[the queen] thought herself justified in her favour to her when she was ashamed of it elsewhere.' Further, Burnet looked on her as in all respects a credit and an ornament

to the court,' and contrasted her forcibly with Mrs. Masham, who was extremely mean and vulgar in her manners, of very unequal temper, childishly exceptious and passionate.'

The duchess left one surviving son, Algernon, Lord Hertford, who afterwards succeeded to the dukedom, and three daughters, all of whom were already married.1 It was through Sir William Wyndham, the husband of the second daughter, Katherine, that the Duke of Somerset had retired from court in 1716. In the Rebellion of 1715 the ministry suspected Sir William, and to prevent him from joining the rebels, or making any movement in their favour in the West, where his interest was very powerful, they determined to take him prisoner. The duke, hearing of the design, went to court and offered himself as security for his son-in-law's appearance whenever he should be called. The king, it was said, in order to make the Duke easy,' gave him his royal word that Sir William should not be taken into custody, and the duke went away content. But the ministers seem to have had too sure intelligence of Sir William's proceedings to allow themselves to be bound by the royal word, and two messengers were sent west to take him prisoner. They seized him at his house in Somersetshire as he was asleep in bed, but, on pretence of going into the next room to take leave of his wife, who was with child, he made his escape through a postern. A proclamation offering a reward of £1000 for his discovery was then issued, and Sir William, finding one of his letters had been intercepted, surrendered

1 Elizabeth married Henry O'Brien, Earl of Thomond; Katherine married Sir William Wyndham, and Anne married Peregrine Osborne, afterwards Duke of Leeds. Three children had died young and unmarried, two sons, Percy (who died in 1721 having served as member for Cockermouth), Charles, who died in 1711, and a daughter, Frances, who died in 1720.

himself to his brother-in-law, Lord Hertford. The duke was enraged, flew to court, and made resignation of all his places and employments, to which, as we have seen, he had been restored by George 1. All the uniforms and badges, belonging to himself and his servants in his office of Master of the Horse, he caused to be carried in a common dust cart to St. James's, where he commanded his servants to shoot the rubbish' into one of the courtyards. He could not refrain,' wrote a contemporary, from using many virulent expressions against the king, and felt so great a disgust towards both the king and his ministers that he never appeared any more at court until the next king's (George II.) accession, when he was sworn of the Privy Council, and carried the orb at the Coronation.'

.

In the meanwhile the duke had married his second wife. Dr. William Stratford of Christ Church, Oxford, Harley's voluminous correspondent, wrote to the latter in January 1725-6: The Duke of Somerset's marriage at present is the entertainment of the town. No one of the duke's family had the least suspicion of it till it was over. He had with her £5000, but has made settle

ments proper for a Duchess of Somerset.' Early in February, Stratford wrote further: The account that Lord Nottingham 1 gives of the match is that he had no reason to expect it till six weeks ago he received a letter from the Duke of Somerset to desire him to give him leave to make his addresses to his daughter, and that, when he was received, the duke desired the utmost secrecy. He had with her only the usual portion of the daughters of that family-£5000, and he is said to have presented her with £2000 of it on the wedding-day.' A few years later the duke retired to Pet

1 The father of the bride, commonly known as 'Dismals,' from his lugubrious appearance. Gloom was a family characteristic, and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams nicknamed them The Black Funereal Finches.'

worth, where his wife endured most of those twenty odd years of what Walpole termed her slavery' with him.

·

During these years his son, Lord Hertford, who had won for himself a military reputation in the early campaigns in Anne's reign, under Marlborough, was awarded several preferments. In 1739 he was made Lieutenant-General of the Horse, the next year Colonel of the Royal Horse Guards, and in 1742 Governor of the Island of Guernsey. He did not, however, take up residence at Guernsey, probably through his chronic ill-health, but that year rented a house called Richings Park (afterwards Percy Lodge), west of Colnbrook, from Lord Bathurst. For several years after his marriage with Francis Thynne in 1713, Hertford and his wife had lived at the Trowbridge Castle at Marlborough. Lady Hertford loved Marlborough, and wrote of it to a friend: Whether it is because this was the first habitation I was mistress of in those cheerful years when everything assumed a smiling aspect from vivacity that attends that season of life, or because almost every little ornament has been made either by my lord's or by my own contrivance, I cannot tell, but I certainly feel a partiality for this place which an indifferent person would be at a loss to account for.' She was full of happiness in watching the growth and character of her only son, George Seymour, Lord Beauchamp. She wrote to Dr. Watts in 1731: 'I assure you my little boy is grown a great proficient in your "Songs for Children," and sings them with great pleasure.' Six years later she wrote again to Dr. Watts: 'I own I find a pleasure in thinking that I perceive dawnings of an honest heart and tolerable reasonings in Lord Beauchamp and his governor and I flatter ourselves that we see a clearness of judgment and distinctness of ideas in the themes he composes, which are infinitely the favourite part of his studies, and always performed with good humour, though he is obliged to write them in three languages-English, Latin,

