John Middleton, 1st Earl of Middleton

“ Sir John Middleton was a good-looking man about forty, thoroughly good-humoured in manner and countenance, friendly and kind-hearted in disposition, who delighted in collecting about him more young people than his house would hold. ”

“ Died this year, by a fall from a horse, at Tangier in Morocco, John Earl of Middleton, governor of that establishment. Of a family of the minor gentry in Kincardineshire, he had entered life as a pikeman in Hepburn’s regiment in France, but soon was called to take part in the civil wars of his own country, serving first the English parliament and Scottish Estates, and afterwards proving an active and vigorous partisan of the king. ”

“ In 1693 the earl joined the exiled king at St Germains, where he became his secretary of state; afterwards he held the same office at the court of James Edward, the old pretender, in Flanders and in Lorraine. He was partly responsible for the unsuccessful expedition of the Jacobites to Scotland in 1707, and he resigned his office as secretary in 1713. Middleton, who had been created earl of Monmouth by the pretender, died in 1719. ”

“ His eldest son Charles, 2nd Earl of Middleton (c. 1640–1719) , held several offices under Charles II. and James II., being envoy extraordinary at Vienna and afterwards joint secretary for Scotland. In 1684 he became an English secretary of state, and with Richard Graham, Viscount Preston, he had the difficult task of managing the House of Commons for James II. He was loyal to James after the king fled to France, although he remained in England. where, as the leader of the moderate Jacobites, he sought to bring about a restoration by peaceful means. ”

“ Since I have so few employments left me to dispose of, and that most of our friends are to hold theirs for life; I hope you will all be satisfied with so great a share of power. I bid you heartily farewell; and am your assured friend.
↑ Published with an intent to throw the odium of a design to bring in the pretender, on the whigs. ↑ Charles Middleton, the second earl of that title, and baron Clairmont, was secretary of state for Scotland from the year 1684 to the revolution; when he followed king James into France, and was attainted by the Scots parliament in 1695. ”

“ MIDDLETON, JOHN HENRY (1846–1896) , archæologist, architect, professor of fine art, and museum director, born at York on 6 Oct. 1846, was the only surviving child of John Middleton, architect, of York, and Maria Margaret, his wife, daughter of James Pigott Pritchett [q. v.] , architect, of York, and his first wife, Peggy Maria Terry. As a child he was taken by his parents to Italy, where he acquired a love of that country and its language, which lasted throughout his life. ”

“ In 1660 he returned to England in the same ship with the king. His peerage was then confirmed by letters patent under the title of Earl of Middleton, Lord Clermont and Fettercairn. He was also appointed commander-in-chief in Scotland, governor of Edinburgh Castle, and lord high commissioner to the Scottish parliament. ”

“ There are fine truths also scattered through his dramas as:—
"To see what solitariness is about dying princes! As heretofore they have unpeopled towns, divided friends, and made great houses inhospitable, so now, O justice, where are their flatterers? Flatterers are but the shadows of princes' bodies; the least thick cloud makes them invisible."
Of Middleton, who wrote from twenty to thirty plays, in some of which, according to a very prevalant fashion of that age, he called in the aid of Rowley, Decker, Fletcher, and Massinger ”

“ Sir John was a sportsman; Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she humoured her children; and these were their only resources. Continual engagements at home and abroad, however, supplied all the deficiencies of nature and education--supported the good spirits of Sir John, and gave exercise to the good-breeding of his wife.
Mrs. Jennings, Lady Middleton's mother, who formed one of the party on the first occasion of the Dashwoods dining at Barton Park, was a good-humoured, fat, elderly woman, who talked a good deal, and seemed very happy, and rather vulgar. ”

“ Amongst dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best scenes recall the creator Middleton and Webster. of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627) , John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in high comedy, like The Old Law, that turns on some exquisite point of honour—“the moral sense of our ancestors”; in comedy that is merely graphic and vigorous ”

