PREFACE. THE noble families, of which this volume is the record-families the most illustrious in the whole range of European Genealogy-are so associated with our national annals, have at all times exercised so powerful an influence on the political events of their country, that their history must of necessity abound in interest. Fortunately the Nobility of the British Empire still endures in all its original grandeur, and includes on its roll the names of Howard, Talbot, Bruce, Stanley, Fitz-Gerald, O'Brien, Courtenay, Nugent, Hastings, Bertie, Russell, Seymour, Clifford, Hamilton, Graham, Butler, Brabazon, Dillon, Barnewall, Murray, Gordon, Lindsay, Forbes, Montgomerie, and others of equal fame; but it must be confessed that many of the most distinguished Houses have passed away and now form part of the Dormant and Extinct Peerage. It is a fact no less strange than remarkable that the more conspicuous a man is for his great mental powers, the more rarely does he leave a representative to perpetuate his name. Neither Shakespeare, nor Milton, nor Marlborough, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, nor Walter Scott, nor Chatham, nor Edmund Burke, nor William Pitt, nor Fox, nor Canning, nor Macaulay, and, I may now add, nor Palmerston, has a descendant, in the male line, now living. May not the same observation be applied with equal truth to those families which stand out the most prominent in the pages of history? May not the splendour of race like the splendour of mind have too much brilliancy to last? Beauchamp, De Vere, De Lacy, Mowbray, Dunbar, Bohun, Fitz-Alan, Sydney, Holland, Tudor, Percy, Plantagenet, and Mortimer are "entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality." This ever-recurring extinction of English titles of honour formed the subject of a chapter in my recent work on "The Vicissitudes of Families," and I venture to reproduce here the following passages which bear so strikingly on the Dormant and Extinct Peerage: : "After William of Normandy had won at Hastings the broad lands of England, he partitioned them among the chief commanders of his army, and conferred about twenty Earldoms: not one of these now exists, nor one of the honours conferred by William Rufus, Henry I., Stephen, Henry II., Richard I., or John. "All the English Dukedoms, created from the institution of the Order down to the commencement of the reign of Charles II., are gone, except only Norfolk and Somerset, and Cornwall, enjoyed by the Prince of Wales. At one time, in the reign of Elizabeth, Norfolk and Somerset having been attainted, the whole order of Dukes became extinct, and remained so for about fifty years, until James I. created George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. |