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?"

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