its own facts; and, too, on whether the judicial conscience is so outraged by the document in question that it cannot possibly uphold it. A probate Court’s jurisdiction is not a jurisdiction of suspicion; it is a jurisdiction of caution, a very different thing. It is also, I think, a mistake too often made to use this phrase ‘suspicious circumstance’ to mean that every contested Will must be seen, merely by virtue of there being a contest, as unproved unless otherwise established. When the weight of established authority uses this phrase, I believe it does so not to imply that every single circumstance, taken in isolation, is sufficient to dislodge an otherwise properly made Will, but to indicate that the propounder of a contested Will has to discharge evidentiary burdens, varying in degree depending on the circumstances of each case, that he would not otherwise have to do if there was no contest. There are, of necessity, degrees of this ‘suspicion’; and, again, when we use this phrase we must remember that we refer to circumstances that require explanation, not to assume that axiomatically all those circumstances are fatal. Regard must be had to the evidence overall; to the context of the lives before us. We must draw for ourselves an image or portrait of the testator, his family, his life, his work, his relationships, and his approach. We seat ourselves in his armchair. We have before us a man approaching his ninth decade, one who was a practicing lawyer some thirty years earlier, with an eye for detail. We have evidence of him being closer to one son and his family, and of having had to put some considerable distance between himself and his other son. There is evidence of acrimony between the Defendant and the testator, of suits filed, criminal proceedings and trials. None of this can have endeared the Defendant to the testator. Given this distancing, it is expected that the Defendant would not be close to
