ancestress; while the touching words of her will, as well as the constancy of her life during the storms which fell upon her, help us to fill up a portrait hardly equalled in beauty by that of any of her contemporaries. But we proceed to note, briefly, the strange vicissitudes which made her name so memorable, and connected it so closely, with the annals of her country; first making mention of her children, through one of whom that connection was made at once so near and so fatal. Henry, the eldest son of the Duchess, fell at the siege of Boulogne, less fortunate than his companion in arms, Sir William Hardres, who (as many here present will remember) escaped in safety from the scene of that fruitless victory, receiving one of the gates of the town as the trophy of his bravery and success. The second son, John, died unmarried—Ambrose, the third, acquired the Earldom of Warwick—Robert was the famous Earl

of Leicester—Henry was slain at St. Quinton—Charles died young—Mary was married to Sir Henry Sydney, and was the mother of the Sir Philip Sydney of a later and brighter day—and four other daughters married into the houses of the greater gentry of the period. I reserve for the last, in this illustrious roll, the name which is to all of us more familiar than any, that of the Lord Guldeford Dudley (wrongly called in our popular histories Lord Guilford Dudley); whose fatal ambition and untimely end connected the name of his mother's house with the most touching and romantic period of our history. Having thus placed before your eye the members of that great house, which was destined so soon to share the fate of the kindred houses of Suffolk and Somerset, and but for its perpetuation in distant and female lines to be