(in Duchesne’s copy, Pecy) One letter has in either case been left out, for Leland’s list enables us clearly to identify the name. We there find this and the preceding one given as “Pygot et Percy,” and come upon one of our great historical houses, “that, like Caesar’s, has been artificially preserved to the present time.” - Freeman. The name, “grotesquely construed in England,” says Sir Francis Palgrave, “as signifying Pierce-eye,” was taken from Percy, a fief near Villedieu in the Côtentin. An Elizabethan herald, named Glover, “derives this family from Mainfred de Percy, a Danish chief, who is said to have lived before the time of Rollo, and whose descendants, named alternately Geoffrey and William de Percy, continued in succession Lords of Percy, until the last William de Percy of Normandy went to England, temp. William I., and founded the English house of Percy. But Percy did not belong to any private family; it was part of the ducal demesne; and consequently it is difficult to believe that the name of De Percy could have existed. In point of fact, it is not mentioned in any record till shortly before the English Conquest, and it had probably been assumed not long previously, for in 1026 the estate of Percy was still part of the demesne of the Duke, who granted it, with other domains and castles, by a charter of that date, to his spouse in dowry.”—The Norman People. William and Serlo de Percy came over in the time of the Conqueror, but neither of them are mentioned at the battle of Hastings; and from a passage in the cartulary of Whitby Abbey, quoted by Dugdale, it appears that William de Percy accompanied his sworn brother-in-arms, Hugh Lupus, to this country, the year afterwards. He was surnamed, from his whiskers (rarely worn by the close-shaven Normans) Alsgernons; and “being much beloved by the King,” appears in Domesday as a great landowner, holding a barony of thirty knight’s fees, including some lands that had belonged to a Saxon lady, whom, “as very heire to them, in discharging of his conscience,” he afterwards married. Hugh Lupus, on becoming Earl of Chester, transferred to him his great domain of Whitby in the East Riding, where he re-founded the Abbey of St.Hilda’s, and appointed his brother Serlo the first prior. He accompanied Robert Curthose on the first Crusade, and died in 1096 at Montjoye, as they came in sight of Jerusalem. The line ended in 1168 with his grandson William, who left only two daughters. Maud, the eldest, was the wife of William de Newburgh, Earl of Warwick, by whom she had no children; her sister Agnes thus became sole heiress, and was married by Queen Adeliza (the second wife of Henry I.) to her brother Josceline de Louvain, a younger son of Godfrey with the Beard, Duke of Nether Lorraine and Count of Brabant Though the bridegroom came of the sacred blood of Charlemagne,“Not only throughout the Middle Ages, but long after that era, there was a species of mystical pre-eminence attached to the Carlovingian lineage, which those who could claim the honour nourished, though often in silence. God alone can bestow the prerogative attached to renowned ancestry, no human power can impart or destroy the prerogative: it is specially and directly created by the Almighty’s hand.” —Sir Francis Palgrave. the bride stipulated that he should take either her name or arms; and he chose the first alternative, calling himself Percy, but retaining the ancient azure lion of Hainault; in order, it is said, to transmit his claim to his father’s principality in default of succession to his elder brothers. From his elder brother are descended the Electors of Hesse Cassel, and the mother of the Princess of Wales. Queen Adeliza granted them, as her marriage gift, the Honour of Petworth, comprising twenty-one knight’s fees, in Sussex; and their son Henry founded the illustrious house of Percy, Earls of Northumberland, that endured close upon five hundred years, and extended through eighteen renowned generations. Its name is written on every page of the history of England, for, during all these centuries, there was scarcely a war or insurrection in which a Percy was not to be found fighting in the foremost rank. They died on the battlefield, the scaffold, or in prison; and their titles perished again and again under attainder. The first baron by writ was Henry de Percy, summoned to parliament by Edward I. in 1299: and he, too, was the first of the family w ho struck root in Northumberland. Ten years later, he purchased from Anthony Beke, Bishop of Durham, the great Northern barony of the De Vescis, with the strong frontier fortress of Alnwick; and his son further obtained from Ed. III. the castle and barony of Warkworth. From that time forth, the Percies were repeatedly March-Wardens, and ever busied in “regulating” the feuds and raids of the wild Border country.

