heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

THE CLIFFORDS. 255
post, however (according to his letter to Sir John Harington, the poet), he
found to be not altogether easy or agreeable. "Good knight," he said,
"rest content, and give heed to one who hath sorrowed in the bright
" lustre of a Court, and gone heavily on even the best seeming fair ground.
" "Tis a great task to prove one's honesty and yet
not mar one's fortune.
" You have tasted a little thereof in our blessed Queen's time, who was
" more than a man, and in truth, sometimes, less than a woman. I wish
" I waited now in your presence chamber, with ease at my food and rest
" in my bed. I am pushed from the shore of comfort, and know not
"where the winds and waves of a Court will bear me. I know that it
"bringeth little comfort on earth, and he is, I reckon, no wise man that
"looketh this way to heaven."
His wife was Elizabeth, daughter of William Brooke Lord Cobham,
and in the old gate-house at Bolton Abbey there is a charming picture,
by Lucas Van de Heere, of this same William Brooke and his wife and
her sister, standing behind a table covered with fruit and toys, at which
are seated six children playing with a parrot and a monkey four boys
and two little girls.
Of the four boys, one of them, the unhappy Henry Lord Cobham,
(though made by Queen Elizabeth Lord Warden of the cinque ports)
was arraigned by James
I. for participation in the alleged treason of
Sir Walter Raleigh, attainted, deprived of all his property, and tortured
by being brought on the scaffold and then taken back to linger fourteen
more years in the Tower (while his heartless wife, Lady Kildare, was
enjoying herself at Cobham, and contributing little or nothing to his
support), until his death in 1618. Another, George, implicated with him
in the same conspiracy, was beheaded on Tower Hill, 1603.
The elder little girl grew up to become Countess of Salisbury, and
probably gave this picture to her daughter, Frances, when she made an
equally grand marriage and became the wife of Henry Lord Clifford,
heir to the earldom of Cumberland.
But her bright prospects were clouded, and her anticipations were
disappointed. Her three sons died, and, one by one, her natural expectations
that her children would inherit and carry on the name and lineage
of this noble house. Her only daughter, Elizabeth, married Richard Boyle
Viscount Dungarvan, eldest son of the first Earl of Cork : an alliance
which, for some reason or other, sorely displeased the young lady's uncle,
Thomas Wentworth Earl of Strafford. Some said because he was jealous
of him ; others because he disapproved of the manner in which he, as
Deputy of Ireland, knew that the Earl of Cork had enriched himself with
Church lands. This, however, had doubtless produced family dissensions,
and aggravated the feud which had raged ever since the death of George