of the Abbey, granted by Philip and Mary 1552 to Sir Thomas Lovell, the brother of the bride. Sir Thomas made these over to Thomas Dereham, the second son of the first owner of Dereham Abbey, the brotherin-law of Lovell, in the early days of Elizabeth. As both he and his two elder brothers died without offspring, the estates passed, on the death of Thomas Dereham (2) in 1577, to Baldwin the fourth son, "a decayed merchant of London." Baldwin, by his first wife, had a large family, of whom the eldest son, another Thomas (3), came into the property. Thomas (3) was knighted at Newmarket by James I. in 1617; his son Thomas (4), who married a daughter of Sir Henry Anderson, an Alderman and afterwards Sheriff of London, was created a Baronet in 1661. By one of these two was built the family seat, Dereham Grange, probably on the site of one of the Abbey Granges, now the property of Sir Alfred Bagge, Bart. It stands back from the high road from Wereham to Lynn. Concealed behind an unsightly brick building, is the picturesque mansion of the family with a high pitched roof. A porch leads into a large oak panelled room, with a great oak beam supporting the upper storey. The passage upstairs also shows a quantity of oak, and leads to a fine room with panelled walls and graceful plaster ceiling with geometric devices. Leading from this is a smaller room, with ceiling and panelled walls, as in its larger neighbour. It was in one of these apartments probably that the subject of this memoir was born. Hard by is the stabling of the old Grange.

A gruesome story of a century ago has given the house a memory more lasting than that of its ancient

1 Spelman, ut supra, p. 156.

owners. A farm labourer was loved by the farmer's wife, and the paramour murdered his master on his return from market. The criminal was seized, tried, and hung at Norwich; but his body was brought back to be suspended in chains in a road running behind the Grange, still bearing the name of Gibbet Lane. This, which can be remembered as village gossip by old folk, was the last instance of gibbeting in Norfolk.

Sir Thomas Dereham, the first Baronet, married the daughter of Sir Richard Gargrave of Nostell in Yorkshire, by whom he had two sons, Sir Henry, who died without issue, some fourteen years after his father, in 1682, and Sir Richard, who was baptised in 1644, and succeeded to the title and the property. He married a lady whose forbears and whose fortune deserve a fuller mention.

Chief Justice Coke, who, if a great lawyer, thought as little of straining the law against the Catholics,1 as he did when he was opposed to Sir Walter Raleigh, and is still better known for his greed of gold. He had married an excellent wife, Dorothy, one of the great Norfolk house of Paston. She bore him a number of sons, and from her descends the present Earl of Leicester. But, after her death, Coke's predominating passion made him contract an ill-fated marriage with a Court beauty of immense wealth, barely six months after the death of his first wife. She was the daughter of Thomas Cecil, Lord Burleigh, the second Earl of Essex, and grand-daughter of the Cecil of Elizabeth's reign. She had previously married the celebrated Sir Christopher

1The extreme weakness of the evidence was made up for by the ferocity of Coke in a manner never paralleled in an English Court of Justice, except perhaps under Jeffreys."-Sir Jas. Stephen, Dictionary of National Biography, Art. Coke.

Hatton, and after his death this her second marriage took place privately in a clandestine and illegal fashion1 at Hatton House, in Holborn, 1598.

2

Some years later, with an armed band of his sons and dependents, Coke came to the house, to which Lady Coke had fled, and tore Frances, his youngest daughter by his second wife, from the arms of her mother. The girl was kept in confinement in his house at Stoke Pogis, till she was forced into a marriage with Sir John Villiers, "a plain man and poor," but the elder brother of Charles the First's favourite, the unfortunate Duke of Buckingham. The marriage was celebrated before the Sovereign in his palace of Hampton Court. One can hardly be surprised that Frances broke her unwilling bonds and eloped with Sir Robert Howard, the fifth son of the Earl of Suffolk. But she was tried, on the birth of her son in 1627, and was convicted of adultery.

