CHAPTER I

THE CRADLE AND THE RACE

Nam genus et proavos et quæ non fecimus ipsi, Vix ea nostra voco.

Of course it was not good taste in Ajax to brag so loudly of being the great-grandson of Jupiter, but then Ulysses need not have snubbed him so fiercely, and then gone on to show how he, too, was god-born, but on the mother’s side as well as on the father’s. Nor was it quite consistent in Ovid, who struggled so proudly for his privileges as _eques_ in the theatre, to clothe these Socialist sentiments in a pair of hexameter lines; but then, in spite of that little flirtation with a naughty Princess, which caused his banishment, Ovid was a Radical and a poet, which gave him a double claim to inconsistency.

The sentiment is, as it seems to me, utterly false and untrue to the very nature of man. From the earliest times, and even in the most savage races, men have been proud of such ancestry as they could lay claim to, and many a poor peasant loves to tell you that he is living in the cottage that his forebears have held for generations. Pride of Race and Pride of Country go hand-in-hand as two forms of Patriotism.

In 1862 poor Laurence Oliphant and I—he, the most charming of companions, just beginning to be bitten by mysticism—were travelling together on the Continent. He was still suffering from the cruel wounds which he received in the night attack by Rônins on the Legation at Yedo in 1861. He had been ordered to drink the iron waters of Spa, and I agreed to go with him for my summer holiday. The first evening at the table d’hôte dinner, I sat next to a very agreeable gentleman with whom I speedily made friends. After about half an hour’s talk he asked my name. I told him who I was. “Dear me,” he said, “if you are the son of Mr. Mitford of Exbury and Lady Georgina Ashburnham, you are descended from perhaps the two oldest Saxon families in England. Sir, you are a very remarkable person.” I felt as Whistler, in his quaint way, told me that he did when Carlyle used the same words to him, “That that was about what was the matter with me!” and when I asked who was my genealogical acquaintance, he turned out to be no less an authority than Sir Bernard Burke.

But in matter of genealogy, as in all others, there are iconoclasts, and now come people of much learning, who declare that the Saxon Mitfords are really Norman Bertrams, and that the famous Ashburnhams, “of stupendous antiquity,” are the descendants of a Norman family who were Counts of Eu—in Domesday Book variously called Estriels, Escriol, Criol, Crieul, or Anglicized as Kiriell, and even Cruel. That after all these centuries, and after such countless marriages as must have taken place in them, so curious an animal as a man of pure Saxon blood, or, indeed, of any pure blood, should still be in existence is, of course, an impossibility. It may be rank nonsense to talk of the Mitfords and the Ashburnhams as two of the oldest Saxon families in England, when there can be no such families, but there can be no doubt that they are both of very great antiquity.

Of the Ashburnhams old Fuller says, “My poor and plaine pen is willing though unable to add any lustre to this family of stupendous antiquitie.” According to Francis Thynne, a herald of Queen Elizabeth’s time, “Bertram Ashburnham, a Baron of Kent, was Constable of Dover Castle in 1066; which Bertram was beheaded by William the Conqueror because he did so valiantly defend the same against the Duke of Normandy.” This is quoted by the Duchess of Cleveland in her “Battle Abbey Roll,” and she then labours with all her might to demolish the whole story. Gwillim’s “Heraldry,” however, takes the other view, and makes out that the second holder of the office of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports was this same Bertram Ashburnham, and that it was he who, on behalf of the King, raised the troops to resist the invasion, Harold himself being away engaged in quelling a rebellion in the North. “Since which time until now, by the grace of God, there hath not been wanting an Ashburnham of Ashburnham in Sussex.”

[Illustration: PORTRAIT IN MEMORY OF BERTRAM ASHBURNHAM, LORD WARDEN OF THE CINQUE PORTS IN KING HAROLD’S TIME.

_From Gwillim’s Heraldry._]

Gwillim has a curious engraving of a portrait “in memory of” this hero in seventeenth-century armour, and the tradition in the family is that it was John Ashburnham, King Charles the First’s gentleman, who sat for this very grim effigy. Then there is another story, for which I know not the authority, if, indeed, there be any, to the effect that Bertram Ashburnham defended the Castle so stoutly that William made terms with him and raised the siege, allowing the Saxon to name his own conditions, which were that he and his men should leave with all the honours of war, and that the law of gavelkind should obtain in Kent for all time. This brave tale, I am afraid, must be dismissed as moonshine.

So there is much complication, but on one point all the authorities are agreed, and that is the marriage of the Norman knight, Bertram, with the Saxon heiress of Mitford; so far as that goes, if we may not call ourselves a Saxon family, our Saxon descent is not denied to us.

About two miles to the west of Morpeth, on a spot romantic enough to inspire a poet’s dream, fair enough for a painter to linger over with a lover’s delight, stand the ruins of the old Saxon castle of Mitford. That is the Cradle of our Race. The keep, battered by storms of war and weather, rises on a rocky eminence to the south of the river Wansbeck,[1] close to the point where the two fords of the Wansbeck and the Font meet. It was from this meeting that the Castle and village took their name,[2] just as Coblenz did from the _confluentiæ_ of Rhine and Moselle. The rivers of Northumberland, tearing their way through the rocks, between banks fringed with the most picturesque vegetation, overhanging trees, shrubs, ferns, docks, and all the fairy-like greenery which they wear with such grace, are the glory of that part of the country. Such streams as the Wansbeck and the Coquet are a haunting memory.

Not even the most audaciously inventive of antiquaries has, so far as I know, been brave enough to fix the date of the Castle’s building; all that can be said is that it is very old. Burke, on the authority of the “Durham Booke,” tells the story how a certain “Robert Mitford, Esq., carried an old writeing to produce at Durham upon some occasion, by wch one of ye ancestors of Mitfords, of Mitford, in ye time of K. Edwd. ye Confessor, did assure his wife’s joynture out of Lands in Mitford, wch writeing Sir Joseph Craddock saw and attests it under the hand, but is since embezzled and lost.” That, since the document is lost, is but a weak foundation upon which to base a belief. The tale, however, must be true, for William the Conqueror’s advent followed almost immediately upon the death of King Edward, and that the Castle was at the time of the Conquest in the possession of Sir John de Mitford is a fact. Beyond that time we must be content to leave the family history lost in the clouds.

Even so, the story is old enough, and we may well be proud of our old cousin Edward Mitford, the head of the family, who fulfilled more than his century of life in 1911, and died on the property and in sight of the ruined Castle which belonged to our ancestors some nine hundred years ago.

