6

within assigned limits; because, like Shakespeare's circle in the water, it is precisely of that quality which too much spreading will disperse to nought.' It is recorded of Mary Lady Honeywood, that, at her decease in her ninety-third year, she had 367 lawful descendants then living, 16 children, 114 grandchildren, 228 great grandchildren, and 9 great great grandchildren. But to show how rapidly blood becomes diffused through females, we have simply to refer to the number of persons who undoubtedly partake of the blood royal. These are now counted by tens of thousands; and (according to Sir Bernard Burke) amongst the descendants of Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, sixth son of Edward I., who died without male issue, were a butcher and a toll-gatherer, namely, Mr. Joseph Smart, of Hales Green, and Mr. George Wilmot, keeper of the turnpike-gate at Cooper's Bank, near Dudley. Amongst the descendants of Thomas Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, fifth son of Edward III., was Mr. Stephen James Penny, the late sexton at St. George's, Hanover Square, who christened his eldest son (we believe still living) Plantagenet.

A single mis-alliance, and the decline proceeds at a gallop. In 1637, the great great grandson of Margaret Plantagenet, daughter and heiress of George Duke of Clarence, was found exercising the cobbler's craft at Newport, in Shropshire. If this scion of royalty had married and left children, he might have stocked the whole country with Plantagenets. Bernard, Duke of Norfolk, of Brooks's and Beefsteak Club celebrity, once resolved to give a dinner to all the descendants of Jockey of Norfolk, Richard III.'s friend, and directed his steward to trace them out and make preparations accordingly. When a list, still incomplete but exceeding six hundred, was laid before him, he gave up the project. All the genuine Howards are entitled to quarter the royal arms in right of their descent from

Margaret de Mowbray (daughter of Jockey of Norfolk'), who married Sir John Howard, fifth in descent from Sir William, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (1297-1308), the founder of the family.1

When estates and dignities are inherited by or through females, and the paternal name is continued by assumption, the chasm is bridged over, and much of the prescriptive feeling popularly attached to an historic family is speedily won back. This is as it should be, assuming the essence of inherited nobility or gentry to consist in our progenitors having been long enough in the higher class to be under the influence of the maxim, noblesse oblige. Female descent will not break the chain of elevating associations when the property and social position are retained and transmitted by an heiress, whilst male descent will hardly preserve these unimpaired long after the estates are separated from the name and its bearers are blended with the crowd. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman,2 we fear it will not take much more to unmake one; and the last Duchess of Douglas surely stretched a point when she frequently invited a London tailor, named Douglas, to dine with her, on the score of a distant connection with her house.

The Percys, who stand at the head of Sir Bernard Burke's examples of vicissitude, hold their heads quite

1 This topic is fully and ably treated by Mr. Charles Long, in his 'Royal Descents: a Genealogical List of the several Persons entitled to quarter the Arms of the Royal Houses of England,' published in 1854. 'The nature of mere Royal descents,' he remarks, is well known to dabblers in genealogy. When once you are enabled to place your client in a current of decent blood, you are certain to carry him up to some one of the great fountains of honour,-Edward the Third, Edward the First, or Henry the Third.' American genealogists assert that Washington was of the blood-royal of England. The descendants of the Kings of Scotland are equally numerous.

2At this time (temp. Ed. III.) there was a distinction of gentlemen of blood and gentlemen of coat-armour, and the third from him that had first coat-armour was to all intents and purposes held a gentleman of blood.'-Gwillym.

as high, and are allowed their precedence almost as readily, as if they could trace a clear descent through males from the first Norman Percy. But the male line of the English branch became extinct as near its source as the reign of Henry II., when Agnes de Percy, daughter and heiress of William, the third lord, married Joceline of Louvain, son of the Duke of Lower Brabant, who assumed the name and arms of the Percys. No diminution of rank can have resulted from such an alliance; and from this renewal of the stock till the death of the eleventh earl in 1670, no succession of feudal nobles played a more conspicuous part or were more frequently mixed up in the troubles of the State. With their vast possessions and paramount influence in the North, it was hardly possible for the Earls of Northumberland to avoid taking a side in every intestine commotion or struggle for supremacy, political or religious; and what with capricious changes of creed by royal command at one time and jarring pretensions to the crown at another, they must have been singularly fortunate, or miraculously sagacious, if they had contrived to be always in the right or always on the winning side. After making all reasonable allowances, however, it must be owned that the Percys had a wonderful knack at getting into difficulty. They not only found rebellion when it lay in their way, but frequently went out of their way to find it, and the result was that, for one of their chiefs to die a natural death, was rather the exception than the rule.

