“You and I are alone left to brother it,” Lord Herbert of Cherbury once
wrote him, in a mood more tender than his wont, when all else of that
radiant family had gone into dust. The youngest of Magdalen Newport’s
sons was Thomas, “a posthumous,” traveller, sailor, and master of a
ship in the war against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Frances
were the daughters, of whom Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction,
that they lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good to their
generation. None of them made an illustrious match. Margaret married
a Vaughan. Frances secured unto herself the patronymic Brown, and was
happily seconded by Elizabeth, George Herbert’s “dear sick sister,”
who became Mistress Jones. In the south chancel transept of Montgomery
Church, where Richard Herbert the elder had been buried three years
before, there was erected in 1600, at his wife’s cost, a large canopied
alabaster altar-tomb, with two portrait-figures recumbent. All around
it, in the quaint and affectionate boast of the age, are the small
images of these seven sons and three daughters; “Job’s number and Job’s
distribution,” as she once remarked, and as her biographers failed
not to repeat after her. But their kindred ashes are widely sundered,
and “as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus.” This at
Montgomery is the only known representation of the Lady Magdalen. Her
effigy lies at her husband’s left, the palms folded, the eyes open, the
full hair rolled back from a low brow, beneath a charming and simple
head-dress. Nothing can be nobler than the whole look of the face, like
her in her prime, and reminding one of her son’s loving epithet, “my
Juno.” The short-sighted inscription upon the slab yet includes her
name.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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