Prince-Bishop of Durham, in trust for an infant illegitimate son, until he should come of age. But Bek picked a quarrel with his ward, and in 1309 sold the lands to Henry Percy, who thus became the first Baron Percy of Alnwick. But let us not do an injustice to the Church. Prince-Bishops were kittle cattle, an amorphous kind of creature. Perhaps his lay half impelled Bek to this knavery, and, following the Scriptural injunction not to let the right hand know what is done by the left, his clerical moiety remained in ignorance of the crime. Heaven be praised, there are no longer any of these Jekyll and Hyde creatures, for the Bishops-Palatine of Durham were abolished two generations or more since. There were, in the fulness of time, three Barons Percy of Alnwick, and then the Barony was erected into the Earldom of Northumberland. The axe and the sword took heavy toll of this new line, for the Earls of Northumberland seldom died in their beds, and father and son often followed one another in a bloody death, until at length they became extinct with the death of the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland. Of these eleven, only seven died a natural death. There were Percies who fell in battle; others who, rightly or wrongly, met the death of traitors; one was torn to pieces by a mob; and another was obscurely done to death in prison. Nor did only the heads of the family end violently; their sons and other relations led lives as turbulent, and finished as suddenly. The only child of the eleventh Earl of Northumberland was a daughter, Elizabeth Percy. She married firstly the Earl of Ogle; secondly, Thomas Thynne of Longleat, who was murdered in Pall Mall in 1682 by Count Koningsmarck; and thirdly, the sixth Duke of Somerset; thus bringing the Percy estates into the Seymour family, and the Percy red hair as well. It was of red-haired Elizabeth Percy, when Duchess of Somerset, that Dean Swift wrote the bitter and diabolically clever lines that are supposed to have lost him all chance of becoming a bishop. He wrote of her as “Carrots”:— Beware of carrots from Northumberland, Carrots sown _Thynne_ a deep root may get, If so be they are in Sumer set; Their _cunnings mark_ thou; for I have been told They assassin when young and poison when old. Root out those carrots, O thou whose name Is backwards and forwards always the same. The one whose name was backwards and forwards alike was Queen Anne, for Swift’s purpose “Anna.” It will be noticed that Swift not very obscurely hints that Elizabeth Percy connived at murder. Her eldest son, the seventh Duke of Somerset, had, curiously enough, only one child, a daughter. She married “the handsomest man of his time,” Sir Hugh Smithson, in 1740, and thus the property came into the hands of the present holders.