The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 252: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SELLIS TRAGEDY 223 with me for upwards of a year. He told me everything, he gave me the letter— But I am anticipating — ”’ ‘‘ Yes, pray proceed in due course, my dear friend,’’ said Lady Prescott, ‘‘ although I am on the tenter-hooks of curiosity.” “You may conceive,’ resumed the Honourable Mrs. Bredalbane, ‘‘ the amazement, the horror, and the conster- nation which seized upon the startled metropolis when the morning papers of June Ist announced that ‘ the Duke of Cumberland had been surprised while asleep by an attempted assassination, made by one of his valets named Sellis, and who had put a period to his own existence.’ A thousand rumours were instantaneously in circulation, and in many quarters the story of the suicide was utterly disbelieved, the valet was declared to have been murdered, and the darkest hints were thrown out. A jury was summoned in the afternoon of the Ist of June to investigate the matter. But you may conceive the astonishment of the jury when the coroner began by informing them ‘ that a long examina- tion of the principal witnesses had already been gone into, and that of course it would only now be necessary to have the depositions then taken read before them (the jury) to the witnesses!’ All the depositions which had been pre- viously and privately taken were therefore now read. ‘The first was that of the Duke of Cumberland. His Royal Highness deposed that he was awakened from a profound sleep by the sensation of some blows being dealt upon his forehead, and at first he thought there was a bat in the room flying over his head. But by the light of the wax taper he beheld the form of a man, and springing from his couch, he erappled with him, wrenching away the sword which had been the weapon of attack. He then saw the assassin escape, but without perceiving who he was, and raising his voice, he summoned Neale, who slept in the adjoining room. Neale instantaneously hurried to his royal matter, and then they went to the hall together to give the alarm in the manner I have already described. On returning to the duke’s chamber, they instituted a search in a closet opening there- from, and in that closet they found a pair of Sellis’s slippers. From this circumstance it was inferred that Sellis was the assassin, that he had concealed himself in the closet pre- viously to the duke retiring for the night, and that, failing Connicloooks (C(O)