Love Romances of the Aristocracy written by Thornton Hall

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Until a few years ago there might be seen in the main street of the
village of Appletrewick, in Yorkshire, a single-storey cottage, little
better than a hovel, which was the cradle of the noble family of Craven.
It was from this humble home that William Craven, the young son of a
husbandman, fared forth one day in the carrier's cart to seek fortune in
far-away London town. Like many another boy who has taken a stout heart
and an empty pocket to the Metropolis as his sole capital, he fought his
way to wealth; and before he died he was addressed as "My lord," in his
character of London's chief magistrate. The eldest son of this peasant
boy won fame as a soldier, became the confidential friend of his
Sovereign, and was created in turn a Baron, a Viscount, and Earl of
Craven. He died unwed, and all his wealth and dignities passed to a
kinsman who, like himself, traced his descent from the peasant stock of
Appletrewick.

The Earls of Denbigh have for ancestor one Godfrey Fielding, who served
his apprenticeship in London city, made a fortune as a Milk Street
mercer, and was Lord Mayor when Henry VI. was King. Five years later,
we may note in passing, London had for chief magistrate Godfrey Boleyn,
whose great-grand-daughter wore the crown of England as Queen Elizabeth.

The present Earl of Warwick, whose title was once associated with such
names as Plantagenet, Neville, Newburgh, and Beauchamp, has in his veins
a liberal strain of 'prentice blood. The founder of the family fortunes
was William Greville, citizen and woolstapler of London, who died five
centuries ago, after amassing considerable wealth; while another
ancestor was Sir Samuel Dashwood, vintner, who as Lord Mayor entertained
Queen Anne at the Guildhall in 1702, and found a husband for his
daughter in the fifth Lord Broke.

The father of the noble house of Dudley was William Ward, the son of
poor Staffordshire parents, who was apprenticed to a goldsmith and made
a fortune as a London jeweller.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century Nottingham had among its
citizens a respectable draper named John Smith, who, it is said, made
himself useful to his farmer customers, in the intervals of selling
tapes and dress materials to their wives, by helping them with their
accounts. John lived and died an honest draper, and never aspired to be
anything else; but his descendants were more ambitious. From drapers
they blossomed into bankers and Members of Parliament; and in 1796
George III. departed for once from his rule never to raise a man of
business to the Peerage, by converting Robert Smith into Baron
Carrington. His successor abandoned the patronymic Smith for his
title-name; and the present-day representative of John Smith, the
Nottingham draper is Charles Robert Wynn Carrington, first Earl
Carrington, P.C., G.C.M.G., and joint Hereditary Lord Chamberlain of
England.

When William Capel left the humble paternal roof at Stoke Nayland, in
Suffolk, to see what fortune and a brave heart could do for him in
London, it certainly never occurred to him that his name would be handed
down through the centuries by a line of Earls, Viscounts, and Barons.
Fortune had indeed strange experiences in store for the Suffolk youth;
for, while she made a Knight and Lord Mayor of him, she consigned him on
a life sentence to the Tower for resisting the extortions of the
mercenary Henry VII. Sir William's son won his knightly spurs on French
battlefields, wedded a daughter of the ancient house of Roos of Belvoir,
and became the ancester of the Barons Capel, Viscounts Malden, and Earls
of Essex.

The Earls of Radnor owe their rank and wealth to the enterprise which
led young Laurence des Bouveries from his native Flanders to a
commercial life at Canterbury in the days of Queen Bess. From this
humble Flemish apprentice sprang a line of Turkey merchants, each of
whom in turn added his contribution to the family dignities and riches,
until Sir Jacob, the third Baronet, blossomed into a double-barrelled
peer as Lord Longford and Viscount Folkestone. Not the least, by any
means, of the descendants of Laurence des Bouveries was Canon Pusey,
the great theologian, who was grandson of the first Lord Folkestone.