This second Lord Percy was a soldier of the first rank, who fought and won at Halidon Hill, and led one of the divisions of the victorious army at Nevill’s Cross, when David II. was taken prisoner, and the famous Black Rood of Scotland offered at St. Cuthbert’s shrine. The next Lord married Lady Mary Plantagenet, the great-granddaughter of Henry III., and had two sons, who both received Earldoms from Richard II. The younger, Sir Thomas, a companion in arms of the Black Prince, was created Earl of Worcester in 1397, and impartially served both Richard and his successor by sea and land; till joining in his brother’s rebellion, he was taken prisoner at the battle of Shrews­bury, and beheaded the following day. He died s. p. The elder brother, Henry, created Earl of Northumberland on the occasion of the King’s coronation in 1377, was the King-maker of his time: “Northumberland, the ladder wherewithall The vaunting Bolingbroke ascends my throne.”

He succeeded in dethroning Richard II., and received as his requital a grant of the Isle of Man, to be held by the tenure of carrying, at each coronation, the sword with which the new King had landed at Holderness. But when he next attempted to change the dynasty in favour of the young Earl of March, he was utterly routed at Shrewsbury; and though then pardoned and restored by the King, rose again in rebellion the following year and was slain at a second overthrow at Bramham Moor in 1403. His head was set up on London Bridge, and his quarters over the gates of London, Lincoln, Berwick, and Newcastle. By his second wife, Maud de Lucy, the widowed Countess of Angus, he acquired the whole of her great Cumberland property (though she brought him no children) as well as the estates of her first husband. See p. 203, and Vol. 3, p. His son Hotspur—the first knight of his age, still lives before our eyes in Shakespeare’s brilliant portrait; “I saw young Harry, with his beaver on, His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly armed, Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury, And vaulted with such ease into his seat, As if an Angel dropt down from the clouds To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus, And witch the world with noble horsemanship.”

Nor is he less familiar to us as “the Persé owt of Northumberlande” of Chevy Chase, the noble old ballad founded on the battle of Otterburn, where he was taken prisoner by the Scots in 1388. His captor, Sir John de Montgomerie, built a castle with the money paid for his ransom. His last field was at Shrewsbury, where he fell fighting by his father’s side in 1403. Both his son and grandson died, as he had done, in battle: and both of them in the service of the House of Lancaster; the second Earl at St. Albans, the third Earl leading the van of Queen Margaret’s army, sword in hand, at Towton. Three more brothers of the latter—he was one of a goodly band of nine—laid down their lives in the same cause; one, Sir Richard, being slain with him at Towton; another (created Lord Egremont in 1449) in the King’s tent at Northampton; and the last, Sir Ralph, at Hedgeley Moor, near Chillingham Castle, crying, as he fell, “I have saved the bird in my bosom!” (his fealty to King Henry.) This third Earl of Northumberland had acquired, by his marriage with Eleanor, grand daughter and heiress of the last Lord Poynings, the three ancient baronies of Poynings, Fitz Payne, and Brian; but all his honours were forfeited, his son thrown into the Tower, and his Earldom transferred in 1467 to Lord Montague by the triumphant Yorkist King. After two years, however, the young heir made his submission, took the oath of allegiance to Ed. IV., and was released and re-instated; Lord Montague receiving the Marquessate of Montague in exchange for the Percy Earldom. Again, in the next generation, Sir Thomas Percy was executed at Tyburn for taking part in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537: and thus, on the death of his childless elder brother, the sixth Earl, (Anne Boleyn’s lover), a few months after­wards, his son, being attainted in blood, was unable to inherit The estates were transferred to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who was created Duke of Northumberland by Ed. VI.: and once more it appeared that the house of Percy-Louvain had come to an end. But once more it was only for a time; for no family ever had a better right to their old war cry of "Esperance!” The crescent moon of their crest was the true type of their fortunes, that never waned but to shine again. Within less than twenty years the new Duke was beheaded for conspiring to place his daughter-in-law on the throne, and the son of the unhappy Sir Thomas was restored by Queen Mary, and created Earl of Northumberland anew in 1557.

