Sir Robert Wroth died no 1614, leaving great debts and an infant son. The son survived him but two years; the Lady Mary, his widow, lived on for many, and her extravagance seems to have kept her in perpetual turmoil. It is quaint, in these democratic days, to read how, year by year, she received from the King protection-orders, by reason of her birth and quality, and the earnest intention she expressed of immediately satisfying her numerous creditors. She was a niece of Sir Philip Sydney, himself a strangely lavish and impecunious person, and, like him, she wrote a book—a big book, which made a stir at the time, less perhaps by reason of its merit than of certain slanders it contained. It was suppressed and is now forgotten, though occasionally one of the poems, with which it is interspersed, is quoted in some modern anthology. The death of her husband gave the succession to his property—sadly diminished since his father’s day, when the family owned from Luxborough to Lambourne—to his brother John. After him came a nephew, John the second, who died at Luxborough in 1661, leaving a young son, John the third, who married a daughter of Lord Maynard (the ancestor of Lady Warwick), and by her became father of John Wroth the fourth. John the fourth married a cousin, Elizabeth Wroth, and died childless. On the death of his widow, in 1738, a descendant of one of her sisters, William, Earl of Rochford, became possessor of the manor and advowson, which, in 1745, he sold to Alderman Whitaker, of London; in 1770 the Alderman’s daughter, Anne, succeeded her mother, and, in 1825, the estate passed to Mr. John Maitland, of Woodford Hall, the great-grandfather of the present owner (1913). THE CHURCH OF ST. NICHOLAS.