Among the knights who fought at Hastings in the train of William the Conqueror were two brothers, Sir Robert[3] and Sir William Bertram. “Robert Bertram ki estoit tort” (crooked) was Lord of Briquebec, near Valognes, a barony consisting of forty knights’ fees, which is said to have taken its name from Brico, a Norwegian Viking, who was the ancestor of the Bertram family.[4] It was the well-known policy of the Conqueror to pacify England and consolidate his power by promoting or even making up marriages between his followers and the Saxons whom they had conquered—especially did this judicious match-making seem to be desirable where there was an heiress to be won. At the time of the Conquest, Sir John de Mitford, who owned the Castle and Barony of Mitford, had no son. His only daughter, Sibella, was his heiress, and between her and Sir Robert Bertram a marriage was arranged and carried into effect.

[Illustration: THE RUINS OF MITFORD CASTLE, NEAR MORPETH, NORTHUMBERLAND.

_From a drawing, dated August, 1769, by J. Mitford (Lord Redesdale), d. August, 1769._]

I wonder what sort of a home it made, this union between the Saxon girl, of whom I like to believe that she was as beautiful as the Lady Rowena, and the Norman warrior? Was it altogether a _mariage de convenance_? Was Sibella forced into it, or might he have lighted just the least little spark of love in her breast?—and when once they were married, did she live happily with her crooked knight? These crook-backed men are apt to have very insinuating ways; we all know how Richard the Third, when he made love to Lady Anne, so flattered and coaxed that her

woman’s heart Grossly grew captive to his honey words,

and in my early diplomatic days, I had a colleague at a certain Embassy, who, though crooked as Pope himself, was declared by all women to be irresistible. How grateful, by the bye, we ought to be for that one and only record “qui estoit tort,” just three words which give to the old story of Sibella a touch perfectly human and real, such as a hundred blazing tales of deeds of derring-do, sung by minstrels or recorded by chroniclers, could never have conveyed. The crook must have been true, it could hardly have been invented. Since walls have ears, what a pity it is that stones have not tongues: these old ruins could teach us so much about the lives that they harboured, lessons which one does so long to learn.

These Bertrams must have been men of no little importance in their generations. The two heroes of Hastings evidently made their mark, and later on there is some reason to suppose that one, at any rate, of the family, perhaps more, joined in one or other of the Crusades. For in some excavations which were made among the ruins of the Castle in the middle of the nineteenth century, the workmen came upon a tiny piece of that serpentine marble which the Crusaders were wont to bring home from the Holy Land to be set in the altars of their chapels; the relic was found on the spot where the chapel is supposed to have stood. As should beseem Crusaders, the Bertrams were good and loyal servants of the Church: a pious Bertram it was that founded or endowed the Augustine Priory of Brinkbourne in the reign of Henry the First.

Sir Roger de Bertram joined the insurrection of the Barons against King John, and it cost him dear, for in retaliation his castle was seized and his town of Mitford destroyed with fire and sword by the savage Flemish hordes who then devastated Northumberland as the auxiliaries of the King.[5] In the year 1215, then, Mitford Castle was in the hands of the Crown, and two years later Alexander of Scotland, who had invaded England at the instigation of France, laid siege to it with his whole army, but he was beaten off, and went back to Scotland none the richer for his venture. King John granted the Castle to Philip de Ulcoves, but in the following reign it was restored to the Bertrams by Henry the Third.

The next notable Bertram was that Sir Roger who, with other northern Barons, marched into Scotland in 1258 to rescue the young King of the Scots, Henry the Third’s son-in-law; but he got into trouble, for six years later he was one of the insurgents in the Barons’ War, was taken prisoner at Northampton, and the Castle and Barony were once more forfeited and alienated from his descendants for four hundred years. He seems, indeed, to have speedily made his peace with the King, for in 1264 he was summoned to Parliament as Baron Bertram—but Mitford knew him no more.[6] This Sir Roger was succeeded by his son, who had only one daughter, and the Barony fell into abeyance between the Fitzwilliams, Darcys and Penulburys, the representatives of his three sisters.

The learned labours of antiquaries and pedigree-mongers have so confused the story of the younger branch of the Bertrams, the Lords of Bothal, that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make head or tail of their several statements. It is the more provoking in that it is from them that we, the Mitfords of the present day, are descended. From them also the Dukes of Portland, through a maternal ancestress, have inherited Bothal Castle.

In the “Battle Abbey Roll” of the Duchess of Cleveland, it is stated that William de Bertram, who founded Brinkbourne Priory, married a daughter of Guy de Baliol by whom he had two sons, Roger, Baron of Mitford, and Richard, the ancestor of the Lords of Bothal, who held that Barony by the service of three knights’ fees. This is, I believe, the more probably correct story, and it comes into line with the evidence of the “Newminster Abbey Register Booke,” which makes the inheritance descend to the Dukes of Portland from the Lady Sibella, wife of the first Lord Bertram.

That Bothal should have been held by Sir William (sometimes called Sir Richard) Bertram, the brother of the first Lord Bertram, as some have maintained, is worthy of no credence. Why should an important portion of Sibella de Mitford’s property have gone to her husband’s younger brother?

Burke, in his “Landed Gentry,” anxious, probably, to prove a Saxon descent from father to son, appears to wipe out all the Bertrams in the middle of the fourteenth century, and makes Mitford (the town or village, not the Castle and Barony, which were forfeited) descend to Sir John de Mitford, tenth in succession to Matthew, the younger brother of the Sir John who was the father of Sibella. That we shall see is quite apocryphal, for when the elder branch of the Bertrams came to an end in 1311, the younger branch continued to flourish at Bothal, and soon adopted the name of Mitford, taking their patronymic from the property which the family had then held for two and a half centuries.

It was to that branch that the famous Hermit of Warkworth belonged, whose tragic story was woven into a poem by Dr. Johnson’s friend, Bishop Percy of Dromore, who collected the “Reliques of Ancient Poetry.” The poem, very poor stuff, was published separately some years after the “Reliques.”

This Bertram was in love with a neighbouring Lady Isabel de Widdrington, and she returned his love, but like a true daughter of

‘These northern counties here Whose word is snaffle, spur and spear.’

she chose to put his mettle to the test before giving him her hand. She sent him a helmet as her love-token, desiring him to try its temper ‘wherever blows fell sharpest;’ and Bertram, obedient to her behest, rode with his brother-in-arms, Lord Percy, on a raid into Scotland, where he was wounded nearly to the death in a desperate fray. The tidings were brought to Isabel, who, struck with terror and remorse, at once set out to go to him, but on her way was seized by some prowling moss-troopers, and carried off to one of their secret fastnesses beyond the border. Thus when at the downfall of the night her rescued Knight was carried home on the shields of his followers, he found his lady gone, and all traces of her lost. He made a vow never to rest till he had found her, and his brother promised to help him in the quest. As soon as his health permitted, they went forth together in a humble disguise, and the better to conduct their search, agreed to separate, the brother going northwards and Bertram himself to the west. For many weary days and weeks he wandered over moss and moor in vain; till at length when he had almost lost heart, a compassionate pilgrim directed him to a distant peel-tower in which a lady’s voice had been heard lamenting.

