(Vol. vii., p. 41.)
I am gratified to see that MR. HARDY's documentary researches have
confirmed my conjectures as to the erroneous date assigned for the death of
the first husband of Jane Beaufort. Perhaps it may be in his power also to
rectify a chronological error, which has crept into the account usually
given of the family into which one of her sons married. The Peerages all
place the death of the last Lord Fauconberg of the original family in 1376,
not observing that this date would make his daughter and heiress married to
William Nevill, second son of the Earl of Westmoreland and Countess Joane,
twenty-five years at the lowest computation; or, if we take the date which
they assign for the death of Lord Ferrers of Wemme, forty years older than
her husband,--a difference this, which, although perhaps it might not prove
an insuperable impediment to marriage where the lady was a great heiress,
would undoubtedly put a bar on all hopes of issue: whereas it stands on
record that they had a family.
I must take this opportunity of complaining of the manner in which many, if
not all these Peerages, are compiled: copying each others' errors, however
obvious, without a word of doubt or an attempt to rectify them; though MR.
HARDY's communication, above mentioned, shows that the materials for doing
so, in many cases, exist if properly sought. Not to mention minor errors,
they sometimes crowd into a given time more generations than could have
possibly existed, and sometimes make the generations of a length that has
not been witnessed since the patriarchal ages. As instances of the former
may be mentioned, the pedigree of the Ferrerses, Earls of Derby (in which
eight successions from father to son are given between 1137 and 1265), and
those of the Netterville and Tracy families: and of the latter, the
pedigree of the Fitzwarines, which gives only four generations between the
Conquest and 1314; and that of the Clanricarde family. It is strange that
Mr. Burke, who appears to claim descent from the latter, did not take more
pains to rectify a point so nearly concerning him; instead of making, as he
does in his Peerage, one of the family to have held the title (MacWilliam
Eighter) and estates for 105 years!--an absurdity rendered still more
glaring by this long-lived gentleman's father having possessed them
fifty-four years before him, and his son for fifty-six years after him. If
such can be supposed true, the Countess of Desmond's longevity was not so
unusual after all.