all comers, and was called, or called himself, John the Dare-all; or, in
old spelling, the Der-all. They were amongst the most powerful families
in the country; their alliances were with the highest houses,--
Montfichets, Nevilles, Mowbrays; they descended through such marriages
from the blood of Plantagenet kings. You'll find their names in
chronicles in the early French wars. Unluckily they attached themselves
to the fortunes of Earl Warwick, the king-maker, to whose blood they were
allied; their representative was killed in the fatal field of Barnet;
their estates were of course confiscated; the sole son and heir of that
ill-fated politician passed into the Low Countries, where he served as a
soldier. His son and grandson followed the same calling under foreign
banners. But they must have kept up the love of the old land; for in the
latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., the last male Darrell returned
to England with some broad gold pieces saved by himself or his exiled
fathers, bought some land in this county, in which the ancestral
possessions had once been large, and built the present house, of a size
suited to the altered fortunes of a race that in a former age had manned
castles with retainers. The baptismal name of the soldier who thus
partially refounded the old line in England was that now borne by your
cousin, Guy,--a name always favoured by Fortune in the family annals; for
in Elizabeth's time, from the rank of small gentry, to which their
fortune alone lifted them since their return to their native land, the
Darrells rose once more into wealth and eminence under a handsome young
Sir Guy,--we have his picture in black flowered velvet,--who married the
heiress of the Haughtons, a family that had grown rich under the Tudors,
and was in high favour with the Maiden-Queen. This Sir Guy was
befriended by Essex and knighted by Elizabeth herself. Their old house
was then abandoned for the larger mansion of the Haughtons, which had
also the advantage of being nearer to the Court, The renewed prosperity
of the Darrells was of short duration. The Civil Wars came on, and Sir