Five years before his acquaintance with Somers commenced, Lord Shrewsbury had lost his father in a duel with the Duke of Buckingham, whose horse was held by the abandoned wife of the murdered nobleman, in the disguise of a page. Lord Shrewsbury had attractive and popular qualities, which rendered him afterwards the darling of a people in whose cause he proffered his fortune and influence, to compass the Revolution. At the period when his acquaintance with the Somers family began, he was disgusted with the unsatisfactory life of a courtier, notwithstanding the adulation paid to his rank and to his possessions, through the medium of personal flattery, and by the incense offered to his talents. Resolved, also, to rid himself of the numerous priests and other dependents who thronged around him, he retired to his estate in Worcestershire, where much of his property was situated; but his seat at Grafton not being in a fit state to receive him, the young nobleman made the house of his agent, at the White Ladies, his principal abode. And here a strange contrast must have been presented to the scenes, and the society which the young but satiated man of fashion had quitted. “Somers’-house,” as the old mansion was irreverently called by the vulgar, was large enough to contain many separate families; and numerous Blurtons, Foleys, and Cookseys, with whom the family of Somers had intermarried, had already taken up their abodes in the capacious edifice. These simple, and, as it happened, united and industrious relatives, lived in the most primitive manner that could be devised, somewhat after the fashion, but without the peculiarities, of a Moravian establishment. They spent the mornings in their respective occupations: some attended to the farm on the Somers property, and in cultivating teasels; others were engaged in the clothing trade, in manufacturing woad and madder; others superintended the labours of the cottagers, dependencies twenty in number, after the conventual fashion; and the making of bricks, tiles, and other building materials, which the dilapidated state of the city brought into great request. When the labours of the day were ended, all the relatives, their children and visitants, repaired to the great hall of the old nunnery, dined together at one common table, the products of their farm and their fish-ponds furnishing the viands, and passed the evening in conversation or merriment, or in discussions more engrossing, on politics and family interests. At Christmas, the board was spread after the ancient fashion; and the collar of brawn, and the huge saltcellar were displayed in the old conventual hall during the whole winter.