“Twelve o’clock the same day.  My tears of excitement have yielded to counter-excitement.  I have just had an intrusive visitor, who came to inquire if it is my intention to remain here.  I replied in the affirmative, adding earnestly, ’I have come to my roofless home,’ and asked ‘Who are you?’ He answered ’I am Mr. Grey, the agent for her Majesty, and I shall have to communicate your intention.’  I answered, ’Quite right, Mr. Grey.  Then what title have you to show that her Majesty has a right here to my freehold estates?’ He replied, ‘I have no title.’  I then took out a parchment with the titles and the barony and manors, and the names of my forty-two rich estates, and held it before him and said, ’I am the Countess of Derwentwater, and my title and claim are acknowledged and substantiated by the Crown of England, morally, legally, and officially; therefore my title is the title to these forty-two estates.’  He has absented himself quietly, and I do hope my lords will not leave my case now to under officials.—­Yours truly,
                        AMELIA, COUNTESS OF DERWENTWATER.”

Their lordships left the case to very minor officials, indeed; namely to a person whom the countess describes as “a dusky little man” and his underlings, and they without hesitation ejected her from Dilstone Hall.  The lady was very indignant, but was very far from being beaten, and she and her adherents immediately formed a roadside encampment, under a hedge, in gipsy fashion, and resolved to re-enter if possible.  From her letters it appears that she was very cold and very miserable, and, moreover, very hungry at first.  But the neighbouring peasantry were kind, and brought her so much food eventually, that she tells one of her friends that cases of tinned meats from Paris would be of no use to her.  The worst of the encampment seems to have been that it interfered with her usual pastime of sketching, which could not be carried on in the evenings under a tarpaulin, by the light of a lantern.

But her enemies had no idea that she should be permitted to remain under the hedge any more than in the hall itself.  On the 21st of October, at the quarter sessions for the county of Northumberland, the chief constable was questioned by the magistrates about the strange state of affairs in the district, and reported that the encampment was a little way from the highway, and that, therefore, the lady could not be apprehended under the Vagrant Act!  A summons, however, had been taken out by the local surveyor, and would be followed by a warrant.  On that summons the so-called countess was convicted; but appealed to the Court of Queen’s Bench.

During the winter the encampment could not be maintained, and the weather, more powerful than the Greenwich commissioners, drove the countess from the roadside.  But in the bright days of May she reappeared to resume the fight, and this time took possession of a cottage at Dilston, whence, says a newspaper report of the period, “it is expected she will be ejected; but she may do as she did before, and pitch her tent on the high-road.”  On the 30th of the same month, the conviction by the Northumberland magistrates “for erecting a hut on the roadside,” was affirmed by the Court of Queen’s Bench.