here offered are well arranged, well written and of great interest is one which every buyer of the book will agree with; but the editor's further suggestion that by the book a new light is thrown upon sixteenth century history, a light which will show our ordinary history books for lying compilations 'written in the Protestant interest and to flatter the national vanity,' is at least unfortunate. Nor does a careful reading of Mr. Brenan's work indicate in any striking manner' how far worse and inexcusable was the Catholic persecution by Protestants under Elizabeth and James than was that of Protestants under Queen Mary.' The war which Elizabeth and her ministers waged, with their backs to the wall, against a religious policy which struck at the very independence of our nation will find excusers in most Englishmen. The torture and murder of men and women for the errors of their religious opinions is so essentially abhorrent a thing that we may refuse to discuss its relative excusableness under one reign or the other.

We have said that Mr. Brenan is a writer fit to take up the tale which was left by the great ballad-singers of the north, but there his fitness ends. For want of help from Mr. Lindsay we must reckon him the bard of the Percys rather than their true chronicler. His page is wounded with a score of errors which an expert might have corrected with *a mum of his mouth.' The very names as we turn the leaves cry out for revision. We have 'old Baron Richard' and 'Baron William,' as though it were the house of Rothschild we were dealing with. We have the Lady Eleanor Plantagenet and the Lady Margaret Plantagenet, names which Mr. Brenan should surely know to have no existence outside the historical novel. Ingelgram, a very clumsy version of Ingram, occurs persistently; and what can be said for Gilbert de Tesson and Gilbert de Bassett. It would seem that Mr. Brenan, who should know better, looks upon the de as a decorative prefix for any high sounding surname.

The origin of the Percy sees the beginning of Mr. Brenan's difficulties, which yet have seemed no difficulties to him. He writes easily, gracefully and confidently on each incident of the early history of the family. With a fine affectation of the critical spirit Mr. Brenan refuses to 'pass' the pedigree of the line from Mainfred, who came out of Denmark to Normandy' before the advent of Duke Rollo' ;

THE ANCESTOR

THE ANCESTOR

but once we have William with the whiskers safely across Channel any tale may have credit.

On more than one occasion he showed a strong sympathy with the defeated race, as when he interceded earnestly for Earl Gospatrick after the revolt of 1069, and he married a Saxon lady, called by the chroniclers 'Emma de Porte,' probably because she inherited Semer, near Scarborough, then a notable seaport.

If Mr. Brenan had shown due mistrust for his chroniclers, he could hardly have failed to discover the not very remote truth that Emma was daughter of a Hampshire baron, Hugh de Port by name and a Norman by birth. The chroniclers are probably answerable for Mr. Brenan's long story about the Louvain-Percy marriage, concerning which Mr. Brenan has an amount of intimate detail suspicious enough when we consider that we are dealing with affairs of the mid-twelfth century.

While the Lady Agnes de Percy, eventual heiress of the race, was in her sixteenth year, and as yet unwedded, it occurred to the shrewd Queen Adeliza of Brabant, second wife of Henry I., that no fitter match than this could be found for her own half-brother, Josceline de Louvain. Accordingly she hastily summoned young Josceline from Brabant, and established him at Court, where Agnes de Percy was a Maid of Honour. Now the birth and ancestry of this Josceline de Louvain were as splendid as his estate was slender. The younger son by a second marriage of Godfred ' Barbatus' Count of Brabant and Louvain, he possessed little of land or gold, but he descended in the direct line from Charlemagne.

The whole of this story may be said to rest upon the description of Josceline de Louvaine as the queen's brother in a certain deed. The legitimacy of his birth is more than doubtful. With the Brabant legend once aboard his bark, Mr. Brenan's steering becomes even wilder.

Old Baron William, albeit somewhat dazzled by the splendours of the house of Louvain and its indubitable descent from Charlemagne, had no intention that the name of Percy should be forgotten in Northumbria. So, before he would consent to a marriage between the Lady Agnes and Josceline de Louvain, he put forward certain alternative conditions.

Every reader of the old peerage legends knows those conditions. Josceline was to choose between taking the name of Percy or forsaking his own arms of the blue lion in a golden field for the ancient arms of Percy. Josceline thereupon chooses to take the name of Percy and to keep his arms, which were his title to the inheritance of the Duchy of Brabant.