and French.' Of her only daughter, Lady Elizabeth (Betty) Seymour, she wrote: 'I have the happiness to see her a very good-natured, sensible young woman, with a sincere sense of religion and virtue, and the same observance from affection to my lord and me at almost one-and-twenty years old that she had in her earliest childhood.' The death of Lord Beauchamp in 1744 was not only a terrible grief to his mother and father, but a severe blow to the pride of his grandfather, the Proud Duke. It is a most terrible loss to his parents, Lord Beauchamp's death,' wrote Horace Walpole. If they were out of the question one could not be sorry for such a mortification to the pride of old Somerset. He has written a most shocking letter imaginable to poor Lord Hertford, telling him it is a judgment on him for all his undutifulness, and that he must always look upon himself as the cause of his son's death. Lord Hertford is as good a man as lives, and has always been most unreasonably used by that old tyrant.'1 Lord Beauchamp had died of smallpox at Bologna on the eve of his nineteenth birthday, and now the title would revert, after the death of Lord Hertford, to the descendants of the Protector by his first wife, Katharine Filliol. Between Sir Edward Seymour, baronet and Speaker of the House of Commons, and the Duke of Somerset, there had been no love lost. Now his eldest son, as representative of the Filliol line, would be Duke of Somerset.

The old duke lived four years longer, dying on the 2nd of 1 There had been a temporary reconciliation between the father and son two years before. Lord Hertford had been desired to resign his regiment in favour of the Duke of Argyll. He declared he had received it from the king, and if His Majesty pleased to take it back he might, but he did not know why he should resign it. Afterwards he sent a letter to the king by Lord Beauchamp resigning his regiment, his Governorship of Guernsey and his wife's pension as Lady of the Bedchamber to the late queen. 'His old Grace of Somerset' was pleased, and sent for Lord Hertford to tell him he had behaved like his son. But his dislike for his son was proverbial.

December 1748, at the respectable age of eighty-six.1 A few days later Walpole wrote: Old Somerset is at last dead.

. . He tendered his pride even beyond his hate; for he has left the present Duke all the furniture of his palaces, and forbore to charge the estate according to a power he had with £35,000.' To his duchess he left only £1000 and a small farm, besides her jointure, while the whole of his unsettled estate went absolutely to his two daughters by her, though neither of them was of age. Lindsay, or Ancaster House,2 in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which the duke had bought of the Duke of Ancaster, was left to the elder daughter, in the hope that she would allow her mother to live in it. To Sir Thomas Bootle, whom he had befriended in his earlier years, the duke left half a borough, and to his own grandson, Sir Charles Wyndham, a whole borough, with an estate costing £14,000. Other legacies were £1000 to another grandson, Mr. O'Brien (brother of Sir Charles Wyndham, and afterwards Earl of Thomond), and £100 a year to Miss Wyndham, 'just such a legacy as you would give to a housekeeper to prevent her from going to service again.' Horace Walpole speaks also of the famous settlement' of the Percy estates having been found. The first duchess had settled her estates, in case her son died without heirs male, on the children of her daughter Katharine, who had married Sir William Wyndham, while the barony of Percy was to go to her son's daughter.

1 He was buried in Salisbury Cathedral, where a statue by Rysbrack surmounts a commonplace Latin epitaph.

2 The house is on the west side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, next door to 'James Forster's house,' the dwelling of 'Mr. Tulkinghorn,' that 'tight, unopenable oyster of an old school' (cf. Bleak House). Lindsay House was built by Inigo Jones, and was formerly considered very handsome, the open balustrade on the top of the house being ornamented by four urns. It is now converted into two houses, 59 and 60 Lincoln's Inn. A neglected stone path leads round a crescent-shaped piece of rough gravel to the house; on either side are high bare brick walls, on each of which stands an ornate stone urn.