Henrietta Tindal

“ He showed no inclination to abscond, and they pronounced him a “very genteel person,” and a “man of quality.” But as he sat there, the object of so much wonder and idle curiosity, Lord Dalrie sometimes burst into tears of passionate indignation at the unseemly exposure of his dear wife’s remains. An awful change had been passing over that beloved face ever since the light and air of the living world had been admitted to this citizen of the grave. ”

“ Lord Dalrie strictly preserved his incognito, until a visitor came into the vestry, who understood French and Latin, who spoke like an educated courteous gentleman to the lonely mourner, and it happened to be this person also who first recognised the changing features of the inmate of the rich coffin, and told the young widower what were the names which had once belonged to his beloved Catherine. Mr. St. George was immediately communicated with, and he learned the manner of his lost wife’s return to her native country, and her strange adventures since she had parted from him. ”

“ The whooping cranes on their broad white wings,
The beaver haunting the water springs,
The porcupine in the cypress trees,
Tribes of the river, and air, and seas—
All are his birthright, the bold and free!
Sometimes, among his brave joys, will he,
Sadly and kindly, remember me? ”

“ Our present Under-Secretary of State for War, the Earl de Grey and Ripon, derives the patriot’s blood through his mother, the Lady Sarah Albinia Louisa Hobart, only child of Robert, fourth Earl of Buckinghamshire. So there is good fruit yet on this ancient family tree: it still bears sons of promise, and yields us men of mark. ”

“ The brown hair is turned off her fine forehead, but one shadowy curl wanders over her neck and bust; her eyes have a more glowing tone of colour, they are singularly liquid and melting; her profile is slightly aquiline, and an indescribable expression of finesse and determination lurks about her full but firmly-closed mouth; the carriage of the lady’s head is haughty, and she looks perfectly conscious of her commanding beauty, as, with one slender bloodless hand, she daintily fingers a blue scarf, which falls over the right side of her dusky pink dress. ”

“ This island was once situated in the midst of the Falls of St. Anthony, on the Mississippi; it has disappeared long since, but its site is said to be haunted at early morning by the spirit of a young Indian, who perished there ages before white men crossed the Atlantic. She was distracted by the faithlessness of her husband, and embarking in her canoe with her first-born infant, drifted down the current of the mighty river, seeking death, which met her at the Falls, within sight of her assembled tribe. ”

“ John Viscount Dalrie might have been about twenty-five years of age: he was the heir to an earldom, and his countess-mother descended from the house of “proud Argyle.” Her son was distinguished for personal grace and beauty; he possessed a highly cultivated exquisitely sensitive mind, and the hapless young nobleman proved himself as gravely enduring and courageously faithful as the stoutest and most chivalric knight in the long rolls of his ancestry. He met Mrs. St. George during one of his visits to London ”

“ In August, 1634, his beloved first wife died; and “the reader who would learn how tender, and yet wise, John Hampden was—affectionate without weakness, and pious without affectation, may turn aside to the sequestered church of Great Hampden, and read the exquisite memorial which describes his wife’s virtues and his own bereavement.” [3]
Many good portraits, that must be marked as unknown, adorn the chambers and passages of this rambling old mansion. They represent fair and dignified women: men evidently prosperous and important in their generation. ”

“ William Norris, came the following day, about two o’clock, p.m. In the course of the afternoon the coffin and its contents were returned to the grave, but in what manner I could not say, as I was not present. . . . . . . The first time I went upstairs, after the exhumation, a portrait, which hung on the best staircase, appeared to be looking at me, and I immediately recognised the face and figure of the man I had seen in the grave in Hampden Church. The sight I shall never forget so long as I live. ”

“ The interview is said to have been “very moving,” and Lord Dalrie earnestly assured Mr. St. George of his entire innocence, and of the honest intentions which he had entertained throughout the affair; but even this discovery of Catherine’s guilt did not put his love to shame, nor shake his determination to attend upon her, even to the last. He accompanied the body to its interment at Stoke, followed by mutes and hired mourners muffled in crape and silk, and drawn by black-plumed horses. He gave this wretched woman the burial of a legitimate Lady Dalrie. ”

“ John Hampden succeeded in his infancy to the family estates, for his father died in 1597, when his heir was little more than three years old, and his will directs that his wife, Elizabeth, shall continue to enjoy the use of such apartments as she may choose in Hampden House. She had a long lease of those chambers, in a dwelling often visited by trouble and death; for we learn from the parish register, that she departed this life February 21st, 1664, having lived a widow sixty-seven years, and attained the great age of ninety. ”

“ During the next four years they travelled over the greater part of Europe, never remaining long in any place, since Catherine was more restless than even in former days, and she now carried in her own bosom certain fierce pursuers, from whom there is no escape. Lord Dalrie’s confidence in her merit and truth was never clouded by suspicion or doubt ”

“ The parish register also had attractions for us; we would inspect the disputed entry of the patriot’s burial, and learn who were the clergy that officiated at Hampden during the time of its greatest squire. The wall of their churchyard adjoins his garden,—they were certainly his nearest neighbours; if they possessed congenial minds, his friends and companions also. We knew already busy William Spurstow, the chaplain to the Green-Coats; but there must have been another rector during the forty-six years John Hampden owned these estates. ”

