198 THE HISTORY OF NEWMARKET. [Book X. 



orations, and the life of her husband, for which purpose she 

 kept a number of young ladies about her person, who occa- 

 sionally wrote as she dictated. Some of them slept in a room 

 contagious to that in which her grace lay, that they might be 

 ready at the call of her bell to rise at any hour of the night, 

 to take down her conceptions, lest they should escape her 

 memory. At a subsequent period, these and similar eccen- 

 tricities obtained for the duchess the soubriquet of " Mad 

 Madge." She died January 7, 1674. 



Among the Turfites of the early Stuart era SiR JOHN 

 Fenwick — as we learn from the Duke of Newcastle — was the 

 most conspicuous. A century prior to this period the Fen- 

 wicks of Northumberland were seated at Wallington House ; 

 and Leland, in his survey of 1 542, describes it as consisting of 

 " a strong tour and a stone house of thinherytance of Sir 

 John Fenwyke in good reTf^'"acons." In the English Baronetage, 

 printed by Wooton in 1740 it is termed "a mansion house" ; 

 but according to a tradition of the Trevelyan family it was 

 more probably a villa venatica. Some of the old tower still 

 remains in the turning-room near the north-west corner of the 

 house ; and in the walls of the cellars, many stones with 

 gothic mouldings for door ways and mullions of windows 

 remain as evidences that the stone-house of the Fenwicks, 

 which was appended to the tower, was not without its decora- 

 tions. The Fenwicks certainly made it their chief residence 

 for many ages, and kept up in it the profuse and jovial 

 hospitality of their times in so high a style as to have made 

 it the subject of convivial songs, and many traditionary tales 

 of fun and frays that happened there after a hard day's chase. 

 The old hospitality of the house could not, however, be sup- 

 ported after frequent residence in London, and the profligate 

 habits of the court of Charles II. began to make demands 

 upon the rental of the estate ; and it is not improbable that 

 the same cause which led to the sale of the property of this 

 once powerful family, had also a hand in leading the last of 

 its owners to his ignominious end. When the hope of patron- 

 age and reward for a wasteful and extravagant attention to 

 the court of one prince, became extinguished by a hostile 



