CHAPTER XXV

THE ROMANCE OF FAMILY TREES

Such are a few of the scenes which arrest the eyes as the panorama of our aristocracy passes before them; but it would require a library of volumes to do anything like adequate justice to the infinite variety of the dramas it presents. There is for instance a whole realm of romance in the origins of our noble families whose proud palaces are often reared on the most ignoble of foundations; and whose family trees flaunt, with questionable pride, many a spurious branch, while burying from view the humble roots from which they derive their lordly growth.

Although Cobden's assertion that "the British aristocracy was cradled behind city counters" errs on the side of exaggeration, there is no doubt that in the veins of scores of the proudest English peers runs the blood of ancestors who served customers in City shops.

When, a couple of centuries ago, John Baring, son of the Bremen Lutheran parson, Dr Franz Baring, opened his small cloth manufactory on the outskirts of Exeter, his most extravagant ambition was to build up a business which he could hand over to his sons, and to provide a few comforts for his old age; if any one had told him that he was laying the foundations of four families which should hold their heads proudly among the highest in the land he would no doubt have laughed aloud.

Yet John Baring lived to see his only daughter wedded to John Dunning, who made a Baroness of her. Of his four sons, Francis was created a Baronet by William Pitt, and found a wife in the cousin and co-heir of his Grace of Canterbury. The second son of this union, Alexander, was raised to the Peerage as Baron Ashburton, won a millionaire bride in the daughter of Senator Bingham, of Philadelphia, and, from the immense scale of his financial operations, was ranked by the Duc de Richelieu as "one of the six great powers of Europe"—England, France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia being the other five. Sir Francis's eldest grandson, after serving in the exalted offices of Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty, was created Baron Northbrook, a peerage which his son raised to an earldom; a second grandson qualified for a coronet as Baron Revelstoke; and a third is known to-day as Earl Cromer, the maker of modern Egypt, with half an alphabet of high dignities after his name.

At least three dukes (Northumberland, Leeds, and Bedford) count among their forefathers many a humble tradesman. Glancing down the pedigree of his Grace of Northumberland, we find among his direct ancestors such names as these, William le Smythesonne, of Thornton Watlous, husbandman; William Smitheson, of Newsham, husbandman; Ralph Smithson, tenant farmer; and Anthony Smithson, yeoman. It was this Anthony whose son, Hugh, left the paternal farm to serve behind the counter of Ralph and William Robinson, London haberdashers, and thus to take the first step of that successful career which made him a Baronet and a man of wealth. From Hugh, the London 'prentice sprang in the fourth generation, that other Hugh who won the hand of Lady Elizabeth Seymour, and with it the vast estates and historic name of Percy.

Some years before Hugh Smithson, the farmer's son, set foot in London streets, Edward Osborne left the modest family roof at Ashford, in Kent, to serve his apprenticeship to, and sit at the board of, William Hewitt, a merchant of Philpot Lane, who shortly after moved his belongings to a more fashionable home on London Bridge. One day it chanced that while his only daughter, the fair "Mistress Anne," was hanging her favourite bird outside the parlour window she lost her balance and fell into the river, then racing in high tide under the arches of the bridge. Fortunately for Mistress Anne the young apprentice saw the accident; quick as thought he threw off his shoes and surcoat, and, plunging into the swollen waters, caught the maiden by her hair as she was being swept away, and with difficulty dragged her to a passing barge, on which both found safety.

There was only one proper sequence to this romantic incident; Mistress Anne lost her heart to her gallant rescuer, the grateful parents smiled on his wooing, and one fine August morning, not many months later, the wedding-bells of St Magnus Church were spreading far and wide the news that young Osborne had found a bride in one of the fairest and richest heiresses of London town. In due time Osborne became, as his father-in-law had been before him, Lord Mayor of London; the son of this romantic alliance was knighted for prowess in battle; Edward Osborne's grandson was made a Baronet; and his great-grandson, Sir Thomas, added to the family dignities by becoming in turn, Baron, Viscount, Earl and Marquis, and, finally, Duke of Leeds. Thus only two generations separated the 'prentice lad of Philpot Lane from his descendant of the strawberry-leaves, the first of a long and still unbroken line of English dukes, whose blood has mingled with that of many noble families.