“ On her deathbed lay the lost wife, and among the terrible bloom and brightness of hectic fever the haunted soul looked out in the anxious intensity of her glowing brown eyes, and mental emotion and physical suffering were indicated by the painful working of her thin nostrils. A young man knelt beside her, listening and watching for every word, symptom, or look. ”

“ The present Earl of Buckinghamshire is the representative of John Hampden, through his daughter Mary. His able and accomplished son, Lord Hobart, inherits the literary tastes of his eminent ancestor, “who improved his fine parts by converse with great men and good authors.” ”

“ When exhaustion and unconsciousness would have been quieting human care in almost any other brain, that which worked under the pale high forehead before me was engaged in calculating the amount of her diminishing strength, and keeping watch lest death should surprise her before she had completed the work which she had reserved for the last minutes of her life ”

“ The London red coats of Hollis, and the blue and purple uniforms of Lords Brook and Say, had appeared among these plains and groves; for the country was sorely rough-ridden then by foe and friend, the cattle were driven by turns for King and Parliament, and the smoke of burning homesteads and villages rose from the fertile fields. Many of the most important parliamentary leaders either belonged to Buckinghamshire, or had extensive family connections among its landed gentry; of this cousinhood were Oliver Cromwell, John Hampden, Sir Hardress Waller, Sir Richard Ingoldsby, Oliver St. ”

“ She speedily met with a powerful protector, and gained all that she had learned to covet in very early days; but nothing was heard of her at Stoke until the summer of 1752, and to find her again we must travel far away from the great farm, its corn lands and marine marshes; far from Mr. St. George’s parsonage on our eastern coast, to “Verona’s Champain,” as Dante and his faithful Carey have it, to a sick room in an Italian villa. ”

“ The estates of John Hampden, and his ancient residence, are still possessed by his descendants, through his sixth daughter, Mary, wife of Sir John Hobart, K.B. The late Earl of Buckinghamshire devised this property to his nephew, George Hampden Cameron, younger son of his sister, the Lady Vere Catherine Louisa Hobart and her husband, Donald Cameron, of Lochiel, chief of the clan Cameron, whose ancestors suffered attainder and forfeiture for their fidelity to the House of Stuart ”

“ No children were born of her second worthless marriage, to give her a motive, colourable even to herself, for maintaining her successful deception. Maternal affection could not interpose to mask the enormity of any part of her guilt ”

“ Germans’ gallery; it realised our ideal of the popular leader; it looked as we thought John Hampden ought to have looked, and we inquired what ground our guide had for stating that this was the portrait of the patriot.
“I know that it is his likeness,” was the answer, very deliberately given, “for I saw him in his coffin, and I afterwards identified this picture in the presence of my master, the Earl of Buckinghamshire.” ”

“ It is not surprising that he should have “put himself into a passion,” as our printed authority states, nor, considering the social tone of the day, that he so far forgot his clerical obligations as “to threaten to run Lord Dalrie through the body.” ”

“ The exciting engagements of this ardent controvertist at that moment may account for his omitting to record in the parish register the burial of his patron, in an age when such clerical duties were so grossly neglected. The entry now standing is an evident interpolation, in the hand-writing of Robert Lenthall, the succeeding rector, who was inducted in the November of the same year. We copy this often-disputed clause:—“John Hampden, Esq., Lord of Hampden, 25 June, 1643.” ”

“ We gather these particulars from an old “Debrett’s Peerage” for 1814:—the very existence of John, Lord Dalrie, is passed over unrecorded in modern, and more popular “Peerages.” The name of this unhappy heir has been struck out of the history of his prosperous house. Mr. St. George took the evils of life more easily, but he never married again, and was laid in his quiet churchyard, on the 11th July, 1774. The family of Hancomb is extinct ”

“ No chronicler was born among them to collect and record the fleeting interest and associations attached to these relics and portraits of the dead; so every clue by which they could now be identified is buried with the Hampdens and the Trevor-Hampdens in the church and graveyard beside their pleasant garden walks; they might have been strangers who “tarried” there “but a day;” ”

“ Brown Willis calls Egeon “a famous man,” and in the margin of his MS. he refers to Anthony Wood, who describes this Buckinghamshire rector as “learned indeed beyond his age, and as well read in the Fathers, commentators, and schoolmen as any man of his time in the University of Oxford.” He was a native of Lancashire, and became student of Oxford in 1593, being then about seventeen years of age ”

“ Within the space of one century, in 1824, the male line of the Trevors also failed; and as that which came through a woman might not go to a woman, this historic property passed to George Robert Hobart, fifth and late Earl of Buckinghamshire, representative of Mary, sixth daughter of the patriot ”

“ J. B. Marsden. ↑ Mr. J. Robertson is now living at Nocton Hall, near Lincoln, in the service of the Countess Dowager of Ripon, herself a descendant of John Hampden. ↑ Quoted by Lipscomb. ↑ Mr. Forster’s “Memoir of Lord Nugent.” ↑ Mr. Forster’s “Memoir of Lord Nugent.” ↑ Letter of Lord Denman to Lord Nugent.—Forster’s Memoir. ↑ Quoted by Lipscomb, “Ex. Autograph. penes Geo. Rob. Com. Bucks,” and to be seen still at Hampden House. ↑ See Wiffen’s “Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell,” 2 vols. ↑ See “Letters of Rachel, Lady Russell, edited by Lord John Russell. ”