Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith. 10'J This marriage led to Sir Thomas Smith's quitting his new house at Ankerwyke as his customary residence, and to his erecting another in his native county. The lady whom he had married was jointured on the manor and estate of They don Mount, and, her former husband having left no heirs, Sir Thomas Smith purchased the mansion." In the year 1557, which was the same in which his father's death occurred, Sir Thomas began to rebuild the manor-house of Theydon Mount, otherwise called Hill Hall, which is still the residence of his family, descendants of his brother George, the London merchant elsewhere mentioned. With the exception of this undertaking, and the ordinary occupations of a country gentleman, Sir Thomas Smith had now insufficient employment for his busy mind ; and the scholar who had been a regius professor at twenty-nine, the vice-chancellor of his university at thirty-one, and a secretary of state at thirty- five, was now at forty-one only eager to devote himself to the recondite mysteries of astrology. This was a renewal, as I have already mentioned, of speculations that had occupied his attention in early life, and which, as is stated by one of his pupils, he then had the good sense to reject and despise. The passage containing that statement, which was quoted without any reference in Strype's Life; of Smith, (Oxford edit. 1820, p. 163,) I have found in the preface placed by Richard Eden before his translation (1501) of the Art of Navigation by Martin Cortez. Eden there deprecates any " folyshe confidence in superstitious Astrologie, which for the vanitie and uncertaintie thereof, the ryght worshipfull and of singular learnynge in all sciences, Syr Thomas Smyth, in my tyine tin; llower of the TJniversitie of Cambridge, and some tyme my tutor, was accustomed to call Ingeniosissimam artem menticndi, (that is) the moste ingenious arto of lyinge." It is remarkable that, only a few years before this testimony to Smith's singular the name of his wife in the following curious passage of his treatise on The Common- Welth of England : " Our daughters so soone as they be maried loose the surname of their father, and of the family and stocke whereof they do come, and take the surname of their husbandes, as transplanted from their familie into another. So that if my wife was called before Philippe Wilford by her owne name and her father's surname, so soone as she is maried to me she is no more called Philippe Wilford, but Philip Smith, and so must she write and signe, and as she chaungeth husbandes, so she chaungeth surnames, called alwaies by the surname of her last husbande. Yet if a woman once marie a Lorde or a Knight, by which occasion she is called my Ladie, with the surname of her husbande, if hee dye, and shee take a husbande of a meaner estate by whom she shall not be called Ladie, (such is the honour we do give to women) she shall still be called Ladie with the surname of her first husband, and not of the second. (In a side-note,) Yet she is no Ladie by the common law, although so called of courtesie." The Common-Welth of England, and maner of Government thereof, 4to, 1569, p. 131.
- Morant's Essex, i. 157.
