Page:Diary of the times of Charles II Vol. I.djvu/25

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INTRODUCTION.
xiii

by whom she had one son. From the dry and concise way in which Lord Leicester has recorded this fact, it may be doubted whether he altogether approved of this marriage. He writes thus : 'On Thursday, the 8th of July, my daughter Spencer (Sunderland) was married to Sir Robert Smith, at Penshurst; my wife being present, with my daughters Strangford and Lucy Pelham, Algernon, and Robin Sidney, &c., but I was in London."

At the period of this correspondence with her brother Henry, Lady Sunderland was in her 62d year. Her letters breathe that kindly spirit for which she was distinguished in her youth, and are amusingly dashed with that love of scandal and taste for politics which we might expect to find in a lady of sixty-two, who had seen so much of the world, and who was intimately related to several of the leading statesmen of the day.

Lady Sunderland survived her second husband, and was buried in the vault of the Spencer family at Brighton, in 1684.[1]


  1. Collins's Sidney State Papers.Blencowe's Sidney Papers.