Memories and Further Memories (Complete)
Baron Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford Redesdale
9781613102619
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Of course it was not good taste in Ajax to brag so loudly of being the great-grandson of Jupiter, but then Ulysses need not have snubbed him so fiercely, and then gone on to show how he, too, was god-born, but on the mother’s side as well as on the father’s. Nor was it quite consistent in Ovid, who struggled so proudly for his privileges as eques in the theatre, to clothe these Socialist sentiments in a pair of hexameter lines; but then, in spite of that little flirtation with a naughty Princess, which caused his banishment, Ovid was a Radical and a poet, which gave him a double claim to inconsistency. The sentiment is, as it seems to me, utterly false and untrue to the very nature of man. From the earliest times, and even in the most savage races, men have been proud of such ancestry as they could lay claim to, and many a poor peasant loves to tell you that he is living in the cottage that his forebears have held for generations. Pride of Race and Pride of Country go hand-in-hand as two forms of Patriotism. In 1862 poor Laurence Oliphant and I—he, the most charming of companions, just beginning to be bitten by mysticism—were travelling together on the Continent. He was still suffering from the cruel wounds which he received in the night attack by Rônins on the Legation at Yedo in 1861. He had been ordered to drink the iron waters of Spa, and I agreed to go with him for my summer holiday. The first evening at the table d’hôte dinner, I sat next to a very agreeable gentleman with whom I speedily made friends. After about half an hour’s talk he asked my name. I told him who I was. “Dear me,” he said, “if you are the son of Mr. Mitford of Exbury and Lady Georgina Ashburnham, you are descended from perhaps the two oldest Saxon families in England. Sir, you are a very remarkable person.” I felt as Whistler, in his quaint way, told me that he did when Carlyle used the same words to him, “That that was about what was the matter with me!” and when I asked who was my genealogical acquaintance, he turned out to be no less an authority than Sir Bernard Burke. But in matter of genealogy, as in all others, there are iconoclasts, and now come people of much learning, who declare that the Saxon Mitfords are really Norman Bertrams, and that the famous Ashburnhams, “of stupendous antiquity,” are the descendants of a Norman family who were Counts of Eu—in Domesday Book variously called Estriels, Escriol, Criol, Crieul, or Anglicized as Kiriell, and even Cruel. That after all these centuries, and after such countless marriages as must have taken place in them, so curious an animal as a man of pure Saxon blood, or, indeed, of any pure blood, should still be in existence is, of course, an impossibility. It may be rank nonsense to talk of the Mitfords and the Ashburnhams as two of the oldest Saxon families in England, when there can be no such families, but there can be no doubt that they are both of very great antiquity. Of the Ashburnhams old Fuller says, “My poor and plaine pen is willing though unable to add any lustre to this family of stupendous antiquitie.” According to Francis Thynne, a herald of Queen Elizabeth’s time, “Bertram Ashburnham, a Baron of Kent, was Constable of Dover Castle in 1066; which Bertram was beheaded by William the Conqueror because he did so valiantly defend the same against the Duke of Normandy.” This is quoted by the Duchess of Cleveland in her “Battle Abbey Roll,” and she then labours with all her might to demolish the whole story. Gwillim’s “Heraldry,” however, takes the other view, and makes out that the second holder of the office of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports was this same Bertram Ashburnham, and that it was he who, on behalf of the King, raised the troops to resist the invasion, Harold himself being away engaged in quelling a rebellion in the North. “Since which time until now, by the grace of God, there hath not been wanting an Ashburnham of Ashburnham in Sussex.”
