On the back of this document was written--"Excerpt from the original charter to William, Earl of Stirling, 7th December 1639. T. C." [_i.e._, Thomas Conyers.] This indorsement was also alleged in the indictment to be a forgery. Here, then, we have an "excerpt" or "abridged copy" of a royal charter, dated the 7th December 1639, granted by King Charles I. to one of his most distinguished subjects, conferring high dignities and vast possessions; a charter yielded to the anxious importunity of the Earl in his old age, "when labouring under great dejection of spirits, after losing three of his sons, who had given him the highest hopes, and fearing, from the declining health of two of the survivors, that his honours might, at no distant period, pass to a collateral branch of his family."[23] And this Earl, too, the head of the office in which the charter originated. NOW, FIRST, the records of every one of the four departments above mentioned--viz., the Signature Record, the Comptroller of the Exchequer's Record, the Privy Seal Record, and the Great Seal Record--had been rigorously searched, _and not the faintest trace of such an instrument appeared in any of, them_!--it being sworn that, had it ever existed, it must have been found in ALL! "This might possibly have been accounted for," said the Solicitor-General,[24] "had there been but one register only; more especially if a blank had occurred in that register, through the obliteration, imperfection, or loss of a volume, or part of a volume. But where there are four independent registers, and these all concurring to supply, in the fullest detail, the necessary evidence as to all _other_ charters, [of which various instances were proved at the trial,] and when you find that _this_ charter is not recorded in _any one_ of them, it is quite impossible to believe--it would really be asking too much of credulity itself to believe--that such a document could ever have existed." If this instrument were the handiwork of a forger, it may be reasonable to suppose him capable of appreciating the efficacy of the negative evidence which might be brought against him, and to endeavour to supply it. This brings us, SECONDLY, to the memorandum in the margin of the first page of the excerpt--_i.e._, _Reg. Mag. Sig. Lib. LVII._--which meant that the charter itself was to have been found "in the fifty-seventh volume of the Register (or Record) of the Great Seal." We have already seen[25] that, in point of fact, twelve leaves, at the beginning _of that volume_, were amissing; and the suggestion, or rather assertion, of the prisoner, when he commenced his legal proceedings to prove the tenor of the missing charter, was, that it was to have been found in one of these twelve leaves, "which had perished, or disappeared--that being a matter of public notoriety, and was so observed by the Lords of Council and Session in their return of the 27th February 1740, to