Part 41

EDWARD VAUGHAN HYDE KENEALY was the junior counsel for Palmer, and was thirty-seven years old. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1840, the year of his call to the Irish bar. In 1847 he was called to the English bar by Gray’s Inn, and by 1850 he was a Doctor of Laws of Trinity College, Dublin. He had published poems as translations from many Eastern and European languages, and especially in 1850 a poem which has been described as marked by genius, “Goethe, a new Pantomime.” Between the year of the trial and 1868 he had risen rapidly, and in the latter year he was made a Queen’s Counsel and a Bencher of his Inn. He was the leading counsel for the prosecution in the great Overend and Gurney case of 1869; and in 1873 came the most extraordinary period of his career, when he became chief counsel for the Tichborne claimant. His conduct of that person’s defence on the prosecution for perjury, and his editing of the wild paper called _The Englishman_, and his scurrilous attacks on the Chief Justice and others, led to his expulsion from the Circuit, the deprival of his legal distinctions, and finally to his disbarring. He was elected in 1875 as member for Stoke, solely as the champion of the Tichborne claimant. He sat until 1880, but was defeated then at the General Election, and in that year he died. He was an accomplished and successful advocate, and a scholar of unusual learning, but his gifts seemed of that order of genius which is allied to madness. In 1860 he published a translation of a Celtic poem, and in 1864 a volume of “Poems”; in 1878, “Prayers and Meditations,” “An Introduction to the Apocalypse,” and “Fo, the Third Messenger of God.”

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JOHN GRAY. Mr. Gray was born at Aberdeen in 1807, and educated at Gordon’s Hospital. First a solicitor in London, he was called to the bar in 1838. After attaining the rank of Queen’s Counsel in 1863, seven years after the Palmer trial, he was appointed solicitor to the Treasury in 1870. It was while holding this office, in 1873, that he conducted the prosecution of Arthur Orton; so that his career and Dr. Kenealy’s touched in two points. He was the author of a number of valuable contemporary legal text books. He died in 1875, owing, it was said, to his labours in preparing and directing the Orton prosecution.

21 Wednesday [325-40]

Facsimile of page from the Diary of William Palmer.]

--23 FRIDAY [327-38] O--

--24 SATURDAY [328-37]--

25 SUNDAY-25 aft Trin. [329-36]

Facsimile of page from the Diary of William Palmer.]