A legend which crumbles under the thumb of the antiquary. In 1150 we are before the period of settled armorial bearings, and the suggested chopping of old shields for new ones stamps the whole story for what it is, a chronicler's yarn of the approved pattern. Not only have we no evidence of Josceline bearing a blue lion—which by the way was not the arms of the Duchy of Brabant—or any beast of any other colour, but we have ample evidence that he never assumed the name of Percy, remaining de Luvene, de Luvain, or de Lovein to the end of his days. In every question of heraldry Mr. Brenan drifts rudderless. Armorial bearings which we find struggling into fashion under Coeur de Lion, with whom the very shield of England has its origin, may be for Mr. Brenan as ancient as the totem. This at least is the impression we gain when we read his remark concerning Great Alan de Percy, who died in 1120. Of him we are told that 'the ancient arms of Percy—"azure five fusils in fesse, or "—lost none of their prestige while he bore them upon his shield, 'a shield which, we beg Mr. Brenan to believe, could have borne no such ornaments. The lion shield of Percy, which Mr. Brenan and the old storymakers attribute to Josceline de Lovaine at the court of Henry I., occurs first in the reign of Edward I., six reigns later, when we find it as the bearing of Henry Percy, who bore it on his banner at Caerlaverock—-jaune o un bleu lyon rampant—and on his seal attached to the barons' letter of 1301. It may have been taken as a variant in colour of the arms of his wife, who was a daughter of FitzAlan of Arundel. To crown his acceptance of the Louvaine legend, Mr. Brenan tells us in all gravity that the new Percys, ' while they retained their own arms, had gladly taken the fine motto of the former line—" esperance en Dieu."' One step further, and we might be told that the gentle Josceline retained the ancient note paper heading of the earlier Percys.

It is an irksome task to point out the many grave errors of archaeological detail in the work of so sympathetic a writer as Mr. Brenan, and we willingly make an end of our carping. But a pause must be made before Mr. Brenan's description of Burghley as the son of Saxon peasants. Now the descent which the Cecils selected for themselves was from a house of the Welsh borders. Apart from this doubtful pedigree, we have the earliest knowledge of them as a respectable family of

the middling sort in a countryside whose people must be at least as Danish as Anglo-Saxon. If, as we imagine, Mr. Brenan has really no new and toothsome bit of genealogy in his sleeve, the ' Saxon peasant' reveals itself as a phrase flung at Cecil in meaningless contumely by a young historian who rebukes Mr. Froude for his biassed writings. And here we must charge our author, in his character of historian, with something more than bias. The documents which, according to the preface, ' are here revealed' to us, are referred to in a most suspicious series of footnotes. Cotton MS., State Papers, Archives des Pays Bas are referred to without a key to volume or page or document, and when references are afforded us, such references as *Cotton MS. Caligula, book vi. 24," ' Cotton MS. Caligula, book vii.,' are apt to arouse doubts in those acquainted with the Cotton Library as to whether our author has ever had any genuine experience of the documents in question. More serious error we find in that mishandling of facts which we find in the historical sections of the volumes which, as Mr. Lindsay tells us in his preface, are to prove to the candid reader that the histories in common use in England are ' far, very far, from veracious.' Cecil is to be painted as a master butcher, Elizabeth as red to the elbows in the blood of the saints, and in the interest of these ideals, it seems allowed to the historian to garble quotations, juggle with dates, or suppress inconvenient facts. Even in dealing with earlier days, where the air is clearer of the dust of bitter controversy, Mr. Brenan shows that his history is the uncritical narrative which will serve a ballad singer. The child Rutland, for example, dies murdered by ruthless Clifford, the furious queen rages like a fury before the dying York, and a foot reference to Holinshed pays for the whole story.

