Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/35

 INTRODUCTION xxxi ������life than could have opened before her had the highest court honors been hers. �It is difficult to think of the present splendid mansion at Eastwell Park as connected in any intimate way with Arde- Eastwell ^ a - The eighteenth century house was built by �The Mansion the Italian architect, Bonomi, under the direc- tion of George Finch Hatton, the eighth Earl of Winchilsea. And that house has been remodeled and enlarged on so magnificent a scale by the present owner, Lord Gerard, as hardly to suggest the house of a century ago. Yet the house to which Mr. and Mrs. Finch went was nevertheless of excep- tional interest. It dated, in its seventeenth century form, from 1589, in which year Sir Moyle Finch obtained permis- sion from Queen Elizabeth to inclose one thousand acres and to embattle his house. The original building was of the sixteenth century, having been built by Sir Thomas Moyle in about 1544, and having come into the Finch family through the marriage of Thomas Finch, Esq., and Catherine Moyle. The wife of Sir Moyle Finch, their son, was the rich heiress of Sir Thomas Heneage. She was a woman, glad, it is true, to be assured of an appropriate local habitation, but more ambitious of a name. Nine years after the death of her husband her energetic use of the resources at her com- mand was crowned by the title of Viscountess Maidstone, and, five years later, in 1628, by that of Countess of Win- chilsea, both titles with reversion to heirs male. So that the house to which Anne came in 1690 was of interest to her not only as a fine English mansion a century old, with por- tions of it boasting an additional half century as well, but it must have had a stronger personal attraction as the home of her husband's family since the days of Catherine Moyle and Elizabeth Heneage, the heiresses to whom they owed rank and fortune. �Of Ardelia's associations with the estate itself we may ��� �