In 1688, Grammont was sent by the Duke of Orleans to congratulate James II. on the birth of his son; in the Ellis Correspondence, under the date of 10th July, 1688, it appears there was to have been an exhibition of fire-works, but it was postponed, and the following intimation of the cause was hinted at by a person behind the scenes:
"The young Prince is ill, but it is a secret; I think he will not hold. The foreign ministers, Zulestein and Grammont, stay to see the issue."
Grammont died on the 30th January, 1707, aged eighty-six years; his Countess survived him only until the 3rd June, 1708, when she expired, aged sixty-seven years. They only left one child, namely, Claude Charlotte, married on the 6th April, 1694, to Henry Howard, Earl of Stafford; Marie Elizabeth de Grammont, born the 27th December, 1667, Abbess of Sainte Marine de Poussey, in Lorraine, having died in 1706, previous to her parents.
Maurepas says that Grammont's eldest daughter was maid of honour to the second Duchess of Orleans, who suspected her of intriguing with her son, afterwards the celebrated Regent. The Duchess, he adds, married her to Lord Stafford.
Another writer says, that although Grammont's daughters were not handsome, yet they caused as much observation at Court as those who were.
W. H. Lammin.
Fulham.
Count Hamilton is little to be trusted to in his chronology, from a mischievous custom that he has of, whenever he has to record a marriage or love affair between two parties considerably different in age, adding to that difference extravagantly, to make the thing more ridiculous. Sir John Denham is a well-known instance of this; but another, which is not noticed by the editor of Bohn's edition, nor any other that I have seen, is his making out Col. John Russell, a younger brother of the first Duke of Bedford, to have been seventy years of age in 1664, although his eldest brother was born in 1612, and the colonel could have been little older than, if as old as, De Grammont himself.
J. S. Warden.