Communicated by Mr. James Waylen. 337 
Grimstead, and Moor Overton, with their demesnes and tenements 
worth £173 9s. 2d. per annum ; old rents belonging thereto, £22 ; 
dry freehold rents, do., £12. His fine was at first declared at 
£5134 16s.7d., but on his settling ministers in four rectories, it 
was reduced to £1459 16s. 7d. See further in the Falstone day 
book, under date 3rd December, 1645. 
Francis, Lorp Corrineton, of Fonthill, was the fourth son of 
Philip Cottington, of Godmanstone, in Somerset, Esq. Having 
held the offices of Clerk of the Council in the reign of King James 
and Secretary to Prince Charles, he was created a baronet in 1623, 
and after Charles’s accession became Chancellor and Under Treasurer 
of the Exchequer, and eventually Lord Treasurer and Master of the 
Wards. For some years he was ambassador at the Court of Madrid, 
where he acquired an attachment for the country, and perhaps also 
a touch of Spanish manners, for during the wars which followed 
he was frequently satirised as “ Cottington the Spaniard ” and “ Don 
Diego Cottington.” The able sketch of his character in Lord 
Clarendon’s History exhibits that combination of stateliness and 
drollery which sufficiently accounts for the above sobriquet. On 
his return from Spain he was elevated to the peerage in 163] as 
Lord Cottington, Baron of Hanworth, in Middlesex. It is hardly 
necessary to say that throughout the war he was Charles’s un- 
flinching adherent, or rather, perhaps, a steady hater of the Re- 
publicans, for he was too old to have wantonly courted the collision, 
and was hardly capable of a generous enthusiasm in any man’s 
behalf. After the King’s death he went into exile with the young 
Prince, and in 16538 died at Valladolid, in Spain, having outlived all 
his children, whereby his title expired, and Fonthill with other 
estates passed to his nephew, Charles Cottington, Esq. In 1716 
this nephew, or his son, was nominated a peer with the title of 
Baron Cottington, of Fonthill, by James Stuart, known as the 
elder Pretender, but the next representative died, s.p., in 1758; 
previously to which he had, as is supposed, alienated Fonthill to 
William Beckford, the London alderman. The lady of the first 
Lord Cottington was Anne, daughter of Sir William Meredith, 
Knight. Fonthill had been in possession of the Mervins ever since 
