Elizabeth and James it made
no noise, the House of Vipont was silently inflating its lungs and
improving its constitution. Slept, indeed! it was wide awake. Then it
was that it began systematically its grand policy of alliances; then was
it sedulously grafting its olive branches on the stems of those fruitful
New Houses that had sprung up with the Tudors; then, alive to the spirit
of the day, provident of the wants of the morrow, over the length
and breadth of the land it wove the interlacing network of useful
cousinhood! Then, too, it began to build palaces, to enclose parks; it
travelled, too, a little, did the House of Vipont! it visited Italy; it
conceived a taste: a very elegant House became the House of Vipont!
And in James's reign, for the first time, the House of Vipont got the
Garter. The Civil Wars broke out: England was rent asunder. Peer and
knight took part with one side or the other. The House of Vipont was
again perplexed. Certainly at the commencement it, was all for King
Charles. But when King Charles took to fighting, the House of Vipont
shook its sagacious head, and went about, like Lord Falkland, sighing,
"Peace, peace!" Finally, it remembered its neglected estates in Ireland:
its duties called it thither. To Ireland it went, discreetly sad, and,
marrying a kinswoman of Lord Fauconberg,--the connection least exposed
to Fortune's caprice of all the alliances formed by the Lord Protector's
family,--it was safe when Cromwell visited Ireland; and no less safe
when Charles II. was restored to England. During the reign of the merry
monarch the House of Vipont was a courtier, married a beauty, got the
Garter again, and, for the first time, became the fashion. Fashion
began to be a power. In the reign of James II. the House of Vipont again
contrived to be a minor, who came of age just in time to take the oaths
of fealty to William and Mary. In case of accidents, the House of Vipont
kept on friendly terms with the exiled Stuarts, but it wrote no letters,
and got into no scrapes. It was not, however, till the Government, under
Sir Robert Walpole, established the constitutional and parliamentary
system which characterizes modern freedom, that the puissance
accumulated through successive centuries by the House of Vipont became
pre-eminently visible. By that time its lands were vast; its wealth
enormous; its parliamentary influence, as "a Great House," was a part of
the British Constitution. At this period, the Ho