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January 7th
Born: Robert Nicoll, poet, 1814.
Died: Fenelon de la Mothe, 1715; Allan
Ramsay, the Scottish poet, 1757; J. H. Frere, poet,
1816.
Feast Day: St. Lucian, of Antioch, priest
and martyr, 312. St. Cedd, bishop of London, 7th
century. St. Thillo, 702. St. Kentigerna, widow, 728.
St. Aldric, bishop of Mans, 856. St. Canut, 1171.
St. Lucian, whose name occurs in the calendar of
the Church of England on the 8th of January, being the
first Roman priest who occurs and is retained there,
was a learned Syrian who busied himself in revising
the Holy Scriptures�was for a while disaffected to
orthodox doctrine, but after-wards conformed to it,
and finally died at Nicomedia, after a long
imprisonment.
St. Cedd was an Anglo-Saxon saint, who took a
prominent part in Christianising his hitherto heathen
countrymen in the midland districts of England. He
long served God in the monastery of Lindisfarne. and
afterwards was appointed bishop of the East Saxons.
Amongst his noted acts was the building of a monastery
at Tilbury, near the mouth of the Thames.
FENELON
Francois de Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon was born
at Perigord, in 1651. He preached a sermon at the
early age of fifteen, before a select assembly at
Paris; but his uncle, the Marquis de Fenelon, fearing
that the praises of the world would make the boy vain,
caused. him to enter the seminary of St. Sulpice,
where he remained several years and took orders. He
was sent by Louis XIV to Poitou, to convert the
Protestants, when he nobly refused the aid of
dragoons, relying solely on his powers of persuasion.
He was appointed tutor to the young Duke of Burgundy,
and in five years Louis made him Archbishop of Cambray.
Thence began his troubles: he was suspected of
favouring the doctrines of the Quietists, and upon his
refusing to condemn them, Bossuet denounced him to the
king as a heretic, and he was eventually banished from
the court; he, however, signed a recantation, and
would have been restored to royal favour, had not his
celebrated romance of Telemaque, which he had written
some years before, been published against his will,
through the treachery of a servant.
Louis suspected several passages in this work to be
directed against himself; it was suppressed in France,
but rapidly circulated in Holland; and perhaps there
is no book in the French language which has been more
read. It is, at this day, a class-book in almost every
European school. His work on Female Education,
published in 1688, proceeds upon the uniformly
indulgent theory, teaching without tears. He wrote his
Dialogues of the Dead for the use of his pupil, the
Duke of Burgundy: his noble zeal in not sparing the
vices of kings shines through-out the work. His
political opinions were liberal; and his acts of
benevolence were munificent: in the year 1709 he fed
the French army at his own expense.
ST. DISTAFF'S DAY
As the first free day after the twelve by which
Christmas was formerly celebrated, the 7th of January
was a notable one among our ancestors. They jocularly
called it St. Distaff's Dag, or Rock Dag, because by
women the rock or distaff was then resumed, or
proposed to be so. The duty seems to have been
considered a dubious one, and when it was complied
with, the ploughmen, who on their part scarcely felt
called upon on this day to resume work, made it their
sport to set the flax a-burning; in requital of which
prank, the maids soused the men from the water-pails.
Herrick gives its the popular
ritual of the day in
some of his cheerful stanzas:
St. Distaff's Day; Or, the Morrow after Twelfth-day
Partly work and partly play
You must on St.
Distaffs Day:
From the plough soon free your team;
Then cane home and fother them:
If the maids
a-spinning go,
Burn the flax and fire the tow.
Bring
in pails of water then,
Let the maids bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff' all the right:
Then bid Christmas sport good night,
And next morrow every one
To his own vocation.'
This mirthful observance recalls a time when
spinning was the occupation of almost all women who
had not anything else to do, or during the intervals
of other and more serious work�a cheering resource to
the solitary female in all ranks of life, an
enlivenment to every fireside scene. To spin�how
essentially was the idea at one time associated with
the female sex! even to that extent, that in England
spinster was a recognized legal term for an unmarried
woman�the spear side and the
distaff side were legal
terms to distinguish the inheritance of male from that
of female children�and the distaff became a synonym
for woman herself: thus, the French proverb was:
'The
crown of France never falls to the distaff.'
