Captain Briggs and Captain Pechell, with whom she had sailed, deposed to some folly, but no positive guilt. Something was attempted to be made out of the arrangement of the respective berths on board the ship commanded by the first officer, but with no remarkable success. The captain of the polacca gave evidence that was much more damaging, with reference to the unseemliness of sleeping on deck, beneath a tent—for which the heat of the atmosphere and the horses and mules that were below deck hardly offered sufficient authority. Again, there was testimony of such disgraceful conduct at inns that, if it be accepted, no other conclusion can be arrived at than that those guilty of it must not only have been lost to all sense of shame, but eager that their iniquity should be a spectacle to all beholders. ‘As the whole case now is,’ says a contemporary writer, ‘by making it more gross than in all human probability it could be, the evidence, where it might otherwise be trusted, is rendered unworthy of credit.’
But there were incidents in the drama that were not all for the audience. ‘Nature,’ says the writer of the ‘Supplementary Letters’ annexed to the ‘Diary Illustrative of the Court of George IV.,’ ‘often mixes up the sublime and the ridiculous helplessly, as it would seem; and I met to-day with a curious instance of her indifference. I forget how it happened, but I was driven accidentally against a curtain, and saw, in consequence, behind it Lord Castlereagh, sitting on a stair by himself, holding his hand to his ear, to keep the sound and words of the evidence which the witness under examination at the bar was giving. Notwithstanding the moody wrath of my ruminations, I could not help laughing at the discovery, and his lordship looked equally amused, and was quite as much discomposed. He smiled, and I withdrew. I met him afterwards in the lobby of the House of Commons, when he again smiled.’
Masons, painters, whitewashers, and waiters vied, or seemed to vie, with each other in the dirty character of their depositions. Rastelli, a groom, but discarded as a thief, did not go further, but both sides evidently considered him as an unmitigated scoundrel, and he was somehow permitted to disappear, as if either side was anxious to be rid of him. Scarcely more respectable was the woman Dumont, who dwelt on the abominations to which she swore as if she loved thinking of them. She was worse than the boatmen, bakers, and others with aliases to their names, who, however, deposed to circumstances sufficiently gross in character, and drew dreadfully strong inferences from generally slender but occasionally very suspicious premises.
The loathsome mass was got through by the 7th of September, when the House adjourned till the 3rd of October. The members needed breathing time, and all parties, the public included, stood in urgent need of that peculiar civet whose virtue, according to the poet, lies in its power to sweeten the imagination.
The course of the trial exhibited more than one trait illustrative of the English Bar, and also of individuals. Thus, in the interim between the closing of the King’s case and the opening of the Queen’s defence by Mr. Brougham, the last-named gentleman went down to Yorkshire to attend the assizes there. The chief advocate of one Sovereign against another was there engaged in a cause on behalf of an old woman upon whose pig-cot a trespass had been committed. The tenement in question was on the border of a common of one hundred acres, upon five yards of which it was alleged to have unduly encroached, and was therefore pulled down by the landlord. The poor woman sought for damages, she having held occupation by a yearly rental of sixpence, and sixpence on entering. The learned counsel pleaded his poor client’s cause successfully, and, having procured for her the value of her levelled pig-cot, some forty shillings, he returned to town to endeavour to plead as successfully the cause of the Queen. The re-opening of the case took place on the 3rd of October. Before Mr. Brougham rose to speak, Lord Liverpool made severe introductory remarks, for the purpose of disavowing all improper dealing with the witnesses on the part of Government. He also expressed his readiness to exhibit an account of all moneys paid to the witnesses in support of the bill.
Mr. Brougham then entered on the Queen’s defence in a speech of great boldness and power. The sentiments put forth in that oration were probably not endorsed by Lord Brougham. He declared, too, that nothing should prevent him from fulfilling his duty, and that he would recriminate upon the King if he found it necessary to do so. The threat gave some uneasiness to ministers, but they trusted, nevertheless, to the learned counsel’s discretion. He would have been justified in the public mind if he had realised his promise. The popular opinion, however, hardly supported him in what followed, when he declared that an English advocate could look to nothing but the rights of his client, and that, even if the country itself should suffer, his feelings as a patriot must give way to his professional obligations. This was only one of many instances of the abuse of the very extensively abused and widely misunderstood maxim of Fiat justitia ruat cœlum.
