judge. The result is, that the will is set aside, and that the young child becomes the heir of the landed estates and a great part of the personalty. The plaintiff, Mrs Neville Bagot, on the other hand, gains little by the verdict. She has been fighting the battle of her son. So ends an extraordinary trial. But it is not unlikely that, in spite of the enormous cost entailed by the preparation of the evidence, and by the twenty-two days’ litigation, an attempt will be made to secure another trial, and that the less irrelevant parts of much astonishing evidence may bo heard over again. Let us hope, at any rate, that it will escape the at tion of those foreign critics who study the social morality and the domestic bliss of England.