Now,
through the change wrought by the organized industries
of Manchester and Glasgow, the princess of the fairy
tale who was destined to die by a spindle piercing her
hand, might wander from the Land's End to John O'
Groat's House, and never encounter an article of the
kind, unless in an archaeological museum.
Mr. John Yonge Akerman, in a paper read before
the
Society of Antiquaries, has carefully traced the
memorials of the early use of the distaff and spindle
on the monuments of Egypt, in ancient mythology and
ancient literature, and everywhere shews these
implements as the insignia of womanhood. We scarcely
needed such proof for a fact of which we have
assurance in the slightest reflection on human needs
and means, and the natural place of woman in human
society. The distaff and spindle must, of course, have
been coeval with the first efforts of our race to
frame textures for the covering of their persons. for
they are the very simplest arrangement for the
formation of thread: the distaff, whereon to hang the
flax or tow�the spindle, a loaded pin or stick,
whereby to effect the twisting; the one carried under
the arm, the other dangling and turning in the fingers
below, and forming an axis round which to wind parcels
of the thread as soon as it was made. Not wonderful is
it that Solomon should speak of woman as laying her
hands to the distaff (Prov. xxxi. 19), that the
implement is alluded to by Homer and Herodotus, and
that one of the oldest of the mythological ideas of
Greece represented the Three Fates as spinning the
thread of human destiny. Not very surprising is it
that our own Chaucer, five hundred
years ago, classed
this art among the natural endowments of the fair sex
in his ungallant distich:
'Deceit, weeping, spinning, God hath given
To women
kindly, while they may live.'
It was admitted in those old days that a woman
could not quite make a livelihood by spinning; but,
says Anthony Fitzherbert, in his
Boke of husbandrie 'it stoppeth a gap,' it saveth a woman from being
idle, and the product was needful. No rank was above
the use of the spindle. Homer's princesses only had
them gilt. The lady carried her distaff in her gemmed
girdle, and her spindle in her hand, when she went to
spend half a day with a neighbouring friend. The
farmer's wife had her maids about her in the evening,
all spinning. So lately as Burns's time, when lads and
lasses came together to spend an evening in social
glee, each of the latter brought her spinning
apparatus, or rock, and the assemblage was called a
rocking:
'On Fasten's eve we had a rocking.'
It was doubtless the same with Horace's uxor Sabina
persuta solibus, as with Burns's bonnie Jean.
The ordinary spindle, throughout all times, was a
turned pin of a few inches in length, having a nick or
hook at the small and upper end. by which to fasten
the thread, and a load of some sort at the lower end
to make it hang rightly. In very early times, and in
such rude nations as the Laps, till more recent times,
the load was a small perforated stone, many examples
of which (called whorls) are preserved in antiquarian
museums. It would seem from the Egyptian monuments as
if, among those people, the whorl had been carried on
the top.
Some important improvements appear to have been
made in the distaff and spindle. In Stow's Chronicle,
it is stated:
'About the 20th year of Henry VIII,
Anthony Bonvise, an Italian, came to this land, and
taught English people to spin with a distaff, at which
time began the making of Devonshire kersies and Coxall
clothes.' Again, Aubrey, in his Natural History of
Wiltshire, says: 'The art of spinning is so much
improved within these last forty years, that one pound
of wool makes twice as much cloath (as to extent) as
it did before the Civill Warres.'
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Spinning with the Distaff
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It is hard to say when the spinning-wheel
superseded the simpler process of the distaff and
spindle. The wheel is stated, in the Dictionnaire des
Origins, to have been invented by a citizen of
Brunswick in 1533; three years before was printed the
Dictionary of Pelsgrave, wherein we find the phrase:
'I spinne upon a rock,' rendered 'Jo file an rouet.'
We have, however, evidence, in a manuscript in the
British Museum, written early in the fourteenth
century, of the use of a spinning-wheel at that date:
herein are several representations of a woman spinning
with a wheel: she stands at her work, and the wheel is
moved with her right hand, while with her left she
twirls the spindle: this is the wheel called a torn,
the term for a spinning-wheel still used in some
districts of England. The spinning-wheel said to have
been invented in 1533 was, doubtless, that to which
women sat, and which was worked with the feet.
