The chapel is notorious for those illegal marriages conducted by the Rev. Alexander Keith, until the scandal was put an end to here by his being unfrocked in 1742. But this action on the part of a justly incensed church did not deter him from carrying on the same practices at another chapel, which he inaugurated close by. What the Church was unable to do, the Law effected, and the subsequent passing of the Marriage Act, in 1754, finally put a stop to Mr. Keith’s illicit activity. It is said that when told that the Bishops would stop his illegal marriages, he replied, “Let them; and I’ll buy two or three acres of ground, and by God, I’ll _under-bury_ them all!” Of those who took advantage of this short cut to wedlock were the Duke of Chandos, who was married (if the word can be permitted in such a connection) to Mrs. Anne Jeffrey, in 1744; Lord Strange and Lucy Smith, two years later; Lord Kensington and Rachel Hill, in 1749; and Lord George Bentinck and Mary Davies, in 1753. The year before this last match, occurred the best-remembered of these “splicings,” when the Duke of Hamilton was wedded at half-past twelve o’clock at night to the beautiful Elizabeth Gunning, who lived to be the wife of two and the mother of four dukes. Horace Walpole has left a vivid account of the ceremony, in which a ring torn from a curtain replaced that circlet of gold which is recognised as the more usual type of matrimonial bondage. [Sidenote: HERTFORD AND CHESTERFIELD STREETS.] Hertford Street, formed about 1764, now almost rivals Wimpole Street in the numbers of the medical profession who reside in it; but at an earlier day it was the home of politicians, with here and there a soldier, and here and there a poet; while it was in a house here that the Duke of Cumberland, brother of George III., was married to Mrs. Horton, in 1771. Sheridan had one of his many residences here, at No. 10, in 1793, and Lord Charlemont, whose wife’s name continues (in booksellers’ catalogues) to be erroneously connected with a notorious translation of Voltaire’s “Pucelle,” was living in the street in 1766. So, too, were Lord Goderich, and the Earl of Mornington, some years later; and, in 1792, died here General Burgoyne, whose surrender to the American forces at Saratoga precipitated that independence which the United States soon after obtained.