Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/172

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. iv. JUNE, wis.

the House of Bourbon who shared her mother's interest in the graceful young man, and whose sympathy and admiration were fast developing into a warmer feeling."

But Ewald gives no reference to the letters or memoirs on which this statement is based. Elsewhere (p. 205) he writes :

" Rumour was ever busy with the alliances that the Prince was about to contract. To give the names of these imaginary brides is to mention half the royal and high-born spinsters of the period."

Andrew Lang, ' Prince Charles Edward Stuart,' new ed., 1903, p. 294, writes of the toast of ' The Black Eye ' : " Perhaps he really meant Clementina Walkinshaw, whose eyes were of the darkest." However, on p. 331 Charles is quoted as writing to his father : " My opinion is I cannot as yet marry unless I get the King's dauter [sic], which is in vain to ask at present, and am afraid will always be the same." The date is apparently Nov. 27, 1746.

Of the daughters of Louis XV., the eldest, Louise Elizabeth, had been married in 1739. Was the daughter that rumour assigned to Charles Henriette or Adelaide ? Henriette is said to have been in love with the due de Chartres. The books that I have at hand make a foolish mystery of the date of her death. EDWARD BKNBLY.

The story of the attachment of the Young Pretender to a French princess is adopted by Aytoun in ' Charles Edward at Ver- sailles,' and he gives the authority for it (not a very convincing one) in a note.

E. W. B.

MEWS OB MEWYS FAMILY (12 S. ii. 26, 93, 331, 419, 432; iii. 16, 52, 113, 195, 236, 421, 454). I notice that Cassan in his ' Lives of the Bishops of Winchester ' heads the biography of Bishop Mews, " Peter Mew, Mews, or Meux, LL.D." It is well known that in old days spelling went for very little, and the same name is constantly found spelt in a variety of ways. Bishop Mews, as many readers will know, was the famous warrior bishop, the record of whose life is specially interesting just now. Besides Cassan' s account of him there is a long notice in the ' D.N.B.'

While Peter was Bishop of Winchester, his near kinsman (possibly, indeed, his brother) Ellis Mewys or Mews was living at Winchester, and was elected Mayor of that ancient city in 1685, the two Mewys being thus Bishop and Mayor of Winchester at the same time. Ellis Mews, who was also

Recorder of Romsey, married at Farley St. John (otherwise Farley Ch&mberlayne), on Oct. 4, 1666 (the year of the awful plague at Winchester), Christian, only daughter of O'iver St. John of Farley St. John. They had, inter alias, a son Ellis, who on Dec. 6, 1699, married at Farley his first cousin Frances St. John, daughter, and eventually the heiress, of Oliver St. John, who was M.P. for Stockbridge at his death in 1689. Ellis took in consequence, by Act of Parlia- ment, the surname of St. John in lieu of Mewys. In little more than three months Frances was dead, and she was buried at Farley on March 15, 1700. We can under- stand how the young and heart-stricken widower would often have been staying with his uncle (or at all events near kinsman) the Bishop at Farnham Castle. Some six miles from Farnham are the manor and parish of Dogmersfield, where shortly before had died old Edward Goodyer, the lord of that manor, and sometime High Sheriff of Hampshire. Edward's eldest son, also Edward, had died before him ; so too had his youngest son Thomas (both unmarried), so also his daughter Mary, who had married one of the sons of Sir Ralph Delaval, Bt. John and James Goodyer were still living, and also their sister Martha ; so, too, was their mother, Hester Goodyer, the daughter of one Terry, and, before she had married Edward Goodyer at Elvetham in 1656, the widow of John Goodyer. Hester, indeed, reached her 90th year, and was buried at Dogmersfield (M.I.) in 1723. Her youngest child by her husband Edward Goodyer was Martha, who was baptized at Dogmersfield in 1675.

Dogmersfield and Farnham Castle being adjacent, it was possibly in this way that the young widower Ellis St. John made the acquaintance of the Goodyers. At all events, we find that in 1702-3 Ellis St. John and Martha Goodyer were married at Dogmersfield. John Goodyer, the lord of that manor, died childless in 1712 ; his brother James (who had purchased the manor of West Court, Finchampstead, from the Hon. H. Howard) had also died childless in 1710. Thus the whole of the Dogmersfield and Finchampstead estates became centred in old Hester Goodyer, from whom they passed in 1723 to her daxighter Martha St. John, the wife of Ellis St. John of Farley St. John. On the death of his wife in 1725 Ellis St. John consequently succeeded to the Dogmersfield and Finch- ampstead estates, as well as those of Farley which had come to him through his first