At the sitting of the court, on the 1st of March, 1870, Sir Roundell Palmer (Lord Selborne), who represented Charles Francis Howard, the other claimant, gave the whole case a new complexion by informing the court that he was in a position to prove that, in the month of August, 1864, Mrs. Howard and another lady visited a workhouse in Liverpool, and procured a newly-born child from its mother, Mary Best, a pauper, then an occupant of one of the lying-in wards of the workhouse hospital.  In support of his assertion he was able to produce three witnesses—­Mrs. Higginson, the head-nurse, and Mrs. Stuart and Mrs. O’Hara, two of the assistant-nurses, of whom two could swear positively to Mrs. Howard’s identity with the lady who came and took away the child.  The third nurse was in doubt.

The Solicitor-General, who represented the infant-claimant, thereupon requested an adjournment, in order to meet the new case thus presented.  Their lordships, however, refused to comply with his desire until they had had an opportunity of examining Mrs. Howard; but when that lady was called she did not appear, and it was discovered that she had left the House of Lords secretly, and could not be found at her lodgings or discovered elsewhere.  The case was therefore adjourned.  At the next sitting, a week later, Mrs. Howard appeared before the committee, but refused to be sworn, demanding that the witnesses who were to be brought against her should be examined first.  As she persisted in her refusal, she was given into custody for contempt of court, and the evidence of the Liverpool witnesses was taken.  As Sir Roundell Palmer had stated, while one of the nurses remembered the transaction she could not be positive that Mrs. Howard was the party concerned in it; but the two others, and Mary Best the child’s mother, had no hesitation in asserting that she was the person who had taken away the infant from the hospital.  Towards the close of the sitting it was announced that a telegram had been received from Boulogne, stating that the real purchasers of Mary Best’s child had been found, and that they would be produced at the next hearing of the case to re-but the Liverpool evidence; but when the next sitting came no Boulogne witnesses were forthcoming, and the Solicitor-General was compelled to state that he had been on the wrong scent; but that he would be able to refute the story which had been trumped up against his client.  Mary Best was placed in the witness-box, and, in the course of a rigorous cross-examination, admitted that she had left the workhouse with a baby which she had passed off as her own.  She stated that this child was given to her while she was in the workhouse, but she could not tell either its mother’s name or the name of the person who gave it to her.  She had never received any payment for it, but had fed and clothed it at her own expense, had taken it with her to her father’s house in Yorkshire, had represented it as her own to her family, and had paid the costs of its burial when it died.  Her relatives and friends were produced, and corroborated these facts.  The nurses, on the other hand, when recalled, denied all knowledge of this second child, and affirmed that a child could not have been brought to her without their knowledge.