Scattered about these letters were mysterious allusions to secrets of state and symptoms of insane delusions.  In one she imagined she had been seriously injured by the Duke of York.  In another, she fancied that some one had poisoned her.  In one letter she actually offered to lend the Prince of Wales, L20,000 to induce him to grant the interview of which she was so desirous, although in other letters she begged for pecuniary assistance, and represented herself to be in great distress.  The letters were also full of astrology; she spoke of her “occult studies;” and she further believed in ghosts.  The manifesto to Poland also pointed to the same conclusion as to her state of mind.  A person of such an erratic character, he said, was very likely to concoct such a story, and the story would naturally take the turn of trying to connect herself with the royal family.

During the interval between the death of Lord Warwick in 1816 and 1821, when it was first made public, her story passed through no less than three distinct and irreconcilable stages.  At first she stated that she was the daughter of the Duke of Cumberland by Mrs. Payne, the sister of Dr. Wilmot; and in 1817 she still described herself as Dr. Wilmot’s niece.  It was said that she did not come into possession of the papers until after Lord Warwick’s death, but this assertion was contradicted by the evidence of Mrs. Ryves, as to events which were within her own recollection, and which she represented to have passed in her presence.

The second stage of the story was contained in a letter to Mr. Fielding, the Bow Street magistrate, in October, 1817.  Having been threatened with arrest, she wrote to him for protection, and in this letter she represented herself as the natural daughter of the late Duke of Cumberland by a sister of the late Dr. Wilmot, whom he had seduced under promise of marriage, she being a lady of large fortune.  In connection with this stage of the story, he referred to another letter which she wrote to the Prince-Regent in July, 1818, in which she stated that Lord Warwick had told her the story of her birth in his lifetime, but without showing her any documents; that he excused himself for not having made the disclosure before by saying that he was unable to repay a sum of L2000 which had been confided to him by the Duke of Cumberland for her benefit; and then she actually went on to say that when Lord Warwick died she thought all evidence was lost until she opened a sealed packet which contained the documents.  This was quite inconsistent with the extraordinary story of Mrs. Ryves as to the communication of the papers to her and her mother in 1815.