scholar. Greymount was noticed; sent for; promoted in the household;
knighted; might doubtless have been sworn of the council, and in due
time have become a minister; but his was a discreet ambition--of an
accumulative rather than an aspiring character. He served the king
faithfully in all domestic matters that required an unimpassioned,
unscrupulous agent; fashioned his creed and conscience according to the
royal model in all its freaks; seized the right moment to get sundry
grants of abbey lands, and contrived in that dangerous age to save both
his head and his estate.

The Greymount family having planted themselves in the land, faithful to
the policy of the founder, avoided the public gaze during the troubled
period that followed the reformation; and even during the more orderly
reign of Elizabeth, rather sought their increase in alliances than in
court favour. But at the commencement of the seventeenth century, their
abbey lands infinitely advanced in value, and their rental swollen by
the prudent accumulation of more than seventy years, a Greymount, who
was then a county member, was elevated to the peerage as Baron Marney.
The heralds furnished his pedigree, and assured the world that although
the exalted rank and extensive possessions enjoyed at present by
the Greymounts, had their origin immediately in great territorial
revolutions of a recent reign, it was not for a moment to be supposed,
that the remote ancestors of the Ecclesiastical Commissioner of 1530
were by any means obscure. On the contrary, it appeared that they were
both Norman and baronial, their real name Egremont, which, in their
patent of peerage the family now resumed.

In the civil wars, the Egremonts pricked by their Norman blood, were
cavaliers and fought pretty well. But in 1688, alarmed at the prevalent
impression that King James intended to insist on the restitution of the
church estates to their original purposes, to wit, the education of the
people and the maintenance of the poor, the Lord of Marney Abbey became
a warm adherent of "civil and religious liberty,"--the cause for which
Hampden had died in the field, and Russell on the scaffold,--and joined
the other whig lords, and great lay impropriators, in calling over the
Prince of Orange and a Dutch army, to vindicate those popular principles
which, somehow or other, the people would never support. Profiting by
this last pregnant circumstance, the lay Abbot of Marney also in this
instanc