A personage of quite a different order to the foregoing was Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, the authoress of the correspondence with Lady Hertford. Lady Pomfret was the granddaughter on the paternal side of Judge Jefferies, on the maternal of the Earl of Pembroke, and on the strength of the latter claimed descent from Edward the First. Lady Pomfret accepted the post of lady of the bedchamber, but she was of a different type to many of the Queen’s ladies. She was a matron of unimpeachable virtue, the mother of six lovely daughters--all beauties--of whom, perhaps, the best known was Lady Sophia Fermor, afterwards Lady Carteret. Lady Pomfret had a keen sense of her dignity, and she affected a knowledge of literature and the fine arts. The celebrated “Pomfret Letters,” much admired in their day, are packed with platitudes, and so dull that they leave no doubt as to the correctness of her principles. Lady Pomfret was considered by many of her contemporaries to be a prodigy of learning; she seems rather to have been a courtly Mrs. Malaprop. She once declared that “It was as difficult to get into an Italian coach as for Cæsar to take Attica”--by which she meant Utica. On another occasion some one telling her of a man “who talked of nothing but Madeira, she asked gravely what language that was”. But despite her eccentricities she had sterling qualities, and was as much a credit to the court as her daughters were its ornaments. The Queen’s household was numerous, and included the Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Dorset, six ladies of the bedchamber, all countesses; six bedchamber women and six maids of honour. The two most prominent members of it were two bedchamber women, Mrs. Clayton, the Queen’s favourite, and Mrs. Howard, the King’s favourite, who hated one another thoroughly.