therefore extinct. The Duchess of Buckingham, of whom Brian Fairfax
remarks, 'that if she had none of the vanities, she had none of the
vices of the court,' survived him several years. She died in 1705, at
the age of sixty-six, and was buried in the vault of the Villiers'
family, in the chapel of Henry VII.

Such was the extinction of all the magnificence and intellectual
ascendency that at one time centred in the great and gifted family of
Villiers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Dryden.]

[Footnote 2: The day after the battle at Kingston, the Duke's estates
were confiscated. (8th July, 1648.)--Nichols's History of
Leicestershire, iii. 213; who also says that the Duke offered marriage
to one of the daughters of Cromwell, but was refused. He went abroad in
1648, but returned with Charles II. to Scotland in 1650, and again
escaped to France after the battle of Worcester, 1651. The sale of the
pictures would seem to have commenced during his first exile.]

[Footnote 3: Sir George Villiers's second wife was Mary, daughter of
Antony Beaumont, Esq., of Glenfield, (Nichols's Leicestershire, iii.
193,) who was son of Wm. Beaumont, Esq., of Cole Orton. She afterwards
was married successively to Sir Wm. Rayner and Sir Thomas Compton, and
was created Countess of Buckingham in 1618.]

[Footnote 4: This incident is taken from Madame Dunois' Memoirs, part i.
p. 86.]