The first earl was slain at Bramham Moor, his brother was beheaded, and his son, Hotspur, fell at Shrewsbury. The second earl was killed at St. Albans; the third at Towton; the fourth was murdered by a mob; the fifth died in his bed, but his second son was attainted and executed at Tyburn, and his eldest, the sixth earl, died of grief and mortification after earning the title of The Unthrifty' by the improvident waste

of his inheritance. For some years after his death the succession was interrupted by the attainder of his brother, and a cloud obscured the fortunes of the family. They had to undergo the mortification of seeing the dukedom of Northumberland conferred on a Dudley; but he, too, getting attainted soon afterwards, the earldom was restored to the rightful heir, who, untaught by adversity, joined the rising of the North against Queen Elizabeth, and ended his life on the scaffold. He makes the seventh. The eighth was sent to the Tower for his exertions in favour of Mary Queen of Scots, and was shot or shot himself there. The ninth was fined 30,000l. and sentenced to imprisonment for life on a charge of being concerned in the Gunpowder Plot.

6

The eleventh, the last male of the English branch, left an only daughter, whose career might match that of the most erratic or adventurous of her race. Before she was sixteen, she had been twice a widow and three times a wife. She was married at thirteen to the only son of the Duke of Newcastle, a lad of her own age, who died in a few months. Her second husband was Thynne of Longleat, Tom of Ten Thousand,' but the marriage was never consummated, and the tie was abruptly severed by the bullet of an assassin, set on by the notorious Count Königsmark, who had been a suitor for her hand, and was desirous of another chance. She then married the proud Duke of Somerset, and probably made him a fitting mate, for when his second wife, a Finch, tapped him familiarly on the shoulder, or, according to another version, seated her

1 So called from his being the reputed possessor of ten thousand a year. He had seduced a maid of honour, which, coupled with his incomplete marriage, gave rise to this epigram

:

'Here lies Tom Thynne, of Longleat Hall,
Who never would so have miscarried
Had he married the woman he lay withal,
Or lain with the woman he married.'

self on his knee, he exclaimed indignantly, 'My first duchess was a Percy, and she never thought of taking such a liberty. One of the most remarkable incidents in her life was yet to come. It was she who, by dint of tears and supplications, prevented Queen Anne from making Swift a bishop, out of revenge for the Windsor Prophecy,' in which she is ridiculed for the redness of her hair and upbraided as having been privy to the murder of her second husband. It was doubted,' says Scott, which imputation she accounted the more cruel insult, especially since the first charge was undoubted, and the second arose only from the malice of the poet.'

When the fortunes of the House of Avenel apparently all hang on Mary, and her marriage with Halbert Glendinning is at hand, the White Spirit looks with sorrow on her golden zone, now diminished to the fineness of a silken thread, and exclaims:

'The knot of fate at length is tied,

The churl is lord, the maid is bride;
Wither bush, and perish well,

Fall'n is the lofty Avenel.'

The spirit or genius, if there be one, which watches over the fortunes of the Percys must have undergone a corresponding sense of depression when by the death of Algernon, the son and successor of the proud duke, without male issue, their honours again devolved on a female, who married Sir Hugh Smithson, a Yorkshire baronet of good family. family. His son is known to fame as having elicited the solitary bon mot attributed to George III. Disappointed at not getting the Garter, in addition to all the rest of the titles and honours commonly enjoyed by the head of his wife's family, he bitterly exclaimed that he was the first Duke of Northumberland that had ever been refused the Garter. 'Yes,' was the retort; and the first Smithson that ever asked for it.'