The noble house of Ripon has its origin in Yorkshire tradesmen who carried on business in York, some of whom were Lord Mayors of that city two or three centuries ago. These early Robinsons added to their fortune and enriched their blood by alliances with some of the oldest families in the north of England—such as the Metcalfes of Nappa and the Redmaynes of Fulford—and slowly but surely laid the foundation of one of the wealthiest and most distinguished of great English houses. For four generations the head of the family was a Cabinet Minister, while one of them was Prime Minister of England.

The Marquises of Bath derive descent from one John o' th' Inne, who was, probably, a worthy publican of Church Stretton, and who was descended in the seventh generation from William de Bottefeld, an under-forester of Shropshire in the thirteenth century; while, through his mother, the late Marquis of Salisbury derived a strain of 'prentice blood from Sir Christopher Gascoigne, the first Lord Mayor of London to live in the Mansion House.

Until a few years ago there might be seen in the main street of the village of Appletrewick, in Yorkshire, a single-storey cottage, little better than a hovel, which was the cradle of the noble family of Craven. It was from this humble home that William Craven, the young son of a husbandman, fared forth one day in the carrier's cart to seek fortune in far-away London town. Like many another boy who has taken a stout heart and an empty pocket to the Metropolis as his sole capital, he fought his way to wealth; and before he died he was addressed as "My lord," in his character of London's chief magistrate. The eldest son of this peasant boy won fame as a soldier, became the confidential friend of his Sovereign, and was created in turn a Baron, a Viscount, and Earl of Craven. He died unwed, and all his wealth and dignities passed to a kinsman who, like himself, traced his descent from the peasant stock of Appletrewick.

The Earls of Denbigh have for ancestor one Godfrey Fielding, who served his apprenticeship in London city, made a fortune as a Milk Street mercer, and was Lord Mayor when Henry VI. was King. Five years later, we may note in passing, London had for chief magistrate Godfrey Boleyn, whose great-grand-daughter wore the crown of England as Queen Elizabeth.

The present Earl of Warwick, whose title was once associated with such names as Plantagenet, Neville, Newburgh, and Beauchamp, has in his veins a liberal strain of 'prentice blood. The founder of the family fortunes was William Greville, citizen and woolstapler of London, who died five centuries ago, after amassing considerable wealth; while another ancestor was Sir Samuel Dashwood, vintner, who as Lord Mayor entertained Queen Anne at the Guildhall in 1702, and found a husband for his daughter in the fifth Lord Broke.

The father of the noble house of Dudley was William Ward, the son of poor Staffordshire parents, who was apprenticed to a goldsmith and made a fortune as a London jeweller.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century Nottingham had among its citizens a respectable draper named John Smith, who, it is said, made himself useful to his farmer customers, in the intervals of selling tapes and dress materials to their wives, by helping them with their accounts. John lived and died an honest draper, and never aspired to be anything else; but his descendants were more ambitious. From drapers they blossomed into bankers and Members of Parliament; and in 1796 George III. departed for once from his rule never to raise a man of business to the Peerage, by converting Robert Smith into Baron Carrington. His successor abandoned the patronymic Smith for his title-name; and the present-day representative of John Smith, the Nottingham draper is Charles Robert Wynn Carrington, first Earl Carrington, P.C., G.C.M.G., and joint Hereditary Lord Chamberlain of England.

When William Capel left the humble paternal roof at Stoke Nayland, in Suffolk, to see what fortune and a brave heart could do for him in London, it certainly never occurred to him that his name would be handed down through the centuries by a line of Earls, Viscounts, and Barons. Fortune had indeed strange experiences in store for the Suffolk youth; for, while she made a Knight and Lord Mayor of him, she consigned him on a life sentence to the Tower for resisting the extortions of the mercenary Henry VII. Sir William's son won his knightly spurs on French battlefields, wedded a daughter of the ancient house of Roos of Belvoir, and became the ancester of the Barons Capel, Viscounts Malden, and Earls of Essex.

The Earls of Radnor owe their rank and wealth to the enterprise which led young Laurence des Bouveries from his native Flanders to a commercial life at Canterbury in the days of Queen Bess. From this humble Flemish apprentice sprang a line of Turkey merchants, each of whom in turn added his contribution to the family dignities and riches, until Sir Jacob, the third Baronet, blossomed into a double-barrelled peer as Lord Longford and Viscount Folkestone. Not the least, by any means, of the descendants of Laurence des Bouveries was Canon Pusey, the great theologian, who was grandson of the first Lord Folkestone.

