Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 31.djvu/293

 Knollys considering how old a man this lord is, and childless.’ Accordingly, on 9 April 1628, the lords resolved to allow the earl the ‘place of precedency’ ‘for his life only.’ On 15 April the earl took his seat ‘next to the Earl of Berks,’ the patent for whose earldom dated from 7 Feb. 1625-6. Banbury proved himself no compliant supporter of Charles I's despotic policy, and when in February 1628 he was invited to collect ship-money in Oxfordshire, bluntly declined. He died at the house of Dr. Grant, his physician, in Paternoster Row, London, on 25 May 1632, and was buried at Rotherfield Greys. His age is stated to have been eighty-five, although he ‘rode a hawking and hunting’ within half a year of his death. His will, which makes no mention of children, was dated 19 May 1630, and was proved by his widow, to whom he left all his possessions, on 2 July 1632. The funeral certificate at the College of Arms describes him as dying without issue. He sold Rotherfield Greys to his brother Richard's son, Sir Robert Knollys of Stanford-in-the-Vale, on 4 March 1630-1.

The earl was twice married. His first wife, by whom he had no children, was Dorothy, widow of Edmund Brydges, lord Chandos, and daughter of Edmund Braye, first lord Braye; she died 31 Oct. 1605. Less than two months later (23 Dec.) Knollys, who was then about fifty-eight, married a girl of nineteen, Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk; she was baptised at Saffron Walden, 11 Aug. 1586. A daughter of this marriage died young, before 1610; but the countess gave birth to a son, Edward, at her husband's house, on 10 April 1627, and on 3 Jan. 1630-1 another son, Nicholas, was born to her at Harrowden, Northamptonshire, the residence of Edward Vaux, fourth lord Vaux. The paternity of these two sons has given rise to much controversy.

Within five weeks of her husband's death, (before 2 July 1632) Lady Banbury married Lord Vaux. She adopted Roman catholicism, the religion of her second husband, and was consequently an object of much suspicion to the Long parliament. On 19 Aug. 1643 the speaker issued a pass enabling her to go to France, and on 13 June 1644 the House of Commons resolved that should she return she should be seized and kept under restraint. She died in her seventy-second year, 17 April 1658, and was buried at Dorking, Surrey, near the residence of her second husband. The latter survived till 8 April 1661, and is said to have died without issue.

Although the legal doctrine, ‘Pater est quem nuptiæ demonstrant,’ assumes in all cases of children born in wedlock that the husband is the children's father, the House of Lords has repeatedly refused to admit the legitimacy of the Countess of Banbury's sons, or to allow the title to them or their descendants. Between 1641 and 1813 the question has been frequently discussed in the House of Lords and in the law courts, with the curious result that while the judges have distinctly acknowledged the children's legitimacy, the peers have persistently adhered to the contrary view, mainly on the grounds of the earl's age at the date of their birth, and his alleged ignorance of their existence at the time of his death. The peers' inference was that Lord Vaux was their father.

The long controversy opened with a legal decision in favour of the claim to legitimacy. Edward, the elder of the countess's two sons, was styled ‘Earl of Banbury’ in a chancery suit to which in February 1640-1 he was party as an infant, for the purpose of establishing his right to a plot of land at Henley, styled the Bowling Place, and to other property left by his father. Under orders of the court of wards an inquiry into the late earl's property was held at Abingdon 1 April 1641, and the court found that 'Edward, now Earl of Banbury, is, and at the time of the earl's decease was, his son and next heir.’ Edward travelled in Italy in 1644, and in June 1645 was slain in a quarrel on the road between Calais and Gravelines. He was buried in the church of the Friars Minims at Calais.

His younger brother, called third  (1631-1674), thereupon assumed the title. He had travelled to France with his mother in 1644, but both had returned before 19 Oct. 1646, when Lord Vaux settled all his lands at Harrowden on his wife (Knollys's mother), with remainder to Knollys himself, who was styled Earl of Banbury in the deed. At an early age Nicholas married his first wife, Isabella, daughter of Mountjoy Blount, earl of Newport, and soon fell into pecuniary difficulties. On 27 Feb. 1654-5, as Nicholas, earl of Banbury, he, with his wife, his mother, and Lord Vaux of Harrowden, petitioned Cromwell to remove the sequestration on Lord Vaux's estate, and to allow them to compound or sell some of the lands. The earl and countess, the petitioners stated, were both young, and owed 10,000l., on account of which debt the earl was confined at the time in the Upper Bench prison (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1654-5, p. 55). Soon afterwards Knollys's first wife died, and he married at Stapleford, Leicestershire, on 4 Oct.