Denman’s famous speech, which many peers thought superior to Brougham’s, was partly prepared, as to some of its points, at one of the ‘Sundays’ he used to spend at Holland House. There, Denman, after suggestions from Dr. Parr, resolved to draw a parallel between Caroline and Octavia, George and Nero. And this he did with such effect as regards George IV. that, veiled as the most personal allusion was, the King never forgot him who made it.
Mr. Denman, the Queen’s solicitor-general, was not less legally audacious, if one may so speak, than his great leader. In a voice of thunder, and in presence of the assembled peerage of the realm, he denounced one of the King’s brothers as a calumniator. Mr. Rush, who was present on the occasion, says, ‘the words were, “Come forth, THOU SLANDERER!”—a denunciation,’ he goes on to say, ‘the more severe from the sarcasm with which it was done, and the turn of his eye towards its object.’ That object was the Duke of Clarence; and in reference to the exclamation, and the fierce spirit of the hour generally, Mr. Rush says: ‘Even after the whole trial had ended, Sir Francis Burdett, just out of prison for one libel, proclaimed aloud to his constituents, and had it printed in all the papers, that the ministers ALL DESERVED TO BE HANGED. This tempest of abuse, incessantly directed against the King and all who stood by him, was borne during several months, without the slightest attempt to check or punish it; and it is too prominent a fact to be left unnoticed that the same advocate who so fearlessly uttered the above denunciation was made attorney-general when the prince of the blood who was the OBJECT OF IT sat upon the throne, and was subsequently raised to the still higher dignity of lord chief justice.’
By the end of the third day of the defence the testimony had assumed so favourable an aspect for the Queen that ministers began to deliberate upon the question of throwing up the bill altogether. During the following fortnight, however, the subsequent testimony was not so decidedly contradictory of what the witnesses on the other side had sworn to, and the government then decided that the bill should take its course. The first witness was a Mr. Lemann, clerk to the Queen’s solicitor. His deposition was to the effect that he had been sent to Baden to solicit the attendance of Baron Dante, the Grand Duke’s chamberlain. The baron, who was proprietor of an estate in Hanover, and who consulted his memoranda before answering the solicitation, finally, and under sanction, if not order, of his ducal master, refused to attend as a witness. Colonel St. Leger simply proved that he did not resign his appointment in the Queen’s household from any knowledge of her having conducted herself improperly, but on account of ill health. The Earl of Guildford spoke to the general propriety of the Queen’s conduct abroad while under his observation; and Lord Glenbervie showed that the royal reputation had not been dimmed, in his eyes at least, during his residence in Italy, or otherwise he would not have permitted Lady Glenbervie to act, even for a brief time, as lady-in-waiting to the Princess. Lady Charlotte Lindsay deposed to having heard reports unfavourably affecting that reputation, but she had never seen anything to confirm them. Persons of inferior rank, in attendance on the Princess, deposed to the same effect. The testimony of Dr. Holland and Mr. Mills was of a highly favourable character, exact and decisive. The evidence of other witnesses was equally favourable to the character and conduct of the courier chamberlain; and, partly in answer to the evidence which spoke of her Royal Highness receiving strangers in her sleeping apartments, the Earl of Llandaff, who had resided in Italy with his lady and family, showed that such a circumstance was a part of the custom of Italy. Mr. Keppel Craven, who had originally engaged Bergami for the service of the Princess, declared that the individual in question brought excellent testimonials with him, and that he was of respectable family and behaved with propriety. Mr. Craven added that he had heard much about spies, and that he had admonished the Princess touching the being seen with Bergami in attendance as a servant. This evidence was corroborated by that of Sir W. Gell. A writer, commenting upon the testimony of these witnesses and that given on the other side, remarks: that the witnesses on the King’s side ‘told improbable stories, and none of them had the look of speaking from recollection ... there is a visible difference between the expression of the countenance in telling a recollection and an imagination, especially such stories as they told.’[18]
It was further proved that, if Bergami kissed the Princess’s hand, he did no more than what was commonly done by respectable Italian servants by way of homage to their mistress.