travellers on the king's highway. A letter of the old lord, his father,
which, by the by, is not the letter of an illiterate man, is still extant,
in which he complains in very moving terms of his son's degeneracy and
misconduct. The young scapegrace, wishing to make his father know from
experience the inconvenience of being scantily supplied with money,
enjoined his tenantry in Craven not to pay their rents, and beat one of
them, Henry Popely, who ventured to disobey him, so severely with his own
hand, that he lay for a long time in peril of death. He spoiled his
father's houses, &c. "feloniously took away his proper goods," as the old
lord quaintly observes, "apparelling himself and his horse, all the time,
in cloth of gold and goldsmith's work, more like a duke than a poor baron's
son." He likewise took a particular aversion to the religious orders,
"shamefully beating their tenants and servants, in such wise as some whole
towns were fain to keep the churches both night and day, and durst not
come at their own houses."--Whilst engaged in these ignoble practices,
less dissonant, however, to the manners of his age than to those of our's,
he wooed, and won, and married, a daughter of the Percy of Northumberland;
and it is conjectured, upon very plausible grounds, that his courtship
and marriage with a lady of the highest rank under such disadvantages on
his part, gave rise to the beautiful old ballad of the Nutbrown Maid. The
lady, becoming very unexpectedly the heiress of her family, added to the
inheritance of the Cliffords the extensive fee which the Percies held in
Yorkshire; and by that transfer of property, and by the grant of Bolton
Abbey, which he obtained from Henry the Eighth, on the dissolution of the
monasteries, her husband became possessor of nearly all the district
which stretches between the castles of Skipton on the south, and of
Brougham, or as the Cliffords, to whom it belonged, always wrote it,
Bromeham, on the north. The second Earl of Cumberland, who was as fond of
alchemy and astrology as his grandfather, was succeeded by his son George,
who distinguished himself abroad by the daring intrepidity with which he
conducted several buccaneering expeditions in the West Indies against the
Spaniards, and at home, by the very extensive scale on which he
propagated his own and his Maker's image in the dales of Craven. Among
the numerous children of whom he was the father, the most celebrated was
the Countess