290 



Edingdon Monastery. 



of the original house, stripped of its gables and altered by the later 

 addition of two square castellated appendages, presents but little 

 that is architecturally interesting. There is an engraving of it as 

 it was in 1846, in the Gentleman's Magazine of that year, p. 257. 



In 1587 a subsidy roll of Queen Elizabeth gives the name of 

 William Jones, of Edingdon, gent., 1 as the principal person in the 

 parish. It was he who in 1599 purchased Brook House of Lord 

 Mountjoy. A son, Sefton, married a daughter of John Still, Bishop 

 of Bath and Wells : a grandson, Sefton, married Hester, daughter 

 of Walter White of Grittleton, who left two daughters, co-heiresses, 

 Ann, wife of Peter Whatley, and Elizabeth, wife of Henry Long. 



The long lease having expired, about the beginning of the seven- 

 teenth century Edingdon became the residence of Sir William 

 Paulet, Kt., 2 one of four natural sons of the third Marquis : of whom 

 Dugdale says that " they were all born of one mother, Mrs. Lambert 

 and provided for by their jfather with leases for 100 years, of little 

 less than £4000 a year, which to this day are called The Bastards' 

 Lands." 



Sir William Pauleys second daughter, Elizabeth, was the second 

 wife of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the Parliamentary general, 

 from whom he obtained a divorce in about four years ; on the ac- 

 cusation of intrigue with Mr Uvedale. She married for her second 

 husband Sir Thomas Higgons. 3 



Lewis. 



The next lessee under the Paulets was Sir Edward Lewis of the 

 Van, near Caerphilly, Co. Glamorgan. He married Ann (Sackville), 

 widow of Sir Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp (who died 1619). 



1 An old churchwarden's account book, in the parish chest, of A.D. 1588 to 

 1615, mentions in 1591, "Mr. Bainton in arrears to the parish £6 13*. 9d. In 

 1593 William Jones signs the account. 



2 Sir William Powlett signs the Church book in 1603. 



3 Sir Thomas Higgons was a valuable servant of the Crown as Ambassador to 

 Vienna : of whom there is a memoir in Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary. He 

 pronounced a funeral oration over his wife at her interment at Winchester in 

 1656, printed in London : in which her character was vindicated, and the true 

 causes of the Earl of Essex's conduct described. See Granger's Biographical 

 Dictionary and Peck's Desid. Curiosa, xii., 16. 