Lord Harewood springs from a stock of merchants who accumulated great
wealth in the eighteenth century; and Lord Jersey owes much of his
riches to Francis Child, the industrious apprentice who, in Stuart days,
married the daughter of his master, William Wheeler, the goldsmith, who
lived one door west of Temple Bar.

Other peers who count London apprentices among their ancestors are Lord
Aveland and Viscount Downe, both descendants of Gilbert Heathcote, whose
commercial success was crowned by the Lord Mayoralty in 1711; the
Marquis of Bath, a descendant of Lord Mayor Heyward, whose sixteen
children are all portrayed in his monument in St Alphege Church, London
Wall; and also of Richard Gresham, mercer, who waxed rich from the
spoils of the monasteries, and whose son was founder of the Royal
Exchange. The Earl of Eldon owes his existence to that runaway exploit
which linked the lives of John Scott, the Newcastle tradesman's son, and
Miss Surtees, the banker's daughter.

If George III. during his lengthy reign only raised one business man to
the Peerage, later years have provided a very liberal crop of coroneted
men of commerce. To mention but a few of them, banking has been
honoured--and the Peerage also--by the baronies granted to Lords
Aldenham and Avebury; Lords Hindlip, Burton, Iveagh, and Ardilaun owe
their wealth and rank to successful brewing; Baron Overtoun was
proprietor of large chemical works; Lord Allerton's riches have been
drawn from his tan-pits; Lord Armstrong's millions come from the
far-famed Elswick engine-works at Newcastle; and Lord Masham's from his
mills at Manningham. The Viscounty of Hambleden has sprung from a modest
news-shop in the Strand; the Barony of Burnham was cradled in a
newspaper office; and Lords Mount-Stephen and Strathcona were shepherd
boys seventy years or more ago, before they found their way through
commerce to the Roll of Peers.

Although these lowly origins are as firmly established as Holy Writ, and
are in most cases as well known to the noble families who trace rank and
riches from them as to the expert in genealogy, they are often as
carefully excluded from the family tree as the poor and undesirable
relation from the doors of their palaces. Not content with a lineage
extending over long centuries, and with a score of strains of undoubted
blue blood, many of our greatest nobles and oldest gentle families
strain after an ancestry which is not theirs, and throw overboard some
obscure forefather to find room for a mythical Norman marauder, who in
many cases exists nowhere but in the place of honour on their own
pedigrees.

"What are pedigrees worth?" asks Professor Freeman. "I turn over a
'Peerage' or other book of genealogy, and I find that, when a pedigree
professes to be traced back to the times of which I know most in detail,
it is all but invariably false. As a rule it is not only false, but
impossible. The historical circumstances, when any are introduced, are
for the most part not merely fictions, but exactly that kind of fiction
which is, in its beginning, deliberate and interested falsehood."

This scathing criticism refers to pedigrees which profess to be based on
existing records; what shall we say, then, of those family trees which
have their ambitious roots in the dark centuries which no ray of
genealogical light can possibly pierce? Take, for instance, that amazing
pedigree of the Lyte family of Lytes Cary, at the head of which is
"Leitus (one of the five captains of Beotia that went to Troye)," whose
ancestors came to England first with Brute, "the most noble founder of
the Britons." (It is only fair to say that the present representative of
this really ancient family, Sir H. Maxwell-Lyte, an expert genealogist,
turns his back resolutely on the Beotian captain, and even on Brute
himself, and generally lops his family tree in a merciless but most
salutary fashion.)

The College of Arms, among many amazing pedigrees, treasures one of a
family "whose present representative is sixty-seventh in descent in an
unbroken male line from Belinus the Great (Beli Mawr), King of Britain,"
which actually exhibits the arms of Beli, who, poor man, died long
centuries before heraldry was even cradled.

