In April, 1889, there was in the “Quarterly Review” an interesting article on the “Annals of the House of Percy,” from which it appears that the Duke and Duchess of Somerset had a large family, of whom six attained maturity. The oldest of these was Algernon, Earl of Hertford. He married the daughter of Henry Thynne, and in 1722, on the death of his mother, he succeeded to her honours, and was summoned to the House of Lords as Baron Percy. He had two children, Elizabeth, born in 1716, and George Lord Beauchamp, born in 1725. When Lady Elizabeth Seymour was twenty-three years old she paid a visit to her cousin, Lady Lowther, at Swillington, and here she met Sir Hugh Smithson, a Baronet of good family and possessing a large estate in Yorkshire. The young people were mutually attracted. Lady Elizabeth received his attentions with pleasure, and wrote to her mother regarding his proposal of marriage that “had it met with my pappa’s approbation, and your’s, I should very willingly have consented to it.” Satisfactory answers having been received to questions as to Sir Hugh’s position, Lord and Lady Hertford gladly consented, but the proud Duke of Somerset did not consider the alliance was good enough for his grand-daughter. However, he at last gave a grudging assent, mainly because the suitor was in the present possession of an ample fortune, and had a good prospect of a future inheritance from an uncle, old Mr. Smithson, of Tottenham High Cross; but he made it plain to Lady Elizabeth that he considered it her duty to stand out for more advantageous terms than had satisfied her father and mother, for he said, “You are descended by many generations from the most antient familys in England, and it is you that doth add antient blood to Sir Hugh Smithson’s family; he adds no such antient blood to your family.” But the old uncle absolutely declined to be tied up by any legal process, saying “It was true, he was no Duke, nor boasted of any such great alliance, but in point of honourable dealing he would yield to no man.” The Duke being at last satisfied, the marriage was solemnized on the 18th July, 1740. The happy pair did not lose much time before they paid a visit of state to the kind uncle who had paved the way to happiness for them, she in a silver stuff of four pounds a yard, and Sir Hugh in a lead colour and silver stuff embroidered with silver. For four years life ran smoothly for them, and then suddenly, in the autumn of 1744, young Lord Beauchamp died of small-pox at Bologna, and Lady Elizabeth Smithson became sole heiress of the honours which her father had inherited from his mother, the last of the Percys. The Duke of Somerset was furious at the extinction of all hope of the direct continuance of his honours. He had always hated his daughter-in-law, Lady Hertford, and he now included his son in that hatred, to whom, as Horace Walpole said, “he wrote the most shocking letter imaginable,”