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The Marquess Townshend, who celebrates to-day his thirty-eighth birthday, and still preserves the happy knack of looking- five-and-twenty, fell heir five years ago this month to twenty thousand acres, a heavily encumbered estate, two historic homes, and as well-authenticated a family spectre as can be boasted of by any famous house.The ghost, which always heralds a death or a birth, is at Raynham Hall, in Norfolk, and tradition declares it to be that of Lady Dorothy Walpole, who in J.713 became the second wife of the second Viscount Townshend, he who was Queen Anne’s Ambassador at The Hague, and, refusing the Viceroyalty of Ireland, became Lord President of the Council.The marriage was not a happy one, albeit she bore the viscount half-a-dozen children ; and eventually her mind gave way, and it became necessary to seclude her in an upper storey at Raynham, where, in 1726, she died.The late Lady Anne Sherson, eldest daughter of the fourth Marquess of Townshend, often told the story of the New sear’s Eve bah at Raynham in December, 1855, when Hie and many other guests watched a little lady in a brown satin dress of the early eighteenth century pass like a stranger through the throng. It was whispered rather fearfully tha* it was the ghost of Lady Dorothy ; and the next day cam© news of the death of George* third Marquess.1 he present peer, who was compelled in the spring of this year to sell some priceless heirlooms in order to keep up the estates impoverished by his predecessors, is the sixth Marquess, and is a nephew of the Duke of Fife, whose sister married the fifth Marquess in 1865. The first of the Townsbends was a great lawyer in the days of the fourth and fifth Edwards, and a Judge of Common Pleas in those of Richard' the Third.
Newspaper Details
London St James Gazette
London, Middlesex, GB
Mon, Oct 17, 1904
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Caitlin B.
GB 25 Nov 2024
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