positions were written. . . . Before 1798 Viscountess Wentworth proposed that Mary, her god-daughter, should reside with her in London. What influence this alteration might have had on her after-life is left to be matter of conjecture. She preferred the quiet and privacy of a Scotch manse. We were married in her twentieth year.
The above are Dr. Brunton’s words. He has also printed some of his wife’s correspondence, and of her journals during tours in England. There are letters to her mother, dated 6th October 1802 and 21st November 1809; to her brother, Captain William Balfour, of the dates 9th September 1813, 21st April and 27th October 1815, and December 1816; and to her brother’s wife of date 21st March 1812; two dated 17th January 1818, and her last, dated 22nd October 1818. In the first letter to her brother she humorously consoles him for the small dimensions of his baby’s corporeal frame-work:— “Like you, like Caesar, Alexander the Great, myself, and others, our friend may hide a capacious soul in a diminutive body.” In one of the last letters she ever wrote there is the following beautiful sentiment:— “Life is too short and uncertain to admit of our trifling with even the lesser opportunities of testifying good-will. The flower of the field must scatter its odours to-day. To-morrow it will be gone.”
Notes.
Louise Boileau, sister of a noble refugee, was born 7th November 1683, and was brought up in France. She became the wife of Noble Abel Ligonier, Seigneur de Moncuquet et de Castre, and died at Castre, 9th October 1748. (I copy this from an old Boileau pedigree; I follow its spelling of the Ligonier titles.)
Before going to Flanders in 1746, at the request of Dunk, Earl of Halifax, “Sir John Legonier” interceded with King George II. for the pardon of a military deserter who was under sentence of death. This man had been brought up in Northampton under the pastorate of Dr. Doddridge, on whose representation Lord Halifax had interested himself in the case, and had communicated with Ligonier. The Rev. Philip Doddridge, D.D., was a grandson of a German refugee clergyman who fled from the Palatinate soon after the exiled royal family and old Schomberg. Doddridge had as a heirloom his grandfather’s German Bible (Luther’s version), printed at Strasburg in 1626, bound in black morocco in 2 vols. i2mo, the binding deeply indented with gilt ornaments. On the fly-leaf of the first volume the grandson made this memorandum:—
“These Bibles my honoured grandfather, Mr. John Bauman, brought with him from Germany, his native country, when he fled on foot from the persecution there on account of the Protestant religion. ‘For he had respect to the recompense of the reward’ (Heb. xi. 26). ‘The law of thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver’ (Ps. cxix. 72). ‘Be ye followers of them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises’ (Heb. vi. 12).”
For the following memoranda, I am indebted to Henry Wagner, Esq., F.S.A.:—
In February 1788 the Gentleman’s Magazine records the death, “in her 100th year, of Judith de Ligonier, born at Castres 2nd May 1688, cousin-german to General [John] Ligonier,” and adds, “there remains at Castres a nephew of the same general, and some grand-nephews of the eldest branch.”
Lieut.-Colonel Arthur Graham, “somewhile of Hockly Lodge, Co. Armagh, and of Dublin,” besides the two sons named above, had four daughters, of whom Penelope became, in 1775, the first wife of Henry Vernon, Esq., of Hilton Park, Staffordshire. Her son, General Vernon, assumed the name of Graham in 1800, but resumed that of Vernon, only in 1838.
Chapter XV.
THE CAUMONT AND LAYARD GROUP OF FAMILIES.
I. La Duchesse de la Force.
The Dues de la Force highly valued their ancient surname of Caumont. Francois de Caumont, Seigneur de Castelnau, married on 16th May 1554, Philippe, daughter of Francois de Beaupoil, Seigneur de la Force. The Seigneur de Castelnau was killed in the St. Bartholomew massacre, as was his elder son, Armand de Caumont. But the family became an illustrious ducal house through the talents and achieve-
