Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton

by Anonymous

The second stage of the story was contained in a letter to Mr. Fielding, the Bow Street magistrate, in October, 1817. Having been threatened with arrest, she wrote to him for protection, and in this letter she represented herself as the natural daughter of the late Duke of Cumberland by a sister of the late Dr. Wilmot, whom he had seduced under promise of marriage, she being a lady of large fortune. In connection with this stage of the story, he referred to another letter which she wrote to the Prince-Regent in July, 1818, in which she stated that Lord Warwick had told her the story of her birth in his lifetime, but without showing her any documents; that he excused himself for not having made the disclosure before by saying that he was unable to repay a sum of £2000 which had been confided to him by the Duke of Cumberland for her benefit; and then she actually went on to say that when Lord Warwick died she thought all evidence was lost until she opened a sealed packet which contained the documents. This was quite inconsistent with the extraordinary story of Mrs. Ryves as to the communication of the papers to her and her mother in 1815.

The claim of legitimate royal birth was first brought forward at a time of great excitement and agitation, when the case of Queen Caroline was before the public; and it was brought forward in a tone of intimidation—a revolution being threatened if the claim were not recognised within a few hours. The documents were changed at times to suit the changing story, and there was every reason to believe that they were concocted by Mrs. Serres herself, who was a careful student of the Junius MSS., who was an artist and practised caligraphist, and who had gone through such a course of study as well prepared her for the fabrication of forged documents. The internal evidence of the papers themselves proved that they were the most ridiculous, absurd, preposterous series of forgeries that perverted ingenuity ever invented. If every expert that ever lived in the world swore to the genuineness of these documents, they could not possibly believe them to be genuine. They were all written on little scraps and slips of paper such as no human being ever would have used for the purpose of recording transactions of this kind, and in everyone of these pieces of paper the watermark of date was wanting.

At this stage of his address the Attorney-General was interrupted by the foreman of the jury, who stated that himself and his colleagues were unanimously of opinion that the signatures to the documents were not genuine.

The Lord Chief-Justice, thereupon, immediately remarked that they shared the opinion which his learned brethren and himself had entertained for a long time—that everyone of the documents was spurious.

After some observations by the counsel for the petitioner, who persisted that the papers produced were genuine, the Lord Chief-Justice proceeded to sum up the facts of the case. He said it was a question whether the internal evidence in the documents of spuriousness and forgery was not quite as strong as the evidence resulting from the examination of their handwriting. Two or three of them appeared to be such outrages on all probability, that even if there had been strong evidence of the genuineness of their handwriting, no man of common sense could come to the conclusion that they were genuine. Some of them were produced to prove that King George III. had ordered the fraud to be committed of rebaptising an infant child under a false name as the daughter of persons whose daughter she was not; another showed that the king had divested the crown of one of its noblest appendages—the Duchy of Lancaster—by a document he was not competent by law to execute, written upon a loose piece of paper, and countersigned by W. Pitt and Dunning; by another document, also written upon a loose piece of paper, he expressed his royal will to the Lords and Commons, that when he should be dead they should recognise this lady as Duchess of Cumberland. These papers bore the strongest internal evidence of their spuriousness. The evidence as to the marriage of the Duke of Cumberland with Olive Wilmot could not be separated from that part of the evidence which struck at the legitimacy of the Royal Family, by purporting to establish the marriage of George III. to a person named Hannah Lightfoot. Could any one believe that the documents on which that marriage was attested by W. Pitt and Dunning were genuine? But the petitioner could not help putting forward the certificates of that marriage, because two of them were written on the back of the certificate of the marriage of the Duke of Cumberland with Olive Wilmot. Men of intelligence could not fail to see the motive for writing the certificates of those two marriages on the same piece of paper. The first claim to the consideration of the royal family put forward by Mrs. Serres was, that she was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Cumberland by Mrs. Payne—a married woman. Her next claim was, that she was his daughter by an unmarried sister of Dr. Wilmot. She lastly put forward her present claim, that she was the offspring of a lawful marriage between the duke and Olive, the daughter of Dr. Wilmot. At the time when the claim was put forward in its last shape, it was accompanied by an attempt at intimidation, not only on the score of the injustice that would be done if George IV. refused to recognise the claim, but also on the score that she was in possession of documents showing that George III., at the time he was married to Queen Charlotte, had a wife living, and had issue by her; and consequently that George IV., who had just then ascended the throne, was illegitimate, and was not the lawful sovereign of the realm. And the documents having reference to George III.'s first marriage were inseparably attached to the documents by which the legitimacy of Mrs. Serres was supposed to be established, with the view, no doubt, of impressing on the king's mind the fact that she could not put forward her claims, as she intended to do, without at the same time making public the fact that the marriage between George III. and Queen Charlotte was invalid. Could any one believe in the authenticity of certificates like these; or was it possible to imagine that, even if Hannah Lightfoot had existed, and asserted her claim, great officers of state like Chatham and Dunning should have recognised her as "Hannah Regina," as they were said to have done?

