Note 98 — THE PROLOGUE.

This was the Lady Mary Talbot, daughter to George Earl of Shrewsbury, by whom he had no issue. "Though little ceremony, and probably as little time, was used in patching up these nuptials. As might be expected, they were most unhappy. So we are told, on the authority of the earl’s own letters, in the very laboured account of the Percy family given in Collins’ Peerage, ed. 1779, perhaps the best piece of family history in our language. “Henry, the unthrifty Earl of Northumberland, died at Hackney in the prime of life, about ten or twelve years after he had consented to this marriage. Of this term but a very small portion was spent in company of his lady. He lived long enough, however, not only to witness the destruction of his own happiness, but the sad termination of Anne Boleyn’s life. In the admirable account of the Percy family, referred to above, no mention is made of the lady who, on these terms, consented to become Countess of Northumberland, in her long widowhood. She sequestered herself from the world at Wormhill, on the banks of the Derbyshire Wye, amidst some of the sublimest scenery of the Peak. Wormhill is about eighteen miles from Sheffield, where Lady Northumberland’s father, brother, and nephew, successively Earls of Shrewsbury, spent the greater part of their lives.”

Who wrote Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey? p. 30.

The reader will be pleased to refer to the note as it now stands in Mr. Hunter’s Essay, prefixed to the present edition. He thinks that Wreshill, and not Wormhill, must be meant, as there is no other evidence to show that Lady Percy had a house at Wormhill.