By the successive deaths
of their parents, they had been left young to the guardianship of Sir
Fulke Somerset and their maternal aunt, his then accomplished lady:
she and their deceased mother, the Lady Grace Beaufort, having been
sisters--the two celebrated beautiful daughters of Robert Earl
Studeley of Warwick.
Sir Fulke's family by the amiable twin of the Lady Grace were Robert
(who afterwards succeeded him) and Dorothy his only daughter. But he
had a son by a former marriage with the brilliantly-endowed widow of
a long-resident governor in the East, who having died on his voyage
home to England, on her landing she found herself the sole inheritrix
of his immense wealth. She possessed charms of person as well as
riches, and as soon as "her weeds" could be laid aside, she became
the admired wife of the "gay and gallant" Sir Fulke Somerset. Within
the twelve subsequent months she presented him with a son and heir,
soon to be her own too; for though she lived three or four years
after his birth, her health became so delicate that she never bore
another child, but gradually declined, and ultimately expired while
apparently in a gentle sleep.
Sir Fulke mourned his due time "in the customary suit of solemn
black;" but he was a man of a lofty and social spirit, by no means
inclined to be disconsolate, and held "a fair help-mate" to be an
indispensable appendage to his domestic state.
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