Spinning with the wheel was common with the
recluses in England: Aubrey tells us that Wiltshire
was full of religious houses, and that old Jacques 'could see from his house the
nuns of Saint Mary's (juxta
Kington) come forth into the Nymph Hay with their
rocks and wheels to spin, and with their sewing work.'
And in his MS. Natural History of Wiltshire,
Aubrey says:
'In the old time they used to spin with rocks; in
Staffordshire, they use them still.'
The change from the distaff and spindle to the
spinning-wheel appears to have been almost coincident
with an alteration in, or modification of, our legal
phraseology, and to have abrogated the use of the word
spinster when applied to single women of a certain
rank. Coke says:
'Generosus and Generosa are good
additions: and, if a gentlewoman be named spinster in
any original writ, etc., appeale, or indictmente, she
may abate and quash the same; for she hath as good
right to that addition as Baronesse, Viscountesse,
Marchionesse. or Dutchesse have to theirs.'
Blount, in
his Law Dictionary, says of spinster:
'It is the
addition usually given to all unmarried women, from
the Viscount's daughter downward.'
In his Glossographia, he says of spinster:
'It is a term or addition in our law dialect, given
in evidence and writings to a femme sole, as it were
calling her spinner: and this is the only addition for
all unmarried women, from the Viscount's daughter
downward.'
'I am unable' (says Mr. Akerman) 'to trace these distinctions to their source,
but they are too remarkable, as indicating a great change of feeling among the
upper classes in the sixteenth century, to be passed unnoticed. May we suppose
that, among other causes, the art of printing had contributed to bring about this
change, affording employment to women of condition,
who now devoted themselves to reading instead of applying themselves to the
primitive occupation of their grandmothers; and that the wheel and the distaff'
being left to humbler hands, the time honoured name of spinster was at length
considered too homely for a maiden above the common
rank.
Before the science of the moderns banished the
spinning-wheel, some extraordinary feats were
accomplished with it. Thus, in the year 1745, a woman
at East Dereham, in Norfolk, spun a single pound of
wool into a thread of 84,000 yards in length, wanting
only 80 yards of 48 miles, which, at the above period,
was considered a circumstance of sufficient curiosity
to merit a place in the Proceedings of the Royal
Society. Since that time, a young lady of Norwich has
spun a pound of combed wool into a thread of 168,000
yards; and she actually produced from the same weight
of cotton a thread of 203,000 yards, equal to upwards
of 115 miles: this last thread, if woven, would
produce about 20 yards of yard-wide muslin.
The spinning-wheel has almost left us�with the
lace-pillow, the hourglass, and the hornbook; but
not so on the Continent.
'The art of spinning, in one
of its simplest and most primitive forms, is yet
pursued in Italy, where the country-women of Cilia
still turn the spindle, unrestrained by that ancient
rural law which forbade its use without doors. The
distaff has outlived the consular fasces, and survived
the conquests of the Goth and the Hun. But rustic
hands alone now sway the sceptre of Tanaquil., and all
but the peasant disdain a practice which ones beguiled
the leisure of high-born dames.'
SERMON TO THE JEWS
7th January 1615, Mr.
John Evelyn was present at a
peculiar ceremony which seems to have been of annual
occurrence at Rome. It was a sermon preached to a
compulsory congregation of Jews, with a view to their
conversion. Mr. Evelyn says:
'They are constrained to
sit till the hour is done, but it is with so much
malice in their countenances, spitting, humming,
coughing, and motion, that it is almost impossible
they should hear a word from the preacher. A
conversion is very rare.'
CATTLE IN JANUARY
Worthy Thomas Tusser, who, in Queen Mary's time,
wrote a doggrel code of agriculture under the name of
Five hundred Points of Good
Husbandry recommends the
farmer, as soon as Christmas observances are past, to
begin to attend carefully to his stock.
'Who both by his calf and his lamb will be known,
May well kill a neat and a sheep of his own;
And he
that can rear up a pig in his house,
hath cheaper his
bacon and sweeter his souse.'
He urges the gathering up of dung, the mending of
hedges, and the storing of fuel, as employments for
this mouth. The scarcity in those days of fodder,
especially when frost lasted long, he reveals to us by
his direction that all trees should be pruned of their
superfluous boughs, that the cattle might browse upon
them. The myrtle and ivy were the wretched fare he
pointed to for the sheep. The homely verses of this
old poet give us a lively idea of the difficulties of
carrying cattle over the winter, before the days of
field turnips, and of the miserable expedients which
were had recourse to, in order to save the poor
creatures from absolute starvation:
'From Christmas till May be well entered in,
Some
cattle wax faint, and look poorly and thin;
And
chiefly when prime grass at first doth appear,
Then
most is the danger of all the whole year.