Of families who derive descent from Charlemagne the name is legion; but
even such elongated pedigrees are quite contemptible in their brevity
compared with others which have at their head no other progenitor than
Adam, the father of us all. At Mostyn Hall, we learn, there is a vellum
roll, twenty-one feet long, of pedigrees, some of which "are traced back
to 'Adam, Son of God,' without any conscious sense of the incongruous";
and these records, we must remember, are in the hand of "a man
thoroughly trustworthy as to the matters of his own time." There is in
the College of Arms a similar family tree which commences boldly with
Adam and the Garden of Eden; and an authority on Welsh pedigrees
declares,

"A Welshman whose family was in any position in the
sixteenth century can, as a rule, without much trouble
find a pedigree thence to Adam; an Englishman who is
unable to do the same has a natural tendency to regard
all Welsh pedigrees with distrust, not to say contempt."

Mr Horace Round gives some startling examples of flagrant dishonesty,
where forgery is only one of the implements used. Take, for example,
that shameful story of the "Shipway frauds," which is thus referred to
by a clergyman of the parish.

"In the fall of 1896, by an elaborate system of impudent
frauds, an unscrupulous attempt was made to claim these
monuments for one who was an entire stranger to the
parish. An agent from London was employed in a search for
a pedigree. He, by fraudulent means, concocted a very
plausible story. Genealogies were manufactured, tombs
were desecrated, registers were falsified, wills were
forged--in a word, various outrages were committed, with
many sacred things in this parish and elsewhere. These
two figures, as part of the pedigree, were deposited in a
niche in the chantry; on either side were huge brass
tablets on which were engraven various untruthful and
unfounded statements."

In another case Hughenden Church was desecrated to gratify the vanity of
a family of Wellesbourne, anxious to trace their descent from the
Montforts.

"They caused a monumental effigy of an imaginary ancestor
to be carved in the style of the thirteenth century
...they adapted the plate-armour effigy to their purpose
by cutting similar arms on the skirts, and they had three
rude effigies fabricated by way of filling up the gaps
between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries."

To give but two more out of many cases of similar imposture, the
Deardens, many years ago, actually had a family chapel constructed in
Rochdale Church with sham effigies, slabs, and brasses to the memory of
wholly fictitious ancestors; while in two Scottish churches altar-tombs
were placed to the memory of successive apocryphal lairds of Coulthart.
Such are the lengths to which a craze for ancestry has carried some
unprincipled persons; and there is no doubt that the arts of the forger
are still enlisted in the service of people who crave long descent and
do not scruple as to the methods by which they attain it.

Happily, however, the mania for ancestors does not often take such
extreme and reprehensible forms; its manifestations are usually rather
amusing than criminal. A common weakness is, however plebeian and
obvious in its origin a surname may be, to dignify it with a Norman or
at least French cradle. Thus we are solemnly assured that the Smithsons
(a name which bluntly proclaims its own derivation) are "a branch of the
baronial family of Scalers, or De Scallariis, which flourished in
Aquitaine as long ago as the eighth century." The first Cooper was not,
as the unlearned might imagine, a modest if respectable tradesman of
that name--no, he was a member of the great house of De Columbers, one
of whom was "Le Cupere, being probably Cup-bearer to the King"; Pindar,
the patronymic of the Earls Beauchamp, is, of course, a translation of
the Norman Le Bailli, and its bearers are "probably descended from
William, a Norman of distinction"; while at least one family of Brownes
springs lineally from "Turulph, a companion of Rollo," founder of the
Ducal House of Normandy. After this, one learns with meek resignation
that the honourable cognomen Smith is derived from _Smeeth_, "a level
plain"; and that some, at least, of the Parker family had for ancestors
certain De Lions, who flourished bravely under William the Conqueror.

Another favourite vanity is to glorify a name by the prefix De:

"a particle which has been all but unknown in England
since the first half of the fifteenth century, and which
has never possessed in Great Britain that nobiliary
character which the French nation have chosen to assign
to it. De Bathe, De Trafford, and the rest are
restorations in the modern Gothic manner."

It is, we fear, a similar vanity which has displaced such modest
surnames as Bear, Hunt, Wilkins, Mullins, Green, and Gossip in favour of
De Beauchamp, De Vere, De Winton, De Moleyns, De Freville, and De Rodes.

