Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/238

224 that religious order, who had been against him in the affair of the divorce, than in opposition to her will. He ordered her to be interred in the abbey church of Peterborough, with all the pomp and ceremony due to her high birth. And, in respect to her remains, though there was a dissolution of all the religious houses in 1543, he not only spared that abbey-church, but advanced it to the dignity of a cathedral. . the natural daughter of a country girl, and was born at Ringen, a small village upon the lake Virtcherve, near Dorpt, in Livonia. The year of her birth is uncertain; but, according to her own account, it was on the fifth of April, 1687. Her original name was Martha, which she changed for Catherine, when she embraced the Greek religion. Count Rosen, a lieutenant-colonel in the Swedish service, who owned the village of Ringen, supported, according to the custom of the country, both the mother and the child; and was for that reason, supposed by many persons to have been her father. She lost her mother when but three years old; and as he died about the same time, she was left in so destitute a situation, that the parish-clerk received her into his house. Soon afterwards, Gluck, a Lutheran minister of Marienburgh, happening, in a journey through these parts, to see the foundling; either to relieve the poor clerk from a burthen he could not well support, or from a particular prepossession in favour of the little orphan, took her under his protection, brought her up in his family, and employed her in attending his children. In