206 Wyndham Family History [1908 



the conversion of Radicals more than Tory opinion. Nobody in Eng- 

 land wishes for Egypt's independence, and the issue does not depend 

 upon English, but on other influences in East and West. What we 

 have to do is to go on agitating and opposing as they do in Ireland. 



" 13th July. — Percy Wyndham, who has been staying here, went 

 away. At breakfast he gave me some interesting particulars about 

 his family history which I had asked him for. He tells me as to his 

 grandfather, Lord Egremont, and his marriage, that his (Percy's) 

 grandmother was the daughter of a certain Reverend Iliffe, a beneficed 

 clergyman of Surrey, Vicar of Bramley, I think, who made her over to 

 him when quite young. She was very beautiful and very innocent. 

 Lord Egremont practically bought her of her father, and for some 

 years they lived together very happily. There were three sons of the 

 union, George, Hugh, and Charles, and two daughters, Lady Burrell, 

 a very pretty woman, and Mrs. King. Lady Munster was by another 

 woman, a celebrated demi-mondaine, Mrs. Fox. George, the eldest son 

 by Miss Iliffe, was born in 1787. Later Lord Egremont married her 

 and had a daughter, Lady Elizabeth Wyndham, but no son. Then they 

 quarrelled, as she found out he was unfaithful to her, and there was a 

 legal separation, and she lived alone for many years at Fulham in the 

 house now the Bishop of London's Palace. She was a well educated 

 woman and affected science as her hobby to the extent that Lord Egre- 

 mont got the Royal Society to give her a medal for some pamphlet she 

 had written. Her house at Fulham was much frequented by scientific 

 people. She was quite respectable in every way except her connection 

 with Lord Egremont which at the time she began it she probably did 

 not understand the meaning of. ' Her subsequent marriage with him,' 

 Percy said, ' would, if it had been made in Scotland, have legalized us 

 all.' When Lord Egremont died nobody knew how he would leave his 

 property and a great number were disappointed. His nephew, who 

 succeeded him as Lord Egremont, he did not like and used to laugh at. 

 He, the nephew, got the Orchard Wyndham property and the property 

 at Dinton, and he began to build an enormous house intended to rival 

 Petworth, but he never finished it, and it is now a ruin. Hugh got 

 Cockermouth and the Cumberland property which he never knew how 

 to manage, getting no more than £5,000 a year from it when it was 

 worth £30,000, and afterwards, when it reverted to Petworth, became 

 worth perhaps £100,000. Charles got Rogate, and George Petworth 

 and the rest. Lord Egremont had more confidence in George than in 

 the others, and rightly. The persons most disappointed by his will 

 were the Herberts, his sister having married one of the Carnarvon 

 Herberts. When the will had been read they ordered their carriages 

 and went off. This at the outset embittered Percy's father towards 

 these relations. When the quarrel between Lord Egremont and his 