“ While man makes sewers and artillery,
Grim bayonets, and howitzers and shell,
The battle-squadron surging through the tides,
Ten thousand hecatombs of reeking red
And all the vile magnificence of War.
Jesse E. Middleton is the only son of the Rev. E, Middleton of the Canadian Methodist Church, and was born in Wellington County, Ontario, Canada, on November 3, 1872. His father is of English birth, but his mother, Margaret Agar, is a native Canadian. His home education, which was very thorough, was supplemented by High School training. ”

“ Two officers of the army, Colonel John Darcy, son of the Lord Conyers, and Captain James Kendall, withdrew to the lobby. Middleton went down to the bar and expostulated warmly with them. He particularly addressed himself to Kendall, a needy retainer of the court, who had, in obedience to the royal mandate, been sent to Parliament by a packed corporation in Cornwall, and who had recently obtained a grant of a hundred head of rebels sentenced to transportation. "Sir," said Middleton, "have not you a troop of horse in His Majesty's service?" ”

“ A moody time though the autumn of 1643 and the winter of 1643-4 must have been for Milton, there was some relaxation for him in society more general than that of his wife-deserted household. "Our author," says Phillips, "now as it were a single man again, made it his chief diversion now and then in an evening to visit the Lady Margaret Ley, daughter to the—Ley, Earl of Marlborough, Lord High Treasurer of England, and President of the Privy Council to King James the First. This lady, being a woman of great wit and ingenuity, had a particular honour for him, and took much delight in his company ”

“ Lord Lorn procured a letter from Charles, ordering the lord advocate to introduce no charge prior to 1651, and that on the conclusion of the trial, the proceedings should be submitted to the king before judgment was given. This would have probably defeated his intended foes had the king been honest in the matter; but Middleton represented to Charles that to stay judgment till the proceedings had been inspected by the king, would look like distrust of the parliament, and might much discourage that loyal body. Charles allowed matters, therefore, to take their course ”

“ Unfortunately no external evidence has been adduced to support this theory, plausible in itself, beyond the assertion of the jacobite second Earl of Ailesbury that William III permitted Shrewsbury, Marlborough, and Godolphin to correspond with Middleton at St. ”

“ In 1648 he was appointed lieutenant-general of the cavalry in the army raised by the Scottish estates to rescue the king from the hands of the sectaries, and on his march south he received a wound at Mauchline-Muir in dispersing some two thousand ultra-covenanters, who had assembled in arms on the Monday, after a communion, to resist the action of the government in connection with ‘the engagement.’ Middleton behaved with great bravery at the battle of Preston, but his horse having been shot under him he was taken prisoner and confined at Newcastle. ”

“ Middleton came to Toronto as music-critic of The Mail and Empire and after a year of serv ice took up similar work on The Toronto Daily News. He retired from critical work to write a daily column of paragraphs and light verse under the heading "On the Side." This "feature" has awakened a good deal of favourable comment. Mr. Middleton is well-known and highly regarded in Canada. Some of his work is not unknown to the readers of the American magazines. ”

“ By improving an affront the king met with anno 1659, some malignants about him so prevailed to heighten his fears of the evil designs of those about him, that by a correspondence with the papists, malignants, and such as were disaffected to the covenants in the north, matters came in a little to such a pass, that a considerable number of noblemen, gentlemen, and others were to rise and form themselves into an army under Middleton's command, and the king was to cast himself into their arms, &c. ”

“ He was an ardent advocate of the restoration of episcopacy, this being one reason which led to serious dissensions between the earl of Lauderdale and himself, and in 1663 he was deprived of his offices. ”

“ Middleton’s force through the Northwest rebellion of 1885, and took charge of the party dispatched by the general through the rebel district from Humboldt to Prince Albert. He was a member of the North-West Council for the district of Lorne, from June, 1883, to October, 1885; and was returned to Parliament, as the member for Saskatchewan, at the general election in 1887. He is a Conservative in politics. He was married August 12th, 1884, to Alice Maude Blanchard, daughter of Charles Blanchard, Truro, N.S. He is a member of the Manitoba Club, Winnipeg ”