Take verjuice and heat it, a pint for a cow,
Bay
salt, a handful, to rub tongue ye wot how:
That done
with the salt, let her drink off the rest;
This many
times raiseth the feeble up beast.'
CONNECTION OF
DISTANT AGES BY THE TRIBES OF
INDIVIDUALS
The shortness at once and speed of human life are
brought strongly before our minds when we cast the
simplest look back upon our own career, find ourselves
grandfathers so long before what appears the proper
time, and finally discover that we are about to leave
the world with not half of our plans and wishes
accomplished. The matter is also very pointedly
illustrated by the great changes which every one finds
in the personnel of his surrounding world every ten
years or so; the boys become men, the little girls now
reckoning each their two or three babies, the matronly
hostesses who used to sit at the heads of hospitable
tables now retired into quiet dowagerhood, the
vigorous mature men now becoming shaky and unfit for
business, the old and venerable now to be found only
in the churchyard! On the other hand, one sometimes
get an exhilaration as to human life and his own
individual prospects, by instances of lives at once
remarkably protracted and attended by singular health
and vigour.
To find a Brougham at eighty-two; heading a great
social gathering like that which took place at
Glasgow in September 1860, or a Lyndhurst at
eighty-eight pouring out the words of experience and
sagacity in the House of Lords for four hours at a
time, is felt by all younger persons as a moral glass
of champagne. The day looks brighter by our even
hearing such a fact alluded to. And the reason
obviously is that we get from such facts a conviction
of pleasant possibilities for ourselves. We all feel
that such may, in favouring circumstances, be our own
case. It seems to imply that time is, after all, not
so deadly an enemy to us as he is generally
represented: if we use him well, he will use us well.
There is, moreover, a spirit in man which gives him
the desire and the power to resist the influence of
surrounding agencies. We delight to brave cold,
hunger, fatigue, and danger. The unconquerable will
joyfully hardens itself to throw off the common
effects of life's many evils. It is a joy to this
spirit to find that some valorous souls can and do
live on, and on, and on, so long, seeming as if they
had acquired some mastery over fate itself�that
Power�'nil Miseraetis Orei,'�before which, alas, we
must all fall sooner or later.
There is, we must admit, a limit to this
satisfaction; for when life becomes in any instance
protracted to a decidedly extraordinary extent, the
individual necessarily feels himself amongst
strangers�perhaps helplessly dependent on them �the
voice of every youthful companion hushed�wife,
perhaps even children, removed from his side�new
things in which he has no part or vocation all around
him. Then, indeed, it were better for him to follow
those who have gone before. Yet, while the spectacle
of such a superfluous relic of past ages gives us, of
course, little pleasure in the contemplation, and can
inspire us with no pleasant anticipations, it may
become a matter of considerable interest to a mind
which dwells upon time with a regard to either its
historical or its sentimental relations.
For example, while no one could wish to imitate the
recently deceased American, Ralph Farnham, in length
of days�the fact being that he lived to 107�no one
could see him, as the Prince of Wales did in November
1860, and reflect that here was still in the body one
of the little civic band which defended Bunker Hill in
1775, without feelings of extreme interest. Such a
man, thus so long surviving the multitude amongst whom
he once acted, becomes to us as one returned from the
dead. He ought to be a shadow and a recollection, and
behold he is a reality! The whole story of the War of
American Independence is now so far removed into the
region of history, that any living link between it and
the present time is necessarily heard of with extreme
surprise. Yet Lord Lyndhurst, who still (1862) takes a
part in our public affairs, was born in Boston, a
British subject, the State of Massachusetts being then
and for some years later a British province.
The affair of the Forty-five precedes the struggle
for American independence by thirty years; yet even
that event is brought into apparent closeness to us by
many surprising connections. There were still one or
two Culloden
men living when George IV was king: one
came to see him at Holyrood in 1822, and greeted him
as 'the last of his enemies.' It is worth noting that
an uncle of the present Lord Torphichen (1862) was an
officer in the royal army in 1745, was present at the
battle of Prestonpans, and is noted by Dr. Carlyle in
his Autobiography as the only wounded man on the
king's side who was carried to Bankton House, all the
other wounded people taken there being Highlanders.