This ludicrous yearning for a Norman ancestry is responsible for many of
the absurdities in the pedigrees of even our most exalted families. Thus
it is that we find such statements as this widely circulated, and
accepted with a quite childlike credence:

"This noble family (Grosvenor) is descended from a long
train in the male line of illustrious ancestors, who
flourished in Normandy with great dignity and grandeur
from the time of its first erection into a sovereign
Dukedom, A.D. 912, to the Conquest of England. The
patriarch of this ancestral house was an uncle of Rollo,
the famous Dane...."

And again:

"The blood of the great Hugh Lupus, Duke (_sic_) of
Chester, flows in the Grosvenor veins."

This pleasing fiction still rears its head unabashed in spite of all
attempts to destroy it; in its honour the late Duke of Westminster was
actually named "Hugh Lupus" at the baptismal font, while his younger
brother was labelled Richard "de Aquila"; and yet it is an indisputable
fact that the Grosvenor ancestors cannot be carried beyond a Robert de
Grosvenor, of Budworth, who lived a good century after the Conquest, and
who has no more traceable connection with Rollo than with the Man in
the Moon.

The Ducal House of Fife, we are told, "derives from Fyfe Macduff, a
chief of great wealth and power, who lived about the year 834, and
afforded to Kenneth II., King of Scotland, strong aid against his
enemies, the Picts." The present Duke, however, has the good sense to
disclaim any hereditary connection with the old Earls of Fife, and to
place at the top of his family tree one Adam Duff, who laid the
foundation of the family prosperity in the seventeenth century. The
Spencers, it is claimed, spring lineally from the old baronial
Despencers, "being a branche issueing from the ancient family and
chieffe of the Spencers, of which sometymes were the Earles of
Winchester and Glocester, and Barons of Glamorgan and Morgannocke."
This, no doubt, is a very distinguished origin; but, alas! the earliest
provable ancestors of this "noble" family were respectable and
well-to-do Warwickshire graziers, and the first authentic title on the
true pedigree is the knighthood conferred on John Spencer in 1519, less
than four centuries ago. Similarly the Russells, Dukes of Bedford, are
said to be derived from one Hugh de Russell, or Rossel (who took that
name from his estate in Normandy), one of the Conqueror's attendant
barons on his invasion of England. Here, again, facts fail lamentably to
support the descent claimed, since the earliest known progenitor of this
"great house" was that Henry Russell who was sent to Parliament to
represent Weymouth in the fifteenth century, and whose great-grandson
blossomed into the first Earl of Bedford. (It may, perhaps, be well to
state that, although the pedigrees here criticised are those that have
been or are widely accepted, they are not necessarily approved by the
families whose descent they profess to give.)

Another Norman ancestor who must go overboard is the alleged founder of
the "noble" house of Bolingbroke--that "William de St John who came to
England with the Conqueror as grand master of the artillery and
supervisor of the wagons and carriages," since it can be positively
shewn that the St John family first set foot in England a good many
years after William I. was safely underground; and with this mythical
William must also go that equally nebulous progenitor of the Fortescue
family, "who" according to the venerable and almost uniform tradition,
"landed in England with his master in the year 1066, and, protecting him
with his shield from the blows of an assailant, was graciously dubbed
'Fortescu,' the man of the stout shield." The Stourtons, so the
"Peerages" say, were "of considerable rank before the Conquest, and
dictated their own terms to the Conqueror"; but, as Canon Jackson, the
learned antiquary, truly points out, "of this there is no evidence. The
name is found, apparently for the first time, among Wiltshire
landowners, in the reign of Edward I., when a Nicholas Stourton held one
knight's fee under the Lovells of Castle Cary."

The Duke of Norfolk has a family tree of very stately growth, and can
well afford to repudiate a good many of the ancestors provided for him
by "Peerage" editors. Certainly, if he ever read the following statement
he must have smiled aloud:

"The Duke's proudest boast is that his name of Howard is
merely that of an ancestor, Hereward the Wake, whose
representative, Sir Hereward Wake, is still in
Northamptonshire."

