158 ECHOES OF OLD COUNTY LIFE. 



Buckingham and Chandos about the year i860, in 

 connection with raihvay business, and our pleasant 

 relations once begun continued to the time of his 

 Grace's lamented death. I had seen and known a great 

 deal of him from his youth upwards, and believe there 

 seldom was a more honourable, trustworthy, hardworking, 

 able man. When the great crash in his father's affairs 

 came, our world held the opinion that the fortune of the 

 family could never again be in the ascendant. It was 

 in the year 1 847 that the blow fell which deprived the 

 then Marquis of Chandos of his ancestral home and 

 patrimony. His grandfather, the first Duke of Buck- 

 ingham, when Marquis of Buckingham, married the 

 daughter, and only child, of the Duke of Chandos, a 

 man of illustrious descent, whose ancestor, knighted on 

 the field of Agincourt as Sir Richard Chandos, became 

 ennobled by successive sovereigns, till the title died out 

 when the family was only represented by this daughter. 

 Soon after the coronation of George IV. the Marquis 

 of Chandos was created Duke of Buckingham and 

 Chandos, thus reviving the title of his wife's father. 

 Their eldest son, Richard Plantagenet Nugent Bridges 

 Temple Grenville (truly a galaxy of names !), was the 

 well-known Marquis of Chandos, the *' Farmers' Friend," 

 and undoubtedly the most popular man amongst the 

 agriculturists in the kingdom. The celebrated 

 " Chandos Clause," moved and carried by him in the 

 House of Commons during the debates on the great 

 Reform Bill of the Whig Government of 1832, enfran- 

 chised the;^5o renter of land, and this clause was fraught 

 with weighty consequence to the future government 



