Fighting Dick Talbot

Fighting Dick Talbot was an ancestor -- need to research exact link and relationship

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Full text of "Little Jennings and fighting Dick Talbot : a life of the Duke and Duchess of Tyrconnel"

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES




THE GIFT OF

MAY TREAT MORRISON

IN MEMORY OF

ALEXANDER F MORRISON



385Wash>nSt.Boston]




//i the painting ky Mary Seal*.. By kind pemitsion of Earl Spencer.

FRANCES JENNINGS,
DUCHESS OF TYRCONNEL.



LITTLE JENNINGS AND
FIGHTING DICK TALBOT

A Life of the Duke and Duchess of

TyrconneL
< that it would more aptly have been named " Materials for a
Life of Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnel, with some Details
about his second Wife." The original plan did not contemplate
the unequal division of the space between Richard Talbot and
Frances Jennings which has been made in the following pages.
But some books insist, as it were, on writing themselves, of
developing independently of preconceived schemes. That has
been the case with Little Jennings and Fighting Dick Talbot.
I have yielded to the claims of the forceful husband to over-
shadow his wife, though aware that thereby the symmetry of
the work has been impaired.

Of Talbot it cannot be said, in the words of the early English
translation of Rochefoucauld's Maxims : " Some Persons are
so extreamly whiffling and inconsiderable, that they are as
far from any real Faults, as they are from substantial Vertues."
Talbot had abundance of real faults as well as some substantial
virtues. I have in no way attempted to conceal the faults
or to magnify unduly the virtues, but have tried to present
the actual man, with the aid chiefly of his own writings and
the estimates of his contemporaries. Few characters in English
history have suffered more grievously from prejudice, and the
only remedy appeared to me to get back to the documents
of the period and examine in them the evidence for the charges
brought against Talbot. In some places this has involved
what may seem over-elaboration of detail ; but apart from the
article in the Dictionary of National Biography there has been

vii

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