The claim of legitimate royal birth was first brought forward at a time of great excitement and agitation, when the case of Queen Caroline was before the public; and it was brought forward in a tone of intimidation—­a revolution being threatened if the claim were not recognised within a few hours.  The documents were changed at times to suit the changing story, and there was every reason to believe that they were concocted by Mrs. Serres herself, who was a careful student of the Junius MSS., who was an artist and practised caligraphist, and who had gone through such a course of study as well prepared her for the fabrication of forged documents.  The internal evidence of the papers themselves proved that they were the most ridiculous, absurd, preposterous series of forgeries that perverted ingenuity ever invented.  If every expert that ever lived in the world swore to the genuineness of these documents, they could not possibly believe them to be genuine.  They were all written on little scraps and slips of paper such as no human being ever would have used for the purpose of recording transactions of this kind, and in everyone of these pieces of paper the watermark of date was wanting.

At this stage of his address the Attorney-General was interrupted by the foreman of the jury, who stated that himself and his colleagues were unanimously of opinion that the signatures to the documents were not genuine.

The Lord Chief-Justice, thereupon, immediately remarked that they shared the opinion which his learned brethren and himself had entertained for a long time—­that everyone of the documents was spurious.

After some observations by the counsel for the petitioner, who persisted that the papers produced were genuine, the Lord Chief-Justice proceeded to sum up the facts of the case.  He said it was a question whether the internal evidence in the documents of spuriousness and forgery was not quite as strong as the evidence resulting from the examination of their handwriting.  Two or three of them appeared to be such outrages on all probability, that even if there had been strong evidence of the genuineness of their handwriting, no man of common sense could come to the conclusion that they were genuine.  Some of them were produced to prove that King George III. had ordered the fraud to be committed of rebaptising an infant child under a false name as the daughter of persons whose daughter she was not; another showed that the king had divested the crown of one of its noblest appendages—­the Duchy of Lancaster—­by a document he was not competent by law to execute, written upon a loose piece of paper, and countersigned by W. Pitt and Dunning; by another document, also written upon a loose piece of paper, he expressed his royal will to the Lords and Commons, that when he should be dead they should recognise this lady as Duchess of Cumberland.  These papers bore the strongest internal evidence of their spuriousness.  The evidence as to the