Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/647

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 633 " I have laboured to make a covenant with myself, that affection may not press upon judgment; for I suppose there is no man, that hath any apprehension of gentry or nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble a name and house, and would take hold of a twig or twine thread to uphold it. And yet. Time hath his revolu- tions. There must be a period and an end of all temporal things, — f,nis rerum, — an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is terrene ; and why not of De Vere ? For, where is Bohun.'* Where's Mowbray.? Where's Mortimer.? Nay, which is more, and most of all, where is Plantagenet .? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality." But the end of the house was not yet. The nineteenth earl died on the continent while fighting for Protestantism. The twentieth earl, " the noblest subject in England," man of loose morals though he was, was too much a Protestant to follow James II. in his attempt to restore Roman Catholi- cism. When this twentieth earl died, the male posterity of Aubrey de Vere was extinct; but his daughter and heiress, Diana, was married to Nell Gwynn's son by Charles II., the Duke of St. Albans. This son had been given the name of Beauclerk, and until recently the name of this family was de Vere Beauclerk. Topham and Lady Di Beauclerk will be remembered as friends of Dr. Johnson. But the present holder of the title seems to wish to forget his name Beau- clerk and is well content to be simply de Vere. Heraldry, which is called " the short-hand of history," shows this descent in the coat of arms of the St. Albans family ; in the first and fourth quarters are the royal arms, debruised by a baton sinister to show illegitimate descent, while in the second and third quarters is the ancient cognizance of the Earls of Oxford, indicating a marriage with the heiress of the Veres. Another stout judicial baron of this time is Milo of Gloucester, whose estates enriched in after times the house of Bohun. His exploit in marching to the relief of the widow of Richard de Clare, besieged in her castle by the Welsh after the murder of her husband, may have fur- nished Sir Walter Scott with his story of " The Betrothed,"