Lord Harewood springs from a stock of merchants who accumulated great wealth in the eighteenth century; and Lord Jersey owes much of his riches to Francis Child, the industrious apprentice who, in Stuart days, married the daughter of his master, William Wheeler, the goldsmith, who lived one door west of Temple Bar.

Other peers who count London apprentices among their ancestors are Lord Aveland and Viscount Downe, both descendants of Gilbert Heathcote, whose commercial success was crowned by the Lord Mayoralty in 1711; the Marquis of Bath, a descendant of Lord Mayor Heyward, whose sixteen children are all portrayed in his monument in St Alphege Church, London Wall; and also of Richard Gresham, mercer, who waxed rich from the spoils of the monasteries, and whose son was founder of the Royal Exchange. The Earl of Eldon owes his existence to that runaway exploit which linked the lives of John Scott, the Newcastle tradesman's son, and Miss Surtees, the banker's daughter.

If George III. during his lengthy reign only raised one business man to the Peerage, later years have provided a very liberal crop of coroneted men of commerce. To mention but a few of them, banking has been honoured—and the Peerage also—by the baronies granted to Lords Aldenham and Avebury; Lords Hindlip, Burton, Iveagh, and Ardilaun owe their wealth and rank to successful brewing; Baron Overtoun was proprietor of large chemical works; Lord Allerton's riches have been drawn from his tan-pits; Lord Armstrong's millions come from the far-famed Elswick engine-works at Newcastle; and Lord Masham's from his mills at Manningham. The Viscounty of Hambleden has sprung from a modest news-shop in the Strand; the Barony of Burnham was cradled in a newspaper office; and Lords Mount-Stephen and Strathcona were shepherd boys seventy years or more ago, before they found their way through commerce to the Roll of Peers.

Although these lowly origins are as firmly established as Holy Writ, and are in most cases as well known to the noble families who trace rank and riches from them as to the expert in genealogy, they are often as carefully excluded from the family tree as the poor and undesirable relation from the doors of their palaces. Not content with a lineage extending over long centuries, and with a score of strains of undoubted blue blood, many of our greatest nobles and oldest gentle families strain after an ancestry which is not theirs, and throw overboard some obscure forefather to find room for a mythical Norman marauder, who in many cases exists nowhere but in the place of honour on their own pedigrees.

"What are pedigrees worth?" asks Professor Freeman. "I turn over a 'Peerage' or other book of genealogy, and I find that, when a pedigree professes to be traced back to the times of which I know most in detail, it is all but invariably false. As a rule it is not only false, but impossible. The historical circumstances, when any are introduced, are for the most part not merely fictions, but exactly that kind of fiction which is, in its beginning, deliberate and interested falsehood."

This scathing criticism refers to pedigrees which profess to be based on existing records; what shall we say, then, of those family trees which have their ambitious roots in the dark centuries which no ray of genealogical light can possibly pierce? Take, for instance, that amazing pedigree of the Lyte family of Lytes Cary, at the head of which is "Leitus (one of the five captains of Beotia that went to Troye)," whose ancestors came to England first with Brute, "the most noble founder of the Britons." (It is only fair to say that the present representative of this really ancient family, Sir H. Maxwell-Lyte, an expert genealogist, turns his back resolutely on the Beotian captain, and even on Brute himself, and generally lops his family tree in a merciless but most salutary fashion.)

The College of Arms, among many amazing pedigrees, treasures one of a family "whose present representative is sixty-seventh in descent in an unbroken male line from Belinus the Great (Beli Mawr), King of Britain," which actually exhibits the arms of Beli, who, poor man, died long centuries before heraldry was even cradled.

Of families who derive descent from Charlemagne the name is legion; but even such elongated pedigrees are quite contemptible in their brevity compared with others which have at their head no other progenitor than Adam, the father of us all. At Mostyn Hall, we learn, there is a vellum roll, twenty-one feet long, of pedigrees, some of which "are traced back to 'Adam, Son of God,' without any conscious sense of the incongruous"; and these records, we must remember, are in the hand of "a man thoroughly trustworthy as to the matters of his own time." There is in the College of Arms a similar family tree which commences boldly with Adam and the Garden of Eden; and an authority on Welsh pedigrees declares,

Mr Horace Round gives some startling examples of flagrant dishonesty, where forgery is only one of the implements used. Take, for example, that shameful story of the "Shipway frauds," which is thus referred to by a clergyman of the parish.

