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246   Life.and Letters of Francis Galton


three years, Penelope one year, Mary herself lived to be thirty, his son Charles died at 48 years, his daughter Frances lived six years and his son Thomas only a few months. The Howard line has been solely preserved through the one child of Mary, Robert Waring Darwin, that survived to have children, and through her brother's child, Mary Ann Howard, who married Sir Robert Wilmot of Osmaston. In both these lines there has been noteworthy achievement.

I have filled in at the bottom of the pedigree two connections of some interest, namely, first the pedigree of the Earles of Heydon (see Plates LXIV to LXVI) as far as known to me, and secondly a pedigree showing how the Sacheverells, through the Warings, link Da_rwins, Poles and Howards together. It has been suggested that Erasmus Darwin met Mrs Pole, his second wife, solely as a medical attendant. I think there was a recognised Sacheverell relationship. In the first place Charles Howard, grandfather of Dr Erasmus Darwin's wife, made Mary Sacheverell, the wife of the famous Dr Henry Sacheverell, an executrix of his will. This lady was the sister of Edward Wilson, a former bailiff and (1687) mayor of Lichfield, and is said to have been a first cousin of Charles Howard's wife, Mary Bromley. She first married George Sacheverell, High Sheriff of Derbyshire, 1709, and secondly his distant relative, the famous Dr Henry Sacheverell. Elizabeth Collier's first husband, Edward Sacheverell Pole, was a son of Elizabeth Sacheverell of Morley. Elizabeth Sacheverell and Erasmus Darwin were distant cousins by common descent from Robert Waring, who died in 1662. Thus Erasmus Darwin probably appears as medical adviser to the Poles owing to the Sacheverell or Waring relationship, and in marrying Mrs Pole as his second wife, he was linking himself to a family already connected by marriage with both Warings and Howards. I am inclined to take the view that Erasmus Darwin gave the name of Francis Sacheverell to his second son by Elizabeth Pole, not after her first husband, but after the family, which itself dying out, had yet linked by intermarriages Darwins, Wilmots, Poles, Howards and Warings.

Picture

Edward, Emma and Violetta Darwin (mother of Francis Galton, on the right), children of Erasmus and Elizabeth Darwin, Derby, 1800. From a picture in the possession of Mr Wheler Galton at Claverdon.

CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.


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