“ Middleton is on the side of youth. Young men induce usurers to compete with one another for the hand of a disguised courtesan, or by ingenious devices rob their old uncles when these refuse to provide for them. Middleton's indelicacy is almost always relieved by real humour. Even A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is as amusing as it is outrageous.
In his more romantic plays Middleton betrays the inability which besets all the minor dramatists, to invest a whole play with the poetic charm which illumines portions. What is beautiful and what is repulsive are found side by side. ”

“ X Daughter to that good Earl, once President Of Englands Counsel, and her Treasury, Who liv'd in both, unstain'd with gold or fee, And left them both, more in himself content, Till the sad breaking of that Parlament Broke him, as that dishonest victory At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty Kil'd with report that Old man eloquent, Though later born, then to have known the dayes Wherin your Father flourisht, yet by you 10 Madam, me thinks I see him living yet; ”

“ Dr. Conyers Middleton, occasioned by his late ‘Free Inquiry.’” 12mo, 102 pages. Middleton was born at Richmond, in Yorkshire, in 1683, and died the year after Wesley wrote his letter. He was a favourite of George I.; was hated by Dr. Bentley, the master of his college; had three wives; was Woodwardian professor, and the university librarian; a writer of great powers, but more an oneht of whose productions are debased by the leaven of infidelity. Of an irritable temper, he was always creating [Pg 62] antagonists instead of friends. ”

“ John Jones's ‘Benefit of the auncient Bathes of Buckstones,’ for Luke Harrison, George Bishop, William Jones, and William Norton. In 1572 Middleton left East and set up his press at the sign of the Falcon in Fleet Street, and also opened a shop for the sale of his books in St. ”

“ Middleton is the only man who does his duty. Depend upon it we shall have Cromwell upon us before we are aware of it; and we are in a state of sad confusion—officers quarrelling, men disobedient, much talking, and little doing. ”

“ CLAYTON, JOHN MIDDLETON (1796–1856) , American politician, was born in Dagsborough, Sussex county, Delaware, on the 24th of July 1796. He came of an old Quaker family long prominent in the political history of Delaware. He graduated at Yale in 1815, and in 1819 began to practise law at Dover, Delaware, where for a time he was associated with his cousin, Thomas Clayton (1778–1854) , subsequently a United States senator and chief-justice of the state. He soon gained a large practice. ”

“ Not unhappily chosen is the epithet “The Squibbing Middleton,” for he almost always fails to impress us fully by his great powers. He warms not, he enlightens not, with steady glow, but gives us fireworks instead of stars or altar-burnings. ”

“ Middleton, John Douglas Middleton, John Henry Middleton, John White Middleton, Joseph William Didcon Middleton, Joshua Heath Middleton, Leonard Middleton, Nathaniel Middleton, Richard Middleton, Robert Marshall Middleton, Samuel Middleton, Rev. ”

“ When opened, his gaze seemed fastened on the clouds which hung around the western horizon, reflecting the bright colors, and giving form and loveliness to the glorious tints of an American sunset. The hour, the calm beauty of the season, the occasion, all conspired to fill the spectators with solemn awe. Suddenly, while musing on the remarkable position in which he was placed, Middleton felt the hand which he held grasp his own with incredible power, and the old man, supported on either side by his friends, rose upright to his feet. ”

“ Middleton no more, but devoted himself to "la belle Hamilton," who subsequently became his wife.
Meanwhile, the merry monarch behaved as if he had no higher purpose in life than that of following his pleasures. "The king is as decomposed [dissipated] as ever," the lord chancellor writes to the Duke of Ormond, in a letter preserved in the Bodleian library, "and looks as little after his business; which breaks my heart, and makes me and other of your friends weary of our lives. ”