Kent, April 25, 1797. On searching the registers of burials, however, of the two villages of that name in the county, the name of Nyren could not be found.'
Miss Nyren has no record that her great-grandfather ever kept an inn at all. He was, she tells me, a farmer, and his interest in the state of the ground was that of an ardent cricketer. Possibly, she suggests, another Richard Nyren (there was another—John Nyren's brother) kept the inn. The point seems to me unimportant. The important thing is that our Richard Nyren, whether he was an innkeeper, or a farmer, or both, was a gentleman. Personally I have always liked to think of him as the purveyor of the stingo which his son has made immortal.
To John Nyren's description of his father (on pp. 44—45), Miss Nyren adds 'Richard Nyren was the son or grandson of Lord Nairne, a Jacobite rebel, one of the five lords imprisoned in the Tower and condemned to be beheaded in 1715; he was pardoned, but in 1745 again risked his life, and to save it hid in the New Forest, near Broad-Halfpenny. He transposed the letters in Neyrne (the old spelling of the name) into Nyren, dropping one "e". The title was taken up by a junior branch of the family. When my grandfather, John Nyren, met the Lord Nairne of that time at the Marylebone cricket ground they conversed together, and Lord Nairne took a seal off his watch-chain, with the family crest on it, and gave it to him, and took in exchange John Nyren's, which bore the same crest'.
A few words must be interpolated here, as Miss Nyren's account of her great-grandfather's parentage is a little too free. A comparison of the date of Lord Nairne's death, 1724, and Richard Nyren's birth, 1734 or 1735, shows that another father must be found for the Hampshire yeoman. Lord Nairne (this was the second Lord Nairne, Lord William Murray, fourth son of the Marquis of Atholl, who married Lady Nairne and took her title), as I have said, died in 1724. It was his son, the third Lord Nairne, who was out in the
