Earl Nugent's Daughter; Or, the Last Days of the Penal Laws - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1883. Excerpt: ... PREFACE. §T appeared to us, on reading in a volume of the Rambler for the year 1855, an interesting narrative )f Lady Mary Arundell, of Wardour, wife of the Tenth Baron Arundell, deceased in 1845, respecting her mother, the Marchioness of Buckingham, that there was suhject matter for a small volume, for there would naturally fall in the records of the lady's life the startling scenes of the latter part of the last century, for in the year 1780, in these realms, a wild and disorderly rabble, at the beck of a mad fanatic, Lord George Gordon, laid London waste at the favourite cry of "No Popery," and a few years later, the awful scene of a sanguinary revolution sent some thousands of the French clergy, and the flower of the noblesse of France, to seek that refuge on the shores of England denied them in their own country. We were much tempted to work up fiction in our volume, for many celebrated personages figured at the time of which we write, whom we would have wished to ' introduce; but on the whole we considered it best to adhere to facts, our simple aim being to show in the slight record of the life of the Marchioness, penned by the hand of her only daughter, arid scrupulously adhered to, save that we have sketched the narrative in several distinct scenes, what the unhappy state of feeling was, before an enlightened government granted to our Catholic grandfathers (for the scenes are recent enough to call those who are advanced in life, no further back than to their day) those equal rights of which the fearful enactments of former reigns, especially that of William III., deprived the members of the old faith, and the miserable scathing influence which they must have exerted on the minds of Protestants, even in their most tender relations of life, whe...