Bertram found the place, and recognized the voice; but watched the tower for two successive nights without obtaining a glimpse of his Isabel. On the third night, however, that he lay crouched in his hiding-place, he saw her descend a ladder of ropes thrown from an upper window, assisted by a man muffled up in a cloak, who bore her across the little stream and led her away, clinging fondly to his arm. Bertram, maddened at the sight, rushed after them with his naked sword, and attacked his rival, who defended himself manfully; but after a stubborn conflict, Bertram succeeded in bringing him to the ground, and stabbed him to the heart, with the words, ‘Die, traitor!’ Then, when she heard his voice the wretched Isabel for the first time knew who he was, and sprang forward to arrest the blow, shrieking, ‘It is thy brother!’ She was too late, for the deed was done, and in the struggle to throw herself between them, she slipped against Bertram’s sword, and fell pierced, by his brother’s side.

For that night’s bloody tragedy the unhappy Bertram did penance to the end of his days. He renounced every tie that bound him to the world. His sword and spear were hung up in his hall, his inheritance passed on to others and his goods were given to the poor, while he himself, clad in monastic garb, took refuge in the rocky recesses of Coquetdale, near Warkworth Castle. No more ideal retreat could be devised for an anchorite than this lovely, sequestered glen, where the hurrying Coquet stays its troubled current beneath precipitous cliffs, clothed with trees that spring from every chink and crevice of the stone; and from an overhanging grove of stately oaks above, a runlet of the purest water comes rippling down.

Here his dwelling-place, scooped out of the living rock, remains almost as perfect as when he left it. It can only be reached from the river by a long flight of steps. Over the entrance linger the traces of the original inscription, ‘_Sunt mihi lachrymæ meæ cibo interdiu et noctu_.’ The first cell is a miniature chapel, complete in all its details, with a raised altar at the east end; and on a recessed altar tomb beside it is the effigy of a woman, very delicately designed, but now broken and timeworn, lying with her head towards the east, and her arms slightly raised, showing that her hands have been folded in prayer. At her feet in a niche cut in the stone, the figure of the Hermit kneels in eternal penitence, his head resting on his hand. Beyond this, reached through a doorway, bearing on a shield the Crucifixion and the emblems of the Passion, is a still smaller oratory, used by the Hermit as a sleeping-place; with a similar altar at the farther end, and near it a narrow ledge hewn out of the rock for his couch.

Neither by night nor by day did he ever lose sight of the beloved effigy in the adjoining chapel; for at the altar a window is contrived through which he could see it as he knelt at his devotions; and when lying on his bed, a niche cut slantwise through the partition wall still enabled him to rest his faithful eyes upon it. No one knows for how many sorrowful years he lived here in penance and contrition, nor when death came to his release.

Such is the touching story of the Hermit of Warkworth, who was of our blood, as it is related in the “Battle Abbey Roll” which I have so often quoted.

Bertram’s friend, Lord Percy, kept his memory green by paying for Masses to be sung in the Chapel, and the allowance for the purpose was continued until the Suppression of the Monasteries, and according to Hutchinson, “the patent is extant which was granted to the last hermit in 1532 by the Sixth Earl of Northumberland.”

* * * * *

So the elder branch of the Bertrams disappeared in 1311, and with them the name, for the Lords of Bothal speedily called themselves de Mitford, which from that time forth became the family patronymic. “Happy the minister who does not make history” is an old saying which may well be applied to families, for if in the centuries during which our people have been Lords of Mitford, though they produced no great soldier, no great statesman, no Raleigh, no Drake, no Frobisher, no Sir Thomas More, no King’s favourite, at any rate they kept their heads upon their shoulders. Political ambition was apt to be a very deadly disease, and they had it not. They were contented to live held in respect by their neighbours, to act as high sheriffs when called upon to do so, and sometimes to represent their county in Parliament.

Perhaps the most distinguished of these ancestors of ours was Sir John de Mitford, who was Knight of the Shire for Northumberland in various Parliaments during the reigns of King Edward the Third, King Richard the Second and King Henry the Fourth. He was High Sheriff for two years, and acted as Commissioner with John Widdrington and Gerald Heron to tender the Oath of Allegiance to the King of Scotland. On the 20th of May, 1369, at Newton Hall, he received by deed of feoffment from David Strathbolgi, Second Earl of Athol, a grant of all his lands and tenements in the Ville of Molesden, to be holden of the grantor and his descendants by the annual payment of sixpence. It has been said that this transfer led to the adoption of the three moles as the family arms, but our family tradition, which I believe to be well founded, is that they were of much older date and taken from the Want’s Beck, the mole’s stream, as was the name of Molesden itself. Sir John was in 1386 Keeper of the Seal to Edward Duke of York for the Liberty of Tyndale.

On his death he was succeeded by his elder son William, who was, like his father, Knight of the Shire and High Sheriff in Henry the Fifth’s reign. Then followed his son John, a pious benefactor of the Church, living, no doubt, in the sweetest odour of sanctity, who granted tenements in Newcastle to the Church of St. Nicholas, and gave lands in Echewicke to the Abbot and Convent of Newminster, to pray for his soul and the souls of his ancestors. He died in the sixteenth year of the reign of King Henry the Sixth. The following three Lords of the Manor, Thomas, Bertram and Cawen, were inconspicuous persons, and there is nothing to be said of our forebears until we come to Cuthbert, who in the sixth year of Edward the Sixth was with Anthony Mitford of Ponteland, Commissioner for the inclosure of the Middle Marches. This said Anthony was a rogue. Cuthbert Mitford by his first wife, Ann, daughter of one Wallis of Akeild, had one son, Robert, and three daughters: failing that son Robert, Anthony of Ponteland would become Lord of the Manor of Mitford and heir to all Cuthbert’s estate. To achieve this end he hatched a plot, seeking to prove that there had been no marriage between Cuthbert and Ann Wallis, and that in consequence Robert was illegitimate.

He contrived to have his contention entered in the Harleian MSS., and to have Robert described as _nothus natus_—base-born, but when he presented the document at the Heralds’ College, it proved to be signed only by himself. On investigation, the lie was nailed to the counter, Robert’s legitimacy was fully proved, and his arms were certified without a difference. He was what would be looked upon in these days as a person of rather lax opinions and was “presented” at the Archdeacon’s Visitations “for sufferinge divers persons to eate, drinke and play atte cardes in time of eveninge praier.” In spite of the Archidiaconal thunders, he lived through the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James, and died in the first year of King Charles the First’s reign at the good old age of eighty-eight.

