Another Yorkshire neighbour whom the Stanhopes visited at this date was Mr Beaumont of Whitley Beaumont, [10] and although on this occasion the entry regarding their visit is scanty, a fuller description of their eccentric host, written by Marianne the following autumn, may be here inserted:-- _Nov. 14th, 1808._ Last Monday we met the Mills' at Grange, she, delightful as usual. We returned the next day, and in our road called on Mr Beaumont of Whitley. The master of Whitley is a strange creature, half mad. He leads the life of a hermit, and has not had a brush, painter or carpenter in his house since he came into possession many, many years ago. It is more like a haunted house in a romance than anything I ever saw. He is now an old man, and has never bought a morsel of furniture; half the house never was finished; one of the staircases has got no banisters. The stables were burnt down some time ago and have never yet been rebuilt. The rooms he lives in have not been put to rights for many years--a description of the things they contain would not be easy,--hats, wigs, coats, piles of newspapers, magazines and letters, draughts, bottles, wash-hand basins, pictures without frames, apples, tallow candles and broken tea-cups. The whole house looks like a place for lumber. There are some fine rooms, but so damp and mouldy it is quite shocking. There is a chapel completely filled with old rubbish and a plaid bed which was put up for the Pretender. In the room Mr Beaumont sleeps in I saw his coffin made of cedar wood. He scarcely ever sees a living creature and quite dislikes the sight of a woman. He does everything in the room, which no housemaid ever enters, nor indeed any part of the house. We saw there Jack Mills, the Democrat, and his little boy who is christened Alfred Ankerstrom Mirabeau. Ankestrome was the man who killed the King of Sweden; Mirabeau the chief author of the French Revolution. He was godfather to this boy. Before you re-instate the Bourbons, should you not extirpate such a man? Shortly after the return of the Stanhopes to town in 1807 they entertained a guest of a very opposite character, but nearly as remarkable for eccentricity as was the hermit of Whitley. In Walter Stanhope's journal for January 30th of that year is recorded a dinner party of strangely incongruous elements. "This night there dined with us Wilberforce, Wharton, Smedley, Skeffington, Sir Robert Peel and Ward." John William Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley, was the son of a former Yorkshire neighbour of the Stanhopes, Julia, second daughter of Godfrey Bosville of Gunthwaite. As such he was an _habitué_ of their entertainments both in London and the country, and was much liked by them in spite of his peculiarities, which occasionally led to most awkward _contretemps_.