royal demise.

"Given at our Palace of St. James's, May 17, 1773.
CHATHAM.
J. DUNNING."

A little before this time (in 1772) Dr. Wilmot had been presented to
the living of Barton-on-the-Heath, in Warwickshire, and thither his
grand-daughter Olive went with him, passing as his niece, and was
educated by him. When she was seventeen or eighteen years old she was
sent back to London, and there became acquainted with Mr. de Serres, an
artist and a member of the Royal Academy, whom she married in 1791.
The union was not a happy one, and a separation took place; but,
before it occurred, Mrs. Ryves, the elder petitioner, was born at
Liverpool in 1797. After the separation Mrs. Serres and her daughter
lived together, and the former gained some celebrity both as an author
and an artist. They moved in good society, were visited by various
persons of distinction, and in 1805 were taken to Brighton and
introduced to the Prince of Wales, who afterwards became George IV.
Two years later (in 1807) Dr. Wilmot died at the mature age of
eighty-five, and the papers in his possession relating to the
marriage, as well as those which had been deposited with Lord Chatham,
who died in 1778, passed into the hands of Lord Warwick. Mrs. Serres
during all this time had no knowledge of the secret of her birth,
until, in 1815, Lord Warwick, being seriously ill, thought it right to
communicate her history to herself and to the Duke of Kent, and to
place the papers in her hands.

Having brought his case thus far, the counsel for the petitioners was
about to read some documents, purporting to be signed by the Duke of
Kent, as declarations of the legitimacy of Mrs. Ryves, but it was
pointed out by the court that he was not entitled to do so, as,
according to his own contention, the Duke of Kent was not a legitimate
member of the royal family. Therefore, resigning this part of his
case, he went on to say that Mrs. Serres, up to the time of her death
in 1834, and the petitioners subsequently, had made every effort to
have the documents on which they founded their claim examined by some
competent tribunal. They now relied upon the documents, upon oral
evidence, and upon the extraordinary likeness of Olive Wilmot to the
royal family, to prove their allegations.

As far as the portraits of Mrs. Serres were concerned, the court
intimated that t