VICISSITUDES IN HIGH LIFE.
The London papers lately recorded the death of a lady who was the representative and last descendant, save one sister, of a house famous in English history. This was Lady Langdale, widow of Bickersteth, first and last Lord Langdale, and sister of Harley, last earl of Oxford. Lady Langdale had but one child, who married Count Teleki, a Hungarian nobleman, and pre-deceased her mother, dying childless. Lord Langdale was the son of Mr. Bickersteth, surgeon, of Kirby-Lonsdale, Westmoreland. He was brought up to his father's vocation, and traveled, as physician, with the earl of Oxford.
Impressed, no doubt, with Mr. Bickersteth's extraordinary abilities, Lord Oxford advised him to go to college and read for the law, which offered greater prizes than the medical profession. Accordingly, he entered at Cambridge, and in 1808 graduated as senior wrangler. Twenty-seven years later, in 1835, he married the daughter and heiress of his friend and patron, and the year following was created a peer.
His brother Edward was the celebrated evangelical leader in the Church of England. Bred to the law, he abandoned that profession for holy orders. Their nephew, son of their brother John, is the present bishop of Ripon.
The Harleys have been seated for six or seven centuries in Herefordshire, at Brampton-Bryan and Egwood, properties which in part remained in Lady Langdale's possession. By marriage! with the heiress of the Vaughans in the fifteenth century, they became possessed of Wigmore Castle, the ancient heritage of the extinct earls of Mortimer, and great estates which added to their consequence.
When Charles II. made a batch of peers on his restoration, the Harley of that day displayed a rare modesty. The king offered him a viscounty, but he declined the honor, "lest his zeal and services for the restoration of the ancient government should be reproached as proceeding from ambition, and not conscience;" and so scrupulous was he that his being made a knight of the Bath even was done without his knowledge, he being then at Dunkirk, and Charles inserting with his own hand his name in the list. But his son was destined for a higher dignity, for he it was who became in the tenth year of the reign of Charles II.'s niece, Queen Anne, earl of Oxford and Mortimer, being the famous Harley of that reign, linked in our memories with St. John Lord Bolingbroke, the Mashams, Marlboroughs, Swift, Addison, Pope, and the host of brilliant men which makes the reign of one of the feeblest women who ever sat on a throne a period of almost pre-eminent interest in English annals to men of cultivated mind subject to the influence of association. By Elizabeth Foley, daughter of the first Lord Foley, of Witley Court (sold, about thirty-five years ago, with the bulk of the Foley estates, for £990,000 to Lord Dudley, who married Lady Mordaunt's sister), the famous lord treasurer, Oxford, had one son, the second earl. He was the friend of Swift, to whom the dean addressed so many letters. A man of literary tastes, he spent a portion of his immense fortune in forming the finest library of the period, and it is to him the student is indebted for the magnificent collection known as the "Harleian," which subsequently became, by purchase, the property of the nation, and is deposited in the British Museum. He married the greatest heiress of the day, Lady Henrietta Cavendish-Holies, only daughter and heir of the duke of Newcastle (of the Holies creation—the present duke, a Pelham-Clinton, derives from a different descent). He left but one daughter. She married the second duke of Portland, grandson of Dutch William's pet page Bentinck, whom he imported into England, and loaded with honors and emolument until even the House of Commons of that day cried out loudly, "Enough! stop!" Through this lady the Bentincks got Welbeck, the duke of Portland's chief seat to-day.
Meanwhile, the Oxford honors and patrimonial estates in Herefordshire passed to the second earl's first cousin, and so on, in regular succession, until the earldom became extinct by the death of Lady Langdale's brother a few years ago. One of Lady Langdale's sisters married a General Bacon. At the time of the marriage he was but a poor captain, and his wealth did not much increase, whilst his family did, and his wife, the once beautiful Lady Charlotte, Byron's "Ianthe"—to whom he addressed the famous lines which form the prelude of Childe Harold, beginning,
Not in those climes where I have late been straying—
had to see her daughter a governess in the family of a Cornishman, once a common miner! One of her daughters is now married to the son of Lord Mount Edgecumbe's agent. It seems that the sisters could not forgive the mesalliance, as they deemed it, for Lady Langdale's will shows no bequest to the Bacons.
Lady Langdale had another sister, who married a son of Doctor Vernon-Harcourt, long archbishop of York, grandfather of "Historicus," the well-known political letter-writer of the London Times. This lady died about the same time as Lady Langdale. One sister only, the wife of a foreign nobleman, survives. She is the last of the Harleys of the great minister's line.