The Greymount family having planted themselves in the land,
faithful to the policy of the founder, avoided the public gaze
during the troubled period that followed the reformation; and
even during the more orderly reign of Elizabeth, rather sought
their increase in alliances than in court favour. But at the
commencement of the seventeenth century, their abbey lands
infinitely advanced in value, and their rental swollen by the
prudent accumulation of more than seventy years, a Greymount,
who was then a county member, was elevated to the peerage as
Baron Marney. The heralds furnished his pedigree, and assured
the world that although the exalted rank and extensive
possessions enjoyed at present by the Greymounts, had their
origin immediately in great territorial revolutions of a
recent reign, it was not for a moment to be supposed, that the
remote ancestors of the Ecclesiastical Commissioner of 1530
were by any means obscure. On the contrary, it appeared that
they were both Norman and baronial, their real name Egremont,
which, in their patent of peerage the family now resumed.

In the civil wars, the Egremonts pricked by their Norman
blood, were cavaliers and fought pretty well. But in 1688,
alarmed at the prevalent impression that King James intended
to insist on the restitution of the church estates to their
original purposes, to wit, the education of the people and the
maintenance of the poor, the Lord of Marney Abbey became a
warm adherent of "civil and religious liberty,"--the cause for
which Hampden had died in the field, and Russell on the
scaffold,--and joined the other whig lords, and great lay
impropriators, in calling over the Prince of Orange and a
Dutch army, to vindicate those popular principles which,