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She was certainly angry, and with every right, because the hypocrite," as she called the King, came up to her at Court as usual, although he was already in negotiation for his future bride. “In short,” she said, "his behaviour is that of a man who has neither sense, good nature, nor honesty." This stricture is not too severe; the only explanation of George's conduct is that he was overborne by his mother and Lord Bute, who brought him to believe that it was his duty to espouse a Princess.

The next meeting of the King and Lady Sarah took place a few days after the engagement was announced. "I went this morning to Court for the first time," the aggrieved young lady wrote to Lady Susan. "He looked frightened when he saw me, but, notwithstanding, came up, with what countenance I don't know, for I was not so gracious as ever to look at him; when he spoke our conversation was short. Here it is: 'I see riding is begun again, it's glorious weather for it now.' Answer: 'Yes, it is very fine '—and add to that a very cross and angry look on my side, and his turning away immediately, and you know the whole."

Lady Sarah, as "the first virgin in England," was chief bridesmaid at the royal wedding, and it was remarked by more than one who was present that George never took his eyes off her throughout the entire ceremony. This is not so surprising, even in the circumstances, if Horace Walpole was right when he said: “The [ten] bridesmaids, especially Lady Caroline Russell, Lady Sarah Lennox, and Lady Elizabeth Keppel, were beautiful figures. With neither features nor air, Lady Sarah was by far the chief angel."

Shortly after the royal wedding, on June 2, 1762, Lady Sarah, then seventeen years of age, married Charles,

eldest son of Sir William Bunbury, Bart., of Barton Hall and Milden Hall, Suffolk, to whose title and estates he succeeded in the following year. "To show himself more of a man," Walpole had written to Sir Horace Mann a few months before, young Bunbury is going to marry Lady Sarah Lennox, who is very pretty, from exceeding bloom of youth; but as she has no features, and her beauty is not likely to last so long as her betrothed's, he will probably repent this step." Bunbury, who at the time of his marriage had just come of age, presently became a great patron of the Turf, and is famous in the annals of racing as the owner of Diomed, winner of the first Derby.

The union seems to have been happy enough at first, but Bunbury's devotion to sport increased year by year, and Lady Sarah was left largely to her own resources. She had, of course, being the beautiful woman she was, many admirers, and in one of them she became more than interested. This was Lord William Gordon, a younger son of the third Duke of Gordon, and a man of her own age. In December 1768 she gave birth to a daughter in her husband's house in Privy Gardens, Whitehall, but the father was not Sir Charles Bunbury, but Lord William Gordon.

It would appear that at one time she did not intend to avow the paternity, since she remained under Sir Charles's roof, and it was only belatedly, in the following February, that she ran away with her lover and her little girl. They stayed in the country for some time, but, yielding to the pressure increasingly exercised by the family, Lady Sarah, in November 1769, went to reside with her brother and her sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, at Goodwood. The Duke built her a house, and here she lived in retirement,

occupying herself with the education of her child. After Sir Charles divorced her in 1776 she resumed her maiden He survived until 1821.

name.

With her marriage in 1781 to Colonel the Hon. George Napier, second son of Francis, fifth Baron Napier, a period of real happiness began. Of this marriage there were five sons and three daughters. The three eldest sons, Charles, George, and William, entered the Army and greatly distinguished themselves. George Napier died in 1804, but his widow survived, a charming, gracious, much-beloved lady, until 1826, when she passed away at the age of eighty-one.

In Lady Sarah's correspondence there is more than one reference to the exalted position that was so nearly hers, but she does not ever seem to have regretted that she missed it by, as it were, a hair's breadth. On the contrary, it is apparent that she regarded herself as fortunate in so having done, and in her later life, when her famous and devoted sons were gathered around her, she must more than once have compared them with the Royal Princes. "I am one who will keep the King's marriage-day with unfeigned joy and gratitude to Heaven that I am not in Her Majesty's place," she wrote in 1789 to Lady Susan. "It was the happiest day for me, inasmuch as I like to attend my dear sick husband better than a King. I like my sons better than I like royal sons, thinking them better animals, and more likely to give me comfort in my old age; and I like better to be a subject, than subject to the terrors of royalty in these days of trouble. It's pleasant to have lived to be satisfied of the great advantages of a lot which in those days I might have deemed unlucky.

Ideas of fifteen and sixty-one cannot well assimilate; but mine began at fourteen, for, if you remember, I was

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