Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 4.djvu/303

DESPENSER 285 terminated in his favour. Lord Lieut, of Bucks May 1763 till his death; Keeper of the Wardrobe 1763-65; Joint Postmaster Gen. 1766 till his death; F.R.S. 19 June 1746; cr. D.C.L. of Oxford 13 Apr. 1749; F.S.A. i June 1769. Hew., 19 Dec. 1745, at St. Geo., Han. Sq., Sarah, (") widow of Sir Richard Eli.is, 3rd Bart. [1660] of Wyham, co. Lincoln (who d. s.p., 14 Jan. 1 74 1/2), da. and coh. of George Gould, of Iver, Bucks. She d. 19 Jan. 1769, at West Wycombe. () M.l. He d. there, s.p. legit. ,{^) after a long illness, 11 Dec. 178 i, aged 73, when the Barony fell again into abeyance till terminated by the death, j.;)., of his sister Rachel () in 1788, as under. M.I. at West W^ycombe.(') W^ill pr. Jan. 1782. known as the Medmenham Club, which has been confused by many writers with "the Hell Fire Club." Over the door was inscribed "/"a/'f ce que tu voudras." An account of the club is to be found in a book called Chrysal written (not by Smollett but) by Charles Johnston. He appears in 1774, "Lord le D . . . and Miss B . . . y," in the notorious tete-a-tcte portraits in Town and Country Mag., vol. vi, p. 9, for an account of which see Appendix B in the last volume of this work. "The most careless and perhaps the most facetious Libertine of his age. He was never known to have corrected one error or to have been reclaimed from one vice he had determined to indulge," is the account given of him in The Abbey of KUkhampton, 1780, pp. 56-57, by Sir Herbert Croft. A rare little book, Alodern Characters by Shakespear (1778), assigns to him FalstafF's speech beginning "Come sing me a bawdy song to make me merry." Of his appointment as Chancellor, Lecky says, "Of financial knowledge he did not possess the rudiments, and his budget speech w.as so confused and incapable that it was received with shouts of laughter." He deserves honourable mention for his strenuous opposition to the execution of Admiral Byng. His portrait, by George Knapton, belongs to the Dilettanti Society, of which he was an original member, and possibly founder. Horace Walpole described the society as a " club for which the nominal qualification is having been to Italy, and the real one, being drunk." G.E.C. and V.G. (*) Horace Walpole speaks of her as "a poor forlorn Presbyterian prude." V.G. C") He pulled down the house at West Wycombe in 1750, and rebuilt it in the Ionic style. V.G. {^) His illegit. da., Rachel Fanny Antonina, b. about 1774, m. about 1794, Matthew Allen Lee, from whom she separated the following year. She called herself Baroness le Despenser, and became notorious from her alleged abduction by two brothers, Lockhart and Loudoun Gordon, for which offence they were tried and acquitted. She d. about June 1829. A long account of her discreditable adventures appears in Ds Quincty's Jutobiographical Sketches, 'iict aXso Annual Register ior 1804. V.G. C^) This Rachel, widow of Sir Robert Austen, 4th Bart. [1660], of Bex- ley, Kent (whom she m. in Nov. 1738, and who d. s.p. 1743), assumed, on her brother's death in 1 78 1, the title of Baroness le Despenser, under the erroneous impression that the termination of the abeyance in favour of her brother was tanta- mount to its having been in favour of her mother, the senior coh. to that dignity. She d. s.p., 16 May 1788, aged 82, in North Audley Str., and was bur. at West Wycombe, when the abeyance terminated as in the text. Her will as "Baroness le Despenser" pr. 1788. (') In 1760 he restored and enlarged this church, which stands at the top of a hill, but did not build it, as Wilkes spitefully and untruthfully says, for the benefit of the parishioners who lived at the bottom. V.G.