He was succeeded by his grandson Robert, both of whose parents had died in his infancy on the same day. This Robert is an ancestor of special interest for us. In the first place it was to him that King Charles the Second restored by grant the Castle and royalties of Mitford, which had been forfeit in punishment of Roger Bertram’s treason by King Henry the Third in 1264, and secondly it is from his third son, John, who left the old home to seek his fortune as a merchant in London, that we, the Mitfords, formerly of Exbury, now of Batsford, are descended. The Mitfords of Pitshill are descended from William, who was a great-grandson of the Robert of Charles the Second’s time.

The portraits of Robert Mitford and Philadelphia Wharton, his wife, are at Batsford. The contemporary frame of her picture is surrounded by carved oak leaves and acorns in memory of the famous escape of the King, and to denote her loyalty to his cause.

Let us linger for a few more moments among the ruins of the old Cradle of our Race. In the dark centuries, when even if there was no actual war between England and Scotland, there was almost continuous fighting between the fierce clans on both sides, feuds and raids and cattle-lifting were the salt of northern life; hatred was a profession, revenge the accomplishment of a gentleman. The border castles were seldom at rest, and Mitford fared no better than its neighbours.

Dreaming on a summer’s day within the, to us, sacred precincts, one can almost hear the grey walls ringing with the music of sword, spear and battle-axe clashing upon hauberk and breast-plate—the shouts of the fighting men mad with the lust of blood—clouds of arrows rattling like hail against the battlements should a head show itself. The borderers were gay men at fighting, and the Scots ever met with a hot welcome.

After the treason of Sir Roger Bertram in 1264, wild men succeeded one another in the ownership of the Castle. In the year 1316 it was the home of a freebooter of the pattern of the Rhenish robber knights, named Sir Gilbert de Middleton. He was an old soldier of fortune, who had fought against Lewelin in the Welsh war and probably for that service was rewarded with the Castle and Manor of Mitford. But he was infuriated against King Edward, on account of the appointment to the See of Durham of Lewis de Beaumont, a cousin of the Queen’s. It was said that Queen Isabella, “the French she-wolf,” as she was called, had knelt upon her bare knees before the King, praying him to confer this fat Bishopric upon her kinsman. Sir Gilbert rebelled, proclaimed himself Duke of Northumberland, and took the occasion of a mission which the King had sent to Scotland, headed by two Cardinals and the Bishop of Durham, to swoop down upon the Embassy and pillage it on its return South.

It was a mistake to attack the scarlet hat; the Church ever had a long arm. Sir Gilbert was taken prisoner by Ralph de Greystoke (or, according to Hollinshed, by Thomas Heton and William de Fulton), fettered in irons and carried to Newcastle, whence he was shipped to Grimsby. From Grimsby he rode to London with his feet tied under his horse’s belly, was imprisoned in the Tower, and dragged by horses to the gallows on the 26th of June, 1318. His property and goods and those of his brother were confiscated. (See Hodgson’s “Northumberland.”)

In 1318 Mitford was the property of Adomar de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, and then it was that the last and fatal attack upon the Castle by the King of Scotland took place, and the grand old stronghold that had withstood the buffets of so many sieges was finally laid in ruins.

When one looks at the humble little village of Mitford to-day it is hard to realize that it was once a borough! I know not how it may be now, but when I was a boy the old folk held firmly to their traditions and to the legends of the ancient greatness of the place; there was an old rhyme which they loved to quote:

“Mitford was Mitford ere Morpeth was ane And still shall be Mitford when Morpeth is gane.”

The feeling of clanship was strongly rooted in the people. In the fifties of last century there was still living a delightful old woman, one Bella Harbottle, who with her brother inhabited two, or three rooms, which were all that remained of the seventeenth-century Manor House—just a tower in an old-fashioned garden, which the brother tended, in the beauty of which Bacon himself would have taken delight. The brother and sister were specimens of a grand old type of northern peasantry not yet passed away, thank Heaven! Their beautifully chiselled features, no less than their proud bearing and dignified manners, might have befitted the descendants of crusaders. She was always clad in an old-fashioned lilac print gown, with a square of shepherd’s plaid crossed over the bosom. Her delicate, high-bred face, with blue eyes, still bright and beautiful, was framed in the frills of an immaculate mutch covering her ears and almost hiding the snow-white hair; her small feet were always daintily cased in grey worsted stockings and scrupulously blacked shoes. She must have been nearly eighty years old when I used to sit with her in her kitchen—the aged dame on one side of the hearth, the little boy on the other, listening to her old-world tales of the past glories of Mitford. There were always a few old-fashioned flowers in the kitchen-parlour, and she herself sweetly reminded one of lavender. The good soul was always stout for the rights and honour of the family.

A gentleman who had bought a small adjoining estate built himself a house just on the boundary. Every day, almost, old Bella would walk out, leaning on her crutched stick, to see that there was no encroachment. The neighbour, aware of this, and greatly amused, said to her one day, “You see, Bella, it is all right. I am not removing my neighbour’s landmark.” “Ah!” grumbled she, with her sweet Northumbrian burr, “I’m thinking that you’re building your house verra high.” Even the air was sacred to the family of her worship.

To the east of the Manor House Tower is the old Norman church. When I first went to Mitford it was a mere wreck, just sufficiently weather-tight for service to be held; but it was beautifully restored some fifty years since by the piety of the last owner but one, Colonel John Philip Mitford.

And now it is time for us to leave the north and travel southward with those who are more immediately responsible for us.

Merchant John, then, came to London, where he seems to have prospered in his business, so much so as to make us wish that he had been furnished in his baptism with some other Christian name, for he became possessed of original shares in the Royal Exchange, the building of which King Charles the Second laid the foundation stone in 1667 to take the place of its predecessor of Queen Elizabeth’s time, which had been destroyed in the great fire of 1666. Unfortunately there was no mention of these shares in his will. There is no doubt that they were the property of this particular John, our immediate ancestor, and when my father and the late Lord Redesdale tried to prove their claim to them nobody doubted its justice, but they were defeated by the fact that they could not prove that there was no other John Mitford to whom they might have belonged; so there they lie in some mouldy old chest, more useless than dead leaves in autumn. Be this a lesson to those who call their sons John, or Thomas, or William, to give them some second and less usual name to make what, in armorial bearings, the heralds call a difference.