[Lord Torphichen, however, had another uncle, who,
when a boy in 1720, was supposed to be bewitched, and
thus was the cause of a fast being held in Calder
parish, and of three or four poor persons being
imprisoned under suspicion of sorcery!] That there
should be now moving in society in Edinburgh, a lady
whose father-in-law attended the Prince in his
wanderings, does not call for particular remark.
It becomes more startling to hear Mr.
Andrew
Coventry, of Edinburgh, a gentleman in the vigour of
life, speak of having dined with the mother-in-law of
the gallant Charles Edward. He did so in 1823, at the
house of Mr. Bethmann in Frankfort. This lady was the
Princess Stolberg, then ninety years of age. Her
daughter, the Princess Louisa de Stolberg, had married
the Prince about fifty years before. It appears from a
note in Earl Stanhope's History of England, that his
lordship also was introduced to the Princess at
Frankfort. He states that she was ' still lively and
agreeable,' and that she lived till 1826. ' It is
singular,' his lordship very naturally adds, 'that a
man born eighty-five years after the Chevalier, should
have seen his mother-in-law.'
When George IV acceded to the throne in 1820, he
had occasion to remark a very curious circumstance
connecting his reign with one which we are accustomed
to consider as remote. The decorations of the
Order of
the Garter, which then returned to the king from his deceased father,
had only been worn by two persons since the reign of Charles II! By that monarch
they had been conferred upon the Duke of Somerset�he who was commonly called the
Proud Duke�and by him they had been retained til his death in 1748, when they were
conferred upon the young Prince of Wales, subsequently
George III. The entire time embraced by the two
tenures of the honour was about a hundred and forty
years. It was remarkable of the Duke of Somerset, that
he figured in the pageants and politics of six reigns.
'At the funeral of Charles II, he was one of the
supporters of the chief mourner, Prince George of
Denmark. He carried the orb at the coronation of James
II; at the coronation of William and Mary, he
bore the
queen's crown.
At the funeral of King William, he was again one of
the supporters of the chief mourner, Prince George;
and at the coronations of Queen Anne, George I, and
George II, he carried the orb.' Mr. Jesse, in relating
these circumstances a few years ago, makes the remark,
that there might be individuals still living, who had
conversed with the Duke of Somerset, who had
conversed with Charles II.
Lord Campbell quotes, in his
Lives of the Chief
Justices, the statement of the Earl of Mansfield to
Mr. Murray of Henderland, about 1787, that 'he had
conversed with a man who was present at the execution
of the Blessed Martyr.' Mr. Murray, who died a very
few years ago, accompanies his report of this
statement with the remark, ' How wonderful it seems
that there should be only one person between me and
him who saw Charles's head cut off!' Perhaps this is
scarcely so wonderful as that the mother of Sir Walter
Scott, who survived 1820, had seen a person who had
seen Cromwell make his entry into Edinburgh in 1650;
on which occasion, by the way, the individual in
question remarked nothing in the victor of Dunbar but
the extraordinary magnitude of his nose!
It was also quite as singular that
Charles James
Fox, who might have lived to attend the levees of
Queen Victoria without being much older than Lord
Lyndhurst now is, had an uncle in office as joint
paymaster of the forces in 1679! This last person was
a son of Sir Stephen Fox by his first marriage. All
Sir Stephen's first family having predeceased him, he
wedded in his old age, in Queen Anne's time, a healthy
young woman, the daughter of a Lincolnshire clergyman,
and by her left two sons, one of whom was the father
of Charles James.
Dr. Routh, who died December 22, 1854, President of
Magdalen College, Oxford, in the hundredth year of his
age:
'... knew Dr. Theophilus Leigh, Master of Baliol,
the
contemporary of Addison, who had pointed out to him
the situation of Addison's rooms: and he had been told
by a lady of her aunt, who had seen Charles II walking
round the parks at Oxford (when the parliament was
held there during the plague of London) with his dogs,
and turning by the cross path to the other side when
he saw the heads of horses coming. � Times, Dec. 25,
1854.
