On John's death he took such measures as caused the youthful Henry III to be received as King until his own death, which occurred in the year 1219. He left, besides daughters, five sons, who all in succession became Earls of Pembroke, leaving no issue. The extinction of the Earl's male line is recorded by Matthew Paris as an evident judgement for his seizure of two manors from the Bishop of Fernes, who, failing to procure redress, excommunicated the Protector. The earldom of Pembroke was in 1247 granted by King Henry III to his own half-brother, William de Valence. His son Aymer de Valence, who ravaged Scotland, but was obliged to retire, left a wife, who by grant from her cousin, King Edward III, founded the College or Hall of Mary de Valence in Cambridge, now called Pembroke Hall. The last de Valence dying without issue, Laurence Hastings, grandson of Isabel de Valence, sister of Aymer, was created Earl of Pembroke. His son, John Hastings, married Margaret, the youngest daughter of King Edward III, who died soon afterwards. Though related to royalty, when he was defeated and captured at sea by the Spaniards, he was not released until he had suffered four years' imprisonment, and he then died at Paris on his way. to Calais, in 1376. He was followed by his son John, who died in 1390. In his family it has been remarked that no son ever saw his own father, the father dying before the son was born. The earldom of Pembroke was then conferred successively on 'Good Duke Humphrey' of Gloucester; William de la Pole, afterwards Duke of Suffolk; and on Jasper Hatfield, half-brother to King Henry VI, afterwards Duke of Bedford. When Jasper, who had taken the Lancastrian side, became a fugitive, the earldom and castle of Pembroke was granted to William Herbert, a stanch adherent of the house of York, who, falling into the hands of the Lancastrian insurgents on the temporary restoration of Henry VI in 1470, was executed at Banbury. He was succeeded in his earldom by his son William, who exchanged this dignity for that of Huntingdon in 1479, King Edward being desirous to confer the earldom of Pembroke upon his son Prince Edward. The Earls of Pembroke, till Wales was incorporated into and united to England (27 Henry VIII, c. 26), were counts palatine, having a jurisdiction exclusive of the King's Courts, and passing all things that concerned the county under the seal of the earldom. In September 1532 Henry VIII advanced Anne Boleyn, whom he afterwards married privately, to the dignity of Marchioness of Pembroke. The Earl of Pembroke, who was captured at Edgecote near Banbury, and was afterwards executed, besides his legitimate offspring left two natural sons, the eldest of whom, Sir William Herbert, Knight of Ewyas and Grove Radnor, Herefordshire, had a son William, who was installed Knight of the Garter in 1548, and afterwards through the influence of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, afterwards Duke of Northumberland, one of whose adherents he had been, was elevated to the peerage October 10, 1551, as Baron Herbert of Cardiff, and on the morrow, Earl of Pembroke. After the fall of the Protector Somerset the Earl of Pembroke was one of the powerful men who ruled England in the name of the boy-king, Edward VI. Stowe and other chroniclers of that time speak of the magnificence of his retinue while living and the vast expenses incurred at his burial in the Cathedral of St. Paul's on April 18, 1570. He was succeeded by his own son Henry, who married for his third wife Mary, daughter of Sir Henry Sidney, K. G., by whom he had two sons and a daughter. A noticeable portrait of this lady, immortalized in Ben Jonson's famous epitaph as 'Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother,' still hangs on the walls of the room in Penshurst called 'Queen Elizabeth's drawing-room.' Of him Clarendon has said, 'Sure never was man planted in a court that was fitter for that soil, or brought better qualities with him to purify that air.' brother Philip had, before he succeeded to the earldom of Pembroke, been elevated to the peerage by the title of Earl of Montgomery. Like his brother, he was also Chancellor of the University of Oxford. This honour was conferred upon him through Cromwell's influence after he had ceased to be Governor of the Isle of Wight. The memoirs of the time bring him before us as 'speaking very loud, as his manner was.' A noisy and obstreperous man, he played an ignoble part in the great drama of the Civil War. While still Earl of Pembroke he 'condescended,' to use the words of His Hallam, 'to sit in the House of Commons for the County of Berks, and was received, notwithstanding his proverbial meanness and stupidity, with such excessive honour as displayed the character of those low-minded upstarts who formed a sufficiently numerous portion of the House to give a tone to its proceedings.' His tenure of office as Governor of the Isle of Wight only lasted for four years. The affairs of the Island were mainly in the hands of the Deputy Lieutenant, Sir John Dingley, and then of Colonel Thomas Carne. Carne and Sir Thomas Barrington, M. P. for Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, were