Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/197

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feet by twenty-two, the house being all one room thick. A good deal of internal decoration—oak panels, a staircase, and marble chimney-pieces, and heavy architraves over the doors—was the work of Lord Delaval about 1760. The pictures are numerous, mostly family portraits, one being of Lord Hussey of Sleaford, beheaded after the Lincolnshire rebellion, 1536. At the south end of the long gallery is a group by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Thomas Taylor died in 1607, and his son in 1652, when the estate devolved on his niece, Lady Hussey of Honington. Her husband, whose great uncle was the man beheaded by order of Henry VIII., was fined as a Royalist in 1646 in the enormous sum of £10,200, of which £8,759 was actually paid—half of it in his lifetime, and the rest by his widow and his eldest son's widow, Rhoda, who had for her second husband married Lord Fairfax. The accession to her uncle's estate at Doddington just two years after she had cleared this huge debt on Honington must have been truly welcome to Lady Hussey, but she only lived to enjoy it for six years, and was succeeded by her grandson, Sir Thomas Hussey, who lived till 1706. Then his title passed to Sir Edward Hussey of Caythorpe and his estate to his three daughters, the last of whom, Mrs. Sarah Apreece, by will dated 1747, settled it on her daughter, Rhoda, the wife of Captain Francis Blake-Delaval, R.N., who had large estates in Northumberland, Seaton Delaval, Ford Castle near Flodden Field, and Dissington. The estate remained with the Delavals till 1814, when Edward Hussey Delaval, a learned man of science and an F.R.S., died, and was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey. Lord Delaval held the property for nearly forty years and spent much on the house, but to spite his brother Edward he had the meanness to cut down all the timber of any value. His youngest daughter was the beautiful Countess of Tyrconnel who died in 1800, and to her daughter he left Ford Castle. He himself died at the age of eighty at Seaton Delaval, and was buried in the family vault in St. Paul's Chapel, Westminster Abbey.

His brother Edward was only one year younger, but lived to the age of eighty-five. Then, in 1814, Seaton Delaval went to his nephew, Sir Jacob Astley, but Doddington to his widow and daughter, the latter of whom became Mrs. Gunman. The mother survived the daughter, and in 1829 it was found that