But there were many, among the thousands who deplored the tragic eclipse of such a promising life, who were by no means satisfied with the vague verdict of the inquest.  Lord George had always been a man of remarkable vigour and health, and never more so than on the day of his death.  Was it at all likely that such a man would drop dead during a quiet and unexciting stroll across country?  Later years, however, have brought new facts to light which suggest a very different explanation of this tragedy.  “The hand of God” it was, no doubt, which struck the fatal blow—­it always must be; but was there no other agency, and that a human one?  Could it not be the hand of a brother?  Some have said it was; and although the story is involved in obscurity and may be open to grave doubt (indeed it has been more than once flatly contradicted) there can, perhaps, be no harm in including it in this volume.  This is the story as it has been told.

Though Lord George Bentinck was the handsomest man, and one of the most eligible partis of his day he never married; yet, no doubt, he had many an “affair of the heart.”  But not one of all the high-born ladies, who would have turned their backs on coronets to become “Lady George,” could in his eyes compare with Annie May Berkelay, a lovely and penniless girl, who could not even boast a “respectable” parentage.

Miss Berkeley was, so it is said, a child of that most romantic union between the Earl of Berkeley and pretty Mary Cole, the butcher’s daughter.  This girl he professed to have made his countess shortly after in the parish church of Berkeley.  That his lordship legally married his low-born bride at Lambeth eleven years later is beyond doubt, but that alleged first secret marriage was more than open to suspicion.  There seems little doubt that the entry the in Berkeley church register was a forgery; and that, not until Mary Cole had borne several children to the Earl, did she become legally his wife by the valid knot tied at Lambeth.  It was, in fact, decided by the House of Peers that the Berkeley marriage was not proven, and thus seven of the children were illegitimate.

It was one of Lord Berkeley’s children thus branded to the world who is said to have won the heart and the homage of Lord George Bentinck.  And little wonder; for Annie May Berkeley had inherited more than her mother’s beauty of face and of figure, with the patrician air and refinement which came from generations of noble ancestors.

But handsome Lord George was only one of many wooers whom her charms had enslaved.  There were others equally ardent, if less favoured; and among them none other than the Marquess of Titchfield, Lord George’s elder brother, and the future “eccentric Duke” of Portland, often referred to as “The Wizard of Welbeck.”  The Marquess and his younger brother had never been on the best of terms.  They had little in common; and when they found themselves rival suitors for the smiles of the same maiden this incompatibility gave place to a bitter estrangement.