Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 7.djvu/379

 10 s. vii. APRIL 20, 1907.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Fanny Russell, daughter of Mr. John Russell, and granddaughter of Sir John Russell, third Baronet of Chippenham. This Sir John Russell had married the Lady Frances Cromwell, daughter of Oliver Crom- well, so that Miss Fanny Russell was great- granddaughter of the Lord Protector. She was also a distant cousin of Mr. Revett's. As your correspondent correctly notes, Sir Thomas Revett of Chippenham, who married Griselda, daughter of Lord Paget of Beaudesert, K.G., having no son, his large possessions in East Anglia and many Welsh manors passed to his two daughters, one married to the fifth Lord Windsor, the other to Thomas Gerard. The latter' s daughter married Sir William Russell, first Baronet, Treasurer of the Navy, and with her the Revett? Chippenham property passed to the Russells.

Miss Fanny Russell was so f ar a " servant " of the Princess Amelia that she was a Woman of the Bedchamber to that princess, daughter of George II. Her pert answer to the Prince of Wales, referred to in ' N. & Q.' of 1865, will be extracted later. Miss Russell's father married as his second wife the widow of Col. Revett, killed at Mal- plaquet, mentioned above. She was the niece of Lord Cutts and heiress of Checkers, and through her the Checkers property passed to the Revetts. Her son by her first marriage, Mr. John Revett, married Miss Fanny Russell, her second husband's daughter by his first marriage. The Checkers papers contain a mass of informa- tion regarding the family, and a most interesting collection of letters, many of which refer to the wars of the time, and on which Mr. Skrine has drawn for his vivid and interesting account of Fontenoy. The collection also contains a family tree much needed, as the intermarriages are compli- cated. Miss Russell in the earlier letters refers to Mr. John Revett, her future husband, as her brother. And the family ties were drawn even closer after her mar- riage by the marriage of her brother Col. Russell, of the 1st Foot Guards, with Col. Edmund Revett's daughter, Mr. John Revett's sister. Mr. Revett having no children, the Checkers property passed to his sister, and thence to the Russells, who thus acquired both the Chippenham and the Checkers properties through Revett alliances. This Col. Russell's letters during the Fontenoy campaign, published among the Checkers papers, are of special interest.

I have not the ' Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke,' referred to by your

correspondent, but in an extract of the letters of the Lady Jane Coke, edited by Mrs. Rathborne, will be found some account of the Revett family ; of the marriage of my great-grandfather, Mr. Thomas Revett, M.P. and High Sheriff for Derbyshire 1745 ; and of the exciting elections of the times. He was further connected with the Brock- ford branch of the Revetts by the marriage of his grandfather with the daughter of his cousin Robert Revett, of Brockford. In fact, in old days, when the means of com- munication were limited, young squires and others could not go very far afield for their wives, and married among their neighbours or cousins whom they had opportunities of meeting.

As it is a far cry back to the Third Series of ' N. & Q.' (1865, vii. 182) it may be well to extract here the story of Fanny Revett and the Prince of Wales referred to by Horace Walpole in his letter to the Countess of Ossory (26 Aug., 1784) :

"In the suite of the Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., was a lacly of the name of Fanny Russell, the great-granddaughter of Oliver Crom- well. One day, it happened to be the 30th of January, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Charles I., she was in waiting, and occupied in adjusting some part of the Princess's dress, when Frederick, Prince of Wales, came into the room, and sportively said, ' For shame, Miss Russell ! Why have you not been at church, humbling your- self for the sins on this day committed by your ancestor?' 'Sir,' replied Miss Russell, 'for a descendant of the great Oliver Cromwell, it is humiliation sufficient to be employed as I am in pinning up the tail of your sister.' "

The Revett family of Suffolk which, as the British Museum MS. Department indi- cates, was a very extensive one some hundred years ago is now extinct in the male line in all its branches, save in that of which I am a cadet, and which is now repre- sented by my cousin Sir James Rivett- Carnac, Bt. Our grandfather, having taken the name of Carnac by sign-manual in 1800, for some inexplicable reason changed the spelling of the original family name from Revett to Revett. I may add that much further information regarding Chippenham, the Revetts, and the Russells will be found in the Rev. R. Barber's ' An East Anglian Village.' J. H. RIVETT-CARNAC.

Schloss Rothberg, Switzerland.

ST. AGNES' EVE (10 S. iv. 449). Nearly eighteen months ago I asked a question upon the subject of Keats's poem of ' St. Agnes' Eve.' The lover is there described on St. Agnes' Eve as heaping a table by the bedside of his lady with various " cates and