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Not long after that marriage had taken place, the ties of family between the two had been drawn closer by the marriage of the Lord Keeper's son, then Sir John Egerton,-with Lady Frances Stanley, the Countess's second daughter by her former husband the Earl of Derby. Thus, while the Countess-Dowager was the wife of the father, one of her daughters was the wife of the son. Her other two daughters made marriages of even higher promise at the time. The eldest, Lady Anne Stanley, had married Grey Bridges, fifth Lord Chandos; and the youngest, Lady Elizabeth Stanley, had married, at a very early age (1603), Henry, Lord Hastings, who, in 1605, succeeded his grandfather as Earl of Huntingdon, and possessor of the fine estate of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire.

This last-named marriage seems to have given peculiar satisfaction to all concerned, and not least to the Countess-Dowager. Accounts remain of a splendid reception given to her on her first visit to Lord and Lady Huntingdon's seat at Ashby-de-la-Zouch in August 1607. The poet Marston had been employed to prepare a masque for the occasion, the MS. of which is still preserved and bears this title: "The Lorde and Ladye of Huntingdon's Entertainement of their right noble Mother, Alice, Countesse-Dowager of Darby, the firste nighte of her Honour's arrivall at the House of Ashby." There were trumpet-bursts of welcome "when her ladyship approached the park-corner"; then, within the park, where "an antique gate" had been erected, "an old enchantress attired in crimson velvet, with pale face and dark hair," seemed to forbid her entrance, but was checked by Saturn, who, recognising the visitor, exclaims

"Peace, stay! it is, it is, it is even she,"

1

and then addresses her in a cordial speech. There was more allegory and speech-making "on the stairs leading to the great chamber"; and then, within the great chamber, the main masque itself, "presented by four knights and four gentlemen," with Cynthia descending in a cloud "in a habit of blue satin, finely embroidered with stag and clouds," Ariadne rising to meet her, etc. Introduced into the masque was a complimentary poem to the Countess in thirteen stanzas, spoken by thirteen ladies in succession; among whom were Lady Huntingdon, her sister Mrs. Egerton, Lady Hunsdon (ie. the

1 The masque is included in Mr. Halliwell's edition of Marston's works, 1856. The MS. is in the Bridgewater Library.

Countess's sister, formerly Lady Carey and Spenser's Phyllis), Lady Compton (the Countess's other sister, Spenser's Charillis), and Lady Berkeley (Lady Hunsdon's daughter).

The masque is a poor affair to read now; but Marston appears to have done his best upon it, and there is a dedication of the MS. in his own hand to the Countess-Dowager of Derby. She was in the habit of receiving such compliments. In 1609, Davies of Hereford dedicated his Holy Roode, or Christ's Cross, "to the Right Honourable well-accomplished Lady Alice, Countess of Derby, my good lady and mistress, and to her three right noble daughters by birth, nature, and education, the Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon, the Lady Frances Egerton, and the Lady Anne, wife to the truly noble Lord Grey Chandois that now is." Other such instances of the Countess's connexion with the literature of the reign of James I. might be cited. In Feb. 1609-10, for example, she and her daughter, Lady Huntingdon, assisted in Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens, performed at James's Court by the Queen and her ladies. But "the peerage-book of this Countess," says Warton truly, "is the poetry of her times."

On the 15th of March 1616-17 the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, then just created Viscount Brackley, died, and the Countess-Dowager of Derby commenced her second widowhood. She was then probably over five-and-fifty years of age, and she survived for twenty years more. These twenty years she spent chiefly in retirement at Harefield, where she endowed almshouses for poor widows, and did. other acts of charity, but was surrounded all the while, or occasionally visited, by those numerous descendants and other relatives who had grown up, or were growing up, to venerate her, and whose joys and sorrows constituted the chief interest of her declining years. By the year 1630, when she was about seventy years of age, she had at least twenty of her own direct descendants alive, besides collateral relatives in the families of her sisters, Phyllis and Charillis. (1) One group of the venerable lady's direct descendants consisted of her eldest daughter, Lady Chandos, and that daughter's four surviving children by her first husband, Lord Chandos. Her first husband, we say; for that daughter, having been left a widow by the death of Lord Chandos in early manhood in 1621, had married, three years afterwards, for her second husband, Mervyn Tuchet, Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven in the Irish peerage, then a widower with six children,—a union