One more such case may be noticed in reference to
the reign of Charles II. Dr. John Mackenzie, who had
been Burns's medical attendant at Mauchline, and who
died in Edinburgh in 1841 at no very advanced age, had
attended professionally a lady of rank who was born
eight years before the death of the Merry Monarch.
This was the Countess of Loudon, widow of the third
Earl. She was born in 1677 and died in 1777, having
attained the venerable age of a hundred.
Elizabeth, Countess Dowager of
Hardwicke, who died
May 26, 1858, was daughter of a person who had been a
naval officer of Queen Anne and a rebel at the battle
of Sheriffmuir, namely, James, fifth Earl of Balearres.
This venerable lady could have said that at her
grandfather's first marriage King Charles gave away
the bride; an event which took place nearly a hundred
and ninety years before her own death.
This marriage, by the way, was a remarkable one.
The young Colin Earl of Balcarres was
obtaining for
his bride, a young Dutch lady, Mauritia de Nassau,
daughter of a natural son of Maurice Prince of Orange.
'The Prince of Orange, afterwards William III,
presented his fair kinswoman on this joyful occasion
with a pair of magnificent emerald ear-rings, as his
wedding-gift. The day arrived, the noble party were
assembled in the church, and the bride was at the
altar; but, to the dismay of the company, no
bridegroom appeared! The volatile Colin had forgotten
the day of his marriage, and was discovered in his
night-gown and slippers, quietly eating his breakfast!
Thus far the tale is told with a smile on the lip, but
many a tear was shed at the conclusion. Colin hurried
to the church, but in his haste left the ring in his
writing-case;�a friend in the company gave him
one,�the ceremony went on, and, without looking at it,
he placed it on the finger of his fair young bride:�it
was a mourning ring, with the mort-head and
cross-bones. On perceiving it at the close of the
ceremony, she fainted away, and the evil omen had made
such an impression on her mind, that, on recovering,
she declared she should die within the year, and her
presentiment was too truly fulfilled.'
When Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall in 1840 made a tour in
Ireland, in order to prepare the beautiful book
regarding that country which they afterwards
published, they were startled one day by finding
themselves in the company of a gentleman of the county
of Antrim who could tell them that his father had been
at the
Battle of the Boyne, fought exactly a hundred
and fifty years before. The latter was fifteen at the
time of the battle. He lived a bachelor life till, on
approaching old age, he overheard one day some young
collateral relations talking rather too freely of
what they would do with his property after his death;
whereupon, in disgust, he took an early opportunity of
marrying, and became the father of the gentleman in
question.
It is even more remarkable that Maurice O'Connell
of Derrynane, who died in 1825 at the age of 99, knew
Daniel M'Carthy, who had been at the battle of Aughrim
(July 12, 1691), who was indeed the first man to run
away from it, but who, being 108 at his death in 1740,
might have equally well remembered Cromwell's massacre
at Drogheda in 1649. The gentleman who relates this
fact in the Notes and Queries, says:
'I remember being
told in the county of Clare, about 1828, of an
individual then lately deceased, who remembered the
siege of Limerick by General Ginkle, and the news of
the celebrated Treaty of Limerick (October 3, 1691).'
If we go back to any former period of British
history, we shall find precisely similar linkings of
remote ages by the lives of individuals.
Lettice
Countess of Leicester, who died in 1634, was born
about 1539; consequently might have remembered Henry
VIII, whose queen, Anne Boleyn, was
her great aunt.
To pursue the remarks of a contemporary writer, 'during the reign of Edward VI,
the young Lettice was
still a girl; but Sir Francis Knollys, her father, was
about the court, and Lettice no doubt saw and was
acquainted with the youthful sovereign. The succession
of Mary threw the family of Lettice into the shade. As
a relative of the Boleyns, and the child of a Puritan,
she could expect no favour from the daughter of
Catherine of Arragon; but Mary and Philip were
doubtless personally known to her.