[Illustration: WILLIAM MITFORD (HISTORIAN OF GREECE)

_From an oil painting by John Jackson, R.A._]

Of this John and his son William there is nothing to be said, but the son of the latter was another John, whose marriage on the 13th of September, 1740, with Elizabeth, the daughter and heiress of Willey Reveley, of Newton Underwood and Throphill in Northumberland and Newby-super-Wiske in Yorkshire, played an important part in the history of our family, for to them were born two remarkable sons, William, the historian of Greece, and John, the first Lord Redesdale. Indirectly, too, this marriage was the cause of a goodly inheritance coming to Lord Redesdale in 1808.

William Mitford,[7] who was born on the 10th of February, 1744, was my great-grandfather, and a man of many and various accomplishments, in his youth famous as one of the handsomest men of his day. Not only was he a profound scholar, but he had a great knowledge of art; he drew beautifully, and I have many of his water-colour paintings, which are of rare merit; his sketch-books recording his journeys in many parts of England are even now a joy to look through. The Royal Academy of his day recognized his worth by making him their historian, an office now filled by Lord Morley of Blackburn. In music, also, he was an expert, having a practical knowledge of several instruments, and so keen was he that when he was an old man, past seventy, he made a journey into Wales, a matter of several days in those posting times, in order to learn the principles of the triple Welsh harp.

He was Member of Parliament successively for Newport in Cornwall, Beeralston and Romney, and commanded the Hampshire Militia. It was as a Militia-man that he made friends with Gibbon, who was a brother officer in the same regiment, and who persuaded him to undertake the history of Greece, so that the Hampshire Militia had the honour of producing two classical historians—the one of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the other of Greece.

Mitford’s history naturally took the Tory side in Greek politics: Grote and Thirlwall followed on the Radical side. One day Thomas Carlyle began talking to me about my great-grandfather; Carlyle was certainly no Tory, but he praised the so-called Tory book far above the other two. He said “that Mitford had the talent of clothing the dry bones of history with living flesh and blood: he made the old Greeks speak and behave like human beings, breathing a living spirit into his work.” The other two were so dreary and dull that they provoked no sympathy in him.

Beyond all this the old Colonel, as he was called, was a very skilful forester and gardener. I possess an old, much-worn pruning knife with a horn handle which he always carried about when he was engaged in his favourite pursuit of landscape gardening. When a boy, he and his brother had been at school at Mr. Gilpin’s academy. Later in life he was able to present Gilpin to the living of Boldre in Hampshire. This led to the writing of the famous “Forest Scenery,” which Gilpin dedicated to his former pupil and subsequent patron. Gilpin’s brother was Sawrey Gilpin, R.A., the animal painter.

It happened that in the spring of 1862 my father, having some business to transact with his agent and being unable to attend to it himself, sent me down to Exbury to act on his behalf. Mr. Lewis Ricardo, who was the tenant at the time, hearing that I was going there, very kindly offered me bed and board, saying that, though he was detained in London, his housekeeper would look after me. She made me very comfortable, and after a light dinner and a pint of claret I went to bed. In the dead of the night I was awakened—as it seemed to me—by a most uncanny noise in the room over my head. Someone was dragging a very heavy weight up and down the floor; then I heard the door open, and the footsteps came down the stairs pulling the weight, bump, bump, bump, until whoever it was reached my door. Then there was silence for a minute or two, and presently the weight was dragged up again, bumping as before, the door of the upstairs room was opened, the weight was dragged across it, and all was still.

I must have been dreaming all the time, for, though I was in deadly fear of I knew not what, it never occurred to me to get up and see what awful being it was that was standing so mysteriously outside my room. But the whole thing was so vivid that the next morning I asked the housekeeper who had occupied the room above me that night. Her answer was that the room had been empty and locked and the key in her possession.

When I got back to London I told my father what I had heard. He was a good deal startled, and replied that one of his grandfather’s eccentricities had been, after a long day’s literary work, to go up into an empty upstairs room and pull a heavy trunk about for exercise. I had never, so far as I knew, heard this before; but it is possible, if it be true that in our sleep we sometimes remember things long since forgotten, that I might in years gone by have been told of the old man’s whim, and that the fact of sleeping in that house struck some chord of a vanished memory; as my father spoke, it almost seemed as if my presence had roused the spirit of the forefather to come and see what manner of creature his great-grandson might be. I insert the story for the benefit of the professors of oneiromancy. To me it seems a curious specimen of dream mystification.

The historian’s eldest son, Henry, was a captain in the Royal Navy. He was twice married. By his first wife, the daughter of Anthony Wyke, Attorney-General of Montserrat, he had a son and two daughters, of whom only one, Frances, was alive in my time. She married her cousin, Bertram Mitford, the head of the family and Squire of Mitford, which she occupied after his death as a dower house; and so it happened that as a boy I passed many happy holidays in the old home. My grandfather’s second wife was Mary Leslie-Anstruther, whom he married in 1803. In the same year he was appointed to the command of H.M.S. _York_, and before commissioning her he went down with his navigating officer—master was the title in those days—to survey her. They reported her unseaworthy. To that, the answer was, in effect, “Sail, or resign your commission.”

Of course they sailed, and on Christmas Eve, 1803, in a fog in the North Sea, the _York_ went down with all hands. Her guns of distress were heard, but no help was forthcoming. I have been told that one spar with “York” upon it was washed ashore on the coast of Yorkshire. There were not then the means that there are now, thanks to Lloyd’s and modern inventions, of obtaining information as to wrecks, and that single spar was, I believe, the solitary evidence of the fate of the _York_. It was something very like an official murder.

My father was born on the following twenty-first of June, a posthumous child, and lived with his grandfather and his two sisters. His mother soon married again, her second husband being Mr. Farrer, of Brayfield in Buckinghamshire, who had been an officer in the Blues. I am afraid that my father had not a very happy childhood, for the historian seems to have been rather crabbed in his old age. Besides, he was fully taken up with his studies and his work, and cared not to busy himself with the yearnings of a child. However, his two half-sisters, Frances and Louisa, were devoted to their brother, and the little boy had a good friend in his grandfather’s younger brother, John, who, in the meantime, had come to great distinction. Having been called to the Bar in 1777, he, three years later, published the famous book commonly called “Mitford on Pleadings,” which speedily became a classic. Lord Eldon said that it was “a wonderful effort to collect what is to be deduced from authorities speaking so little what is clear”; while Sir Thomas Plumer declared that it “reduced the whole subject to a system with such universally acknowledged learning, accuracy and discrimination, as to have been ever since received by the whole profession as an authoritative standard and guide.”

