The Anglicized form of Chaurtes, Chaurcis, or Cadurcis; a name “derived,” says Camden, “from the Cadurci in France,” and dating from the Conquest in this country. Patric de Cadurcis, of Little Brittany, who was seated in Gloucestershire, and a benefactor of Gloucester Abbey in the latter years of the Conqueror’s reign, founded a powerful family of Lords Marcher, that bore rule on the Welsh frontier up to the close of the fourteenth century. Pain, called by Dugdale Patric’s grandson (though, as he was living in 1217, a hundred and thirty years after the death of the Conqueror, he must have been a far more remote descendant), held 12½ knight’s fees in Montgomery, and acquired Bridgewater Castle in Somersetshire, with other estates, through his wife Gundred de la Ferté, whose mother had been the sister and co-heir of the last William de Briwere. His son and successor, Patric, made a still greater alliance, for he married Hawise, the only daughter of Thomas de Londres, who brought, “with his fair Inheritance, the title of Lord of Ogmor and Kydweli. The heirs of Maurice de Londres were oblig’d by their tenure, in case the King or his chief justice should lead an army into these parts, to conduct the said army, with their banners, through the county of Neath to Lochor.”—Camden. This great lordship was confirmed to him by Henry III., “providing he could win and keep it for himself;” a condition rendered onerous by the distracted state of the country. In 1244 he had received the King’s precept to “use all his power and diligence in annoying the Welsh, then in hostility;” and the Welsh naturally retaliated; for in 1258 Llewellyn and the princes of South Wales encamped at Kidwelly, and fired all the houses, except the castle. While thus engaged, “they were surprised by Meredith ap Res and the Lord Patric, who suddenly came down upon them with a body of Englishmen from Carmarthen. A vigorous battle took place, in which the Welshmen were eventually victorious.” (Bridgeman’s Princes of South Wales.) Then followed a year’s truce, during which Prince Edward sent Patric, the King’s Seneschal at Carmarthen, to treat with the Welsh at Emlyn. According to Matthew Paris, Llewellyn “meaning good faith, sent his brother David, with some others, to entreat with them of peace; but Patric, meaning to entrap them, laid an ambushment of armed men by the way, and as they should have met, these men fell upon the Welshmen, and slew a great number of them.” Those that escaped from this base act of treachery raised the country, and collecting a considerable force, marched to meet the English, who had “mustered at Cardigan in all their pride.” They encountered near the town of Kilgarran, “and a fierce engagement took place, in which the English were routed and fled, leaving their slain, with many caparisoned horses, behind them. In that battle the Lord Patric de Chaworth, Walter Malenfant, a stout and valiant knight from Pembroke, and other knights who had lately arrived from England, were slain.”—Ibid.

Patric left three young sons—the eldest then only thirteen—who proved the last heirs of his house. All of them, Pain, Hervey, and Patric, were signed with the cross in 1269, and attended Prince Edward to the Holy Land; but of Hervey there is no further mention. Pain commanded Edward I.’s army in West Wales in 1277, when Llewellyn was forced to conclude a treaty of peace; and “being thus victorious, was made governor of the Castles of Dumevor, Karekenyl and Landevery.” He died in the following year, and his brother Patric, who succeeded him, only survived till 1282, leaving by Isabel de Beau­champ his wife, an only child, Maud, Lady of Kilwelly, married to Henry Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster, the nephew of Edward I.

A far longer-lived branch of the family had been very early established in Nottinghamshire, through the marriage of Robert de Chaworth with the heiress of Marnham, Alice de Walichville. He was, without doubt, a relative or de­scendant of the first Patric, but he cannot possibly have been, as Dugdale asserts, his brother, as he lived in the ensuing century, and appears in the Liber Niger as holding a fee of William de Albini in Leicester. His grandson, William, acquired Alfreton, “in ancient times esteemed a barony of honour,” through Alice, daughter and co-heir of its last lord, whose arms “were,” says Thoroton, “almost ever used by Chaworth.” The next heir, Thomas, was a baron by writ in 1296, but none of his posterity were ever honoured by a second summons, though their domain in Nottingham expanded apace through successive addi­tions. Fourth in descent from Thomas was Sir William, whose wife was the heiress of Wyverton, as one of the representatives of the last Lord Basset of Drayton; and their son Sir Thomas married Isabel, daughter of Sir Thomas Ailesbury. “By this Match, he was entitled to the Inheritance of the honourable Families of Aylesbury, Pakenham, Engaine, Basset of Weldon, and Kaines, and better enabled to make the Park at Wiverton, which he had the King’s License to do 24 Hen. VI.: who likewise granted him Free Warren in that Place, whereby it is very probable that he was the chief Builder of that strong House, which from thenceforward was the principal Mansion of his worthy Successors, and in our Times made a Garrison for the King, which occasioned its Ruin; since when, most of it is pulled down and removed, except the old uncovered Gatehouse, which yet remains a Monument of the Magnificence of this Family.”—Thoroton's Notts. A third heiress brought Annesley to the next heir, George; but the line expired after three more generations, ending in 1589 with Sir George Chaworth. His daughter and sole heir, Elizabeth, married Sir John Cope.

