THE EXETER LINE 141
and spelling." l We have no reason to suppose that she sank under " the burthen of an honour unto which she was not born " ; and all we know is that she died in 1797, at the age of twenty- three, in giving birth to her fourth child. Thus Tennyson's ballad, which is based on this some- what sordid episode, has very little foundation in fact, and it seems a pity that he should have attached a real name to his romantic version of the story.
The Earl was still in the prime of life. His experiences of wedlock had possessed a pleasing variety, but he had not yet exhausted its possibilities. Having taken his first wife from the landed gentry, and his second from the people, it remained for him to choose a third from the higher ranks of the peerage. Accordingly, in August, 1800, he replaced his peasant Countess by a divorced Duchess, Elizabeth, relict of the sixth Duke of Hamilton. 2 In the following year Lord Exeter was advanced to the dignity of Marquess, and in 1804 he died, at the age of fifty, leaving three young children by his second wife. 3
The second Marquess, who succeeded to the title at the age of nine, was educated at Eton and St. John's College, Cambridge, as usual in
1 Walpole's Letters, Mrs. Paget Toynbee's ed., XV. 333.
2 She had been divorced in 1794. The Duke died in 1799.
8 The only daughter, Sophia, married Henry Pierrepont, and their daughter, Auguste, married Lord Charles Wellesley, brother of the Duke of Wellington, and was the mother of the third and fourth Dukes. Another brother of the Duke of Wellington married Lady Georgiana Cecil, sister of the second Marquess of Salisbury. See p. 240.
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