oo pass, with many another treasured ancestor, into the
crowded genealogical land of the rejected; for the real founder of the
Fitzgerald house was Walter, son of "Other," whose name is first met
with in Domesday Book in 1086. The Otho story is shown to be "absolute
fiction."

In view of such examples of misplaced ingenuity exhibited by the makers
of pedigrees for our noble families, one can almost read without a smile
that

"there were Heneages at Hainton in the time of King Edwy;
they doubtless took part in the revolt which brought
Edgar to the throne, and it is not impossible that some
of them were in the train of Wulfhere, King of Mercia;"

or that

"Lord Alington comes of a family of ancient lineage, one
of his ancestors being Sir Hildebrand de Alington, who
was marshal to William the Conqueror at the battle of
Hastings,"

though we may know full well that the Sturt pedigree really begins in
the seventeenth century, and that the earliest known Heneage lived and
died some three centuries before.

But "noble" families have no monopoly of misguided genealogy. "The
immense majority of the pedigrees of the landed gentry," says a
well-known officer of arms, "cannot, I fear, be characterised as
otherwise than utterly worthless. The errors of the 'peerage' are as
nothing to the fables which we encounter everywhere;" and the same may
be said of many another collection of pedigrees which is a treasured
possession in countless British homes.

Some even justly famous men have not been proof against this insidious
form of vanity and pretence. Edmund Spenser was ungenerous enough to
"dismiss his known ancestry of small Lancashire gentry and plant himself
modestly in the shadow of the newly discovered shield of arms of the
noble house of Spencer, 'of which I meanest boast myself to be.'" And
Lord Tennyson, whose ultimate ascertainable forefather was an eighteenth
century Lincolnshire apothecary, was provided with a slightly
differenced cadet's version of the arms of Archbishop Tenison, with whom
he had no connection whatever.

INDEX

Aberdeen, Earl of, 299
Affleck, Lady, 66
----, Misses, 66
Alava, General, 44
Albemarle, Lord, 235
Aldenham, Lord, 333
Alexander, Emperor, 49
Alington, Lord, 343
----, Sir Hildebrand, 343
Allerton, Lord, 334
Almack's, 45-49
Andrews, Mr, 71-73
Anglesey, Earl of, 165
Anne, of Austria, 2
----, Princess, 113