improper in England, I hope every candid mind will make allowance for the different notions which my foreign education and habits may have given me.’ Nine weeks elapsed since the Princess had addressed the above memorial and depositions to the King, and still no reply reached her, except an intimation through the Lord Chancellor that his Majesty had read the documents in question, and had ordered them to be submitted to the commissioners. She complained, justly enough, at being left nine weeks without knowledge as to what judgment the commissioners had formed of the report drawn up in reply to their sentence, which acquitted her of gross guilt, yet left her under the weight of an accusation of having acted in a manner unbecoming her high station, or, indeed, unbecoming a woman in any station. From such delay, she said, the world began to infer her guilt, in total ignorance, as they were, of the real state of the facts. ‘I feel myself,’ she then said, ‘sinking in the estimation of your Majesty’s subjects, as well as what remains to me of my own family, into (a state intolerable to a mind conscious of its own purity and innocence) a state in which my honour appears at least equivocal, and my virtue is suspected. From this state I humbly entreat your Majesty to perceive that I can have no hope of being restored until either your Majesty’s favourable opinion shall be graciously notified to the world, by receiving me again into the royal presence, or until the false disclosures of the facts shall expose the malice of my accusers, and do away every possible ground for unfavourable inference and conjecture.’ The Princess then alluded to the fact that the occasion of assembling the royal family and the King’s subjects ‘in dutiful and happy commemoration of her Majesty’s birthday’ was then at hand; and she intimated that if the commissioners were prevented from presenting their final report before that time, and that consequently, at such a period, she should be without any knowledge of the King’s pleasure, the world would inevitably conclude that her answers to the charges must have proved altogether unsatisfactory, and the really infamous charges would be accounted of as too true. Some months longer, notwithstanding this urgent appeal, was the Princess kept in suspense. There seemed a determination existing somewhere that, if her accusers could not prove her guilt, she should at least not be permitted to substantiate her innocence. At length, on the 25th of January 1807, the King having referred the entire matter, with her Royal Highness’s letters, to the cabinet ministers, the latter delivered themselves of their lengthily gestated resolution.