He, like his father, died the traitor’s death on the scaffold. In 1569, he and the Earl of Westmorland, who were both by position and family the hereditary leaders of the North, placed themselves at the head of the great Catholic conspiracy so long and bitterly remembered as the Rising of the North. It seems certain that he, at least, entered into it unwillingly, urged on by his wife, Lady Anne Somerset, for “she,” writes Lord Hunsdon to Cecil, "is the stouter of the two, and doth harden him to persevere, and rideth up and down with the army, so that the grey mare is the better horse.” When the enterprize ended in disaster and their followers dispersed, the two Earls, with Lady Northumberland, made their way across the Border into Liddesdale, where the poor Countess had to be left behind at the house of a Scottish moss-trooper, described as "not to be compared to an English dog-kennel.” Another Border thief, Hector of Hardlawe—a name ever after infamous in Border story—betrayed the Karl to the Regent Murray, who delivered him up to the tender mercies of Elizabeth.

He was beheaded at York in 1572. On this occasion, a reversionary clause in the new patent preserved the honours of the house to his brother. But he, led by the inborn habit of rebellion that seemed inveterate in his race, in his turn conspired for Mary Queen of Scots, with whom he had fallen deeply in love, and in 1584 was thrown into the Tower, where, the next year, he was found one morning dead in his bed, with three pistol bullets in his body. In the next generation, the ninth Earl shared the same fate, except in the manner of his death, for he was accused of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot (in which one of his nephews had taken part) and fined and imprisoned by the Star Chamber. The fine imposed was ₤30,000: an enormous sum at that time, for which he vainly strove to compound by the offer of Syon, that had been granted to him by Queen Elizabeth in 1602. No less than fifteen years of his life were spent in the Tower, but not altogether unhappily, for with his fellow-prisoner Sir Walter Raleigh, he devoted himself to abstruse scientific studies, which earned for him, in those unlettered days, the name of the Wizard Earl. His son sided with the Parliament against Charles I., and with his grandson the curtain dropped upon the varied vicissitudes of their story, by the final extinction of the Percies in the male line.

Jocelyn, this last and eleventh Earl, died in 1670 at Turin, in the very flower of his age—a young man barely twenty-six; and with him descended to the grave the world-famous name he bore. He left one only child; a little daughter of four years old, Lady Elizabeth, known as “the great Percy heiress,” who was three times a wife, and twice a widow, before she was seventeen. On this baby girl, in her own right Baroness Percy, Lucy, Poynings, Fitz Payne, Bryan and Latimer, were centred all the possessions, and—with the sole exception of the Earldom—all the honours of her house. It was a heavy burden to be laid on so youthful a head; and from the day that she was left an orphan, she was singled out for contention by the cupidity of the world. Match-makers were lying in wait for her from her earliest years. She was scarcely thirteen when Charles II. wrote a coaxing letter to the Countess of Northumberland, asking the hand of the Percy heiress, then “of full age,” for his son George Fitz Roy (by Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland) whom, as a preparatory measure, he had created Earl of Northumberland five years before. This usurpation of her lost husband’s title was scarcely likely to propitiate the Countess; and the proffered alliance was rejected. A few months afterwards, in 1679, Lady Elizabeth was married to the heir of one of the greatest fortunes in the kingdom, Lord Ogle, son of the Duke of Newcastle; a lad but a few years older than herself, who died within a twelvemonth. Her second husband, Thomas Thynne, to whom she seems to have been only “contracted,” was murdered by another jealous aspirant, Count Königsmark: and she became Duchess of Somerset in 1682.

