140 THE CECILS
her duty." Accordingly, Mr. Cecil took his wife to Birmingham, where Mr. Sneyd was staying, and leaving her there, to be brought back by Mr. Sneyd senior, returned home. Mrs. Cecil, however, immediately persuaded her lover to rise from his sick bed, and to fly with her, partially disguised, to Exeter, where they lived together at an hotel under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Benson. After these revelations it is scarcely surprising that the jury found for the plaintiff with 1,000 damages, thus entitling him to a divorce, which he obtained by Act of Parliament in June, 1791.
It can hardly be doubted that Henry Cecil connived at his wife's seduction and elopement, and, in fact, in less than a year after she had left him, and before the trial, he succumbed to the charms of a " village maiden," named Sarah Hoggins (aged seventeen), and wooing her under the name of John Jones, led her to the village altar at Bolas Magna, in Shropshire (April, 1790). After the divorce he married her again at St. Mildred's, Bread Street, but the marriage seems to have been kept secret until after his accession to the title in 1793. Of the Countess we know little, though Horace Walpole records that he " heard a good account of her, especially of her great humility and modesty on her exalta- tion," and adds : " if she is brought into the fashionable world, I should think the Duchess of Gordon would soon laugh her out of those vulgar qualities, though she may not correct her diction
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