In after times, it is curious to find Mary Beaumont, then Lady Villiers Compton, inviting her country kindred to Court, and providing a place for them to learn to carry themselves in a “Court-like manner.” It was the lowly serving-maid who first introduced what were called Country Dances instead of French dances, which her provincial relations could not learn soon enough for their deportment to assimilate with the costly garments with which their prodigal kinswoman supplied them, in order that they might do her credit in the gay spheres to which they were introduced.[20] Footnote 20: Secret History, vol. i., edited by Sir Walter Scott. Three sons and a daughter were the offspring of this marriage; the eldest, John, afterwards created Baron Villiers, of Stoke, and Viscount Purbeek, was singularly infelicitous in his domestic life, but is said, by an historian adverse to the family, to have “exceeded them all in wit and honesty, and, by his influence, to have kept his brother George in some bounds of modesty, whilst he lived with him, by speaking plain English to him.”[21] Footnote 21: Nichols’s Progresses of James I., vol. iv., p. 688. The next child of the second marriage was George Villiers, who was born at Brookesby, on the 20th of August in the year 1592.[22] Another son, Christopher, became eventually Baron Daventry, and Earl of Anglesea; a daughter, Mary, afterwards Countess of Denbigh, was also born, to encumber, as it seemed, the limited means with which the parents of this younger race were scarcely able to endow them. Footnote 22: Fuller styles him the second son of his mother, and the fourth of his father.—Fuller’s Worthies of Leicestershire. On the fourth of January, 1605-6, Sir George Villiers died. His landed property consisted at that time of the Manors of Brookesby, Howby, Godby Marward, and the Grange of Goadby. These were all settled on the children of his first marriage. He was also lay improprietor of the tithes of herbage and hay, in the parishes of Cadewell and Wikeham, and these, he settled on the three sons of Mary Beaumont, John, George and Christopher;[23] his daughter appears to have been left wholly portionless. When it is remembered that this family were all raised to rank and opulence, and that they were, in various instances, the sources from which the ancestry of several great houses is derived, the early privation and difficulties of their career form a strong contrast to their subsequent elevation. Footnote 23: Nichols’s Hist. of Leicestershire, p. 189.