In another case Hughenden Church was desecrated to gratify the vanity of a family of Wellesbourne, anxious to trace their descent from the Montforts.

To give but two more out of many cases of similar imposture, the Deardens, many years ago, actually had a family chapel constructed in Rochdale Church with sham effigies, slabs, and brasses to the memory of wholly fictitious ancestors; while in two Scottish churches altar-tombs were placed to the memory of successive apocryphal lairds of Coulthart. Such are the lengths to which a craze for ancestry has carried some unprincipled persons; and there is no doubt that the arts of the forger are still enlisted in the service of people who crave long descent and do not scruple as to the methods by which they attain it.

Happily, however, the mania for ancestors does not often take such extreme and reprehensible forms; its manifestations are usually rather amusing than criminal. A common weakness is, however plebeian and obvious in its origin a surname may be, to dignify it with a Norman or at least French cradle. Thus we are solemnly assured that the Smithsons (a name which bluntly proclaims its own derivation) are "a branch of the baronial family of Scalers, or De Scallariis, which flourished in Aquitaine as long ago as the eighth century." The first Cooper was not, as the unlearned might imagine, a modest if respectable tradesman of that name—no, he was a member of the great house of De Columbers, one of whom was "Le Cupere, being probably Cup-bearer to the King"; Pindar, the patronymic of the Earls Beauchamp, is, of course, a translation of the Norman Le Bailli, and its bearers are "probably descended from William, a Norman of distinction"; while at least one family of Brownes springs lineally from "Turulph, a companion of Rollo," founder of the Ducal House of Normandy. After this, one learns with meek resignation that the honourable cognomen Smith is derived from Smeeth , "a level plain"; and that some, at least, of the Parker family had for ancestors certain De Lions, who flourished bravely under William the Conqueror.

Another favourite vanity is to glorify a name by the prefix De:

It is, we fear, a similar vanity which has displaced such modest surnames as Bear, Hunt, Wilkins, Mullins, Green, and Gossip in favour of De Beauchamp, De Vere, De Winton, De Moleyns, De Freville, and De Rodes.

This ludicrous yearning for a Norman ancestry is responsible for many of the absurdities in the pedigrees of even our most exalted families. Thus it is that we find such statements as this widely circulated, and accepted with a quite childlike credence:

And again:

This pleasing fiction still rears its head unabashed in spite of all attempts to destroy it; in its honour the late Duke of Westminster was actually named "Hugh Lupus" at the baptismal font, while his younger brother was labelled Richard "de Aquila"; and yet it is an indisputable fact that the Grosvenor ancestors cannot be carried beyond a Robert de Grosvenor, of Budworth, who lived a good century after the Conquest, and who has no more traceable connection with Rollo than with the Man in the Moon.

The Ducal House of Fife, we are told, "derives from Fyfe Macduff, a chief of great wealth and power, who lived about the year 834, and afforded to Kenneth II., King of Scotland, strong aid against his enemies, the Picts." The present Duke, however, has the good sense to disclaim any hereditary connection with the old Earls of Fife, and to place at the top of his family tree one Adam Duff, who laid the foundation of the family prosperity in the seventeenth century. The Spencers, it is claimed, spring lineally from the old baronial Despencers, "being a branche issueing from the ancient family and chieffe of the Spencers, of which sometymes were the Earles of Winchester and Glocester, and Barons of Glamorgan and Morgannocke." This, no doubt, is a very distinguished origin; but, alas! the earliest provable ancestors of this "noble" family were respectable and well-to-do Warwickshire graziers, and the first authentic title on the true pedigree is the knighthood conferred on John Spencer in 1519, less than four centuries ago. Similarly the Russells, Dukes of Bedford, are said to be derived from one Hugh de Russell, or Rossel (who took that name from his estate in Normandy), one of the Conqueror's attendant barons on his invasion of England. Here, again, facts fail lamentably to support the descent claimed, since the earliest known progenitor of this "great house" was that Henry Russell who was sent to Parliament to represent Weymouth in the fifteenth century, and whose great-grandson blossomed into the first Earl of Bedford. (It may, perhaps, be well to state that, although the pedigrees here criticised are those that have been or are widely accepted, they are not necessarily approved by the families whose descent they profess to give.)

