attention, has made them leave the important duties of this investigation, in many particulars, imperfectly discharged :—a more thorough attention to it, must have given them a better and truer insight into the characters of those witnesses, upon whose credit, as I am convinced Your Majesty will now see, they have without sufficient reason relied. There remains nothing for me, on this part of the charge, to perform; but, adverting to the circumstance which is falsely sworn against me by Mr. Bidgood, of the salute, and the false inference and insinuation from other facts, that Captain Manby slept in my house, either at Southend, or East Cliff, on my own part most solemnly to declare, that they are both utterly false; that Bidgood's assertion as to the salute is a malicious, slanderous invention, without the slightest shadow of truth to support it; that his suspicions and insinuations, as to Captain Manby's having slept in my house, are also the false suggestions of his own malicious mind; and that Captain Manby never did, to my knowledge or belief, sleep in my house at Southend, East Cliff, or any other house of mine whatever; and however often he may have been in my company, I solemnly protest to Your Majesty, as I have done in the former cases, that nothing ever' passed between him and me, that I should be ashamed or unwilling, that all the world should have seen. And I have also, with great pain, and with a deep sense of woanded delicacy, applied to Captain Manby to attest to

the same truths, and I subjoin to this letter his deposition to that effect.

"I stated to Your Majesty, that I should be obliged to return to other parts of Fanny Lloyd's testimony. At the end of it, she says, "I never told Cole that M. Wilson, when she supposed the Princess to be in the library, had gone into the Princess's bed-room, and had found a man there at breakfast with the Princess; or that there was a great to do about it, and that M. Wilson was sworn to secrecy, and threatened to be turned away, if she divulged what she had seen." This part of her examination, Your Majesty will perceive, must have been called from her, by some precise question addressed to her, with respect to a supposed communication from her to Mr. Cole. In Mr Cole's examination, there is not one word upon the subject of it. In his original declaration however, there is; and there Your Majesty will perceive, that he affirms the fact of her having reported to him Mary Wilson's declaration, in the very same words in which Fanny Lloyd denies it, and it is therefore evident that the Commissioners, in putting this question to Fanny Lloyd, must have put it to her from Cole's declaration. She positively denies the fact: there is then a flat and precise contradiction, between the examination of Fanny Lloyd and the original statement of Mr. Cole. It is therefore impossible that they both can have spoken true. The Commissioners, for some reason, don't examine Cole to this point

at all, don't endeavour to trace out this story; if they had, they must have discovered which of these witnesses spoke the truth; but they leave this contradiction not only unexplained, but uninquired after, and in that state, report both these witnesses, Cole and Fanny Lloyd, who thus speak to the two sides of a contradiction, and who therefore, cannot, by possibility, both speak truth, as witnesses who cannot be suspected of partiality, whose credit they see no reason to question, and whose story must be believed, till contradicted.

"But what is, if possible, still more extraordinary, this supposed communication from F. Lloyd to Cole, as Your Majesty observes, relates to something which M. Wilson is supposed to have seen and to have said; yet though M. Wilson appears herself to have been examined by the Commissioners on the same day with Fanny Lloyd, in the copy of her examination as delivered to me, there is no trace of any question relating to this declaration, having been put to her.

"And I have not less reason to lament, than to be surprised, that it did not occur to the Commissioners to see the necessity of following this Inquiry still further. For, if properly pursued, it would have demonstrated two things, both very important to be kept in mind, in the whole of this consideration. First, how hearsay representations of this kind, arising out of little or nothing, become magnified and exaggerated by the circulation of prejudiced, or malicious

reporters; and secondly, it would have shewn the industry of Mr. and Mrs. Bidgood, as well as Mr. Cole, in collecting information in support of Lady Douglas's statement, and in improving what they collected by their false colourings, and malicious additions to it. They would have found a story in Mrs. Bidgood's declaration, as well as in her husband's (who relates it, as having heard it from his wife,) which is evidently the same as that which W. Cole's declaration contains. For the Bidgoods' declarations state, that Fanny Lloyd told Mrs. Bidgood that Mary Wilson had gone into the Princess's bed-room, and had found her Royal Highness and Sir Sydney in the most criminal situation; that she had left the room, and was so shocked, that she fainted away at the door. Here then are Mrs. Bidgood, and Mr. Cole, both declaring what they had heard Fanny Lloyd say, and Fanny Lloyd denying it. How extraordinary is it, that they were not all confronted! and Your Majesty will see presently, how much it is to be lamented, that they were not. For, from Fanny Lloyd's original declaration, it appears that the truth would have come out as she there states, that "To the best of her knowledge Mary Wilson said, that she had seen the Princess and Sir Sydney, in the Blue Room, but never heard Mary Wilson say, she was so alarmed as to be in a fit." If then, on confronting Fanny Lloyd with Mrs. Bidgood and Mr. Cole, the Commissioners had found Fanny Lloyd's story to be what she related before, and bad then put the question to Mary

Wilson, and had heard from her what it really was, which she had seen and related to Fanny Lloyd, they could not have been at a loss to have discovered which of these witnesses told the truth. They would have found, I am perfectly confident, that all that Mary Wilson ever could have told Fanny Lloyd, was, that she had seen Sir Sydney and myself, in the Blue Room, and they would then have had to refer to the malicious, and confederated inventions of the Bidgoods and Mr. Cole, for the conversation of the Blue Room, into the bed-room; for the vile slander of what M. Wilson was supposed to have seen, and for the violent effect which this scene had upon her. I say confederated inventions, as it is impossible to suppose that they could have been concerned in inventing the same additions to Fanny Lloyd's story, unless they had communicated together upon it. And when they had once found Mrs. Bidgood and Mr. Cole, thus conspiring together, they would have had no difficulty in connecting them both in the same conspiracy with Sir John Douglas, by shewing how connected Cole was with Sir John Douglas, and how acquainted with his proceedings, in collecting the evidence which was to support Lady Douglas's declaration.

"For, by referring to Mr. Cole's declaration, made on the 23rd of February, they would have seen that Mr. Cole, in explaining some observation about Sir Sydney's supposed possession of a key to the garden door, says that it was what "Mr. Lampert, the servant of Sir John