prize in the matrimonial
speculations of the times, and was quite in a flutter to know which of
the reigning beauties, would captivate the young Lord Russell. Lady
Elizabeth Cecil, Lady Dorothy Sidney, Lady Anne Carr were the rival
belles upon whom the eyes of the world were fixed. It was with no small
consternation that the Earl of Bedford soon found that the affections of
his son had been attracted by Lady Anne Carr, the daughter of the Earl
and Countess of Somerset, more widely known as Robert Carr and Lady
Essex. The Earl of Bedford had taken a prominent part in the Countess's
trial, and participated in the general abhorrence of her character. In
vain his son pleaded the innocence of the daughter, who, early separated
from her parents, knew nothing of their history or their crimes. The
Earl of Bedford shrunk with a feeling of all but insurmountable aversion
to such an alliance; and not until the king interceded for the youthful
lovers, did the father yield a reluctant consent, and their marriage was
celebrated. The undisturbed happiness and harmony in which the parties
lived reconciled the Earl to the connection; he became much attached to
his beautiful daughter-in-law; and in the sweetness and domestic purity
of her character he could sometimes forget her parents. Lady Anne's life
passed quietly in the discharge of the duties of a wife and mother, and
of those which devolved upon her when her husband became fifth Earl of
Bedford in 1641. In 1683, their eldest son, Lord William Russell, died
on the scaffold.

"There is a life in the principles of freedom," says the historian of
the House of Russell, "which the axe of the executioner does not, for it
cannot, touch." This great thought must have strengthened the souls of
the parents under so terrible a trial. The mother's health, however,
sunk under the blow, which, in the sympathy of her celebrated
daughter-in-law, the heroic Lady Rachel Russell, she endeavored to
sustain. One day, seeking, perhaps, some book to cheer her thoughts,
Lady Bedford entered the library, and in an anteroom seldom visited
chanced to take a pamphlet from the shelves. She opened its pages, and
read there, for the first time, the record of her mother's guilt. The
visible in that page rent aside the invisible veil which those who loved
Lady Bedford had silently woven over her whole life, as a shield from a
terrible truth. She was found by her attendants senseless, with the
fatal book open in h