active members of the committee for the safety of the Isle of Wight, a body which held their meetings in London. Pembroke survived to see the Restoration, dying in 1665. Had he been a younger man, this timeserving politician, who had been a Royalist under James and during the earlier part of the reign of Charles I, and a violent loud-tongued Roundhead under Cromwell, would have been one of the most servile courtiers in Whitehall, and voted in his place in the House of Lords for the execution of the regicides. He belonged to that lowest type of public who men, 'Proteus-like, must alter His face and habit, and like water seem Of the same colour that the vessel is That doth contain it; varying his form July 26, 1890. THE DINGLEY ARMS IN WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. In Winchester Cathedral is the Dingley shield impaled with the Hammond arms. The impalement must have come about from the fact that Sir John Dingley of the Isle of Wight married Jane, daughter of Dr. John Hammond, physician to Prince Henry, the elder brother of Charles I. Colonel Hammond, who was Governor of Carisbrooke Castle when Charles I came in November, 1647, was the second son of Robert Hammond, Esq., of Chertsey in Surrey, who was a brother of Lady Dingley, who was also a sister to Dr. Henry Hammond, the eminent divine and chaplain to the King. We are indebted to Sir John Dingley for an interesting letter, dated March 31, 1642, in which he, as Deputy Governor of the Isle of Wight, gives an account of the state of the Island at that time, in reply to one addressed to him by Philip, Earl of Pembroke, who had been appointed Governor of the Island by Parliament in place of Jerome, Earl of Portland. This letter will be found in Worsley (Hist. I. W. pp. iii, 114). November 7, 1885. THE HOBSON OR HOPSON FAMILY, AND MILTON'S SONNET TO THE LADY MARGARET, WIFE OF CAPTAIN HOPSON. THE Hobsons or Hopsons (for the name is spelt in both these forms), father and son, are mentioned by Sir John Oglander as belonging to the company of the gentlemen of the Isle of Wight who met together at the ordinary at Standen, and who dined with the Governor of the Island, Lord Southampton. The wife of old Mr. Hobson, whose maiden name was Margaret Holbourn, of Chelsea, was one of the three gentlewomen of ffashion and repute' who alone in the whole Island, so Oglander states, were 'accounted in qualified fitting to kepe companye with my Lady Carye,' daughter of Sir John Spenser, of Althorpe, and wife of Sir George Carey, who preceded Lord Southampton in the government of the Isle of Wight. The Hobsons were therefore a family which moved in what would now be called the best circle of the society of the Isle of Wight. Little notice has been taken of this family by Worsley and others, nor am I able to give their lineage. Possibly Mr. Long of Portsmouth or others who are acquainted with the genealogy of the leading families in the Island may be able to furnish information upon this point. Their connexion with the Island arose with the seizure by the Crown of the property belonging to the monasteries, though not for some time after the dissolution of the religious houses. Worsley (Hist. I. W. p. 265) mentions that the Priory of Christchurch, Twineham, which had considerable property in the Isle of Wight, in all probability held out beyond the time of the suppression of the monasteries. There is,' he says, 'a remarkable entry in Bishop Gardiner's Register of a presentation to Thorley Church in the year 1537 by John Draper, by divine sufferance prior of Christchurch, and the monks of the convent.' The manor and appropriation of the great tithes and advowson of the vicarage became, when the Priory of Christchurch was dissolved, the property of the Crown, and were, along with the manors of Ningwood, Wellow, Wilmingham, and Shalcombe, exchanged for the manor of Marylebone, with Thomas Hopson, Esq. This exchange was effected in 1544. How the Hobsons became possessed of the manor of Marylebone does not appear. A certain Thomas Hobson is mentioned frequently in the State papers of Henry VIII as having rendered services to the King's grandmother, Margaret, Countess of Richmond; he was auditor to the Duchy of Cornwall, and died in 1514. Marylebone, the largest parish of London, more than twice. the extent of the city, and its population greater, was originally called Tyburn, from its being on a brook, or bourne, that rose near Hampstead. This rivulet, called Ay-bourne or Ty-bourne, crossed Oxford Street near Stratford Place and made its way by what is now called Brook Street, from being built on its banks, through the hollow of Piccadilly into the Green Park. Here it expanded into a large pond, from which it ran past what is now the garden of Buckingham Palace in three distinct branches through Tothill Fields to the Thames. On the site of what is now Curzon Street, Hertford Street, and Chesterfield House, a yearly fair was held in the month of May, which afterwards gave the name of Mayfair to the district. In a record of Henry VIII this district is called Tyborne, alias Mary-borne, alias Mary-bourne. Lysons conjectures |