that king, first called Lord Harry,' and afterwards Duke of Grafton. She had been married to him for her inheritance, still the main property of the Fitzroys, almost as a child. At her second marriage she was a woman of great beauty, as her picture by Lely in the library at Bettisfield shows. Swift, however, who could not speak well of any one, except he expected to get something by it, cavils in one of his coarse vain letters at her personal appearance, as he saw her towards the end of Queen Anne's reign, particularly alluding to a towering headdress that she wore; and, as to that article of apparel, he may have been right enough, but the great painter has drawn her far

1 In King James the Second's Memoirs, written by himself and printed by Macpherson, there is a note, July 15th, 1672: "Buckingham proposed to the King if he would break off the marriage with Lord Harry and Arlington's daughter, and so get Lady Piercy for Lord Harry; but the King answered it was too late, the other being concluded." In 1692 some one persuaded the Duchess, then a widow, to ask for a patent to coin two and three-penny pieces of "coarse silver," like Dutch stivers, which was refused; the lowering of the value of money by one-fourth since the reign of King Henry VIII., so that one shilling of his time was equal to four of King William's, is mentioned in reply by the Secretary of the Treasury. See Calendar of State Papers.

otherwise. Euston belonged to her, and afterwards to her descendants the Fitzroy family; but the late Lord Charles Fitzroy once told me that her second husband, my kinsman, whose birth at Bettisfield, 24th Sept., 1677, I have mentioned already, and whom she married in 1698,1 had a considerable life-rent out of it. The Suffolk neighbourhood of Mildenhall, which Sir Thomas inherited from his mother's family of North, most likely brought about his first acquaintance with his wife; but almost every year he appears to have passed some time at Bettisfield, where he was contented with a moderate house, but having large stables standing between the present parterre on the western side and the park, and, as I suppose, effectually blocking out all view of the Welsh hills, which form the chief charm of our scenery. These stables were pulled down about ninety years since, and the place has become open and picturesque. I understand from the Ordnance Surveyors, that the Red Tower, which they have taken for one of their angles, can be seen from the westward at thirty miles dis

tance.

1 See Narcissus Luttrell's Diary.

The old Welsh song, of which I printed a few lines in English, addressed in the reign of King Henry the Eighth to our forefather of that day, says in another part,

"Thou art a knight having horses and men,

And the honour of all the minstrels."

His descendant of Queen Anne's time appears by more than one token to have indulged in a rather hereditary weakness for large trains of horses;1 but it may be said that at each of these dates, and long afterwards, they were not unnecessary, if they are now, to those who had any leading in their counties. The papers published by Macpherson show how soon Sir Thomas renewed this position of his predecessors, and grew to be of importance among men whose inclination, one way or other, to the Stuarts or to the Hanover successors of the Crown established by the then recent Act of Par

1 In Sir Henry Bunbury's book ("Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer, and other Relics of a Gentleman's Family") there are two letters from the Duc de Lausun, the same who carried away Queen Mary of Modena and her son from Whitehall in 1688, thanking Sir Thomas in May and June, 1716, for the gift of a grey horse. Prior also begs of him, some years earlier, 1709, to buy him a horse at Wrexham fair.

liament,' was jealously watched from day to day, and under all political contingencies. One of the first votes, however, of which I find any notice that he gave as a member of the House of Commons, was in 1704, in favour of tacking the bill against occasional conformity to a money bill, so as to ensure its passage through the House of Lords, and this, whatever may be said against it, indicated the determination, to which he held through life, of maintaining the Church of England, with its affairs as then understood, for a bulwark of public liberty, repelling the restoration of a family more papal than the Pope, and much resembling our contemporaries the Neapolitan Bourbons. Yet he

1 The Act of Settlement was passed 12th June, 1701. When George I. succeeded to the throne under it, there were fiftyseven persons nearer in blood than himself, descendants of James I. and Charles I., but all were Roman Catholics, as the Hanover family had very nearly been.

" At that time Sir Thomas was member for Flintshire; he had been returned in those days of short Parliaments once before, for Thetford; afterwards as long as he was in the House of Commons, and while Speaker, he represented Suffolk; but in 1710 he was also elected at Thetford. A correct list of the House of Commons in successive Parliaments would be a desirable acquisition to public as well as local history. Browne Willis's Notitia Parliamentaria only goes down to 1660, and is imperfect, though a very meritorious work.

E E

was one of the statesmen who for a moment held that restoration in their hands, and he went to Paris in 1712, not like his Cavalier grandfather in 1644, an exile of civil war, with a little money and a weary foot, but privately entrusted by the Queen, and by a large body of Parliamentary and country gentlemen, to form some reliable opinion of her brother's real intentions and views. This was the simple cause of the extraordinary honours shown him by command of King Louis the Fourteenth, which seem to have excited the spleen of the morose, though in his memoirs very entertaining, Duc de St. Simon. Before this he had been with the Duke of Ormond in the Netherlands, and carried to him some verbal instructions, the result

1 A letter to him on this occasion from Lord Bolingbroke is printed in the third volume of that statesman's letters, dated at Whitehall, Sept. 17th, 1712

"Sir,

"I have the honour of your letter of the 17th, N. S., from Ghent, and have lost no time in putting your commands in execution. The pass, in the form you desired it, was this day given to your steward, who came to the office by your order for it. Your journey to France can certainly give no offence to any one here, and I am sure will give great satisfaction to many there. I shall send Prior the good news that he may soon have the honor of seeing you; and, if you approve of it, will write the same to some of my friends of that Court, who will be proud