"The family had deserved well of the country for FIVE SUCCESSIVE GENERATIONS." LONDON RIVINGTONS. MDCCCXLV. PREFACE. "And yet they think that their houses shall continue for ever, and that their dwelling-places shall endure from one generation to another, and call the lands after their own names." "This is their foolishness, and their posterity praise their saying." THESE passages may appear singularly chosen to head the historical account of a family through succeeding generations, condemning, as they do, the pride of those who seem to think that what they are permitted to enjoy must necessarily endure for ever, and the vanity of such of their posterity who exult in the boast of their forefathers; and yet they are specially here selected to express the writer's full conviction of the instability of all temporal possessions. For as to antiquity, "a thousand years in the Lord's sight are but as yesterday." As to wealth, "the rich shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth, neither shall pomp follow him." And with regard to fame, "man being in honour, abideth not." The following treatise, therefore, is not undertaken without a due consideration, in submission to the sacred warning, of the fleeting and perishable nature of all earthly tenures, and all human mementos; nor has partiality in recording the good and great, thrown a veil over the evil deeds of members of the family. If Leopold, in the spirit of the barbarous age in which he lived, cruelly avenged the death of a son; or Jerome, at a later period, offended, by improperly resenting the mention of these circumstances by a preacher, these events are as truly narrated as the subsequent repentance of the same Jerome; the sufferings, exile, and dangers of Richard Bertie and his wife, the Duchess of Suffolk, for conscience sake; the great military qualities and gallant spirit of Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby; or the heroic valour, and devotion to the cause of his sovereign, which cost Robert, Earl of Lindsey, his life, on the field of Edgehill, and which, drawing his sons in the footsteps of their father, made two of them sacrifices in the same righteous cause, and induced his noble heir, Montagu, to offer himself (with others of the Privy Council) in the room of the intended royal victim, if thereby he might assuage the malice of his enemies. These last-mentioned incidents are gratifying to record, in the history of a family which bears as its crest the palm or date-tree, the emblem not only of victory, but of virtue, and whose motto gives the latter qualification its due pre-eminence over the force of arms, or "the pomp of heraldry;" pronouncing (in allusion to the armorial bearings of the shield to which it is appended) |