In another document the Duke of Kent gave the guardianship of his daughter to the Princess Olive. Remembering the way in which that lady had been brought up, and the society in which she had moved, could the Duke of Kent ever have dreamed of superseding his own wife, the mother of the infant princess, and passing by all the other distinguished members of his family, and conferring on Mrs. Serres, the landscape painter, the sole guardianship of the future Queen of England? They must also bear in mind the way in which the claim had been brought forward. The irresistible inference from the different tales told was, that the documents were from time to time prepared to meet the form which her claims from time to time assumed. A great deal had been said about different members of the royal family having countenanced and supported this lady. He could quite understand, if an appeal was made on her behalf as an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Cumberland, that a generous-minded prince might say, "As you have our blood flowing in your veins, you shall not be left in want;" and, very likely, papers might have been shown to some members of the royal family in support of that claim which they believed to be genuine. It was just as easy to fabricate papers showing her illegitimacy as to fabricate those produced; and probably such papers would not be very rigorously scrutinized. But it was not possible to believe that the documents now produced (including the Hannah Lightfoot certificates) had been shown to members of the royal family, and pronounced by them to be genuine. He could not understand why the secret was to be kept after the Duke of Cumberland's death, when there was no longer any danger that he would incur the risk of punishment for bigamy; and why the death of George III. should be fixed upon as the time for disclosing it. The death of George III. was the very time when it would become important to keep the secret, for if it had been then disclosed, it would have shown that neither George IV. nor the Duke of Kent were entitled to succeed to the throne. Why then should the Duke of Kent stipulate for the keeping of the secret until George III. died? They must look at all the circumstances of the case, and say whether they believed the documents produced by the petitioner to be genuine.

The jury at once found that they were not satisfied that Olive Serres, the mother of Mrs. Ryves, was the legitimate daughter of Henry Frederick Duke of Cumberland, and Olive his wife; that they were not satisfied that Henry Frederick Duke of Cumberland was lawfully married to Olive Wilmot on the 4th of March, 1767. On the other issues—that Mrs. Ryves was the legitimate daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Serres, and that the younger petitioner, W.H. Ryves, was the legitimate son of Mr. and Mrs. Ryves—they found for the petitioner.

On the motion of the Attorney-General, the judges ordered the documents produced by the petitioners to be impounded.

It may be noted, in conclusion, that if Mrs. Ryves had succeeded in proving that her mother was a princess of the blood royal, she would at the same time have established her own illegitimacy. The alleged marriage of the Duke of Cumberland took place before the passing of the Royal Marriage Act; and, therefore, if Mrs. Serres had been the duke's daughter, she would have been a princess of the blood royal. But that Act had been passed before the marriage of Mrs. Serres to her husband, and would have rendered it invalid, and consequently her issue would have been illegitimate. As it was, Mrs. Ryves obtained a declaration of her legitimacy; but in so doing she sacrificed all her pretensions to royal descent.