RACING LADIES, AND A FOUNDER OF THE JOCKE1' CLUB. 221 



minster. He left one child, a girl named Mary, who seems to have lived 

 chiefly with Dr. Dukeson, her grandfather, for her mother very soon married 

 John Tregonwell, of the West Country, and thus, by a very curious coinci- 

 dence, became a member of that family from which the mother of the famous 

 Tregonwell Frampton came at about this very time. Unhappy little Mary 

 Davies, thus doubly orphaned, was soon destined to play the most pathetic part 

 in the world in which she owned so much valuable property. By 1676 her 

 estates had already become so valuable that they were vested in the hands of 

 trustees by special Act of Parliament. Her southern holding is marked by the 

 names of Grosvenor Place and Lupus Street. Her northern limits extended along 

 Oxford Street from Davies Street to Park Lane. Berkeley Square and the streets 

 about Mayfair formed its boundaries in the other direction. And it may be noted 

 that this territory, comprising Grosvenor Square and its adjacent streets, has never 

 varied in value; never waxed or waned, like Soho, or Marylebone, or Pimlico, or the 

 Strand ; but from the clay it was covered with houses until now has remained a 

 centre of intellectual and aristocratic London. So Mary Davies, at the age of eleven, 

 was about to become one of the greatest heiresses in England, as Mr. W. J. Loftie 

 points out in the fascinating supplement to his "History of London"; and her 

 grandfather, Dr. Dukeson, having certain connections with Cheshire, was well aware 

 of the existence and worth of one of its most ancient families, the Grosvenors, 

 Gravenors, or Grosvenoars of Holme, a younger branch of which had married the 

 heiress of the Eatons of Eaton. In 1621 Sir Richard Grosvenor, of Eaton, baronet, 

 was Mayor of Chester ; and it was the third baronet, Sir Thomas (whose mother was 

 a Middleton, of Chirk Castle, in Denbighshire) who, at the age ol nineteen, married 

 Mary Davies at St. Clement's in 1676. The bride was only eleven, and her eldest 

 surviving son, who was not born till 1688, had but reached the age of twelve when her 

 husband died in 1700. The unfortunate widow went mad, and died in the custody 

 of Robert Middleton, of Chirk, in 1730. This eldest son and heir, Sir Richard 

 Grosvenor, obtained leave by a private Act to grant leases for sixty years, on the 

 occasion of his marriage in 1711, and he at once began to lay out streets and 

 houses round what is now Grosvenor Square. By 1726 these were approaching 

 completion, but Sir Richard only lived for five years of the reign of George II., 

 and his great estates passed eventually to the last surviving son of Mary Davies, 

 Sir Robert, whose eldest son became Baron Grosvenor in 176!, Viscount Belgrave 

 and Earl Grosvenor in 1784, father of the first Marquis of Westminster, and 

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