The Earl had been three times married; but he had left a family only by his first wife--Mary, daughter of John Petty, of Stoke-Talmage, co. Oxon., Esq. Eleven children had been the issue of this marriage:--to wit (according to Dugdale), "three sons--_Henry, James_, and _William_; and eight daughters--_Elizabeth_, married to Morice Carant, of Looner, in com. Somers., Esq.; _Anne_, to Sir Walter Long, of Draycot-Cerne, in com. Wilts., Knight; _Mary_, to Richard Erisy, of Erisy, in com. Cornw., Esq.; _Dionysia_, to John Harington, of Kelneyton, in com. Somers., Esq.; _Margaret_, to ... Hobson, of ... in the Isle of Wight, Esq.; _Hesther_, to Arthur Fuller, of Bradfield, in com. Hertf., Esq.; _Martha_, died unmarried; and _Phoebe_, to ... Biggs, of Hurst, in com. Berks., Esq." [Footnote: Dugdale, _vt. supra_.] All these children, it would appear, had been born, and most of them married and settled in life, before their father's promotion to the peerage, and while he was yet only James Ley, or Sir James Ley, the eminent lawyer. Indeed, his promotion to the Earldom in his old age had been, in part, a compliment to his third wife- -Jane, daughter of Lord Butler of Bramfield, whose mother was a sister of the Duke of Buckingham; and it had been specially provided, in the patent of the Earldom, that it should descend, by preference, to his heirs by that lady. That lady having failed, however, to produce heirs, the benefits of the Earldom had reverted to the Earl's family by his first wife, Mary Petty. His eldest son by that wife, Henry Ley, had, accordingly, succeeded him in the title. But this Henry, second Earl of Marlborough, had died in 1638; and the actual Earl at the time with which we are now concerned (1643) was _his_ son, James, a youth of only some three-and-twenty years, but already serving as a general officer of artillery in the army of the King. He seems, indeed, to have been one of the finest young fellows on that side; and he had a career before him which was to entitle him, at his death in 1665, to this notice in a summary of his character by Clarendon: "He was a man of wonderful parts in all kinds of learning, which he took more delight in than his title." [Footnote: Clar. Life, ed. 184 p. 1141.] For the present, however, it is with the good ladies his aunts, the surviving daughters of the first Earl, that we have to do; or rather only with the fifth of them--the Lady Margaret Ley, the friend of Milton. The husbands of at least two of her sisters (Long of Wilts., and Erisy of Cornwall) being among the Parliamentarians of the Long Parliament, it can hardly be doubted that this lady's husband--Dugdale's "... Hobson of ... in the Isle of Wight, Esq.," and Phillips's "Captain Hobson, a very accomplished gentleman"-- was also a Parliamentarian, though of less wealth and note, and not in Parliament. Otherwise, Lady Margaret's house in London could hardly have been one of Milton's evening resorts. What kind of "Captaincy" her