ntricate successions, came to the
present proprietor.

Bacon, like so many other famous men, had no children. He died in Lord
Arundel's house at Highgate in 1626.

Sir Robert Bacon, fifth baronet, sold Redgrave, the family seat in
Suffolk, to Lord Chief-Justice Holt toward the end of the seventeenth
century. Holt, who died in London 5th of March, 1710, was buried there,
and a grand monument to his memory may be seen in the church. It was
erected by his brother and heir, for, like Bacon, he was childless.

Redgrave Hall, eighty-seven miles from London by the coach-road, is a
large square mansion. The male line of the Holt family has long been
extinct, but the present owner of the estate is descended from the great
lord chief-justice's niece, who married Mr. Wilson, a younger son of an
ancient Westmoreland family.

But to pass to the origin of the order of baronets. After one of the
almost chronic Irish insurrections against British rule, James I.
conceived in 1609 the idea of offering to English and Scotch settlers,
known to be possessed of capital, a large portion of the forfeited
estates in Ulster. The supposed necessity of a military force for the
protection of the colonists suggested to Sir Antony Shirley a project of
raising money for the king. He proposed the creation of a new honor,
between those of knight and baron, and that it be conferred by patent at
a fixed price for the support of the army in Ulster--that it should
descend to heirs male, and be confined to two hundred gentlemen of three
descents in actual possession of lands worth one thousand pounds a
year--a sum equal to five thousand now.[N]

James I. approved of the scheme, as he would have done of any which
seemed feasible for raising the wind, and the patents were offered at
the price of ten hundred and ninety-five pounds, the estimated amount of
the charge of thirty soldiers during three years. The purchasers did not
prove so numerous as had been expected. In the first six years
ninety-three patents were sold at L101,835. "It is unnecessary to add,"
says Doctor Lingard, "that the money never found its way to Ireland" in
the shape of forces paid for by this process.

There have been three or four creations of baronetesses in their own
right, but nearly two centuries have elapsed since such a creation.
James II. made a curious remainder clause in a patent, by creating a
Dutchman a baronet with remainder to his mother. It has been a mooted
questio