Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/321

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members of noble families.
307

French Hospital in 1780, married in 1788 Emmeline, daughter of the late Richard Jelf, and had a daughter, Eliza, and three sons, George, Charles-James, and Edward. The last was the Rev. Edward Auriol, M.A., Prebendary of St. Paul’s, Rector of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, in London, a venerated clergyman, ready for every good work, a worthy successor of his dignified predecessors, the prebendaries John Rogers and John Bradford. His only son, Edward, was drowned in Lake Leman in 1849, aged eighteen. He himself died on 10th August 18S0, aged seventy-five.

(3.) The fourth son, Elisha Auriol, married Marguerite, daughter of Le Marquis de Fesquet, Seigneur de la Baume; he died in Old Broad Street, London, on 25th January 1778, aged eighty-six. He had five children, of whom Elizabeth was married in 1756 to William De Vismes, and her daughter, Elizabeth, was the first wife of Dean Drummond.

(4.) The fifth son, Peter Auriol, a successful London merchant, who died in 1754, left two daughters, of whom the younger, Elizabeth, died unmarried in 1799 in Queen Street, Westminster. He himself is remembered as the father of Henrietta Auriol, the ancestress of the Earls of Kinnoull, whose marriage was thus recorded in the Gentleman’s Magazine: — “Married, 31st Jan. 1749, the Right Rev. Robert Drummond, Bishop of St. Asaph, to the eldest daughter of Mr. Auriol, merchant in Coleman Street, £30,000.” This prelate was by birth the Hon. Robert Hay, second son of George Henry, 7th Earl of Kinnoull. He assumed the name of Drummond in 1739, on succeeding to the estates (not to the title) of the first Viscount of Strathallan, his maternal great-grandfather. He rapidly rose in the Church, becoming a Prebendary of Westminster in 1743, Bishop of St. Asaph in 1748, Bishop of Salisbury in 1761, and in the same year Archbishop of York. He was born 10th November 1711, and died 10th December 1776. He was a very distinguished man; but this memoir principally concerns his wife and her children by him. There were six sons, and the father (says a family manuscript) “chose to have all his children christened with the name of Auriol, well aware of the rank of the Auriol family as certainly no disparagement to his own.”

“It is remarkable,” says the editor of the Scottish Nation, “that three of the six sons of this eminent prelate came to untimely deaths. Peter Auriol Hay Drummond, the third son, Lieut.-Colonel of the 5th Regiment of West York Militia, died in 1799 (aged forty-five), in consequence of a fall down the staircase of his house. John Auriol Hay Drummond, the fourth son, Commander R.N., was lost in the Beaver (prize) off St. Lucia in a hurricane in 1780, aged twenty-four; and the youngest son, aged forty-six, Rev. George William Auriol Hay Drummond, editor of his father’s sermons, was drowned while on a voyage from Bideford (in Devonshire) to Greenock, the ship having been cast away in a storm on the night of 6th December 1807.”

Besides these, in 1766, the Hon. Mrs. Drummond lost her eldest child, Abigail, a beautiful girl, aged sixteen, for whom Mason wrote the following epitaph, which, slightly abridged, is printed in that poet’s works:—

Hence, stoic apathy! to breast of stone.
A Christian sage with dignity can weep:
See mitred Drummond heave the heartfelt groan,
Where cold the ashes of his daughter sleep.
Where sleeps what once was beauty, once was grace,
Grace that, with tenderness and sense, combined
To form that harmony of soul and face
Where beauty shines, the mirror of the mind.
Such was the maid that, in the morn of youth,
In virgin innocence, in nature’s pride,
Blest with each art that owes its charm to truth,
Sank in her father’s fond embrace, and died.
He weeps; oh! venerate the holy tear.
Faith lends her aid to ease affliction’s load;
The parent mourns his child upon the bier;
The Christian yields an angel to his God.”

The Scots Magazine, vol. xxxv., contains the following Inscription on Miss Drummond’s Monument (it is in the church near the Archbishop’s country-seat, Brodsworth, in Yorkshire):—

To Abigail Drummond, daughter of Robert, Archbishop of York, who lived, alas! only sixteen years, this last duty is paid by her afflicted parents:

Here sleeps what once was beauty, once was grace,
Grace that with tenderness and sense combin’d
To form that harmony of soul and face,
Where beauty shines, the mirror of the mind.