o 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 marriage of the Duke of Cumberland with Olive Wilmot could not
be separated from that part of the evidence which struck at the
legitimacy of the Royal Family, by purporting to establish the
marriage of George III. to a person named Hannah Lightfoot. Could any
one believe that the documents on which that marriage was attested by
W. Pitt and Dunning were genuine?