Here oft for thee the silent tear be shed;
Beloved through life, till life can charm no more,
And mourned till filial piety be dead.”
By this lady, who died in 1765, aged sixty-three, the Earl had issue three sons—Brownlow Cecil, ninth Earl of Exeter; Thomas Chambers Cecil, whose son ultimately became tenth earl; and David Cecil—and two daughters, viz. Margaret Sophia and Elizabeth (who became the wife of John Chaplin, Esq.). His lordship died in 1754, and was succeeded by his son.
East View.
Brownlow Cecil, tenth baron and ninth earl, succeeded to the titles and estates in 1754, and having married Letitia, only daughter and heiress of the Hon. Horatio Townsend, he died without issue in 1793, and was succeeded in his title and estates by his nephew, Henry Cecil, only son of the Hon. Thomas Chambers Cecil, by his wife, Charlotte Garnier.
Henry Cecil, eleventh Baron Burleigh, tenth Earl of Exeter, and first Marquis of Exeter, was born at Brussels in 1754, and for many years in his early life was M.P. for Stamford. His lordship was married three times: first, to Emma, only daughter and heiress of Thomas Vernon, Esq., of Hanbury, from whom he was divorced in 1791, after having issue by her one son, Henry, who died young; secondly, to Sarah, daughter to Thomas Hoggins, of Bolas, Shropshire, by whom he had issue four children, viz. the Lady Sophia Cecil, married to the Hon. Henry Manvers Pierrepoint (whose daughter married Lord Charles Wellesley, second son of the first Duke of Wellington, and was mother of the present heir-presumptive to that dukedom); Lord Henry Cecil, who died young; Lord Brownlow Cecil, who became second Marquis of Exeter; and Lord Thomas Cecil, who married Lady Sophia Georgiana Lennox; and, thirdly, to Elizabeth, Duchess of Hamilton, by whom he had no issue. The second of these three marriages has supplied a theme to many novelists and dramatists. They have used the poet’s license somewhat; but it is certain that the bride and her family had no idea of the rank of the wooer until the Lord of Burleigh had wedded the peasant-girl. Thus Moore pictures Ellen, the “hamlet’s pride,” loving in poverty, leaving her home to seek uncertain fortune. Stopping at the entrance to a lordly mansion, blowing the horn with a chieftain’s air, while the porter bowed as he passed the gate, “she believed him wild,” when he said, “This castle is thine, and these dark woods all;” but “his words were truth,” and “Ellen was Lady of Rosna Hall.”
The story is more accurately and more plaintively poetically told by the Laureate Tennyson, who undoubtedly adheres more literally to fact when he describes the lady as bowed down to death by the heavy weight of honour laid upon her, “unto which she was not born.” Tennyson’s ballad of “The Lord of Burleigh,” in which the story of the “village maiden,” from her wooing when she was plain Sarah Hoggins to the time of her early death as Countess of Exeter, is so sweetly and touchingly told, is too sadly beautiful to be omitted here. It is as follows:—