Communicated by Mr. James Waylen, 339 
to act as a political partisan, placed in jeopardy his power to fulfil 
those engagements to brothers and sisters on which the validity of 
his own title morally rested; and in the remarkable history of the 
Squire Papers we have evidence that the smouldering embers of family 
jealousy, thus first kindled, have in one instance, at least, retained 
a murky vitality down to the middle of the nineteenth century. See 
the introduction to the Squire Journal in Thomas Carlyle’s Letters 
and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. 
Mr. Townson’s fine, which was not adjudicated till August, 1649, 
was fixed at £320—to one in his embarassed position no doubt a 
serious infliction ; for he had to suffer the further indignity of eject- 
ment from the living of Bremhill in favour of a nominee of the 
Parliament, Richard Franklyn. He recovered it as a matter of 
course at the Restoration, and continued to hold it till his death, in 
1687. The peculiar circumstances environing this family may 
warrant a brief additional note. 
Robert Townson, father of the compounder, had been by James 
I. advanced in 1620 from the Deanery of Westminster to the 
Bishoprie of Sarum; but within ten months, too short a space in 
which to accumulate much private wealth, his premature death cast 
his widow and fifteen children on the fraternal resources of his 
brother-in-law, Dr. John Davenant. To enable him to meet this 
unlooked-for liability, Davenant was at once promoted to the vacant 
see, but was at the same time given to understand that along with 
the bishopric he must accept as a legacy his sister’s family, together 
with the further implied stipulation that he should not take to 
himself a wife. In Bishop Davenant’s Salisbury palace, therefore, 
his widowed sister, Margaret, found an asylum for thirteen years, 
as testified by her epitaph in the Cathedral ; while in the dispensation 
of his various preferments nepotism ‘assumed the form, if not of a 
virtue, yet of something resembling a moral obligation. The small 
number of legacies mentioned in Mrs. Townson’s will shews that at 
_ the time of her death the majority of the children must have been 
either provided for or removed by death. John, the eldest, with 
whom we commenced, became Prebendary of Highworth in the 
Cathedral of Salisbury, and Vicar of Bremhill, in 1640. One 
z2 
