The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, who presided over the trial, believed that Bogle had been honest though mistaken in his evidence, and was therefore guilty of no crime. He urged the Tichbornes to restore his pension, stopped when he supported the ‘Claimant’, which they eventually did, though very grudgingly. Bogle's last years were not happy; he was in very straightened circumstances and he and his son Henry lived on Argyle Street in the London district of St. Pancras, where he died in 1877. No record of a funeral or burial has so far been discovered.

  Henry Bogle, Andrew

  Bogle's son, sat beside

  the Claimant through-

  out the trial.

Thus ended the saga of ‘Old Bogle’, the Jamaican ex-slave who had found himself at the heart of one of the most famous English legal issues of the 19th century, and who had been for a time one of the best known people in Britain. But the question of the actual nature of his support of the ‘Claimant’ still persists; the film made on the case in 1998 firmly insists that he was a co-conspirator with Orton.

Inside St Pancras Station c1875

When I was doing research at the British Library on Euston Road in the 1990s, I walked past the end of Argyle Street many times on my way from King's Cross Station. It was some time before it registered that Argyle Street was where Andrew and Henry Bogle were living in the 1870s. Many of the buildings on the street are more recent than that, and the Bogle's 1870s address is at one of those newer buildings.