CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
save that he was the fourth husband of "the Begum,"
Mrs. Johnson's tomb, in excellent preservation, is in St. John's Churchyard, and her epitaph records her history at length. She was Frances, second daughter of Edward Crook, Esq., Governor of Fort St. David, an English factory on the Madras coast, near the French settlement of Pondicherry. Her father declined the post of Governor of Fort St. George (Madras), on account of his "age and infirm health," and retired to England, but it does not appear whether his family accompanied him. When Frances was in her twentieth year, she married, in Calcutta, the nephew of the then Governor (Mr. Braddyll), Parry Purple Templer, Esq. The date of this marriage is given in the epitaph as 1738, but the Rev. Mr. Hyde has been able to prove by the old parish registers that the correct date is November 3, 1744. Exactly four years later, on the 2nd of November, 1748, the young wife, who had then been a widow for nine months, was married to her second husband, James Althen, Esq.; and ten days later he died of smallpox, and she was once more a widow. When November came round again, the doubly-widowed Frances, who was still under twenty-five, stood once again before the altar in St. Anne's, and
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