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The
recent death of the Duchess of Somerset,* who was one of three very
beautiful, witty, and accomplished sisters, and who, as Lady Seymour,
presided with grace and elegance over the Eglinton Tournament in August,
1839, may serve to remind the reader of history that the noble house of
Seymour has, from a very early date, been celebrated for the beauty of its
daughters; and the truth of the tradition may be proved by the many
portraits in our great public and private galleries, painted by the hands
of Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller.
But probably there was
never a fairer triplet of daughters to be seen than the Ladies Anne,
Margaret, and Jane Seymour, daughters of a
certain nobleman, who is described on a family tomb in Westminster Abbey
as ‘The renowned prince, Edward, Duke of Somerset, Earl of Hertford,
Viscount Beauchamp, and Baron Seymour.' Their mother was Anne, daughter of
Sir William Stanhope, of Rampton in Nottinghamshire, and sister of Sir
Michael Stanhope, of Sudbourne Hall, Suffolk, and heiress of her mother,
Elizabeth, sister of John Bourchier, Earl of Bath; so that their blood was
on both sides of the very bluest possible hue.
This trio of sisters were as accomplished in mind as they were
beautiful in person. They were famous, we are told, for their learning,
even in an age when young ladies were not ashamed to study the classical
writers of antiquity, and to imitate their style in prose and in verse.
Thus we are told by Mr. G. Ballard in his ‘Memoirs of Several Ladies of
Great Britain,' published at Oxford in 1752, that ' they wrote four
hundred Latin distiches upon the death of the Queen of France, Margaret de
Valois, sister of Francis L.,' and that these verses were translated soon
after into Greek, French, and Italian, and were printed in Paris in 1551,
under the title of ‘Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois, Royne de Navarre.'
From the same work we learn that one Nicholas Denisot, who had been
preceptor to these learned ladies, made a collection of their distiches
and some other verses, as well in honor of them as in commemoration of the
queen, and dedicated it to another Marguerite de Valois, Duchess de Berrie,
sister of Henry II. of France. They have been praised, he adds, by several
authors, particularly by Ronsard, whose ode pays these three fair Seymours
the compliment of suggesting that ‘if Orpheus had only heard them, he
would have been safe to become their pupil!'
It is delightful to read the gushing words of the Frenchman himself:
' If that famous writer heard the song of these sirens who sing upon the
foamy shores of their sandy Albion, he would surely break his pagan lyre
and become their scholar, in order to learn their Christian song, as their
voices excelled his own!' He adds, in the same hyperbolic strain:
'Learning, which so long resided in the East, has at last by degrees
advanced into the West, and never stopped, till it arrived at that unknown
land, whither she came to engage the affections of these young virgins,
the only ones of our age; and she succeeded so well with them that we hear
them singing their many distiches, which we blush to find superior to our
own.’ And, further, the learned translator of Amadis de Gaule spoke in
terms equally enthusiastic of the talents and learning of these ladies, in
a letter which he addressed to them, and which was prefixed to a
collection of epitaphs on Queen Margaret herself. It is, therefore,
surprising that their names were always and are so little known, if not in
France, yet in their own country. Thus Monsieur Bayle says that he has
questioned some Englishmen of great learning, and well versed in the
knowledge of books and of authors, but can find little or nothing known
about them. And apparently their names were unknown even to Leland, the
royal antiquary; though this maybe accounted for by the fact that he
became insane before he had reached middle life, and so probably their
names escaped the knowledge of the many biographers who copied and
reproduced Leland's stores of information.
It would seem, from the slight sketch of these young ladies given by
Mr. Ballard---whose work likewise deserves to be better known than it
is---that they were the three eldest daughters of their parents, and that
they had three younger sisters, who proved to be by no means their equals
in devotion to the Muses, though the author is at the pains to tell us
that they were all ' bred up to learning.' They were all quite young, and
the third was probably little more than a child when their fame made its
sudden blaze in 1551. They were brought up carefully at home and away from
the court; and, besides their ‘preceptor' for the Latin tongue, they had
other professors to ' teach them music and the sciences.' Of their skill
in broidery and needlework there is no record; possibly Mr. Ballard did
not lay much stress on that branch of feminine accomplishments. One of
them, however, sang divinely, and another played with great skill on the
virginals.’
Of their subsequent life there is very little to say. Possibly the
young men about the Court and in high society in those days did not care
for such qualities as a taste for composing Latin verses in the ladies
among whom they looked for wives, and were rather alarmed at the
possibility of finding in them any touches of the ‘blue-stocking.' At all
events, two of them, Marguerite and Jane, died young and unmarried. It is
true that a suitor was found for Lady Marguerite, for, if we may believe
Strype,* she was sought in marriage by Lord Strange, son of the Earl of
Derby; and the king appears to have smiled graciously on the proposed
alliance. But somehow or other the marriage never came off, for the
disgrace and misfortunes which soon after overtook the Duke of Somerset
probably caused the match to be postponed and ultimately set aside, and
the young lady did not long survive the affair. The third of the trio,
Lady Jane, also was carried to her tomb in Westminster Abbey when only in
her twentieth year. She was one of the maids-of-honor to Queen Elizabeth,
and, we are told, , in great favor with her royal mistress;' but she was
carried off by a fever, and died on the 19th of March 1560.
The Lady Anne, however, made up for her sisters by marrying twice;
her first husband was John Dudley, Earl of
Warwick, and after his death she married Sir Edward Unton, Knight
of the Bath. The date of
her death is not recorded in the Peerages, nor is it known whether she
left any children behind her. As for the three youngest sisters whom I
have mentioned incidentally above, the name of one is not given by Sir
Bernard Burke and the heralds; but the two others, as being less learned,
found husbands, the Lady Mary marrying, firstly, Mr. Andrew Rogers, and,
secondly, Sir Henry Peyton, of Peyton Hall; while her sister, the Lady
Elizabeth, became the wife of Sir Richard Knightley, of Norton and Fawsley,
the owner of many broad acres and manors in Northamptonshire and the other
midland counties, and an mcestor of the present baronet of that name.
*Her Grace died December 14, 1884.
* Ecclesiastical Memoirs vol. ii, p. 358.
Chapters From the Family Chests, 1887
Chapters From the Family Chest |
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