At this juncture, Molly Jones, forgetting her own past, was injudicious enough to engage a fresh coloured country girl—­who was scarcely twenty—­as dairymaid, for whom Sir William quickly conceived an amorous regard.  Actuated by jealousy or disgust, Molly Jones threatened to leave Sir William, a resolution which she soon carried out, retiring to Cambden, a neighbouring market town, where she was reduced to keep a small sewing school as a means of livelihood.  Although left to carry on his intrigue undisturbed, Sir William soon became a victim to gloomy reflections, feeling at times that he had not only cruelly wronged a good wife, but had been deserted by the very woman for whose sake he had brought this trouble and disgrace upon his family.  Tormented by these conflicting passions, he occasionally worked himself up into such a state of frenzy that even his new favourite was terrified, and had run away.  It was when almost maddened with the thought of his evil past that he formed that fatal resolve which was a hideous ending to “the dreadful consequence of a licentious passion not checked in its infancy.”  One October evening, as a housemaid was on the stairs, suddenly “the lobby was all in a cloud of smoke.”  She gave the alarm, and on the door being forced open whence the smoke proceeded, it was discovered that Sir William had set fire to a large heap of fine linen, piled up in the middle of the room.  From an adjoining room, where Sir William had made his escape, the flames burst out with such fury that all were glad to make their escape out of the house, the greater part of which was in a few hours burnt to the ground—­no other remains of its master being found next morning but the hip-bone, and bones of the back.

A case which, at the time, created considerable sensation was the murder of Thynne of Longleat by a jealous antagonist.  The eleventh Duke of Northumberland left an only daughter, whose career, it has been said, “might match that of the most erratic or adventurous of her race.”  Before she was sixteen years old, she had been twice a widow, and three times a wife.  At the age of thirteen, she was married to the only son of the Duke of Newcastle, a lad of her own age, who died in a few months.  Her second husband was Thynne of Longleat, “Tom of Ten Thousand,” but the tie was abruptly severed by the bullet of an assassin, set on by the notorious Count Konigsmark, who had been a suitor for her hand, and was desirous of another chance.  After his death, the young widow, who was surrounded by a host of admirers, married the Duke of Somerset, and she seems to have made him a fitting mate, for when his second wife, a Finch, tapped him familiarly on the shoulder, or, according to another version, seated herself on his knee, he exclaimed indignantly: 

“My first wife was a Percy, and she never thought of taking such a liberty.”