As a matter of fact, his Grace's earliest known ancestor was Sir William
Howard, "who was a grown man and on the bench in 1293, whose real
pedigree is very obscure"; and who, no doubt, would have laughed as
heartily as his descendant of to-day at his imaginary derivation from
the Conqueror's stubborn foe of the fens, Hereward the Wake.

In the Fitzwilliam pedigree we encounter another nebulous knight of the
Conqueror. "The Fitzwilliams," we are informed, "date so far back that
their record is lost, but Sir William, a knight of the Conqueror's day,
married the daughter of Sir John Elmley," and so on; and further, that
at Milton Hall, Peterborough, one may actually look on an antique scarf
which "was presented to a direct ancestor of the Fitzwilliams by William
the Conqueror." The most skilled of our genealogists have sought in vain
for an authentic trace of this gallant knight of Conquest days; and
Professor Freeman does not hesitate to dismiss the story of his
existence as "pure fable." But if Sir William of Normandy must fall from
the family tree, his place is most creditably taken by Godric, a Saxon
Thane, who, as a forefather, is at least as respectable as any Norman
warrior in William's train.

The house of Fitzgerald is credited with an ancestor, one Dominus Otho,
"who is supposed to have been of the family of the Gherardini of
Florence. This noble passed over into Normandy, and thence, in 1057,
into England, where he became so great a favourite with Edward the
Confessor that he excited the jealousy of the Saxon Thanes." Dominus
Otho must too pass, with many another treasured ancestor, into the
crowded genealogical land of the rejected; for the real founder of the
Fitzgerald house was Walter, son of "Other," whose name is first met
with in Domesday Book in 1086. The Otho story is shown to be "absolute
fiction."

In view of such examples of misplaced ingenuity exhibited by the makers
of pedigrees for our noble families, one can almost read without a smile
that

"there were Heneages at Hainton in the time of King Edwy;
they doubtless took part in the revolt which brought
Edgar to the throne, and it is not impossible that some
of them were in the train of Wulfhere, King of Mercia;"

or that

"Lord Alington comes of a family of ancient lineage, one
of his ancestors being Sir Hildebrand de Alington, who
was marshal to William the Conqueror at the battle of
Hastings,"

though we may know full well that the Sturt pedigree really begins in
the seventeenth century, and that the earliest known Heneage lived and
died some three centuries before.

But "noble" families have no monopoly of misguided genealogy. "The
immense majority of the pedigrees of the landed gentry," says a
well-known officer of arms, "cannot, I fear, be characterised as
otherwise than utterly worthless. The errors of the 'peerage' are as
nothing to the fables which we encounter everywhere;" and the same may
be said of many another collection of pedigrees which is a treasured
possession in countless British homes.

Some even justly famous men have not been proof against this insidious
form of vanity and pretence. Edmund Spenser was ungenerous enough to
"dismiss his known ancestry of small Lancashire gentry and plant himself
modestly in the shadow of the newly discovered shield of arms of the
noble house of Spencer, 'of which I meanest boast myself to be.'" And
Lord Tennyson, whose ultimate ascertainable forefather was an eighteenth
century Lincolnshire apothecary, was provided with a slightly
differenced cadet's version of the arms of Archbishop Tenison, with whom
he had no connection whatever.

INDEX

Aberdeen, Earl of, 299
Affleck, Lady, 66
----, Misses, 66
Alava, General, 44
Albemarle, Lord, 235
Aldenham, Lord, 333
Alexander, Emperor, 49
Alington, Lord, 343
----, Sir Hildebrand, 343
Allerton, Lord, 334
Almack's, 45-49
Andrews, Mr, 71-73
Anglesey, Earl of, 165
Anne, of Austria, 2
----, Princess, 113
----, Queen, 331
Ardilaun, Lord, 333
Argyll, Duke of, 295
Arlington, Lady, 184
----, Lord, 6, 182, 183
Armstrong, Lord, 334
Arran, Lord, 76
Ashburton, Lord, 327
Atholl, Duke of, 299
Avebury, Lord, 333
Aveland, Lord, 333
Aylesbury, Lady, 154