of unexampled wretchedness, which closed in circumstances of infamy in 1631, when the Earl was tried and executed on charges hardly paralleled in the criminal annals of England. There are letters in the aged Countess-Dowager of Derby's hand, still extant in the State Paper Office, that prove how sorely her heart was wrung by the disgrace of this affair, which did not leave even her daughter unstained in the eyes of the world. From these letters we learn that she consented, in the course of 1631, though not without reluctance, to receive that daughter, twice widowed now, but still calling herself Lady Chandos, into the shelter of her house at Harefield; where already were domiciled three of that daughter's children by her first husband: viz. George Bridges, now Lord Chandos, a boy of about twelve years of age, and a younger brother and sister. The estate of Harefield itself, we also learn, was to descend, after the CountessDowager's death, to Lady Chandos, otherwise left “destitute,” and so to her son, young Lord Chandos. (2) An additional group of relatives, also sharing the affections of the venerable Lady of Harefield, but needing her help less than the children of her secluded and unfortunate eldest daughter, consisted of the children of her youngest daughter, that Countess of Huntingdon who, with her husband, had received her so splendidly, three-and-twenty years before, on her first visit to their seat at Ashby-de-la-Zouch. The Countess, who seems to have inherited much of her mother's talent and goodness, and to whom Donne had addressed poems, had now four grown-up sons and daughters: Ferdinando, Lord Hastings, twenty-four years of age in 1633, and heir-apparent to the Earldom of Huntingdon; his younger brother Henry, afterwards Lord Loughborough; a daughter, Alice, married to Sir Gervase Clifton; and another daughter, Elizabeth. These four grandchildren would sometimes be on visits to their grandmother at Harefield from their own homes in London, Ashby-de-laZouch, and elsewhere. (3) There was still a third group of relatives around the venerable lady. At or near the time when she herself had married the Lord Keeper Egerton, her second daughter by her former husband, Lady Frances Stanley, had, as we have seen, married the Lord Keeper's son, Sir John Egerton. When the Lord Keeper was raised to the peerage as Baron Ellesmere (1603), this Sir John Egerton had become "baron-expectant,”—a designation which rose to the higher one of "Lord Egerton" when his father was made Viscount Brackley (1616). On his father's death, a few months

afterwards (March 1616-17), he succeeded him as Viscount. But his dignities did not stop at that point. In May 1617 an earldom which had been intended for the father, in recognition of his long services as Lord Chancellor, was bestowed on the son, and he became Earl of Bridgewater. Thus, the Countess-Dowager of Derby saw her second daughter, as well as her youngest, take rank as a Countess. A far larger family of children had been born to this daughter than to either of her sisters. Out of fifteen children, born in all, at least ten were alive in 1633, in order of age as follows: the Lady Frances Egerton, married to Sir John Hobart, of Blickling, Norfolk; the Lady Arabella, married to Lord St. John of Bletso, son and heir of the Earl of Bolingbroke; the Ladies Elizabeth, Mary, Penelope, Catharine, Magdalen, and Alice, yet unmarried,-the last, Lady Alice, being in her thirteenth or fourteenth year; John, Viscount Brackley, the son and heir, in his twelfth year; and his brother, Mr. Thomas Egerton, about a year younger. The London head-quarters of this numerous family, or of such of them as were unmarried, were the Earl of Bridgewater's town-house in the Barbican, Aldersgate Street; the country residence of the family was the Earl's mansion of Ashridge, Hertfordshire, about sixteen miles from Harefield. Visits of the Bridgewater family to their aged relative at Harefield might be frequent either from London or from Ashridge.

We are now prepared to understand the exact circumstances of the Arcades. Some time in 1633, we are to suppose, some of the younger members of the different groups of the relatives of the Dowager-Countess of Derby determined to get up an entertainment in her honour, at her house at Harefield. The occasion may have been the aged lady's birthday, or it may have been some incidental gathering at Harefield for a family purpose.1 Whatever it was, the young people had resolved to amuse themselves by some kind of festivity in compliment to the venerable lady of whom they were all so proud.

1 Had we been able to conclude that 1634 was the year of the Arcades, the following memorandum by the topographer Lysons might have suggested a fit occasion for such a gathering: :-"On the 10th of April 1634 Mr. Hugh Calverley, "afterwards Sir Hugh, was married at Harefield to the Lady Elizabeth Hastings, one of the daughters of the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon, and granddaughter of the Countess of Derby." But the evidence, we have seen, is for 1633 as the likeliest year.

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VOL. I

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What should the form of the thing be? What could it be but a masque? Harefield, with its avenue of elms called "the Queen's Walk" in memory of Queen Elizabeth's visit, and with its fine park of grassy slopes and well-wooded knolls, was exactly the place for a masque; besides which, was not the Countess accustomed to this kind of entertainment? Would it not be in good taste to remind her of the masques and similar poetical and musical entertainments that had pleased her in her youth, when she had been the theme of Spenser's muse, and had sat by the side of her first husband, Lord Strange, beholding plays brought out under his patronage? Would it not be pleasant to remind her, also, of such incidents of her subsequent life as the royal visit to her and the Lord Keeper at Harefield in 1602, when the mansion and the grounds were for four days a scene of dramatic pageantry, and her own motherly visit to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, five years later, when that masque of Marston's the MS. of which was still kept in the family was performed in her honour? Masques, indeed, were even more in fashion now, in the reign of Charles I., than they had been in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, and a masque in a noble family on any occasion of family-rejoicing was the most natural thing in the world.

There was, then, to be a masque, or at least a bit of a masque, at Harefield; and the actors were already provided. But for a good masque, or even a good bit of a masque, more is required than willing actors. Who was to write the words for the little masque, and who was to set the songs in it to music?

The latter question may be answered first. There can be little doubt that the person to whom the young people of the family of the Countess-Dowager of Derby trusted for all the musical requisites of the masque, if not the person who suggested it originally and entirely superintended it, was Henry Lawes, gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and one of his Majesty's private musicians. Farther particulars respecting this interesting man, one of the most celebrated musical composers of his day, will be given in the Introduction to that one of Milton's Sonnets which is addressed to him (Sonnet XIII). What we have to attend to here is that, though Lawes was well known and very popular through English society on account of his musical eminence, and had professional connexions as a composer and teacher of music with not a few aristocratic families, there is proof

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