ought to rejoice 'that so good a man is safely landed on the blessed shores of a safe eternity.' She was detained in London longer than she wished by the arrival of her uncle the Marquis de Ruvigny, who had come over from France to assist in the endeavour to gain from the King and Government the subversion of the attainder which affected the Russell children. Very interesting letters and documents on this subject are extant at Woburn Abbey. Lady Russell was very much attached to her uncle, and welcomed him, his wife, and a favourite niece, to her house, where the last-mentioned relative fell sick of malignant fever and died, to the inexpressible grief of De Ruvigny. Rachel's anxiety on account of her own children may be imagined; she removed them to the country, and then returned to London to comfort her sorrowing uncle. De Ruvigny later on resided permanently in England, and became the centre of a small colony of French refugees which settled at Greenwich, and he ended his days in this country. The Earl of Devonshire, the faithful friend (when Lord Cavendish) of William Russell, who had offered to change clothes with him and remain in his stead in prison, had never slackened in his friendship for his friend's widow; and he now came forward with a proposal of marriage between his eldest son and Rachel's eldest daughter and namesake.
In those days no time was lost in such matters. My Lord Cavendish was sixteen, Mistress Rachel fourteen. There were difficulties about settlements (car l'histoire se répète) among the lawyers, but the marriage did come off at last in spite of those everlasting impediments to the course of true love. Deeply interested as she was in domestic details and in arrangements for the future of her child, Lady Russell was no indifferent spectator to the rapid strides which James the Second was making towards the downfall of political and religious liberty which he was too short-sighted to foresee would include his own. When M. Dykeveldt, the minister
