Francis Rawdon, second Earl of Moira (1754-1826), created Lord Rawdon (1783), and Marquis of Hastings (1817), married, in 1804, the Countess of Loudoun.
Edward Harley (1773-1848) succeeded his uncle as fifth Earl of Oxford in 1790, and married, in 1794, Jane Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. James Scott, Vicar of Itchin, Hants. It is probably of Lady Oxford, whose picture was painted by Hoppner, that Byron spoke to Lady Blessington (
Conversations
, p. 255),
"Even now the autumnal charms of Lady —— are remembered by me with more than admiration. She resembled a landscape by Claude Lorraine, with a setting sun, her beauties enhanced by the knowledge that they were shedding their last dying beams, which threw a radiance around. A woman... is only grateful for her first and last conquest. The first of poor dear Lady ——'s was achieved before I entered on this world of care; but the last, I do flatter myself, was reserved for me, and a bonne bouche it was."
The following passage certainly relates to Lady Oxford:
"There was a lady at that time," said Byron (Medwin's Conversations, pp. 93, 94), "double my own age, the mother of several children who were perfect angels, with whom I had formed a liaison that continued without interruption for eight months. The autumn of a beauty like her's is preferable to the spring in others. She told me she was never in love till she was thirty; and I thought myself so with her when she was forty. I never felt a stronger passion; which she returned with equal ardour.... She had been sacrificed, almost before she was a woman, to one whose mind and body were equally contemptible in the scale of creation; and on whom she bestowed a numerous family, to which the law gave him the right to be called father. Strange as it may seem, she gained (as all women do) an influence over me so strong, that I had great difficulty in breaking with her, even when I knew she had been inconstant to me: and once was on the point of going abroad with her, and narrowly escaped this folly."