The Marquis’s extensive property in Middlesex and in Wales enabled the Government to discharge many heavy claims; but among its claimants, its very good friends, its warmest and most needful supporters had first to be considered; while charitable acts, and the asserted claims of persons related to recusants, and persons specially proscribed by Parliament, and all who were even remotely related to them would have to submit to long delays and hard wrung submissions, when the object was to obtain the least assistance from an already depressed treasury.
That the Marquis’s wife and family received any assistance whatever, through appeals to the Commonwealth Parliament, is significant of the high estimation in which he himself must have been held, simply for his moral worth, and his not overstrained political bias: marking his acts with extreme humanity in war, and good sense in avoiding the risk of launching into any of those extraordinary measures, for which the late King had granted him the ample powers already considered. Indeed the Nuncio,[C] as early as 1646, had correctly estimated his Lordship’s character, designating him “an Englishman of a very mild temper.”
Footnotes
[57] Jo. H. C. Vol. vi. p. 565.
[A] Page 577. The same inquiry also supplied an interesting notice of Lord Herbert’s early life.
[57] Jo. H. C. Vol. vii. p. 33.
[B] Page 67.
[57] Jo. H. C. Vol. v. p. 504; vi. p. 256.