It was equally well accepted in America, and when I was in the United States in 1873 more than one well-known judge and lawyer came up to me wanting to know what relation I was to the “Pleadings.” The success of the book brought prosperity and a seat in Parliament, by the favour of his cousin, the Duke of Northumberland. In 1793 he succeeded his lifelong friend Sir John Scott (Lord Eldon) as Solicitor-General; the Attorneyship followed as a matter of course, and in 1801 he became Speaker of the House of Commons. This latter office he did not hold long, for in 1802 Lord Clare, who was Lord Chancellor of Ireland, died, and Sir John Mitford was appointed to succeed him, being raised to the peerage as Baron Redesdale of Redesdale in Northumberland, a title which he took from the beautiful moorland property on the southern slope of the Cheviots which he had purchased with the idea of linking himself as closely as might be with the border home of the ancient clan.

It was a great wrench to resign the Speakership of the House of Commons, a post of high honour for which he was admirably fitted. He left an assembly over which he presided with a dignity and impartial tact which confirmed the esteem and regard in which he was held by its members, and justified their choice. At the call of duty he parted from his friends and severed many ties of affection, to take up a task which, however congenial it might be professionally, carried him into a country where he was a stranger with a surrounding of men who were to him a new experience—men possessed of great talents and a charm peculiarly their own, but which did not appeal to his serious and rather matter-of-fact nature. On the bench his success was immediate and triumphant.

Sheil, who was called to the Bar in 1811, and must have known many of the counsel who practised before Lord Redesdale, said of him that he introduced a reformation in Irish practice “by substituting great learning, unwearied diligence, and a spirit of scientific discussion, for the flippant apophthegms and irritable self-sufficiency of Lord Clare,” and Story pronounced him to be “one of the ablest judges that ever sat in equity.”

The Irish Bar speedily recognized in him a scientific lawyer of the first quality, but the witty barristers, bubbling over with fun and rollicking spirits, were socially quite out of touch with him. He did not understand them, nor they him. O’Flanagan, in his “Lives of the Lords Chancellors of Ireland,” tells several amusing stories of the way in which the lawyers—none too respectfully, considering the dignity of his office—cracked jokes in his solemn presence. “I never saw Lord Redesdale more puzzled,” says Sir Jonah Barrington, “than at one of Plunket’s _bons mots_. A cause was argued in Chancery, wherein the plaintiff prayed that the defendant should be restrained from suing him on certain bills of exchange, as they were nothing but kites. ‘Kites!’ exclaimed Lord Redesdale, ‘Kites, Mr. Plunket? Kites could never amount to the value of these securities. I don’t understand the statement at all, Mr. Plunket.’ ‘It is not to be expected that you should, my lord,’ answered Plunket. ‘In England and Ireland kites are quite different things. In England the wind raises the kite, but in Ireland the kite raises the wind.’ ‘I do not feel any better informed yet, Mr. Plunket,’ said the matter-of-fact Chancellor. ‘Well, my lord, I’ll explain the thing without mentioning those birds of prey’—and thereon he explained that in Ireland bills and notes which are not what is termed good security are commonly called kites, because they are used to raise money, which is termed ‘raising the wind.’”

Great as was Lord Redesdale as a judge, there were other duties of his office which militated against his being a success in Ireland. He was a devoted Church of England man and a bitter opponent of Catholic emancipation, and it was abhorrent to him that any office, even that of justice of the peace, should be held by a Roman Catholic. A letter addressed by him to the Earl of Fingal on appointing him to the Commission of the Peace provoked a correspondence which inflamed the Roman Catholics against him, and was fiercely blamed in the House of Commons by Fox and Canning.

The final crisis was brought about by his treatment of Lord Cloncurry, who had twice been arrested for high treason, imprisoned under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act in 1799, and very harshly treated in the Tower of London. When the Habeas Corpus Act was restored, he regained his liberty after two years all but a few days, and went abroad for four years. On his return, a Mr. Burne, a King’s Counsel, applied on Lord Cloncurry’s behalf for his admission to the Commission of the Peace. Lord Redesdale resented this interference of a third person, and wrote Mr. Burne an angry and not very judicious answer, in which Lord Cloncurry’s past history was raked up as a ground of refusal. This drew a furious letter from Lord Cloncurry himself, in which he recited the illegality and cruelty under which he had suffered, and made a violent attack upon the bigotry and prejudice of the Chancellor. The Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Hardwicke, at once ordered the Chancellor to insert Lord Cloncurry’s name in the magistracy of the two Counties of Kildare and Dublin, and further offered to recommend that nobleman for promotion in the Peerage. The Viscount’s coronet was refused, but the indignity placed upon the Chancellor was complete. Mr. Ponsonby was appointed to hold the Great Seal of Ireland, and pending his arrival, the Great Seal was put in Commission and Lord Redesdale was not even allowed to sit in the Court of Chancery—his own court. This, in his farewell speech to the Bar, he described as “a personal insult.”

His final letter to Lord Cloncurry was characteristic. “My Lord, I have desired instructions with respect to the insertion of your lordship’s name in the Commission of the Peace for the Counties of Dublin and Kildare, and I have to request that your lordship will be pleased to apply to Mr. Ponsonby, whom His Majesty has appointed Chancellor of Ireland, and to whom the Great Seal will be delivered as soon as he shall arrive in the country. I have, etc. (sgd.) Redesdale.” So the stout old Lord stuck to his colours, and without bending left Ireland in 1806, having held his office for four years.

It is a singular instance of the fickleness of fate that he should have been hounded out of Ireland by the Roman Catholics of that country, when their co-religionists in England had a few years before got up a national subscription to present him with a magnificent piece of gold plate, in gratitude for the determined action in the House of Commons, by which they were relieved from those penal laws to which they had been subject for more than two hundred years. That golden vase is a treasured heirloom at Batsford.

There was nothing inconsistent in his conduct. His nature, essentially humane and merciful, recoiled from anything which savoured of persecution: at the same time, in the political government of his country, his Protestant principles and his attachment to the existing Constitution found no place for the professors of a form of religion which, in his view, constituted a danger to the State.

Meanwhile, in 1803, Lord Redesdale had contracted a marriage with Lady Frances Perceval, daughter of Lord Egmont, and sister of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, who was murdered by Bellingham in 1812. This happy union brought him three children, two of whom, his son who afterwards became first and only Earl of Redesdale, and Frances Elizabeth, survived him.

