Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/337

 

The Layard family claims descent from the Raymonds, whose chiefs were the illustrious Sovereign Princes and Comtes De Toulouse. They are believed to spring from the same ancestry as the Ducs Caumont de la Force. The more specific ancestor was either Guillaume Raymond, the first Seigneur de Caumont (who died 1n 1337), or Nompar Raymond, Seigneur de Caumont, who died in 1400. Among the family papers are the names and armorial bearings of Pierre de Caumont and Jeanne de Brissac, his wife (1570), and of Raymond de Caumont de Layarde, and Francoise Savary de Mauleon de Castillon, his wife (1590).

Without presuming to decide the question of descent, I follow the documents before me, and inform my readers that the refugee’s name was Pierre Layard; his father’s name was Raymond Layard, and his mother’s baptismal name was Francoise. Pierre was born in 1666, at Montflanquin, in the Duchy of Agen and Province of Guienne. Having taken refuge in Holland in 1685, he came to England in the train of William of Orange. I first meet with him as a cadet in Miremont’s Dragoons. He had to go upon half-pay when the Huguenot regiments were disbanded in 1698. Soon afterwards he received a commission in an English regiment, and in 1710 he had attained the rank of Major. He was naturalized, along with many others, by Act of Parliament, on 16th July 1713.

In 1716 he married a Huguenot and comparatively youthful bride, Mary Anne Croze or Croisey, by whom he had twelve sons, of whom all died in infancy except one son and two daughters. Major Layard died in his eighty-first year, on the 18th March 1747.

Major Layard’s daughter, Elizabeth, was born at Sutton-Fryers, Canterbury, on 23rd June 1731, and was married at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, London, on 4th November 1760, to Charles Fouace. Her sister, Mary Ann, born in the same place, 5th March 1733, was married on 2nd January 1769, to Brownlow Bertie, fifth and last Duke of Ancaster. The Duchess died 13th January 1804, leaving an only child, Lady Mary Elizabeth Bertie, the first wife of Thomas Charles Colyear, fourth and last Earl of Portmore, whose son Brownlow, Viscount Milsington (heir-at-law of the Duke of Ancaster), died before him, being mortally wounded by banditti near Rome, in 1819.

Major Layard’s sole male representative (registered as the son of Major Pierre De Layard) was Daniel Peter Layard, born on 28th March 1720, and baptized in the French Church of Les Grecs on April 8, the parents being resident in St. Ann’s parish, Westminster. He became M.D. of Rheims, on 9th March 1742. He married, on 9th August 1743, in the Westminster French Church in the Savoy, Susanne Henriette Boisragon, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Louis de Boisragon by his second wife, Marie Henriette, daughter of the Chevalier Nicolas de Rambouillet. In April 1747 he became physician accoucheur to the Middlesex Hospital, but retired to the Continent on account of bad health. On his return he established a prosperous medical practice in Huntingdon, and was styled “of Woodhurst, Huntingdonshire;” he claimed the barony of Clifton-Camville. He was admitted a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, on 3rd July 1752. A most calamitous cattle-plague raged in Great Britain from 1744 to 1756. In 1757 Dr. Layard published “An Essay on the Contagious Distemper among the Horned Cattle in these Kingdoms.” He also published “An Essay on the Bite of a Mad Dog” (1762). In 1769, when the cattle-plague again broke out, he was sent for by the Privy Council, and assisted in the drafting of Orders in Council and Acts of Parliament, which were mainly instrumental in extirpating the plague. The House of Commons gave him a grant of £500, and the king appointed him to be Corresponding Secretary with Foreign Courts on the nature, causes, and cure of that distemper. In 1762 Dr. Layard had settled in London as an accoucheur, and in 1772 he published a Pharmacopoeia, specially for his feminine patients. But in or before 1769 he had taken up his abode in Greenwich. He received many honours; he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and of the Academy of Gottingen, and he received in 1792 the honorary degree of D.C.L. from Oxford. He was elected a Director of the French Protestant Hospital of London on 4th October 1775. He died at Greenwich on 28th March 1802, aged eighty-two.

Dr. Layard left three sons. His daughter, Susanna Henriette (born 1757, died 1832), wife of Peter Pegus, Esq., had a son, Peter William Pegus, M.A., of Cambridge, who married his cousin, the Countess Dowager of Lindsey, and whose daughter, Mary Antoinette Pegus, was married to Charles, tenth Marquis of Huntly. Dr. Layard’s younger sons, Lieut.-General Anthony Lewis Layard (died 1823, and buried