At length Lady Charlotte expressed her intention of eloping with Mr. Denison, and at the prospect of indirectly creating a sensation in high life the Farmer Duke relented.

Lady Charlotte’s marriage was her first triumph.  Her next was when her husband rose to be Speaker of the House of Commons in 1857 and she herself one of the most important personages at the Court of Queen Victoria.

She had become rich and influential, so that when her husband retired from the Speakership he was in a position to tell the Government of the day that he did not intend to take the pension of L5000 a year, to which he was entitled as an ex-Speaker.  His refusal was couched in the following words:—­“Though without any pretensions to wealth, I have a private fortune which will suffice, and for the few years of life that remain to me I shall be happier in the feeling that I am not a burden to my fellow-countrymen.”

Such self-abnegation is not characteristic of many men.  On being elevated to the House of Lords he took the title of Viscount Ossington (after the village of Ossington in Notts, which was his ancestral home) and Lady Charlotte was henceforth known as the Viscountess Ossington.

It was a step downward in rank for her, as her marriage with a Commoner did not degrade her to his status.  As a Duke’s daughter she was still Lady Charlotte and took precedence of Marchionesses, Countesses, and Viscountesses in the etiquette of royal courts and drawing-rooms.

When her husband became a peer she had to take his rank, and it was one of those indefinable sacrifices associated with noble birth, that, as a Viscountess, she had to give precedence to the wives of Marquises and Earls.

To one who had filled so high a position as Lady Ossington had done in political and social life the descent in status involved by the adoption of the new title was not of much moment.  She had been honoured by royalty and had done the honours to royalty, she had tasted all the pleasures that aristocratic Society could provide.

Like her brother, the eccentric Duke, Lady Ossington spent large sums of money, intended, directly or indirectly, to benefit the wage-earning classes.

In a spirit of philanthropy she built a coffee palace at Newark, Notts, a town nine miles from Ossington, at a cost of over L20,000.  Her object was to provide a hostel where travellers of humble means could find accommodation for the night, at charges within their means, and that it should be a centre of meeting for Friendly Societies and other bodies in their business and social gatherings.  The profits of the establishment she directed to be paid to the hospital.

Another coffee palace on similar lines she erected in Marylebone, London, involving an outlay of several thousands.

South African colonization found in her a sympathetic patroness in days when South Africa was little more than a name to the large majority of Englishmen.  At her expense in 1886 a party of twenty-four families was sent to the Wolseley settlement, an estate acquired by purchase, about seventeen miles from King William’s Town, where full preparations for their reception had been made by a committee.  Within two years and a-half the settlement was closed, the cheapness of untaxed drink having changed the settlers from abstainers into drunkards.