The Attorney-General, in opposing the claim, alleged that the whole
story of the Duke of Cumberland’s marriage to Olive Wilmot was a
concoction from beginning to end, and said that the mere statement of
the Petitioner’s case was sufficient to stamp its true character. That
its folly and absurdity were equal to its audacity; in every stage
it exposed itself to conviction by the simplest tests. He added that
the Petitioner 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
in fact entirely imaginary. No part of her story was corroborated
by a single authentic document, or by a single extrinsic fact. The
forgery, falsehood and fraud of the case were proved in many ways. The
explanations were as false and feeble as the story itself. “I cannot
of course,” he said, “lay bare the whole history of the concoction
of these extraordinary documents, but there are circumstances which
indicate that they were concocted by Mrs. Serres herself.”
Having commented on some other matters spoken of, but regarding which
no evidence was adduced, he proceeded to speak of the alleged wife of
Joseph Wilmot D. D., the Polish Princess, sister of Count Poniatowski,
afterwards elected King of Poland (1764), who was the mother of his
charming daughter, Olive. “The truth is,” said Sir Roundell, “that
both the Polish Princess and the charming daughter were pure myths;
no such persons ever existed--they were as entirely creatures of the
imagination as Shakespeare’s Ferdinand and Miranda.”
As to the documents produced by the Petitioners he remarked:
“What sort of documents were those which were produced? The
internal evidence proved that they were the most ridiculous,
absurd, preposterous series of forgeries that the perverted
ingenuity of man ever invented ... they were all written on
little scraps and slips of paper, such as no human being would
ever have used for the purpose of recording transactions of this
kind, and it would be proved that in every one of these pieces of
paper the watermark of date was wanting.”
This was but a new variant of the remark made by the Lord Chief
Justice, just after the putting-in of the alleged marriage Certificate
of the Prince of Wales and Hannah Lightfoot:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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