The Attorney-General, on behalf of the crown, after explaining the provisions of the Act, proceeded to tear the story of the petitioners to pieces, pronouncing its folly and absurdity equal to its audacity.  The Polish princess and her charming daughter he pronounced pure myths—­as entirely creatures of the imagination as Shakspeare’s “Ferdinand and Miranda.”  As to the pretended marriage of George III. and Hannah Lightfoot, the tale was even more astonishing and incredible, for not only were wife and children denied by the king, and a second bigamous contract entered into, but the lady held her tongue, the children were content to live in obscurity, and Dr. Wilmot faithfully kept the secret, and preached sermons before the king and his second wife Queen Charlotte.  Not that Dr. Wilmot did not feel these grave state secrets pressing him down, but the mode of revenge which he adopted was to write the “Letters of Junius!”

Yet Dr. Wilmot died in 1807, apparently a common-place country parson.  Surely there never was a more wonderful example of the possibility of keeping secrets.  One would have imagined that the very walls would have spoken of such events; but although at least seven men and one woman (the wife of Robert Wilmot) must have been acquainted with them, the secret was kept as close as the grave for forty-three years, and was never even suspected before 1815, although all the actors in these extraordinary scenes seemed to have been occupied day and night in writing on little bits of paper, and telling the whole story.  In 1815 the facts first came to the knowledge of Mrs. Serres; but, even then, they were not revealed, until the grave had closed over every individual who could vouch as to the handwriting.

As far as the petitioner, Mrs. Ryves, was concerned, the Attorney-General said he could imagine that she had brooded on this matter so long (she being then over 70 years of age), that she had brought herself to believe things that had never happened.  The mind might bring itself to believe a lie, and she might have dwelt so long upon documents produced and fabricated by others, that, with her memory impaired by old age, the principle of veracity might have been poisoned, and the offices of imagination and memory confounded to such an extent that she really believed that things had been done and said in her presence which were entirely imaginary.  He contended that Mrs. Serres, the mother of the petitioner, was not altogether responsible for her actions, and proceeded to trace her history.  Between 1807 and 1815, he said, she had the advantage of becoming personally known to some members of the royal family, and being a person of ill-regulated ambition and eccentric character, and also being in pecuniary distress, her eccentricity took the turn of making advances to different members of that family.  She opened fire on the Prince of Wales in 1809, by sending a letter to his private secretary, comparing His Royal Highness to Julius Caesar, and talking in a mad way about the politics of the illustrious personages of the day.  In 1810 other letters followed in the same style, and in one of them she asked, “Why, sir, was I so humbly born?”