At Elizabeth's succession, Lettice was in her
eighteenth year, and in all the beauty of opening
womanhood. About 1566, at the age of twenty-six, she
was married to the young Walter Devereux, Viscount
Hereford, created Earl of Essex in 1572. He died in
1576, and in 1578 his beautiful Countess was secretly
married to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The great
favourite died in 1588, and within the year of her
weeds Lettice was again married to an unthrifty knight
of doubtful character, Sir Christopher Blount. In
1601, Lettice became a widow for the third time: her
husband was a party to the treasonable madness of her
son, and both suffered on the scaffold. Such
accumulated troubles would have sufficed to kill an
ordinary woman; but Lettice retired to Drayton
Bassett, and lived on in spite of her sorrows. In
James's time her connections were in favour. She came
up to London to share the smiles of the new dynasty,
and to contest for her position as Countess of
Leicester against the base-born son of her predecessor
in the Earl's affections. At James's death she had
attained the age of eighty-five, with faculties
unimpaired. We may imagine that she was introduced to
the new sovereign. The grandmother of the Earls of
Holland and Warwick, and the relation of half the
court, would naturally attract the attention and share
the courtesies of the lively Henrietta and the grave,
stately, formal Charles. He was the sixth English
sovereign (or the seventh if Philip be counted) whom
she had seen. The last few years of her life were
passed at Drayton:
"Where she spent her days so well,
That to her the
better sort
Came as to an holy court,
And the poor that lived near
Dearth nor famine
could not fear
Whilst she lived."
'Until a year or two of her death, we are told that
she "could yet walk a mile of a morning." She died on
Christmas Day in 1634, at the age of ninety-four.
Lettice was one of a long-lived race. Her father
lived till 1596, and one of her brothers attained the
age of eighty-six, and another that of ninety-nine.
'There is nothing incredible, nor even very
extraordinary, in the age attained by the Countess Lettice; but even her years
will produce curious
results if applied to the subject of possible
trans-mission of knowledge through few links. I will
give one example: Dr. Johnson, who was born in 1709,
might have known a person who had seen the Countess
Lettice. If there are not now, there were, amongst us,
within the last three or four years, persons who knew
Dr. Johnson. There might therefore be only two links
between ourselves and the Countess Lettice who saw
Henry VIII'
Even these cases, remarkable as they are when
viewed by themselves, sink into comparative
unimportance before some others now to be adverted to.
The first gives us a connection between the time of
Cromwell and that of Queen Victoria by only two lives.
William Horrocks, born in 1657, one year before the
death of the Protector, was married at the usual time
of life, and had a family. His wife was employed as a
nurse in the family of the Chethams at Castleton Hall,
near Rochdale. In 1711, when eighty-four years of age,
he married for a second wife a woman of twenty-six,
who, as his housekeeper, had treated him with a
remarkable degree of kindness. The circumstance
attracted some share of public attention, and the
Chetham family got portraits of the pair painted, to
be retained in their mansion as a curiosity; which
portraits were not long ago. and probably still are,
in existence.
To William Horrocks in 1744 there was
born a son, named James, who lived down to the year
1844, on a small farm at Harwood, about three miles
from Bolton. This remarkable centenarian, who could
say that he had a brother born in the reign of Charles
II, and that his father first drew breath as a citizen
of the Commonwealth, is described as having been
wonderfully well-preserved down almost to the last. At
ninety, he had one day walked twenty-one miles,
returning from Newton, where he had been recording his
vote at an election.
The second case we have in store for the reader is
a French one, and quite as remarkable as the
preceding. It may first be stated in this form: a
lady, who might be described as a niece of Mary Queen
of Scots, died so lately as 1713. She was the widow of
the Due d'Angouldme, a natural son of Charles IX, king
of France, who died in 1574, so that she survived her
father-in-law a hundred and thirty-nine years. At the
time when she left the world, a sixth generation of
the posterity of Mary ( Prince Frederick, father of
George III) was a boy of five years.
A third case may be thus stated: A man residing in
Aberdeenshire, within the recollection of people still
living there, not only had witnessed some of the
transactions of the Civil War, but he had seen a man
who was connected with the battle of Flodden, fought
in September 1513. The person in question was Peter
Garden, who died at Auchterless in 1775, aged 131.
When a youth, he had accompanied his master to London,
and there saw Henry Jenkins, who died in 1670, at the
extraordinary age of 169. Jenkins, as a boy, had
carried a horse-load of arrows to Northailerton, to be
employed by the English army in resisting the invasion
of James IV of Scotland, and which were in reality
soon after used at the battle of Flodden. Here two
lives embraced events extending over two hundred and
sixty-two years!
January 8th
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