R.B.E.

VICISSITUDES IN HIGH LIFE.

The London papers lately recorded the death of a lady who was the representative and last descendant, save one sister, of a house famous in English history.  This was Lady Langdale, widow of Bickersteth, first and last Lord Langdale, and sister of Harley, last earl of Oxford.  Lady Langdale had but one child, who married Count Teleki, a Hungarian nobleman, and pre-deceased her mother, dying childless.  Lord Langdale was the son of Mr. Bickersteth, surgeon, of Kirby-Lonsdale, Westmoreland.  He was brought up to his father’s vocation, and traveled, as physician, with the earl of Oxford.

Impressed, no doubt, with Mr. Bickersteth’s extraordinary abilities, Lord Oxford advised him to go to college and read for the law, which offered greater prizes than the medical profession.  Accordingly, he entered at Cambridge, and in 1808 graduated as senior wrangler.  Twenty-seven years later, in 1835, he married the daughter and heiress of his friend and patron, and the year following was created a peer.

His brother Edward was the celebrated evangelical leader in the Church of England.  Bred to the law, he abandoned that profession for holy orders.  Their nephew, son of their brother John, is the present bishop of Ripon.

The Harleys have been seated for six or seven centuries in Herefordshire, at Brampton-Bryan and Egwood, properties which in part remained in Lady Langdale’s possession.  By marriage! with the heiress of the Vaughans in the fifteenth century, they became possessed of Wigmore Castle, the ancient heritage of the extinct earls of Mortimer, and great estates which added to their consequence.

When Charles II. made a batch of peers on his restoration, the Harley of that day displayed a rare modesty.  The king offered him a viscounty, but he declined the honor, “lest his zeal and services for the restoration of the ancient government should be reproached as proceeding from ambition, and not conscience;” and so scrupulous was he that his being made a knight of the Bath even was done without his knowledge, he being then at Dunkirk, and Charles inserting with his own hand his name in the list.  But his son was destined for a higher dignity, for he it was who became in the tenth year of the reign of Charles II.’s niece, Queen Anne, earl of Oxford and Mortimer, being the famous Harley of that reign, linked in our memories with St. John Lord Bolingbroke, the Mashams, Marlboroughs, Swift, Addison, Pope, and the host of brilliant men which makes the reign of one of the feeblest women who ever sat on a throne a period of almost pre-eminent interest in English annals to men of cultivated mind subject to the influence of association.  By Elizabeth Foley, daughter of the first Lord Foley, of Witley Court (sold, about thirty-five years ago, with the bulk of the Foley estates, for L990,000 to Lord Dudley, who married Lady Mordaunt’s sister), the famous