Anecdotes of the Aristocracy, and Episodes in Ancestral Story
by John Bernard Burke (9781150428043)

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1849 Original Publisher: Henry Colburn Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: FRANCES, COUNTESS OP HERTFORD. Frances, third Countess of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was daughter of Thomas Howard, Viscount Bindon, and widow of Henry Prannel, citizen of London. Of her ladyship, Arthur Wilson gives the following very amusing history: -- " This lady was one of the greatest, both for birth and beauty, in her time; but at first she went a step backwards, as it were, to fetch a career, to make her mount the higher. Her extraction was high, fit for her great mind; yet she descended so low as to marry one Prannel, a vintner's son, in London, having a good estate, who, dying, left her childless -- a young and beautiful widow; upon whom, Sir George Rodney, a gentleman in the west, suitable to her for person and fortune, fixing his love, had good hopes from her to reap the fruits of it. But Edward, Earl of Hertford, being entangled by her fair eyes, and she having a tang of her grandfather's ambition, left Rodney, and married the Earl. Rodney, having drunk in too much affection, and not being able with his reason to digest it, summoned up his scattered spirits to a most desperate attempt; and coming to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, where the Earl and Countess were then resident, to act it, he retired to an inn in the town, shut himself up in a chamber, and wrote a large paper of well-composedverses to the Countess, in his own blood (strange kind of composedness), wherein he bewails and laments his own unhappiness; and when he had sent them to her, as a sad catastrophe to all his miseries, he ran himself upon his sword, and so ended that life which he th...

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