Queen, and offer her terms to stay away.

He arrived

at his destination at the same time as Mr. Brougham. She spurned his offers, and, without even Mr. Brougham's knowledge, ordered her carriage, and left her hotel for Calais, while Lord Hutchinson-the Government agent— and Brougham were conferring upon her case.

The Queen's bold determination had thrilled the whole nation. All at once they went into a fever of excitement, and of devotion to the royal lady who had been so wronged. Received at Dover with a royal salute from the castle guns, and by the acclamations of a multitude assembled on the beach to welcome her, she at once continued her journey to London, amid the cheers of the populace all along the great high road. She crossed Westminster Bridge, and passing along Pall Mall, the mob obliged her carriage to stop before Carlton House, where they gave three lusty cheers of derision against the owner of the notorious palace. Her temporary residence was the house of Alderman Wood, in South Audley Street.

On the very day of Her Majesty's arrival the King sent a message to Parliament, requesting that an inquiry into the Queen's conduct should be instituted, and that the papers containing the evidence which had been collected at Milan should be examined, in order that a Bill of Pains and Penalties might be passed, for the pur pose of depriving the Queen of her rights and dignities, and of divorcing her. On the day following Mr Brougham read in the House of Commons a letter from the Queen, praying for a public inquiry. Numerous discussions took place in both Houses, and much delay occurred in consequence. Mr. Wilberforce, in the

interest of public morals, endeavoured to pour oil upon the troubled waters. But conciliation was impossible. The King and Queen were each equally eager to pursue the investigation. The House of Commons washed its hands of the whole business, and would not consent to appoint a committee to deal with it. The Lords appointed a secret committee to examine the documents which the King had sent down, and it was finally determined to try the Queen by the peers of the realm. Messrs. Brougham and Denman were formally appointed her attorney and solicitor-general; they were recognised as such by the judges, and admitted within the bars of the several courts. The Queen's friends endeavoured to set aside the proposed trial by the peers as arbitrary and unconstitutional, alleging that her rank ought not to deprive her of the right possessed by every British subject, of being tried by a jury.

Brougham and Denman took more pertinent objections to the course which was being pursued. On the 26th of June they were heard by the Lords in support of the Queen's petition against a secret inquiry; but the Peers decided against them. On the 4th of July the Lords' committee brought up their report. The Queen prayed to be heard by counsel at once, but this was refused; and on the 5th Lord Liverpool introduced an Act to deprive Her Majesty Queen Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, of the titles, prerogatives, rights, privileges, and exemptions of Queen Consort of this realm, and to dissolve the marriage between His Majesty and the said Caroline Amelia Elizabeth." The preamble of the bill accused her generally of improper conduct, and specifically of adulterous intercourse with Bartolomeo Bergami,

one of her Italian servants. The day after the first reading of the bill, the Queen offered a protest, and was heard by counsel. It was urged that the bill should be either dropped, or be carried through without delay. Expedition was promised, but the second reading did not come on till the 17th of August, after which Gifford and Copley, the attorney and solicitor-general, proceeded to examine their twenty-five witnesses. Then there was poured forth, day after day, a profusion of the most obscene details, the falsity of most of which was obvious, and was displayed by the rigorous cross-examination of Brougham, but which, diffused every day in the public prints, did infinite damage to the decency and morality of the empire. Day after day, for three weeks, the Queen sat at the bar, while her Italian servants, and English officers who had observed her conduct, narrated foolish or disgusting tales. The case for the prosecution was finished by the 8th of September, and Brougham and Denman applied for a delay of three weeks to enable them to prepare their defence.

Seldom, if ever, has any advocate in ancient or modern times occupied a more distinguished position than did Brougham, when, on the 3rd of October, he opened the defence of his regal client. It was a splendid position to occupy to have entrusted to his advocacy the honour, the fame, and the fate of the Queen Consort of the first country in the world, against a charge preferred by the Sovereign himself, before a body of judges who were his own subjects. But Brougham's clients were the whole nation; the brief he held was for the men and women of England. Opinions were divided as to the Queen's guilt, but there was almost absolute unanimity as to the

desirability of her acquittal. Even those who believed
her guilty believed that the sad circumstances of her lot,
and the peculiar temptations to which she had been sub-
jected ever since her disdainful rejection by him who had
sworn before God to protect her, if they did not actually
condone her culpability, at least operated most strongly
against the injustice of meting out to her the punishment
inflicted upon
the abandoned and the wanton. Those who
believed her innocent were indignant at the persecution
of one whom they believed to be a spotless woman and a
faithful wife, by one who, ever since he had reached man-
hood, had paraded his impurity without the slightest
inkling of shame or decency, and whose example had cor-
rupted a Court whose natural heads were patterns of all the
domestic virtues. All eyes were fixed on Mr. Brougham;
he knew that the reward of his advocacy, if successful,
would be no less than the hearty gratitude of a whole
people. He proved himself equal to the occasion. His
vehement and splendid oratory as the defender of the
Queen, was as matchless as had been his skill and self-
possession while tearing to shreds the incoherent and halt-
ing evidence of the suborned instruments of the prosecu-
tion. The defence, which altogether occupied forty-nine
days, was concluded by Brougham in a speech which we
should gladly have presented entire, but from which we
can only extract some of the closing sentences :—

Such, then, my lords, is this case. And let me again call on your lordships, even at the risk of repetition, never to dismiss for a moment from your minds the two great points upon which rests my attack upon the evidence; first, that they have not proved the facts by the good witnesses in their reach, whom they have no shadow of pretext for not calling; and secondly, that the witnesses whom they have ventured to call are, every one of them, injured in their credit. How,

I again ask, my lords, is a plot ever to be discovered, except by the means of these two principles? Nay, there are instances in which plots have been discovered through the medium of the second principle, when the first had happened to fail. When venerable witnesses bave been seen to be brought forward, when persons above all suspicion have lent themselves, for a reason, to impure plans, when nothing seemed possible, when no resort for the guiltless seemed open-they have almost providentially escaped from the snare by the second of these principles; by the evidence breaking down where it was not expected to be sifted, by a weak point being found where no pains, from not foreseeing the attack, had been made to support it.

Your lordships recollect that great passage—I say great, for it is poetically just and grand-in the Sacred Writings, where the elders had joined themselves, two of them, in a plot which had appeared to have succeeded. In that, as the Scriptures say, they had "hardened their hearts and had turned away their eyes, that they might not look at heaven, and that they might do the purposes of unjust judgment." But they, though giving a clear, consistent, and uncontradicted story, were disappointed, and their victim was rescued from their gripe by a trifling circumstance of a contradiction about the mastic-tree. Let no man call those contradictions or those falsehoods which false witnesses swear to from heedless falsehood-such as Sacchi about his changing his name; or such as Demont about her letters; or such as Majocchi about the banker's clerk; or such as all the others belonging to the other witnesses; not going to the main body of the case, but to the main body of the credit of the witnesses-let no man blindly call these accidents. They are dispensations of Providence, which willed not the guilty should triumph, and which favourably protects the innocent.

Such, my lords, is the case before you. Such is the evidence in support of this measure, inadequate to prove a debt, impotent to deprive of any civil right-ridiculous of the lowest offence-scandalous if brought forward to support a charge of the highest nature which the law knows-monstrous to ruin the honour of an English queen! What shall I say, then, if this is their case, if this is the species of proof by which an act of judicial legislature, an "ex post facto" law, is sought to be passed against this defenceless woman? My lords, pray your lordships to pause. You are standing on the brink of a precipice. It will go forth your judgment, if it falls against the Queen; but it will be the only judgment you will ever pronounce which will fail in