Note (return) — Replies to Minor Queries.

Lady Percy, Wife of Hotspur (Daughter of Edmumd Mortimer, Earl of March) (Vol. viii., p. 104.).—On reference to the volume and page of Miss Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England, cited by your correspondent G., I find that not only does this lady, by her sweeping assertion, bastardise the second E. of Northumberland, but, in her zeal to outsay all that "ancient heralds" ever can have said, she annihilates, or at least reduces to a myth, the mother of Thomas, eighth Lord Clifford. This infelicitous statement may have been corrected in the second edition of the Lives, for in "N. & Q.," Vol. vii., p. 42., there is a detailed pedigree tracing the descent of Jane Seymour through Margaret Wentworth, her mother, by an intermarriage with a Wentworth, and a granddaughter of Hotspur, Lord Percy, (not daughter, as Miss Strickland writes) from the blood-royal of England. My object, however, in writing this is not farther to point attention to Miss Strickland's mistake, but to invite discussion to the point where this pedigree may be possibly faulty. I will not say "all ancient heralds," but some heralds, at least, of acknowledged reputation, viz. Nicolas, Collins, and Dugdale[6], have stated that the wife of Sir Philip Wentworth was a daughter of Roger fifth Lord Clifford. If this be so, in truth there is an end at once of the Seymour's claim to royal lineage; for it is an undoubted fact that it was the grandson of Roger fifth Lord, namely, John, seventh Lord Clifford, K.G., who married Hotspur's only daughter.