With a good will we leave Mr. Brenan's history and go back to his Percys. Their story as he tells it gains interest as it goes in the hands of a writer keen to catch the good phrase from the long page of his chroniclers and letter inditers. And what a ladder of history is this story as we climb it. Percy ove les gernouns—Percy with the whiskers, the Conqueror's man, dies in sight of Jerusalem. A Percy is a guardian of the great charter of our liberties and another is prisoner at Bannockburn. The favourites of kings and queens are foes of the Percy, whether they be Gavestons, Spensers or Mortimers. No regimental colour bears such a

list of battles as does the pedigree of Percy. Did ever a 'taken care of officer in later days have such fortune as that which fell to the little knight Harry Percy, who led his Northumbrians on the famous field of Cressy and yet was able to hurry home in time to share victory at Nevill's Cross with his warlike father, who was keeping the enemy from our back gate with an army of chaplains and friars having two archbishops and two bishops for brigadiers ? In a yet more famous Harry Percy, the Hotspur, we have a world paladin, a champion whose sword-blows and lance-pushes a quarter of Europe followed with that delight and enthusiasm to which our compatriots today are moved by very successful players at a ball-game. At eight years of age Hotspur sees his first campaign against Du Guesclin, he is a knight by the king's hand at eleven, and at twelve he leads the last assault through the breach of Berwick wall. He is well within forty years of age when he dies on Shrewsbury field by an English yeoman's arrow, with Douglas dead at his side, and his old companion in arms King Henry IV. salts his body and sets it up between two millstones by Shrewsbury pillory. His father is forced to take cover amongst the Scots and to ride a moonlight foray against his own cattle, and, old as he is, comes to no straw death in the end. To see how readily the Percys risked the Percy skin one has but to follow the line of descent. The first earl dies fighting on Bramham Moor, and his brother is shortened by a head after Shrewsbury fight. At Shrewsbury Hotspur is killed, Hotspur's brother Ralph having been slain four years before in the Holy Land. Hotspur's son and heir lives to be killed at St. Albans, having reared four sons who each and all die on the stricken field, two at Towton, one at Northampton, and one, the Gled of Dunstanburgh, at Hedgeley Moor. The next generation after these four warriors has Henry, the fourth earl, and him the northern rioters kill before his house at Cocklodge. Henry the Magnificent, fifth Earl of Northumberland, is a silken prodigal and dies in his bed, and his valiant brother William comes scatheless away from Flodden, but after their generation violent death waits again for the Percys. The magnificent one's son Thomas is beheaded in 1537. Of Thomas's sons the eldest is beheaded in 1572. He had sought refuge amongst the Scots, as his ancestor had done after Shrewsbury, and the Scottish gentlemen sold him to his enemies after the fine old

THE ANCESTOR

Scottish custom, for a sum in ready money. The second son Henry is found dead in his cell in the Tower, and a coroner's jury find that 'not having the Almightie God or his feare before his eies, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil' the Earl of Northumberland did discharge a dag or pistol into his body and heart, of which he instantly died. The foreign press, as may be expected, brought in its verdict of wilful murder against Queen Elizabeth with the greatest promptness, and it is not to be doubted but that Mr. Brenan will endorse you their calm and deliberate judgement.

With this sombre business ends the bloody story of the Percys of Alnwick, who henceforth may die in their beds, unless we must reckon in cousin Percy the Gunpowder Plotter, who comes in due time to a plotter's end.

With Josceline, the eleventh lord, the line of Percy ends at Turin in 1670. His daughter married three times, and with each marriage shows forth afresh the woes of the heiress. She is married first to the young Lord Ogle, son of the Duke of Newcastle, 'a sickly boy of appalling ugliness, certainly weak-minded if not indeed an absolute idiot.' Fortunately this gallant bridegroom leaves her a virgin widow at thirteen years, but her second marriage brings her to the arms of Tom Thynne of Longleat, a brutal libertine, of whom she is rid by the three horsemen who met Mr. Thynne's coach in Pall Mall and there murdered him with a blunderbuss, as may be seen depicted in a neat marble bas-relief upon his tomb in Westminster Abbey. A third husband was waiting for the unhappy lady in Charles, Duke of Somerset, an ill-tempered egotist, with whom pride of race and place grew to be a disease to himself and a drollery to his contemporaries. He lived however to see his granddaughter and heir match Seymour-Percy with Smithson and carry his ricketty honours to a house of Yorkshire husbandmen, who had come to riches and a baronetcy as London haberdashers. But Hugh Smithson was a tall upstanding gentleman, handsome and quick-witted, and we cannot but believe that his wife was a luckier woman than her grandmother. Hugh Smithson became Hugh Percy and Hugh Percy Duke of Northumberland in due course. The new made Percy yielded in pride to none of his predecessors, and devoured the family legends with such hearty yeoman's appetite