In the reply to the Middlesex address occurs the sole admission of blame attaching to her through indiscretion. ‘My frank and unreserved disposition may, at times, have laid my conduct open to the misrepresentations of my adversaries.’ But ‘I am what I seem, and seem what I am. I feel no fear, except it be the fear that my character be not sufficiently investigated. I challenge every inquiry. I deprecate not the most vigilant scrutiny.’ Against the method of carrying on the scrutiny she continued to protest most heartily. ‘In the bill of Pains and Penalties,’ she replied to the address from Shoreditch, ‘my adversaries first condemn me without proof, and then, with a sort of novel refinement in legislative science, proceed to inquire whether there is any proof to justify the condemnation.’ To the more directly popular mind, to the address of the artisans, for instance, she delivered an answer in which there is the following passage: ‘Who does not see that it is not owing to the wisdom of the Deity, but to the hard-heartedness of the oppressors, when the sweat of the brow during the day is followed by the tear at its close?’ This was stirring up popular opinion against the King, of whom she invariably spoke as her ‘oppressor.’ She, however, as significantly directed the public wrath against the peers in her reply to the Hammersmith address, wherein she says: ‘To have been one of the peers who, after accusing and condemning, affected to sit in judgment on Queen Caroline, will be a sure passport to the splendid notoriety of everlasting shame.’ The married ladies of London went up to her with an address of encouragement and sympathy. Her answer to this document contained an asseveration that she was not unworthy of the sympathy of English matrons. ‘I shall never sacrifice that honour,’ she observed, ‘which is the glory of a woman.... I can never be debased while I observe the great maxim of respecting myself.’ An eye-witness well remembers seeing several of these ladies (principally wives of small shopkeepers) descend from the hackney coaches in which they were conveyed to Brandenburgh House. They descended the steps as a man comes down a ladder! The Queen’s answer to them was, however, full of dignity. But her reply to the inhabitants of Greenwich had even more of the matter in it that would sink deep in the bosoms of mothers. After alluding to the period when she was living happily with her daughter, among those who were now addressing her, she added: ‘Can I ever be unmindful that it was a period when I could behold that countenance which I never beheld without vivid delight, and to hear that voice which to my fond ear was like music breathing over violets? Can I forget? No; my soul will never suffer me to forget that, when the cold remains of the beloved object were deposited in the tomb, the malice of my persecutors would not even suffer the name of the mother to be inscribed upon the coffin of her child.