Lord Redesdale’s father, John Mitford of Exbury, was married, as I have said above, to a Miss Reveley, whose sister[8] was the wife of Thomas Edwards Freeman,[9] a wealthy and highly respected squire in the County of Gloucester. This Mr. Freeman had only one son,[10] who predeceased him, as did also the son’s wife, Mary Curtis[11] that was, leaving a daughter[12][13] who married Mr. Heathcote of Dursley in Hampshire. But this daughter had apparently inherited the bad health of her parents; she had no child, and it became evident to Mr. Freeman that she was not likely to live: so in his will he made provision that failing her and any children that she might have, since he had apparently no relations of his own, his property should go to his wife’s nephew, Lord Redesdale. Mrs. Heathcote did not survive her grandfather by many days, and almost immediately after his death in 1808, the property of Batsford passed to the ex-Chancellor of Ireland.

One fine day the old lord took his little son, aged three, to see Mr. Freeman, who went and fetched a crazy old barrel organ, which he proceeded wheezily to grind for the child’s pleasure: when he had finished playing, the boy turned to his father and said with much dignity, “Give the old man a shilling!” to the great amusement of the benefactor whose property the child was one day to inherit.

Lord Redesdale never again held any office, though Mr. Perceval wished him to return to the Chancellorship of Ireland. He knew how unpopular he was in that country, and wisely declined. He preferred his independence, and became a very useful and much consulted member of the House of Lords. Lady Redesdale died in 1817, and Lord Redesdale thirteen years later at the age of eighty-one.

The second Lord Redesdale, who was educated at Eton and at New College, Oxford, speedily made his mark in the House of Lords by his diligence and capacity for business. The Duke of Wellington appointed him to be his Whip, and encouraged him to master all the details of the procedure and private business of the House with a view to his becoming Chairman of Committees, an office for which on the death of Lord Shaftesbury in February, 1851, he was chosen unanimously and which he held until his death in 1886.

He was a keen sportsman, master and owner of the Heythrop hounds, which post he resigned when he found public business increasingly making inroads upon his time, but though he ceased to be master, the hounds remained his property until Mr. Albert Brassey, who had recently become master, made overtures to him to buy them. At first Lord Redesdale refused, but eventually yielded, and gave the purchase money, £2,000, to the hunt as an endowment. He was a good shot, though he very rarely went out with a gun; gave great attention to local affairs, never missing the sittings of the Board of Guardians. “Give old Pensioner (his hack) his head,” said his studgroom, “and he’ll go straight to Shipston.[14]” He continued to hunt so long as he was able and always hacked to covert, no matter what the distance might be.

No man was more looked up to, and I don’t believe that he had an enemy in the world, unless it might be among certain Parliamentary agents and promoters over whose proceedings he kept so strict a watch that he earned the name of the Lord Dictator. It was mainly owing to his determined action that the attempt to abolish the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords fell through. His literary controversy with Cardinal Manning on the Infallible Church and the Holy Communion is still remembered by ecclesiastics. He wrote several pamphlets, chiefly on doctrinal or genealogical subjects, in which his arguments were always ingenious and well expressed. In 1877 he was created an Earl by Queen Victoria on the recommendation of Lord Beaconsfield.

Lord Redesdale never married. He and his sister kept house together at Batsford until her death in 1866. She was a woman of great ability, full of sympathy with all her brother’s pursuits: her loss was a cruel blow to him, and during the twenty years which followed between her death and his, he never put off mourning. I was in the Far East when she died, and after all these years I could repeat by heart much of the touching letter which he wrote to me as being the one man to whom he could open out the grief that was in his soul.

Batsford stands on a lovely spur of the Cotswold Hills, crowned with a glory of oaks and elms, beeches, ashes and chestnuts, a most fascinating spot, and here it was that, under the genial influence of the kind old lord, whose portrait by Lawrence is the very embodiment of goodwill towards men, the happiest days of my father’s childhood were spent.

The three little cousins were devoted to one another. It was a beautiful friendship which strengthened as they grew up, and only ended with their lives. No two men could have been greater contrasts than my father and the late Lord Redesdale: perhaps their affection was all the stronger for that; it had begun in childhood and lasted into extreme old age; they were always happy together, and when they were parted it was rarely that a day passed without their writing to one another. They went to the same schools, Iver first, then Eton, but not in the same house. At Oxford Lord Redesdale was at New College, my father at Magdalen.

My father did not stay long at college. He soon left the University to take up an attachéship at the Legation at Florence, where Lord Burghersh[15] was minister, in whom he had the luck to find a most sympathetic chief, devoted to art, and especially to music, which with my father was a passion. The musical society of Florence at that time was brilliant, and the young attaché was speedily welcomed into its intimacy. Of those days he had many stories, none, I think, more curious than this.

One evening after the opera there was a supper party at the house of the Grisis, the parents of the famous prima donna. Giudetta, the elder daughter, had been singing and the unhappy tenor had been hissed off the stage with all the viciousness of which an Italian audience has the secret. My father was sitting next to Giulia Grisi, then a little girl of twelve—it was in 1827—and he happened to say to her: “Ebben Giulia, I suppose some day you will be singing in grand opera?” “I sing in opera,” answered the beautiful child, “and run the risk of being hissed like that wretched man to-night!” In two years’ time, 1829, she made a precocious début at Bologna, and was not exactly hissed! Seldom can there have been a more triumphant career than hers from the day when, as a mere chit of fourteen, she dazzled the world with her beauty and that lovely velvety voice.

There was also at that time at Florence a very charming English coterie, which gathered round Lord and Lady Burghersh. Lord and Lady Dillon were there with their daughters, and I have often heard my wife’s grandmother, old Lady Stanley of Alderley, who was one of them, say how agreeable the society of the Legation then was. Among others who occupied villas were my grandparents, Lord and Lady Ashburnham, and it was there that my father and mother made acquaintance. They were married in February, 1828.

There is much talk nowadays about links with the past. I take it that there are not many men who can say, as I can, that they had an uncle whose portrait was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds who died in 1792. My grandfather’s first wife was Lady Sophia Thynne, and there is a beautiful portrait of her at Ashburnham by Sir Joshua, playing with her baby boy who lies in her lap: that boy, my uncle, was born in 1785, just one hundred and thirty years ago. The picture was privately engraved, and I have one of the only twenty-five copies that were struck off.

His second wife, my grandmother, was Lady Charlotte Percy, sister of the Duke of Northumberland. She was a noted beauty, and there is a charming portrait of her by Hoppner, which has also been engraved.

Among the treasures which are at Ashburnham is one of the two shirts worn by King Charles the First at his execution. Everybody remembers how the King insisted on wearing two shirts lest on that cold January morning he should shiver, and men should think that it was from fear. The shirt was kept as a sacred relic by our ancestor, John Ashburnham, who attended His Majesty on the scaffold: it was deeply stained with the blood of the Martyr, and people used to beg to be allowed to touch it as a remedy for the King’s Evil. When my grandmother came back from Florence, she asked the housekeeper where the shirt was. “Quite safe, Mylady,” was the answer, “but it was so stained that I have had it washed.” The pity of it! The second shirt is at Windsor.

