Hastings have not been earls of Huntingdon, though more than one, including the Marquis of Hastings, Viceroy of India from 1813 to 1823, have been connections of the family. Warren Hastings sprang from an entirely different line, though all the Hastings are supposed to be anxious to trace their descent back to a pirate, that Hastings who gave such sore trouble to our order-loving Alfred. Unquestionably the coronet of Huntingdon was never so honorably illustrated as by the excellent Countess Selina, a woman whose vagaries it is easy to laugh at, but whose virtues are not so easy of imitation. It is understood, by the way, that Earl of Huntingdon was the title selected by Cromwell when he was negotiating with Charles I. for a peerage and a garter. One can only regret that the treachery of Charles made the conclusion of the arrangement impossible. As a regularly-constituted minister of the crown, Cromwell could have rendered immense services to his country. Nearly all that he had done for England, while usurping the supreme authority, was undone at his death. He left us, indeed, little beyond the remembrance of his great deeds and a doubtful example to public men. And Cromwell is to a certain extent responsible for Napoleon, even as the Judicial murder of 1649 became a precedent for that of 1793.
Another title which has passed through many vicissitudes is the earldom of Essex. It was conferred in April 1540, on Thomas Lord Cromwell. Three months later, the Earl of Essex was arrested on a charge of high treason, a bill of attainder speedily passed through a compliant Parliament, and on July 28 Cromwell had lost both his coronet and his head. Walter Devereux Viscount Hereford next obtained the title, on a grant by Elizabeth in 1572. His son it was who terminated a brilliant career on the scaffold and broke the heart of the sovereign, who was after all but a woman. His son again commanded the Parliamentary army in the civil war. The domestic history of this nobleman is of the most curious. He was last earl of the Devereux line. Upon the Restoration, Charles II. revived the title in favor of Arthur Lord Capel, whose father had been beheaded by the Roundheads in 1649. He is ancestor of the present earl.
The earldom of Shaftesbury has never been in any other than the Ashley family, but it would be difficult to say what ideas are connoted by the title. Statesmanship of an altogether American "smartness," if one thinks of the first earl,
For close designs and crooked counsels fit,
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
sceptical epicureanism and astheticism if one thinks of the third; but if of the seventh, a vision of Exeter Hall straightway looms in the distance; also, it must in fairness be added, of a practical benevolence which has nothing in common with the philosophies of the academy or the garden.
In 1759 the Earl Brooke, owner of Warwick Castle. obtained the title of Earl of Warwick, which has remained with his descendants till this day. Before it was given to the Grevilles the title had been borne by the chiefs of the house of Rich; in the sixteenth century it belonged to the Dudleys, in the fifteenth to the Nevilles, while in the fourteenth it had been conferred on a Beauchamp. Henry Beauchamp, who succeeded to the earldom in 1439, was in 1444 created Duke of Warwick. In the following year Henry VI. bestowed on him the astonishing title of King of the Isle of Wight, and crowned him with his own hands. The dignity seems to have proved too much for the king-duke, who died the same year.
The earldom of Orford has had a singular fate. No distinguished man who has ever borne it is remembered in history by that name. We speak of Sir Robert Walpole, and of Horace Walpole, but both father and son ended as earls of Orford. Again, the victor of La Hogue is far better known as Admiral Russell than by the title to which he was raised by William. III.[1] It may be added that the present earl, though a Walpole, descends from neither the prime minister nor the master of Strawberry Hill.
Lord Granville, who narrowly missed the premiership in 1859, and is pretty sure to hold it before many more years are passed, would be the second prime minister of the title. Lord Carteret, who became Earl Granville in 1744, was never indeed at the head of the treasury, but was virtually chief of the cabinet formed on the retirement of Walpole. Though far from being the ablest or the most patriotic of English statesmen, there are perhaps few on that bead-roll of fame who could more justly be styled "men of genius" than he. We too seldom understand such men until they are dead, and it is not surprising that our fathers should have termed Lord Granville's "the drunken administration." Of course to a certain extent the epithet was literally just, yet no one would have thought
- ↑ The Russell earldom of Orford became extinct at the death of the first earl in 1727.
