The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Anecdotes prefixed to this edition, a sketch of the family history of Lady Mary, to which it will not be necessary to add many particulars. The "Wiltshire heiress" there alluded to, the paternal grandmother of Lady Mary, is however worthy of something more than a passing allusion. She was the daughter of Sir John Evelyn, of West Dean, in Wiltshire, a branch of the family rendered illustrious by including the author of "Sylva." Evelyn has, indeed, an allusion to her in his "Diary," which becomes interesting from the glimpse that it affords of her remarkable mental powers. Under the date of 2nd of July, 1649, he records a day spent at Godstone, where Sir John was on a visit with this daughter, and he adds: "Mem.-The prodigious memory of Sir John of Wilts's daughter, since married to Mr. W. Pierrepont." We may, at least, assume that she was in

1 [The following table shows Lady Mary's connexion with the Evelyn family:

John Evelyn (of Kingston), 1520.
I

1st wife George Evelyn (of Long Ditton and

George Evelyn (of Everley and West Dean).

Sir John Evelyn (of West Dean).

Elizabeth Evelyn Hon Robert Pierrepont.

Wotton 2nd wife.
Votton-2

Evelyn Pierrepont (1st D. of Kingston).

Lady Mary Pierrepont (afterwards Wortley).]

2 Evelyn is here in error. Sir John of Wilts's daughter married the Honourable Robert Pierrepont, son of "Wise William," alluded to in the "Introductory Anecdotes."

some way an extraordinary person.

Among the old monuments in the church at West Dean is one to Sir John, set up by this daughter, with a long inscription in prose and verse, probably from the lady's own pen. The few traces she has left behind, point to an intelligent and worthy woman. Her father left her his large property, in confidence that if her youngest son, Evelyn, afterwards the father of Lady Mary, should prove a dutiful son, she would settle the whole of the estates upon him. Elizabeth Pierrepont survived her husband many years, no doubt bringing up her family in the noble old manor-house at West Dean. She had three sons, all of whom were successively Earls of Kingston. Her daughter married William Lord Cheyne, and is the “Aunt Cheyne" frequently mentioned in the letters. Evelyn, the youngest son, and the favourite of his grandfather, survived his two brothers; and when his wife died in 1692, Lady Mary, then a child of three yeas old, would probably go to West Dean to be under the care of this grandmother, now left alone. Lady Mary tells us that she quitted West Dean at eight years old, which was about two years before her grandmother's death; and she did not return there till her time of womanhood. She must have remembered her grandmother, who could not fail to take delight in the growing intelligence of the child of her favourite son. That Mrs. Elizabeth Pierrepont communicated to her granddaughter something of the vivacity and shrewdness of her earlier days, and that in her remote solitude at West Dean, where within the present century the solemn house, its ancient avenues of trees, its dismantled terraces and bowling-green, were still objects of admiration, she taught her to read the old books in the library of the Evelyns, is a fancy which can hardly be altogether wide of the truth, The grandmother, on her mother's side, with whom Lady Mary tells us she maintained a "regular commerce" when a girl, appears to have been a no less remarkable person. She died at ninety-six, after Lady Mary's return from the East.

When Evelyn Pierrepont married he had one elder brother, then Earl of Kingston, still living, and he had not yet inherited the property which his grandfather had designed for him. He appears, when Lady Mary was born, to have had [temporary] lodgings in Covent Garden, London, then a fashionable quarter; for although Lady Mary, who was his eldest child, was baptized at the church there, I do not find the name of her father among the occupiers of houses mentioned in the parish rate books of the

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The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Volume 1