But she did not succeed either to Wyverton or Annesley, for there yet remained descendants of Sir George’s uncle, whose grandson, another Sir George, was created in 1672 Viscount Chaworth of Armagh in the peerage of Ireland. This title was borne for little more than seventy years, as the third Vis­count, again, left no heir but a daughter, Juliana Countess of Meath, the ancestress of the present Earl. The first Lord Chaworth had, however, younger brothers, whose posterity carried on the line at Annesley until the first years of the present century, when the last heir male, William Chaworth, died, and the estates devolved on his only child, Mary Anne, “The solitary scion left Of a time honour’d race.”

This was the fair lady immortalized by Lord Byron’s early idolatry—the heroine of his ‘Dream.’ They were close neighbours in the country (Annesley Hall is scarcely three miles from Newstead) and distant relations by blood; for the sister of the last Viscount had married the ancestor of Lord Byron. But the families had been sundered by a deadly feud, caused by the fatal duel fought in 1765 between the poet’s great uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, and Mr. Chaworth of Annesley. “The following,” writes Horace Walpole, “is the account nearest the truth that I can learn of the fatal duel last night. A club of Nottinghamshire gentlemen had dined at the Star and Garter, and there had been a dispute between the combatants whether Lord Byron, who took no care of his game, or Mr. Chaworth, who was active in the association, had most game on their manor. The company, however, had apprehended no consequences, and parted at eight o’clock: but Lord Byron, stepping into an empty chamber, and sending the drawer for Mr. Chaworth, or calling him thither himself, took the candle from the waiter, and bidding Mr. Chaworth defend himself, drew his sword. Mr. Chaworth, who was an excellent fencer, ran Lord Byron through the sleeve of his coat, and then received a wound fourteen inches deep into his body. He was carried to his house in Berkeley Street, made his will with the greatest composure, and dictated a paper which, they say, allows it was a fair duel, and died at nine this morning.” Lord Byron surrendered to take his trial in Westminster Hall, and was, almost unanimously, found guilty, but discharged on claiming his privilege of peerage under Edward VI.'s statute.

The hereditary ill-will between the two families had been suffered to die out in the time of the orphaned heiress of Annesley, and during the summer of 1803 she and Lord Byron were constantly together. The young poet, then only in his sixteenth year, fell passionately in love with the beautiful girl of seventeen, and spent rapturous hours by her side, listening spell-bound to her singing, or roaming over the old terraced garden of Annesley. To him, in truth, it was enchanted ground: “He had no breath, no being, but in hers; She was his voice: he did not speak to her, But trembled on her words; she was his sight, For his eye follow’d hers, and saw with hers, Which colour’d all his objects he had ceas’d To live within himself; she was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts, Which terminated all.”

Miss Chaworth by no means shared these ecstatic feelings. A maiden “on the eve of womanhood” seldom if ever smiles upon a stripling younger than herself: and he had the mortification of hearing her say to her maid: “Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?”—“This speech, as he himself described it, was like a shot through his heart.”—Moore.

The brief love-dream had ended with the summer holidays. He only saw Miss Chaworth once again in the following year, when she was engaged to be married to Mr. Musters of Colwick Hall. He bravely wished her joy and bade her farewell; then, “Mounting on his steed, he went his way, And never cross’d that hoary threshold more.”

His childish passion had been no evanescent fancy, but a heart-wound that left an abiding scar. Years afterwards, in one of his memorandum books, he accidentally mentions Miss Chaworth as “My M. A. C. Alas!” he presently adds, “Why do I say my? Our union would have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers; it would have joined lands broad and rich; it would have joined at least one heart, and two persons not ill-matched in years; and—and—and —what has been the result!”

The close of Mrs. Musters’ life was in mournful contrast to the golden promise of its opening years. Her married life was unhappy; though surrounded by blooming children, she fell a prey to secret and devouring melancholy, gradually became insane, and died a tragical death. During the Nottingham riots of 1831, Colwick Hall was assailed by a brutal mob, plundered, and set on fire;“The master of the house was absent; his lady, in delicate health, was forced from her couch to a precipitate flight; led by her young daughter—another Antigone— to a distant part of the grounds; they both remained for hours on the damp earth, the daughter supporting her mother’s head on her bosom, and both concealing themselves under a laurel tree. So profound was the terror of these unhappy ladies, that for hours after the wretches had quitted the grounds, the servants sought for their mistress and her daughter in vain. And at last when they found them in the situation I have so feebly endeavoured to describe, half dead with cold and terror, there was no apartment, no couch, no bed of that so lately splendid residence fit to receive them, and they were carried inanimate to the only place which had escaped the incendiaries —a groom’s bed, over one of the stables.”—J. W. Croker. and its unhappy mistress, driven from her house in the middle of the night, had to seek refuge in a neighbouring plantation. The terror of this midnight flight stamped itself on her sick brain; she never recovered from the shock she had received, and did not long survive it.

Chaworth: is supposed to come from Cadurcis (Cahors), in the South of France. Peter de Cadurcis was seated in Gloucestershire towards the end of the Conqueror’s reign. He must have been a soldier of fortune. Leland gives the name Chaward.