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By Root 268 0

Navy these two years past, and is presently stationed at Rams-gate, about the coastal defences. I cannot think with Frank to prevent it, that the French under Buonaparte are likely to invade our little island; and in the meanwhile, as he assembles his Sea Fencibles2 about Pegwell Bay, my dear brother might just as readily occupy himself in determining the use of a private deep-water port in the Barbadoes. That Lord Harold has recently visited France, and is bent upon acquiring such a port in the Indies, must give one pause; there is intrigue here, and Frank is sure to parse out the meaning. I wrote to him this morning, and am impatient for his reply.

And now I must see to my wardrobe, for assuredly I possess nothing grand enough for the witness-bar of the Royal Gallery. And what am I to say? Only the truth, Sir William told me this morning, as he stepped into his carriage—but what he believes to be true, and what I know to be false, are one and the same.

1. Henry Austen refers here to the London Stock Exchange, founded in Change Alley in 1698. Before the mid-nineteenth-century dismantling of restrictive legislation on joint-stock companies (the result of the South Sea Bubble crisis and its resultant 1720 Act forbidding the formation of companies except by royal charter, or Act of Parliament), the Exchange was concerned primarily with public funds: government stock, East India bonds, canal-company shares, and later utilities and dock-company stocks.

2. This was a corps of fishermen and coastal villagers equipped with boats—a sort of seaside militia—placed on alert in the event of invasion. —Editor's note.

9 January 1803

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HOWEVER UNFORTUNATE THE CIRCUMSTANCES, I MAY justly say that the display of British might that is the House of Lords, fully assembled for trial—a thing that happens not above once in a generation—has not its equal for solemnity and grandeur. The youngest barons proceeded first, and the august file closed with the most ancient of dukes, all shepherded by heralds and the Garter at Arms—two hundred-odd men, arrayed in robes that signified their ranks in the peerage, filing two by two into benches ranged on either side of the Royal Gallery's Bar. On the high dais sat a chair meant for the Lord High Steward.

Below it were the seats reserved for peeresses; here should Isobel have sat, had fortune been kinder. These gave way to Mr. Cranley and Sir William's place, and then to the witnesses’ seats, in one of which I found myself. Lizzy Scratch was to my right, looking well-scrubbed and defiantly in her element, despite the incongruity of her position; I feared her spirits should take a theatrical turn, once called before the Bar. Dr. Philip Pettigrew sat to my left, and beside him the cherubic scholar of Cambridge, Dr. Percival Grant.

Madame Delahoussaye and her daughter were lodged above, in the spectators’ gallery; the briefest of glances revealed their seats to my indifferent eye. Miss Fanny had adopted the dubious mystery of a quantity of black silk veiling about her blond curls; it was sheer enough to disclose a flash of blue eyes and white teeth, while enshrouding her in all the discretion her interesting circumstances demanded. I knew her to be wishing for a greater part in the drama—or a wider stage, at least, for the parading of her costume; and would gladly have exchanged my place for hers.

A solemn bell tolled the hour; all rose; and a Proclamation of Silence was issued by the Serjeant at Arms. The Clerk of the Crown then knelt to present the Commission under the Great Seal to the Lord High Steward, who returned it to him; at which point the Clerk read its substance aloud, at interminable length, and we were treated to a declaration of “God Save the King!”

We must then endure the Certiorari and Return, a summary of the House of Lords’ authority to preside over the case, with each and every peer a judge of fact and of law; much precedent was stated for their office, and many mouldy precepts of common law dredged before the assembly; but at last, when I had almost despaired of my sanity,