THE ANCESTOR 231
- You are a Norman,' was the firm reply. The * chief ' had
imagined himself, he explained, to be of Irish descent, but * I said,' his biographer informs us : — The Russells were Normans. They settled at Lecale in the twelfth century. ... In the reign of Henr)' II. Robert de Russell or De Rosel (a cadet of the house of Kingston-Russell, whence the ducal house of Bedford) accompanied Strongbow to Ireland. On the death of Strongbow he went with De Courcy to Ulster, and, as a reward for his services in that province, was granted lands in the barony of Lecale in the county Down. Passing over his immediate descendants, we come in 1 3 1 6 to Thomas Russell, who was created Baron of Killough, a little seaport in the east of the county. From Thomas Russell the first to James Russell the eighth Baron of Killough the line of succession was unbroken. Of this barony, ^ created 'in 1 3 1 6, we confess to knowing nothing. The author tells us that ' Henry Russell, who ranks in the French nobility as Count Russell, is the present repre- sentative of the Russells of Killough ' ; but, unless we are mistaken, the count's title is not French but Papal, and was bestowed on one of his brothers. As for the late eminent law)^er, his father we learn was a brewer at Newry, and his grandfather a corn merchant at Killough. Whether the pedi- gree can be traced, as alleged in this book, to a cadet of the old Ulster Russells we do not know. Lord Russell himself was modestly content to begin it, in Burke s Peerage^ with the corn merchant's father.
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The grant of arms to Lord Russell of Killowen affords a notable example of the official laxity in such matters. The Lord Chief Justice's own belief that he came of native Irish stock seems at least a reasonable one in default of evidence to the contrary, the more especially as the Irish had English sur- names forced upon them by law, even as on the continent of Europe Moses and Abraham became perforce Lilienthal and Oppenheim. Yet it was assumed as beyond doubt that he came from a conquistador knight, who in his turn was, on the evidence of a clumsily forged pedigree, made a collateral ancestor of the Duke of Bedford. The official mind recorded its opinion of the force of this reasoning by allowing to Lord Russell of Killowen the whole arms of the Duke of Bedford with the trivial ' difference ' of an engrailed border. The highest authority in the land, in the great day of heraldry, pronounced the border too slight a difference to be borne by any one not a near kinsman of the bearer of the original coat.
