44 A FORGOTTEN EPISODE. 



ants advanced their pretensions as time went on. The Fifty 

 thousand pounds mentioned in the first petition had grown to 

 Sixty thousand ; while the Bailleul family, whom we know to 

 have been simple Guernsey country folk of moderate means, 

 were claiming honours and dignities entirely unconfirmed by 

 any historical evidence. 



But the fourth and last petition is worded in a very 

 minor key. In the Calendar of Treasury Papers for July to 

 December, 1723, is "The Petition of Margaret Baliol to the 

 Lords of the Treasury. She asks for deliverance to her of 

 her Letters Patent, Warrant, Accounts, etc., mentioned in 

 her printed case annexed " to prevent her (who has exhausted 

 all her substance) and sixty of her family from perishing." 

 She adds " Your Lordships know it is your oppressed 

 petitioners' birthright and patrimony and inheritance for them 

 and their heirs, and it His Sacred Majesty's gracious 

 commands that we should be invested in our property." 

 Annexed to this is the printed copy of her Petition to the 

 House of Commons of 1722-23. 



Margaret Bailleul died in London in 1729, aged 81 years, 

 and after her death, these petitions and struggles for restitution 

 seem to have been abandoned. One cannot but feel what a 

 sad eighty-one years she must have spent, when feverish hope 

 and confidence must have gradually been succeeded by the 

 darkest doubt and despair. But the more one reads the 

 extraordinary statements I have quoted, the more impossible 

 it seems to be to disentangle any possible strand of fact which 

 may be interwoven in this vast tissue of fiction. 



We know certainly that Peter Bailleul's grandfather was 

 not the " Honourable John Bailliol of Scotland," nor did his 

 ancestors ever live in that country ; the Bailleuls as a Channel 

 Island family did not conquer Guernsey, nor did they found 

 Baliol College, Oxford, and it certainly sounds most impro- 

 bable that Peter Bailleul could have lent sixty thousand 

 pounds or sixty thousand pence to William of Orange. In 

 his palmiest days his estate never seems to have exceeded four 

 acres of ground; and we must remember that the Guernseymen 

 of the seventeenth century were exceedingly poor. A local 

 document dated about 1660* gives the population as being 

 about 8,000, of whom " not above two have two hundred 

 pounds per annum, not ten one hundred, not thirty fifty pounds 

 per annum." These small incomes were heavily taxed to pay 

 board, lodge and equip the English garrisons quartered in the 

 Island, while the commerce, on which the fortunes of the 



* " A declaration of ye Condition of ye Islande of Guernesey," 1654-1660. 



(Guille MSS.) 



