The mother of that doughty champion of the Church in the thirteenth century, Robert de Insula, Bishop of Durham from 1274 to 1283, must have been the very ideal of a shrew. The Bishop rose to his high station from quite a menial office in the monastery of Durham, and his origin was so lowly that he had no family name, but is supposed to have assumed one from his birthplace of Holy Island, off the Durham coast. The monkish chronicler of Waverley calls him Halieland, and the Monk of Lanercost dubs him ‘Robertus de Coquinâ,’ from which it would seem that even these old historians had their prejudices. However that may be, the Bishop was either not ashamed of his origin, or else had all the vanity of a ‘self-made’ man, for he was not slow to allude to the original meanness of his birth on occasion, as the following anecdote may show:--‘The Bishop was once at Norham, and the Lord of Scremerston sent him a present of some country ale. The Bishop had long been unused to such humble beverage, yet, from respect to the donor, and also to the good report of the liquor, he tasted a cup of it--_et non sustinens statim a mensa surgens evomuit_. “See,” said he, “the force of custom: you all know my origin, and that neither from my parents nor my country can I derive any taste for wine, and yet now my country liquor is rendered utterly distasteful to me.”’ To his mother the Bishop gave a train of male and female servants, and an honourable establishment, as befitted the parent of one come to such high dignity as to be Bishop Palatine of Durham. He visited her afterwards, and apparently found the dame in anything but a sweet temper. ‘What ails my sweet mother?’ says he; ‘how fares she?’ ‘Never worse,’ quoth she. ‘And what ails thee, then, or troubles thee?’ asks the good son. ‘Hast thou not men and women and attendants sufficient?’ ‘Yea,’ quoth she, ‘and more than enough. I say to one, “Go,” and he runs; to another, “Come hither, fellow,” and the varlet falls down on his knee; and, in short, all things go on so abominably smooth that my heart is bursting for something to spite me, and pick a quarrel withal.’ And with that she fell a-weeping. Lady Hester Stanhope, daughter of Charles, third Earl Stanhope, granddaughter of the great Earl of Chatham, and niece of William Pitt, was a woman of unbounded vanity, arrogance, and ill-temper. A technical termagant she could not be, for she was never married, and that was perhaps a better fate which met General Sir John Moore at Corunna than would have been his had he survived his disastrous retreat, and returned to England. For Hester Stanhope was his _fiancée_; and if he had married her, she could not have failed of keeping him in a life-long subjection.