Bacon, Francis, 270
Barillon, 193
Baring, Alexander, 327
----, Francis, Sir, 327
----, Franz (Dr), 326
----, John, 326-327
Barnard, Dr, 64
Bath, Marquess of, 330, 333
Beaconsfield, Lord, 159, 160
Beauchamp, Earl, 338
Beaufort, Duc de, 178, 179, 191
Becher, Sir William W., 251
Bedford, Duchess of, 46
----, Dukes of, 340
Bentinck, Lord George, 156-164
Berkeley, Annie May, 162, 163
----, Earl of, 162
Bilton, Miss Belle, 255
Bingham, Senator, 327
Blantyre, Lord, 1, 20, 305
Blessington, Countess of, 97, 100-109
----, Earl of, 99-105
Blount, Christopher, 281
Boleyn, Godfrey, 330
Bolingbroke, Lord, 290, 321
Bolton, Duke of, 246
----, Duchess of, 246
----, Mary Catherine, 246, 247
Boothby, Brook, 46
Boswell, 296, 297, 298
Bottefeld, William de, 330
Bouveries, Laurence des, 332, 333
Bracegirdle, Mrs, 166-173
Bridges, Sir Thomas, 85
Bridgewater, Duke of, 295
Bristol, Earl of, 199, 204
Broke, Lord, 331
Brougham, Lord, 107
Browne, family, 338
Brunton, Louisa, 251, 252
Buccleuch, Duchess of, 300
----, Duke of, 299
Buckingham, Duke of, 4-6, 36, 37, 80-85, 112, 181, 182
Buller, Lady Harriet, 48
Bunbury, Sir Thomas, 216-218
Burke, Sir Bernard, 62-63
Burleigh, Lord, 257, 258
Burney, Dr Charles, 22
Burnham, Barony, 334
Burrell, Mrs Drummond, 46
Burton, Lord, 333
Bute, Countess of, 238
Byron, Lord, 42-43, 45, 48, 102

Cadogan, Earl of, 208
Campbell, Colonel John, 295
Canning, 42
----, Mrs, 35
Capel, William, 332
Cardigan, Earl of, 74
Carhampton, Earl of, 89
Carlingford, Lord, 7
Carnegie, James, 223-225
Caroline, Princess, 45
Carrington, Lords, 332
Castlemaine, Lady, 8-12, 14, 18, 115, 116, 184, 192
Castlereagh, Lady, 42
Catherine, Empress, 205
----, Queen, 3, 10-12, 16
----, the Great, 75
Cecil, Henry, (Earl of Exeter), 256-265
----, Lord Thomas, 265
Chaffinch, Barbara (Countess of Jersey), 37
Charles I., 1
Charles II., 1-20, 75-84, 110, 112, 115, 116, 177-194, 207
Charlotte, Queen, 202, 214, 296
Chesterfield, Lord, 116, 291, 325
Child, Anne, 37-41
----, Francis, 37
----, Robert, 37-41
Christina, Queen of Sweden, 74
Chudleigh, Colonel, 195, 196
----, Elizabeth, 195-206
Churchill, Arabella, 115
----, John, 114-126
----, Winston, 114, 120
Clarendon, Chancellor, 17
Cobden, 326
Cochrane, Lady Susanna, 222-227
Compton, Lady, 142-147
----, Lord, 139-147
Congreve, 166
Conolly, Lady Louisa, 209
Coombe, William, 63
Cooper family, 338
Coutts, Thomas, 252-255
Coventry, Countess of, 287-290
----, Earl of, 286
Cowper, Lady, 46
Cradock, Mr, 52
Craven, Earl of, 252, 330
----, William, 330
Crawford, Lord, 306
Creevey, 43
Cromer, Earl, 327
Crosby, Sir John, 137
Cumberland, Duchess of, 91-95
----, Duke of, 87-95, 286

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