[24] The authorities for this detail of the employments, rewards, and honours of Sir William Cavendish are to be found in the Biographia and the Peerages.
[25] Life and Times, &c. vol. iii. p. 98.
Mary, Countess of Northumberland.
Though little ceremony and probably as little time was used in patching up these nuptials. As might be expected, they were most unhappy. So we are told on the authority of the earl’s own letters in the very laboured account of the Percy family given in the edition of Collins’s Peerage, 1779; perhaps the best piece of family history in our language. “Henry the unthrifty,” Earl of Northumberland, died at Hackney in the prime of life, about ten or twelve years after he had consented to this marriage. Of this term but a very small part was spent in company of his lady. He lived long enough, however, not only to witness the destruction of all his own happiness, but the sad termination of Anne Boleyn’s life. In the admirable account of the Percy family, referred to above, no mention is made of the lady who, on these terms, consented to become Countess of Northumberland, in her long widowhood. She had a valuable grant of abbey lands and tythes, from which, probably, she derived her principal support. One letter of hers has fallen into my hands. It presents her in an amiable position. She is pleading in behalf of a poor man whose cattle had been impounded by one of Lady Cavendish’s agents. Its date and place is to the eye Wormhill[27]; but the running hand of that age, when not carefully written, is not to be depended on for representing proper names with perfect exactness, and the place may be Wreshill, which was a house of the Northumberland family. She died in 1572; and on the 17th of May her mortal remains were deposited in the vault made by her father in Sheffield church, where sleep so many of her noble relatives, some of them in monumental honours.
[27] In justice to the amiable author of this essay, who is extremely anxious to be accurate, I think it proper to apprise the reader that the note taken from the former edition of his work at p. 127 must be qualified by what is here stated. In a letter with which I have been favoured, he says, “I have looked again and again at the letter, and the word is certainly (if we may judge from the characters which the lady’s pen has formed) Wormhill: yet still I think it must have been intended for Wreshill, as I have met with nothing else to show that the lady had a house at Wormhill.” S. W. S.
[28] Broadgate in Leicestershire. See the Funeral Certificate. They were married on the 20th Aug. 1 Edw. VI., at two o’clock after midnight.
[29] Among the Wilson collection is a list of jewels presented to the Countess of Shrewsbury by the Queen of Scotland.
[30] See “Memoirs of the Peers of England during the Reign of James the First,” p. 19. Lodge’s “Illustrations,” &c. iii. 50-64, and Harl. MS. in Brit. Mus. No. 4836. fol. 325. and 6846. fol. 97.
[31] “Illustrations,” &c. Introd. p. 17.