The winner of this great prize, Charles Seymour, the “Proud Duke” of Somerset, was a man who, from his extravagant eccentricities, might in the present day run the risk of being considered insane. His pride of birth and rank was nothing short of a mania. He had an almost overwhelming sense of his own dignity; and, aping the seclusion observed by Oriental monarchs, shunned to expose himself to the profanation of vulgar eyes. When he took the air in his State coach, running footmen preceded him to warn every one else off the road. His daughters never sat down in his presence; and when, suddenly aroused from an after-dinner nap, he found that one of them had been guilty of this gross breach of etiquette, the offence never passed out of his mind, and he remembered it against her even in his will. Again, when his second wife, Lady Charlotte Finch, once tapped him familiarly on the shoulder, he was amazed beyond measure, and severely rebuked her for her forwardness. “Madam,” said he, “my first Duchess was a Percy, yet she never dared to allow herself such a liberty.” Not content with the old manor house of the Percies at Petworth, he transformed it into a palatial mansion, built on a scale of grandeur proportioned to his aspirations; and when the Percy heiress came of age, induced her to release him from the engagement to take her name and arms, which he had entered into on their marriage. She brought him no less than thirteen children; (of whom several died in infancy); and appears in a great fresco, painted by La Guerre at Petworth House, as Juno, seated on a triumphal car, and surrounded by her numerous family. Yet one son only lived to be married—Algernon, Earl of Hertford; and one daughter only left children—Lady Catherine, the wife of the well-known statesman, Sir William Wyndham. The son married a Thynne, by whom he had one daughter—another Lady Elizabeth; and one son, George Viscount Beauchamp, a lad of great promise, who was carried off by the small­pox in 1744 at Bologna at the early age of nineteen. The daughter, who thus remained the only surviving child, was older than her brother, and at the time of his death had been already four years married to Sir Hugh Smithson of Stanwick, in North Yorkshire. Sir Hugh Smithson has been called an apothecary's son; but it was in reality the first Baronet’s brother, Bernard, who was an apothecary in the City, as appears from the grant of arms which they jointly received in 1663. It seems unaccountable that they should have owned no paternal coat, for they belonged to a very respectable family in Yorkshire. The elder, a rich London merchant, who acquired Stanwick in the North Riding, had obtained his baronetcy for his loyalty during the Civil War. Yet Sir Hugh was very far from being considered a fitting match for the Duke of Somerset's grand-daughter; and a letter from the old Duke, strongly opposing Lady Elizabeth’s marriage, is still preserved at Alnwick. The solitary bon-mot with which George III. was ever credited was made when the newly-created Duke applied in vain for the Garter, and exclaimed: “I am the first Northumberland that was ever refused the Garter!” "Rather say," rejoined the King, “the first Smithson that ever asked for it.” But though this second Lady Elizabeth now became heiress to her grandmother’s Percy baronies, a settlement made by that same grandmother (who had died in 1722) excluded her from the succession of the greater part of the Percy estate. Whether deterred by her own example from burdening another woman with so great an inheritance, or because she (not unnaturally) preferred her own daughter to her yet unborn grand-daughter, the Percy heiress decreed that two-thirds of her domain should pass to that daughter’s son, Sir Charles Wyndham, in case her own sons died without heirs male. Accordingly, immediately after young Lord Beauchamp’s death, we find the old Duke writing eagerly, with his own cramped and trembling hand, to the then Prime Minister, Lord Granville, to ask for the Earldom of Northumberland and Barony of Cockermouth for his grandson; assuring him that the Wyndhams would never be a burthen to the Crown, as they would “have more than £20,000 per annum, to support these titles, of the Northumberland estate.” Twenty thousand a year was at that time an enormous fortune. About sixty years before, Lord Macaulay tells us there were only three subjects in England possessed of such an