MEMOIR OF CHARLES COTTON. 



" All he desires, all that he would demand, 

 Is only that some amicable hand 

 Would but irriguate his fading bays 

 With due, and only with deserved praise." 



THE family of Cotton, of which the subject of this memoir was a 

 younger branch, is both ancient and honourable ; and his immediate 

 ancestor, Sir Richard Cotton, Comptroller of the Household and 

 Privy Councillor to Edward the Sixth, was settled at Warblenton, 

 in the county of Sussex, and at Bedhampton, in Hampshire. 8 His 

 grandfather, Sir George Cotton, who died in 1613, left issue by 

 Cassandra ( Mac William, 4 his wife, two children, Charles and 

 Cassandra. The latter died unmarried before the year 1649, anc * 

 an elegy was written on her decease by the friend of her father 

 and brother, Colonel Richard Lovelace. 5 



Charles Cotton, the father of the poet, and the only son of Sir 

 George Cotton, is said to have lived at Ovingdean in Sussex ; but 

 having married Olive, the daughter of Sir John Stanhope, of 



8 Sir George Cotton (the poet's grandfather) who died in 1613, is described in the 

 Heralds' Visitation of Staffordshire in 1664, as "a younger son of Cotton, of Warblenton, 

 in the county of Sussex, and of Bedhampton, in the county of Hants ;" but though con- 

 siderable trouble has been taken to ascertain the connection, it has not been successful. 

 Sir George Cotton of Warblenton was living in 1595, and by Mary, daughter of John 

 Shelley, of Michelgrove, in Sussex, had several children, but none of the name of Charles 

 or George are mentioned in the pedigrees of the family ; and it is doubtful whether Sir 

 George Cotton (the grandfather of the poet) was a younger son of Sir George Cotton by 

 Mary Shelley, or whether he was that identical person, who may have married 

 Cassandra Mac William to his second wife, and by her have been the father of a son 

 named Charles, who was possibly so called after Charles Earl of Kent, the husband of 

 Susan Cotton, sister of the said Sir George Cotton of Warblenton. 



4 It is most probable that Cassandra Mac William was the daughter of Henry Mac 

 William, by Margaret or Maria, daughter and coheir of Richard Hill, Sergeant of the 

 Wine-cellar to Henry VIII.. and widow of Sir John Cheeke, Secretary of State and 

 Preceptor to Edward VI. The said Maria Hill was one of the maids-of-honour to Queen 

 Elizabeth. Vide Harleian MS. 801, f- 49, and Anthony Wood's MSS. 8469, f. ioa b . 

 Cassandra Mac William is said, in the Visitation of Staffordshire in 1664, to nave been 

 the "daughter and heiress of Mac William," but the pedigree in the Harleian MS. 891, 

 states that Henry Mac William had by Margaret (or Maria) Hill two sons, Henry 

 and Ambrose, and three daughters, Susan, the wife of Edward Saunders, Cicely, and 

 Cassandra. 



4 Lucasta, 8vo, 1649, p. 112 "An E'egie on the death of Mrs Cassan Ira Cotton, 

 only sister to Mr C. Cotton." 



