Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 9.djvu/46

26 On whose death in 1779 it again fell in abeyance between co-heirs. These were his sisters, Lady Priscilla wife of Sir Peter Burrell, and Lady Georgiana, afterwards wife of the first Marquess Cholmondeley. Their children, the present Lord Willoughby de Eresby and the present Marquess Cholmondeley, are now jointly Lord Great Chamberlain of England, and an arrangement has been made that either family shall exercise the office alternately, in successive reigns.

According to the original practice with respect to earldoms to England, the heir general would certainly have been entitled to this ancient earldom; but the act of parliament of the 16th Rich. II., by which the dignity was revived after attainder, had, as we have seen, limited its inheritance to the heirs male; and, although the lord Willoughby appears to have relied upon the uncertainty that might arise from subsequent acts of parliament, by which the rebel earls of Oxford had been successively either attainted or restored in blood, and particularly upon an award relative to the family estates, confirmed by parliament in the 23rd Hen. VIII.; still it appeared that the act of the 16th Rich. II. had not been affected by any of them.

Robert the nineteenth earl of Oxford died in 1632, and there was only one more earl after him: but this earl, the last of his illustrious race, enjoyed the dignity for no less than seventy years. The old name of Aubrey was revived in his person. He flourished, or rather faded, in the effeminate age of Charles II., and to which his manners were unfortunately conformed. On his death in the year 1702 the male line of Veres became extinct; and it is a remarkable circumstance that the heiress of this ancient race was married to the first of an entirely new one. The heiress of Vere was united to one of the natural sons of king Charles the Second, who was created Duke of St. Alban's.

There had been a junior branch elevated to the peerage in the preceding century, in the person of the gallant sir Horatio Vere, brother to John the sixteenth earl. He was created Baron Vere of Tilbury in 1625, and died without issue in 1635.

After the extinction of the male line, lord Vere Beauclerk, grandson by his mother of the last earl, was in 1750 created