Despite all of Britain being transfixed by the case for years, by the time Orton was released 10 years later, nobody really cared anymore. Still insisting he was the real Roger Tichborne, he died in poverty.
The Truth
So who was he? Nobody knows for certain. The evidence certainly seemed to suggest that he was Arthur Orton, but there are definitely question marks around the whole thing. If he was a fraud, he was a very good one — a huge amount of people who had known Tichborne closely believed him. There was also, despite the very different body types, a definite facial resemblance. There is a real possibility that he was the genuine Tichborne and had killed Orton — using a murder you committed to acquit yourself of fraud would after all be an extremely bold defense.
The 1998 movie The Tichborne Claimant stars John Kani (now best known as T’Chaka in Black Panther) as Tichborne’s manservant Andrew Bogle, who the film posits as being part of a plot with Orton, sneaking him information about his former life in order to share the wealth.
Revisiting Armin Tamzarian
Rewatching “The Principal and the Pauper” with all this information, does it play out any differently? Not really — it still feels like it has a lot more in common with the Martin Guerre tale and Sommersby than the Tichborne story. The war, the original person returning, the idea that the impostor is preferable — the only element in the episode that feels lifted from the Tichborne case is the heartbreaking idea of a lonely elderly mother opting to believe a fraudster because the alternative, that her son is dead, feels unthinkable.
But something worth bearing in mind is that Ken Keeler is legitimately a genius. He has a PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard and was responsible for a huge amount of the highbrow math jokes sprinkled through both The Simpsons and Futurama. He once came up with a new mathematical proof, known as the Futurama Theorem, to demonstrate that the plot of one episode was numerically sound.
If he’s super clever, and he thinks it’s good, maybe it’s good? Maybe there are deeply buried details within the tale of the Tichborne claimant that Keeler was inspired by, and he enjoys the episode on a deeper level compared to the people offended by its seeming cruelty and contempt.
Or maybe Keeler is channeling Skinner — or rather, Tamzarian — himself, seeing the backlash to the episode and opting for an approach of, “No, it’s the viewers that are wrong.”