A subtle admixture of talent and inherited rank is to-day more than ever the strength of our folk. Nor do I fear to offend the modern taste by printing here the typical record of a great line.
Lord Benthorpe’s family is first heard of more than a century ago. His grandfather, John Calvin Benthorpe was, at the close of December 1796,[7] a young solicitor[8] in the town of Dublin. In the very next year we find him put into the Irish Parliament by the Duke of Meath as a recognition of his strong sympathy with the national aspirations of the time, and, Presbyterian as he was, with the legitimate demands for religious emancipation preferred by the bulk of his fellow-citizens: co-religionists of his Grace.
His fine talents and excellent appreciation of men soon won him a political position independent of his early patron; and he had the good fortune to be instrumental, both as a principal and as a shrewd negotiator, in the passing of the Act of Union. He had indeed permitted himself certain rhetorical exercises against that measure in debate; but, in the hard practical matter of voting, his inheritance of Scotch common-sense had outweighed his Irish enthusiasm, and he soon found himself in a position to purchase an estate in Wiltshire, some fifteen miles to the north-east of Old Sarum.
A character too weighty, and perhaps too sincerely Christian, to feel in middle age the continued attraction of political life, he applied himself rather to the founding of a family worthy of the title which His Majesty King George III. had, at the respectful entreaty of Mr Pitt, conferred upon him.
With this object, he considered for some years the contracting of a suitable marriage, and, after a deliberation whose purpose he was far too chivalrous to conceal, he decided to honour from among many, and to lead to the altar, the charming Laetitia Green, only child of Mr Groen, senior partner in the well-known banking firm of Strong-i’-th’-arm and Hurst.
His wife’s and his own remaining fortune he sank in further purchases of land, and in the erection of a very fine mansion in the Debased Palladian manner. This great house (to which its owner first attached the name of Placton) is not only famous with most educated men, but will also be familiar to the general reader from its frequent appearance in the Memoirs of Lady Graftham, and in the Life of Mr Groen, recently published by his nephew, Lord Hurst of Hatton.
George Patrick Frederick-Culson Delamaine, the fruit of this marriage, was born in 1823, at a moment when his father, the first Lord Benthorpe, was at the zenith of his career as a land-owner. All the gifts of fortune seemed to have been showered upon the boy; his youth was leading to a manhood of the most brilliant promise, when, at the age of twenty-two, romance or folly led him into an alliance with a woman hopelessly beneath him in station.
She was the daughter of some local lawyer or other, and so betrayed, in every accent and gesture, the restrictions of her upbringing, as to be incapable of that moulding influence which her father-in-law’s family had hoped to exercise. Her rare visits to Placton grew to be an increasing embarrassment for the spacious dignity of the household, and it was perhaps but a merciful intervention of Providence when she was left a widow in June 1852, as the result of her husband walking inadvertently into the well of a lift: a new invention, to which the upper classes were as yet unaccustomed.
He left two children: Mary, born in February 1847, and Albert Delamaine (the present Lord Benthorpe) born in July 1849.
To these children the old man showed a peculiar and a noble devotion. He paid the mother a yearly allowance of no less than £400, on the strict condition that she should live out of England, and enter into no communication with the family. He was even at the charge of employing private agents to see that this condition was observed.