4

When this child, who was named Robert, grew up, he married the daughter of Sir John Danvers, one of the Regicide judges, and assumed that patronymic by patent of Oliver Cromwell. Later on, however, in 1670, he claimed the titles of Baron Villiers, Viscount Purbeck, and Earl of Buckingham, all belonging to the

1 The marriage "was itself irregular, being celebrated in a private house without banns or license. Coke and his party were prosecuted in the Archbishop's Court, but on making submission were absolved."—Dictionary of National Biography, Art. Coke; cf. Curious Case of Lady Purbeck, pp. 6, 7.

2 Our readers are referred for fuller details to the interesting workCurious Case of Lady Purbeck by the author of the Life of Sir Everard Digby, 1909, p. 23.

3 Curious Case, p. 82.

He had been brought up a Catholic, but renounced his faith, just as from being a colonel of dragoons in the Royal army, he, on his marriage, entered Parliament under Richard Cromwell.-Dictionary of National Biography.

husband of his mother.1 The House of Lords found he was illegitimate and declared that he was plain Robert White, a surname which had been assumed by his mother on her deserting Sir John Villiers. Robert's daughter, Frances, who claimed the title of Lady Purbeck, married Sir Richard Dereham, the third Baronet, in 1678.

In 1636 both Lady Purbeck and Sir Robert Howard, following the example of her husband and of Sir Robert's mother, became Catholics. Lady Purbeck had fled to Paris to avoid the public penance which Archbishop Laud wished to enforce upon her for her fall, but she at last was allowed to return to England and to her husband, John Villiers, Viscount Purbeck, with whom she lived until her death at Oxford, about 1645, and to her child Robert, whom, as we have seen, her husband regarded as his own son.3 Viscount Purbeck, after the death of Lady Purbeck, married Catherine Neville, and lived with his second wife at his house at Clun in Shropshire. He died in 1653.

A terrible fire, by which the village of Dereham was almost entirely destroyed, took place in 1679; and that same year our worthy, Thomas Dereham, was born, about March 27th. The loss by fire was serious, and Richard, on succeeding to the title, was hardly the man to strive to recover this loss. As a friend of the Merry Monarch, he soon ran through his property, and sold the family estates to his cousin, Sir Thomas Dereham, Kt., whose.

1Lord Purbeck acknowledged Robert White as his own son.-Curious Case, pp. 87, 88.

2 Curious Case, p. 122.

3 Curious Case, p. 124.

4 There is no entry of the baptism of Thomas Dereham in the Registers of West Dereham.

father was Richard, fourth son of the Thomas Dereham (3) knighted by James I. There was another child of Sir Richard, the third Baronet, a daughter, Elizabeth, who, as will be seen (p. 19), finally came into the Dereham property. Sir Richard, under the wing of the second Duke of Albemarle, who had gone to Jamaica as Governor General of that island in 1687, went with him to that island. The Duke died in the following year, and Dereham did not long survive him. But misfortune accompanied Dereham to his grave. He had lived in Kingston, concealing his title; and when search was made for the certificate of his burial it was nowhere to be found. A tornado in 1722 seems to have swept away all the Records of the island. Nor was the entry discovered in the new Register. It was certain therefore that he died before 1722. He does not appear to have left any

will. 1

But there is a clearer indication of the date of the death of our worthy's father. As early as August 29th, 1692,2 poor Lady Dereham, as "widow of Sir Richard, deceased," shows, in a petition, "that Charles II. had granted her husband for life the post of Controller of the Customs of the port of King's Lynn,' that, on his leaving for Jamaica, he assigned the post to Sir Thomas (probably his cousin), for the Lady and her three children, and by the death of her lately deceased husband, the post had become vacant. She prays that it may be granted to some person for the maintenance of her family." The place was worth only £80 a year, and, of this, £20 had to be paid to an acting deputy. Meanwhile Sir Thomas Dereham, the knight, had

1 Copy of official documents penes Colonel Custance, Weston Hall, Norwich, the present owner of the site of West Dereham Abbey. 2 State Papers of this date.