JAMES THE SECOND.

141

and I cannot comply.” He was instantly deprived of his chap.lieutenancy and of his regiment.* - ]687 j~

Inferior in antiquity and splendour to the house of DeiheEariVere, but to the house of De Yere alone, was the house ofTalbot. Ever since the reign of Edward the Third, the Tal- bury,bots had sate among the peers of the realm. The earldom ofShrewsbury had been bestowed, in the fifteenth century, onJohn Talbot, the antagonist of the Maid of Orleans. He hadbeen long remembered by his countrymen with tendernessand reverence as one of the most illustrious of those warriorswho had striven to erect a great English empire on the Conti-nent of Europe. The stubborn courage which he had shownin the midst of disasters had made him an object of interestgreater than more fortunate captains had inspired, and hisdeath had furnished a singularly touching scene to our earlystage. His posterity had, during two centuries, flourished ingreat honour. The head of the family at the time of theRestoration was Francis, the eleventh Earl, a Roman Ca-tholic. His death had been attended by circumstances suchas, even in those licentious times which immediately followedthe downfall of the Puritan tyranny, had moved men to horrorand pity. The Duke of Buckingham in the course of hisvagrant amours was for a moment attracted by the Countess ofShrewsbury. She was easily won. Her lord challenged thegallant, and fell. Some said that the abandoned womanwitnessed the combat in man’s attire, and others that sheclasped her victorious lover to her bosom while his shirt wasstill dripping with the blood of her husband. The honours ofthe murdered man descended to his infant son Charles. Asthe orphan grew up to man’s estate, it was generally acknow-ledged that of the young nobility of England none had beenso richly gifted by nature. His person was pleasing, histemper singularly sweet, his parts such as, if he had been

* Halstead’s Succinct Genealogy of the Family of Vere, 1685; Col-lins’s Historical Collections. See in the Lords’Journals, and in Jones’sKeports, the proceedings respecting the earldom of Oxford, in Marchand April 162g. The exordium of the speech of Lord Chief JusticeCrew is among the finest specimens of the ancient English eloquence.

Citters, Feb. A. 1688