Note 26 — WHO WROTE CAVENDISH’S LIFE OF WOLSEY?

Mary, Countess of Northumberland.

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 the edition of Collins’s Peerage, 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 part was spent in company of his lady. He lived long enough, however, not only to witness the destruction of all 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 had a valuable grant of abbey lands and tythes, from which, probably, she derived her principal support. One letter of hers has fallen into my hands. It presents her in an amiable position. She is pleading in behalf of a poor man whose cattle had been impounded by one of Lady Cavendish’s agents. Its date and place is to the eye Wormhill[27]; but the running hand of that age, when not carefully written, is not to be depended on for representing proper names with perfect exactness, and the place may be Wreshill, which was a house of the Northumberland family. She died in 1572; and on the 17th of May her mortal remains were deposited in the vault made by her father in Sheffield church, where sleep so many of her noble relatives, some of them in monumental honours.