income: the Duke of Ormond, who had £22,000 a year; the Duke of Buckingham, who had £19,600; and the Duke of Albemarle, who left £15,000 a year, and £60,000 in money. The King agreed to grant the Earldom, but only as a reversion, whenever Sir Charles should come into the property. Earl Granville writes, Nov. 23, 1744, that he is “commanded by the King to assure you in his name that he is ready and willing to comply with your request, in granting the Earldom of Northumberland and Barony of Cockermouth to Sir C. Wyndham, with the remainder which you propose, in case your Grace and the Earl of Hertford should have no issue. But, as it is His Majesty’s opinion that the Earldom of Northumberland would be rather a burden to Sir C. Wyndham than an advantage, until such time as, by God’s will, the estate should come to him, His Majesty has commanded me to acquaint you, that the only method in which he thinks this affair can at present be carried into execution is in the following manner, viz.: That your Grace should take out a patent for the Earldom of Northumberland and Barony of Cockermouth to yourself and heirs male of your body; and in failure of such issue (which at present Lord Hertford and his possible issue must be), then remainder to Sir C. Wyndham, &c.; remainder to his brother Percy Wyndham Obrien, &c.: remainder to their sister, &c.; according to what your Grace desires in your letter, and conformably to what, as far as I can recollect, was your intention, when an affair of this nature was in agitation some years ago” (evidently when Lady Elizabeth married) “viz.: that the Wyndham family should have the title of Northumberland, when a considerable part of that great and ancient estate should devolve on them.”—Petworth MS. “Lord Hertford represented against it; at last the King said he would give it to whoever they would make it appear was to have the Percy estate; but old Somerset refused to let anybody see his writings, and so the affair dropped; everybody believing there was no such settlement.”—Horace Walpole. However, when the old Duke died in 1748, this famous settlement was brought to light; and his son and successor, Algernon, seventh Duke, naturally wishing the title of Northumberland to go to his own daughter, Lady Elizabeth Smithson, actually succeeded, through his great influence at Court, in obtaining two separate Earldoms in 1749, with remainder, the one to his son-in-law, the other to his nephew. On his death, a few months afterwards, Sir Hugh Smithson accordingly succeeded to the Earldom of Northumberland, with Syon, Northumberland House, Alnwick, Warkworth, and the estates in Northumberland, while Sir Charles Wyndham succeeded as Earl of Egremont, with Petworth, the Honour of Egremont, Topclyffe, Wressel, Leconfield, The manor of Leconfield, near Beverley, was granted to Henry de Percy by his brother-in-law, Peter de Bruce, to be held by the curious tenure, “That, every Christmas Day, he and his heirs were to repair to Bruce’s castle at Skelton, and lead the lady of that castle by the arm from her chamber to the chapel to mass; and thence to her chamber again; and after dining with her, to depart.” and the great Yorkshire fief, part of which had come to the Percies by grant of William the Conqueror. The second had very considerably the lion’s share, for the Northumberland property, though of great extent, was at that time scarcely cultivated, and of comparatively little value. But on the first devolved the honour of representing the family; for he took the name and arms of Percy, and being created Duke of Northumberland in 1766, was the direct ancestor of the present Duke. The old Percy baronies, however, passing in the female line, were, on the death of Hugh, third Duke, transferred to his nephew, John Murray, seventh Duke of Atholl, whose mother was Lady Emily Percy.

Two years before he died, the first Duke had obtained the title of Lord Lovaine, with remainder to his second son Lord Algernon, who inherited it in 1786, and was created Earl of Beverley in 1830. His son George, second Earl, succeeded to the Dukedom in 1865, on the death of his cousin Algernon, fourth Duke, who had been called up to the House of Lords as Lord Prudhoe in 1816. It is to this Duke Algernon, who was a man of singular taste and knowledge, that the admirable restoration and fine new buildings of Alnwick Castle are due.

A Norman name: From the Domesday Book, Peret