Another Norman ancestor who must go overboard is the alleged founder of the "noble" house of Bolingbroke—that "William de St John who came to England with the Conqueror as grand master of the artillery and supervisor of the wagons and carriages," since it can be positively shewn that the St John family first set foot in England a good many years after William I. was safely underground; and with this mythical William must also go that equally nebulous progenitor of the Fortescue family, "who" according to the venerable and almost uniform tradition, "landed in England with his master in the year 1066, and, protecting him with his shield from the blows of an assailant, was graciously dubbed 'Fortescu,' the man of the stout shield." The Stourtons, so the "Peerages" say, were "of considerable rank before the Conquest, and dictated their own terms to the Conqueror"; but, as Canon Jackson, the learned antiquary, truly points out, "of this there is no evidence. The name is found, apparently for the first time, among Wiltshire landowners, in the reign of Edward I., when a Nicholas Stourton held one knight's fee under the Lovells of Castle Cary."

The Duke of Norfolk has a family tree of very stately growth, and can well afford to repudiate a good many of the ancestors provided for him by "Peerage" editors. Certainly, if he ever read the following statement he must have smiled aloud:

As a matter of fact, his Grace's earliest known ancestor was Sir William Howard, "who was a grown man and on the bench in 1293, whose real pedigree is very obscure"; and who, no doubt, would have laughed as heartily as his descendant of to-day at his imaginary derivation from the Conqueror's stubborn foe of the fens, Hereward the Wake.

In the Fitzwilliam pedigree we encounter another nebulous knight of the Conqueror. "The Fitzwilliams," we are informed, "date so far back that their record is lost, but Sir William, a knight of the Conqueror's day, married the daughter of Sir John Elmley," and so on; and further, that at Milton Hall, Peterborough, one may actually look on an antique scarf which "was presented to a direct ancestor of the Fitzwilliams by William the Conqueror." The most skilled of our genealogists have sought in vain for an authentic trace of this gallant knight of Conquest days; and Professor Freeman does not hesitate to dismiss the story of his existence as "pure fable." But if Sir William of Normandy must fall from the family tree, his place is most creditably taken by Godric, a Saxon Thane, who, as a forefather, is at least as respectable as any Norman warrior in William's train.

The house of Fitzgerald is credited with an ancestor, one Dominus Otho, "who is supposed to have been of the family of the Gherardini of Florence. This noble passed over into Normandy, and thence, in 1057, into England, where he became so great a favourite with Edward the Confessor that he excited the jealousy of the Saxon Thanes." Dominus Otho must too pass, with many another treasured ancestor, into the crowded genealogical land of the rejected; for the real founder of the Fitzgerald house was Walter, son of "Other," whose name is first met with in Domesday Book in 1086. The Otho story is shown to be "absolute fiction."

In view of such examples of misplaced ingenuity exhibited by the makers of pedigrees for our noble families, one can almost read without a smile that

or that

though we may know full well that the Sturt pedigree really begins in the seventeenth century, and that the earliest known Heneage lived and died some three centuries before.

But "noble" families have no monopoly of misguided genealogy. "The immense majority of the pedigrees of the landed gentry," says a well-known officer of arms, "cannot, I fear, be characterised as otherwise than utterly worthless. The errors of the 'peerage' are as nothing to the fables which we encounter everywhere;" and the same may be said of many another collection of pedigrees which is a treasured possession in countless British homes.

Some even justly famous men have not been proof against this insidious form of vanity and pretence. Edmund Spenser was ungenerous enough to "dismiss his known ancestry of small Lancashire gentry and plant himself modestly in the shadow of the newly discovered shield of arms of the noble house of Spencer, 'of which I meanest boast myself to be.'" And Lord Tennyson, whose ultimate ascertainable forefather was an eighteenth century Lincolnshire apothecary, was provided with a slightly differenced cadet's version of the arms of Archbishop Tenison, with whom he had no connection whatever. Eo8UD4OOjAxF2ThguP0XuD23HcRwfWa3pTGz2t/C4SI1FB3LoiaZC8RfEkoEltaw

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