Page:Biographical catalogue of the portraits at Weston, the seat of the Earl of Bradford (IA gri 33125003402027).pdf/145

 touching letter extant from Lord Leicester to his widowed daughter, which our limited space alone prevents our inserting here. The fair hopes contained in her old admirer Waller's letter, written at the time of her marriage, to her sister, Lady Lucy Sidney, were far from being fulfilled. After wishing the couple every happiness, he says, 'May her lord not mourn her long, but go hand in hand with her to that place where is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, but being divorced, we may all have an equal interest in her.' There spoke the disappointed and jealous lover. Lady Sunderland was with child of a daughter at the period of her lord's untimely death, who scarcely survived its birth. She retired to her husband's estate in Northamptonshire, where she made herself generally beloved. 'She is not to be mentioned,' says Lloyd in his Memoirs of the Loyalists, 'without the highest honour, in the catalogue of sufferers, to so many of whom her house was a sanctuary, her interest a protection, her estate a maintenance.' Influenced, it is said, by her father's wishes, she contracted a second marriage in 1652 to Sir Robert Smythe, of the family of the Lords Strangford, a gentleman of Kent, but was again left a widow; she survived Sir Robert some time, and, we are told, she continued to see her old flame Waller, to whom she one day put the dangerous question—'Pray, Master Waller, when will you write such pretty verses to me again?' Was it the sting of old mortification which prompted the cruel answer, 'When your ladyship is young and beautiful again'? By her first husband Lady Sunderland had two children, Robert, the second Earl,—the Minister of whom the anecdote is told that when Addison intrusted Edmund Smith with the task of writing a history of the Revolution of 1688, the proposed author asked the staggering question, 'What shall I do with the character of Lord Sunderland?' and a daughter, Dorothy, who married Sir George Saville, afterwards Marquis of Halifax. By her second husband she had an only child, Robert, Governor of Dover Castle. Lady