This brave, good woman showed still greater fortitude when her husband
died and left her almost penniless in a strange country. She had only
twenty-eight doubloons with which to bring home her children, and sixty
servants, and the dead body of her husband. She, however, instantly sold
her carriages and a thousand pounds’ worth of plate, and setting apart the
queen’s present of two thousand doubloons for travelling expenses, started
for England. “God,” she says, in her brave, pious way, “did hear, and
see, and help me, and brought my soul out of trouble.”
In 1677 Lady Fanshawe took a house in Holborn Row, the north side of the
square, and spent a year lamenting “the dear remembrances of her past
happiness and fortune; and though she had great graces and favours from
the king and queen and whole court, yet she found at the present no
remedy.”[735]
Lord Kenyon lived at No. 35 in 1805. Jekyll was fond of joking about
Kenyon’s stinginess, and used to say he died of eating apple-pie crust at
breakfast to save the expense of muffins; and that Lord Ellenborough, who
succeeded on Kenyon’s death to the Chief Justiceship, always used to bow
to apple-pie ever afterwards which Jekyll called his “apple-pie-ety.” The
princesses Augusta and Sophia once told Tom Moore, at Lady Donegall’s that
the king used to play tricks on Kenyon and send the despatch-box to him at
a quarter past seven, when it was known the learned lord was in bed to
save candlelight.[736] Lord Ellenborough used to say that the final word
in “Mors janua vitæ” was mis-spelled _vita_ on Kenyon’s tomb to save the
extra cost of the diphthong.[737] George III. used to say to Kenyon, “My
Lord, let us have a little more of your good law, and less of your bad
Latin.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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