His mantle of romance, however, fell on his son and successor, the second Duke, who was brought up in a Palace nursery, and had for playmates the children of Charles I.; and who, after a career which in its dramatic adventure outstripped fiction, ended his turbulent life, if not, as Pope says,

    “In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half-hung,”

at least in extreme poverty and suffering in a Yorkshire inn, at Kirby Moorside.  Of all the vast estates he had inherited, his kinsman, Lord Arran, said:  “There is not so much as one farthing towards defraying the expense of his funeral.”

Nor have the men of Villiers’ blood had any monopoly of adventure.  Their wives and daughters have seldom been content to lead the unromantic life which happily contents so many of their sex.  From Barbara Chaffinch, whose intrigues secured the Earldom of Jersey for her husband in William III.’s reign, to the Lady Adela Villiers who ran away with Captain Ibbetson, a handsome young officer of Hussars, to Gretna Green and the altar, they have played many diverse and sensational roles on the stage of their time.

It was but fitting that George Villiers, fifth Earl of Jersey, should make a Countess of the Lady Sarah Sophia Fane, in whose veins was an adventurous strain as marked as in his own; for she was the fruit of one of the most dramatic unions recorded in the annals of our Peerage.  A year before she was cradled her mother was Anne Child, the richest heiress in England—­the only daughter of Robert Child, head of the great banking firm at Temple Bar, and a descendant of Francis Child, the industrious London apprentice who married the daughter of his master, William Wheeler, goldsmith, whose riches and business he inherited.

“Old Child,” as Anne’s father was familiarly known, had many aristocratic clients who used his cheques and overdrew their accounts; but the most prodigal, as also the most ingratiating, of them all was the young Earl of Westmorland, who, not content with making large demands on the banker’s exchequer and patience, had the audacity to aspire to all his wealth through his daughter’s hand.

Anne was perhaps as naturally flattered by the attentions of a lord as she was fascinated by his handsome face and figure and his courtly manners; but the father had other designs for his heiress than marrying her to a prodigal young nobleman.  “Your blood, my lord, is good,” he once told him; “but money is better.”

Lord Westmorland was not, however, the man to be turned aside from the gilded goal on which he had set his heart.  If he could not wed the heiress with her father’s blessing, he would dispense with the benediction.  That he would marry her he was determined; and Anne was just the girl to assist a bold lover in such an ambition.