Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/195

Rh Baronesses Berners and Burdett-Coutts. The arms of Thomas of Brotherton are quartered by the Dukes of Norfolk, Manchester, and Richmond and Gordon, the Marquis of Exeter, the Earls of Berkeley, Carlisle, Devon, Effingham, Somers, Spencer, and Suffolk and Berkshire, and Lords Arundell of Wardour, Bray broke, Clifford, Dorchester, Eliot, Howard de Walden, Howard of Glossop, Lanerton, Petre, Stourton, and Suffield, and the arms of Edmund of Woodstock are quartered by the Duke of Rutlapd, the Earls of Abingdon, Bradford, Essex, Howth, and Tankerville, Viscounts Falkland and Gage, and Lords De Ros, Lyttelton, Manners, Scarsdale, Vaux, and Wentworth. Several of these families are entitled to quarter many of these arms through different and distinct descents. But we have ranged them under the best of these — that is, under the one by which they are most nearly connected with their Plantagenet ancestors.

These descendants of the Plantagenets are all of them of more or less eminent position. But among those who are mentioned by Mr. Long there are some whose rank and fortune are very dissimilar from theirs. Descended from and quartering the arms of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, by the second marriage of his daughter and heiress Anne Plantagenet with William Bouchier, Earl of Ewe, are John Penny, the only surviving son of Stephen James Penny (late sexton of St. George's, Hanover Square), who in 1845 was apprenticed to Mr. Watson, saddler, of Windmill Street, Haymarket; and his uncles, William John Penny, foreman to Messrs. Baker, upholsterers, of Lower Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, and Thomas Penny, shoemaker at Brompton. Sir John Bouchier, a younger son of the Earl of Ewe, married the heiress of Sir Richard Berners, and was summoned to Parliament as Baron Berners. His great-granddaughter and heiress married Edmund Knyvett, serjeant porter to Henry VIII. In the sixth generation from him the male line of the Knyvetts became extinct, and the barony of Berners fell into abeyance between the two daughters and co-heiresses, Elizabeth and Lucy, of John Knyvett, of Norwich. Baroness Berners descends from the marriage of the elder co-heiress with Henry Wilson of Didlington, and the Pennys descend from the second marriage of the younger co-heiress with John Field, carpenter, of Reading. Among the descendants of Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, entitled to quarter his arms are Joseph Smart, butcher, of Hales Owen, and George Wilmot, the keeper of the turnpike-gate at Cooper's Bank, near Dudley. They are among the co-heirs of Frances, eventually heiress of Ferdinando Lord Dudley, the wife of Walter Woodcock, whose first and second daughters and co-heiresses were respectively the mothers of Joseph Smart and George Wilmot. They are thus co-heirs of the old barony of Dudley, created by writ in the reign of Edward II. Their royal descent and quarterings they derive direct through the Wards, the Suttons, the Tiptofts, the Cherletons, and the Hollands from Joan Plantagenet, the "Fair Maid of Kent."

 

 From The Spectator.

news has recently been received from an Australian observatory respecting the largest and most massive of the planets. We have from time to time called the attention of our readers to certain novel views respecting the planets Jupiter and Saturn which have been advanced during the last few years. Regarded, since the Copernican theory was established, as simply the largest members of the family to which our earth belongs, these giant orbs were made the subject of many interesting speculations respecting the conditions under which such life as we are familiar with may exist upon their surface. These speculations were to some degree checked by the well-known treatise in which Whewell attempted to show that Jupiter and Saturn must needs be too cold for life, unless perhaps some wretched gelatinous creatures float languidly in the half-frozen seas which he regarded as constituting the chief part of the bulk of the two largest planets. Even Whewell's views, however, widely though they differed from those which were in vogue when he announced them, were yet based on the ideas which had been so long entertained respecting the family of planets. It was because he regarded Jupiter and Saturn as in the same state as our own earth that he inferred from their small density that their substance must be in the main watery, and that he concluded they must be exceedingly cold on account of their remoteness from the sun. He did not inquire whether they may not be in an entirely different condition, passing, in fact, through 