232 THE ANCESTOR The source of the wonderful story told by the chiefs biographer is Mr. Wiffen's marvellous and romantic Memoirs of the House of Russell^ where we read how Richard de Russell accompanied Strongbow to Ireland, bringing to his help ' the swords of his three sons, Richard, William and Thomas.' The dignity of the family however required that Robert, ' with his company of knights,' should cross separately in his own ship on a kind of private invasion. When he afterwards joined John de Courcy in his raid on Ulster, Mr. WifFen's retrospective vision enabled him to describe how ' Courcy and De Russell plied their swords and polished lances.' Henry II., in admiration of the valour displayed by the latter, ' settled on De Russell a great part of Galway ; but the period when the grant was made is involved in obscurity.' So we should imagine. Yet, according to Mr. WifFen, the Irish lands that he obtained in other quarters were sufficiently extensive to provide estates for his three gallant sons. On the whole 'De' Russell story, English and Irish, we may refer the readers of The Ancestor to Mr. Round's paper on ' The Origin of the Russells ' in his Studies on Peerage and Family History, By the way, we observe that the whole pedigree, which he there completely overthrew, renews its appearance unabashed in the current issue of Burke s Peerage,
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A fashionable weekly paper, in its series of ' Celebrities at Home,' began its article on the Earl of Orford with the amazing statement that ' Of the Norfolk families which can trace their ancestry back to those remote ages which preceded the Norman Conquest, there is none which has occupied a larger place in history or done better service to the State than the Walpoles.' One wonders which are the Norfolk families that can claim this distinction, and whether the writer was thinking of the Hevinghams, who, as Mr. Walter Rye re- minds us, ' were gravely said to be descended from Arphaxad, one of the knights who watched Christ's sepulchre.' Of Lord Orford's family the same authority, to whom one would naturally turn for the truth about a Norfolk pedigree, has written thus : ' Another good later family, whose earlier pedi- gree is all moonshine, is that of the Walpoles ; Collins and Burke gave them an ante-Norman descent, but their pedigree is not provable, at Houghton at all events, before 1286, the fact that there were people living earlier who took their name
