Stirling peerage

40 INTRODUCTION.
gave an air of brilliancy to the assemblage, which
resembled the audience of a theatre rather than of a
hall of judgment. And all this to witness the infirmities
of poor human nature !
The whole proceedings of Mr Humphrys during the
progress of his " claim," have been, to speak artistically,
" in keeping ; " and he deserves credit for the manner
in which he has conducted himself under his assumed
dignities. Not even Abon Hassan, in his dream of
sovereigTity, could have performed the part with
greater propriety.
Of his early history little is known, save what
appears from the evidence adduced on his trial. His
father, it seems, was a respectable merchant in Bir-
mingham, who lived in good style. He went abroad
in 1802, accompanied by his son, the claimant; and
not immediately returning upon the declaration of
hostilities, which succeeded the short peace, was, in.
common with many other natives of this country,
arbitrarily detained by Napoleon. Mr Humphrys,
the elder, died at Verdun in 1807, and the son
remained a prisoner in France till the general peace in
1814. He returned in 1815, and commenced business
as a teacher near Worcester.*
When Mr Humphrys first bethought him of aspiring
to the honours of a peerage does not precisely appear ;
but it is not improbable that his pretensions were first
* This is spoken to in the evidence. Prior to the trial, a paragraph
in the Worcester Chronicle of March, 1839, mentions that " the Earl of
Stirling, who is now under prosecution in Scotland, on a charge of
forging certain document', calculated to forward his claim to the
peerage, formerly kept a school near Worcester, called Netherton-House
Academy. He then went under the name of Mr Alexander Humphrys.'"