Charles Townshend was the erratic son of a singularly {110} erratic mother. The beautiful Audrey Harrison married the third Marquis Townshend, bore him five children, and then separated from him to carry her beauty, her insolence, and her wit through an amazed and amused society. It was one of her eccentricities to change her name Audrey to Ethelfreda. Another was to fancy herself and to proclaim herself to be very much in love with the unhappy Lord Kilmarnock. She attended the trial persistently, waited under his windows, quarrelled with Selwyn for daring to jest about the execution--no very happy theme for wit--and was all for adopting a little boy whom some of the officials of the Tower had palmed off upon her as Kilmarnock's son. Walpole liked her, delighted in her witty, stinging sayings. She was always entertaining, always alarming, always ready to say or do anything that came into her mind. She lived, a whimsical, spiteful, sprightly oddity, to be eighty-seven years of age. [Sidenote: 1766--Peculiar characteristics of Charles Townshend] Charles Townshend was her second son, and Charles Townshend was in many ways as whimsical as his mother. He had a ready wit, a dexterity in epigram, an astonishing facility of speech, and a very great appreciation of his own power of turning friends or foes into ridicule. It is told of him that once in his youth, when a student at Leyden, he suffered from his readiness to jest at the expense of another. At a merry supper party he plied one of the guests, a seemingly unconscious, stolid Scotchman named Johnstone, with sneers and sarcasms which the Scotchman seemed to disregard or take in good part. On the next morning, however, Townshend's victim, enlightened by some friend as to the way in which he had been made a butt of, became belligerent and sent Townshend a challenge. Various opinions have been expressed of Townshend's action in the matter. He has been applauded for good sense. He has been reproached for cowardice. Certainly Townshend did not, would not fight his challenger. It required a great deal of good sense to decline a duel in those days, and Townshend did decline the duel. He apologized to his slow-witted but stubborn-purposed opponent with a profusion of apology which some of his {111} friends thought to be excessive. In these days we should consider Townshend's refusal to fight a duel merely as an unimportant proof of his common-sense, but in the last century, in the society in which Townshend moved, and on the Continent, such a refusal suggested the possession of a degree of common-sense that was far from ordinary--that was, indeed, extraordinary. Townshend's tact, wit, and good spirits carried him through the scrape somehow. He made the rounds of Leyden with his would-be adversary, calling in turn upon each of his many friends, and obtaining from each, in the presence of his companion, the assurance that Townshend had