At this time he was a widower, his first wife, Lady Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Charles Cotterell, having died in July, 1704. He soon after married Lady Judith Alexander, youngest daughter of Henry, 4th Earl of Stirling, who at that time was residing at Binfield, though in what house is not now known. Sir William was then almost seventy years of age, having been born apparently about the year 1636, and had no children. And thus it is easy to understand how the forlorn old man, riding often no doubt in the direction of Binfield in search of his second wife, frequently met the invalid poet as he left home in search of health, through the devious maze of drives in Windsor Forest, on which even then he was meditating to write a poem. Long residence in France and Turkey had no doubt made Trumbull a citizen of the world. His capacious mind would have no room in it for the prejudices against Papists, which in England at that time were very strong, and in country districts banished them from ordinary society. [Illustration: EAST HAMPSTEAD CHURCH.] Nor was the discrepancy of their years, seventy and seventeen, any bar to their growing friendship. Like all solitary children, especially the children of aged parents, Pope, even when a boy, seems always to have preferred the company and friendship of elderly men. Another link too was doubtless their mutual incapacity for shooting and hunting, then, as now, the ordinary pursuits of country gentlemen. Sir William Trumbull's long absence from England throughout his youth (for he was educated at Montpellier, in France, during the troubles of the Commonwealth) and in middle life, when he was engaged in the service of his country abroad, indisposed him as an old man to begin a new kind of life, and Pope's crooked frame and feeble health forbad him altogether to join in such sports. In 1705 he wrote to his friend Wycherly:-- "Ours are a sort of inoffensive people, who neither have sense nor pretend to any, but enjoy a jovial kind of dulness. They are commonly known in the world by the name of honest, civil gentlemen. They live much as they ride, at random--a kind of hunting life, pursuing with earnestness and hazard something not worth the catching; never in the way nor out of it. I cannot but prefer solitude to the company of all these." ... And in another letter he wrote to his friend Cromwell in the same strain:-- "I assure you I am looked upon in the neighbourhood for a very sober and well-disposed person, no great hunter indeed, but a great esteemer of that noble sport, and only unhappy in my want of constitution for that and drinking. They all say 'tis pity I am so sickly, and I think 'tis a pity they are so healthy; but I say nothing that may destroy their good opinion of me."