The Patrician Author:John Burke Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NEGLECTED GENEALOGY. A SKETCH OF THE MALE LINE OF THE FAMILY OF VILLIERS, CLAIMING TO RE VISCOUNTS PIJKRECK AND EAIILS OF RUCKINGHAM. The simple unexaggera... more »ted history of the family of Villiers, which held the Viscountcy of Purbeck and claimed the Earldom of Buckingham, may seem a romance to those whose youth and inexperience have hitherto concealed from them how often truth is stranger than fiction. The father of George Villiers, the favourite raised by King James to the Dukedom of Buckingham, was twice married. The descendants of the first marriage ascended slowly to the honours of the Peerage, and are now represented in the male line by the Earls of Jersey and of Clarendon. The sons of the second marriage, brothers of the whole blood to the favourite, were ennobled with a rapidity proportioned to that of his own elevation. John Villiers, the eldest son of this second family, had, in the dawn of the fortunes of his honour, aspired to the hand of Frances the daughter of Sir Edward Coke, but his advances had been repulsed. To the girl herself the proposals were most distasteful; and the friends of the daughter of the successful lawyer and courtier, " a lady of transcending beauty,"t and sole heiress of the great wealth and high blood of her mother, J might well expect for her a more advantageous alliance than any member of the Villiers family then afforded. Soon, however, Fortune reversed her wheel, and Coke, pursued by the united hostility of George Villiers and Francis Bacon, was, in the year 1617, deprived of the Chief Justiceship, expelled the Privy Council, and threatened with the terrors of the Star Chamber for some portion of the Legal Reports which he had published. In this crisis of his fate, the father bethought himself that, by the sacrifice of his daughter, he ...« less