My grandfather’s Garter was a great honour, if something of a disappointment. He had been a great friend of George the Fourth when he was Prince of Wales, and the Prince had promised him that when he should come to the throne, he would show him some mark of his favour. Lord Ashburnham attended his first levée. In those days, and indeed down to the end of King William the Fourth’s reign, a levée was not what it is now; it was a reception attended by very few people, and the King entered into conversation with everyone present in turn. The King greeted my grandfather most cordially, saying, “Ah! George, I see you have come to remind me of my promise. Well, there is a Garter vacant, and you shall have it.” (The Garter, like all other honours, was then still in the gift of the sovereign without any reference to ministers). My grandfather was deeply grateful, but he had a large family, and he had hoped that he might have obtained for his second son some one of those snug offices to which the only duty attached was the reception of the salary—sinecures now all vanished!—and instead of that, at a moment when he was feeling rather poor, he had to find one thousand pounds for fees.

[Illustration: THE ASHBURNHAM FAMILY.]

Of my mother’s brothers and sisters, those that I knew best were my uncles Charles, who was in the Diplomatic Service, and Thomas, who was first in the Coldstream Guards and, after exchanging into the line, served in many Indian battles; his last post was that of Commander-in-Chief at Hong Kong; he was one of the wittiest of men, endowed with the power of giving a fantastic turn to the most commonplace topics, and his subtle humour was enhanced by being rendered in a musical speaking voice which was a special attraction in all his family. He was the darling of society, and might easily have been a spoilt darling, but that was impossible.

His last years—he died in 1872—were spent in the very able administration of various charities. The widow of my Uncle Charles, a brilliantly clever woman, married Sir Godfrey Webster, and became the châtelaine of Battle Abbey, which was afterwards bought by the Duchess of Cleveland, the authoress of the “Roll of Battle Abbey,” and the mother of Lord Rosebery. My aunt, Lady Jane Swinburne, was the mother of the poet. She was a very cultivated woman, to whose bringing up he owed the finest side of his character.

I hardly knew my eldest uncle, Lord Ashburnham, the famous scholar and bibliophile, a man of recognized learning and taste. He was a great Pasha of whom men stood in terror. Old Mr. Quaritch, the bookseller, used to tell a good story of him.

Like the rest of mankind, he quailed before the great man. The running account between the two used to run into very high figures. One day Mr. Quaritch called at Ashburnham House, and the Earl, glaring at him through his awe-compelling spectacles, asked what he wanted. “Well, my lord, I have come to ask your lordship if you could let me have a little money on account.” “Money, sir!” answered my uncle, “what on earth can you want with money?” “My lord, there is a great sale coming off at Paris next week, and as your lordship knows these Paris sales are a question of ready money.” “Go away, sir! Go away! You want to go to Paris and speculate with _MY MONEY!_” A just indignation beamed through the awful spectacles. The argument was irresistible. Mr. Quaritch was glad to make his escape, crossed over to Paris the next day and did not “speculate with my uncle’s money.”

And now as a last word let me brag a little after the manner of Ajax and Ulysses as recorded in the quotation from Ovid, with which I started this record. It is true that, unlike those heroes, I cannot claim a descent from Jupiter, who, after all, was rather a disreputable Père Prodigue; yet I am inclined, for my children’s sake, and as an encouragement to them to incite their own children to prove themselves worthy “citizens of no mean city,” to show them that they come of a goodly stock on both sides. I have in my possession a short family tree in the handwriting of the second Lord Redesdale, who, as I have said above, took great delight in genealogy. That tree shows that the Lords Ogle of Northumberland, who were our forbears, were descended both on the father’s side and on the mother’s from Charlemagne. My cousin traced it as follows:

Charlemagne, A.D. 800. Pepin, King of Italy. Bernard, 818. Pepin, Lord of Peroune and St. Quentin. Herbert I., 902. Herbert II., Count de Vermandois, 943. Robert, Count de Troyes. Adelair = Geoffrey, Earl of Anjou, 957. Fulco II., the Black Earl of Anjou. Ermangarde = Geoffrey, Count de Gastinois. | +---------------------+----------------------+ | | Fulco IV., Earl of Anjou Judith =| Iro Tailbois, and King of Jerusalem niece of William the | Baron of Geoffrey Plantagenet Conqueror and widow | Kendal, 1114 Henry II., King of England of Waltheof, Earl of | John Northumberland and | Henry III. Lord of Hepple Barony | Edward I. William Tailbois de Hepple, 1150. Edward II. Edward III. Richard. John of Gaunt. Robert. Joan = Neville, Earl of Westmorland Robert. Robert, 1300 Catherine = Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk Joan Annabella = Sir Robert Ogle. heiress of Hepple Catherine = Sir Robert Grey Barony. Robert = Helen, daughter of Sir Robert Bertram. Robert = Joan de Heton Maud who married Sir Robert Ogle.

Constance, the daughter of Sir Robert Ogle (the first Lord Ogle), married John de Mitford in 1437, and from them descended:

Bertram. Gawen, 1550. Cuthbert Robert. Cuthbert Robert, b. 1612. John. William. John. William (the historian, my great-grandfather). Captain Henry Mitford, R.N. Henry Reveley Mitford. Myself.

My wife’s father, David, seventh Earl of Airlie, was the lineal descendant of the Mormaers, hereditary royal deputies of Angus. Scotland was in ancient days divided into seven parts, each ruled by a Mormaer or Maormor, a title which as long ago as the eleventh century was converted into that of Earl. The story of the Ogilvys in more modern days, how they fought for their King and were attainted as Jacobites, is too well known to need retelling, nor need I speak of the burning by the Campbells of the Bonnie House of Airlie. Historians have recorded it; poets and musicians have sung it.

Lord Airlie married Henrietta Blanche, the daughter of Lord Stanley of Alderley, a cadet branch of a family so proud that it used to be said of them “The Stanleys do not marry: they contract alliances.” Here again are two pedigrees tracing back to the remotest times of which there is any record. There is no need to search out the family tree of the Stanleys to prove their descent from Charlemagne. It is a matter of common knowledge. It is only in the case of inconspicuous families like our own that it is well to set down for those who come after us that which is so easily lost sight of. When in this year, 1915, the shells are flying in the trenches, it should be a stimulant to a man to think that he has in his veins some of the blood of Charlemagne and of that glorious old Charles Martel, the hammer that at the battle of Poitiers saved Europe from being overrun by hordes of Saracens nearly twelve hundred years ago.