Under these adverse circumstances, so far as related to the proper maintenance of her father's rank in England, was Winifred Herbert reared. How and where she met with Lord Nithisdale, and whether the strong attachment which afterwards united them so indissolubly, was nurtured in the saloons of St. Germains, or in the romantic haunts of Nithisdale, we have no information to decide, neither have the descendants of the family been able even to ascertain the date of her marriage. It is not improbable, however, that, before his marriage, Lord Nithisdale visited Paris and Rome, since the practice of making what was called "the grand tour" not only prevailed among the higher classes, but especially among the Jacobite nobility, many of whom, as in the case of Lord Derwentwater, were educated abroad; and this is more especially likely to have been the case in the instance of Lord Nithisdale, since, as Lady Nithisdale remarks in her narrative, her husband was a Roman Catholic in a part of Scotland peculiarly adverse to that faith, "the only support," as she calls him, "of the Catholics against the inveteracy of the Whigs, who were very numerous in that part of Scotland." In her participation of those decided political opinions, which were inbred in Lady Nithisdale, she appears not to have departed from that feminine character which rises to sublimity when coupled with a fearless sacrifice of selfish considerations. It was the custom of the day for ladies to share in the intrigues of faction, more or less. Lady Fauconbridge, the Countess of Derwentwater, Lady Seaforth, all appear to have taken a lively part in the interests of the Jacobites. The Duchess of Marlborough was, politically speaking, extinct; but the restless love of ascendancy is never extinct. The fashionable world were still divided between her, and the rival whom she so despised, Catherine Sedley, Duchess of Buckingham. But Lady Nithisdale, living in the North, and possibly occupied with her two children, remained, as she affirms, in the country, until the intelligence of her lord's committal to the Tower brought her from her seclusion years afterwards; she writes thus to her sister, the Lady Lucy Herbert, Abbess of the English Augustine Nuns at Bruges, who had, it seems, requested from her an account of the circumstances under which Lord Nithisdale escaped from the Tower.