The habits and manners of the “Llangollen ladies” were frank and open, and their hospitality of the most liberal kind. They visited and received the neighbouring gentry until the “weight of years pressed heavy on them.” Madame de Genlis and the Mademoiselle D’Orleans, are to be numbered amongst their visiters; and it was here that intellectual being first heard the wild notes of our Æolian harp, of which she remarks, “it is natural for such an instrument to have originated in a country of storms and tempests, of which it softens the manners.”
Upwards of half a century these amiable companions graced the valley of Llangollen, extending a cheerful hospitality to their numerous guests, and exercising a benevolence the most unlimited towards the most friendless of their neighbours. At length they were called before the throne of brightness and purity, at the advanced ages of seventy-two and seventy-seven. Their remains are deposited in a vault in Llangollen cemetery, where the body of Mrs. Mary Carroll, their faithful servant, had been laid at rest before them.
THE castle of Denbigh (_Dinbach_, the little fort) occupies the crown of a rocky eminence on the south side of the noble vale of Clwyd, and commanding an extensive prospect over that rich and beautiful vein of country. This impregnable fortress, with one thousand pounds in lands, was granted by Edward the First to Davydd, the brother of Llewellyn, as a marriage portion with the Earl of Derby’s widow, whom he espoused at the king’s request. Davydd forfeited these grants by his rebellion, which enabled Edward to reward one of his English followers with this noble estate. The fortunate grantee was Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln and of Denbigh, who had married the daughter and sole heiress of Long-sword, Earl of Salisbury, by whom he had two sons, Edmund and John, who both died young, one of them by a fall into a very deep well within the castle of Denbigh; and a daughter named Alicia, espoused by Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster, who, in right of this lady, became Earl of Lincoln and of Sarum, Lord of Denbigh, Halton, Pomfret, and constable of Chester Castle. The melancholy death of his son Edmund so afflicted the earl, that Leland assures us it caused him to desert his proud castle without completing its great design. Upon the attainder of Thomas of Lancaster, son-in-law of Lacy, the lordship of Denbigh was conferred upon Hugh D’Espencer, a favourite of Edward the Second; but this unpopular person being also cut off by violence, Roger Mortimer obtained a grant of his estates, in fulfilment of a promise made to his mother by Edward the Third, before he ascended the throne, “that he would bestow one thousand pounds upon her son if ever he should succeed to the crown of England.” The proprietorship of this impregnable rock seems to have inspired its lords with ideas of independence, uniformly growing up into rebellion. Mortimer was infected with the same anti monarchical notions, and met with a similar fate. The succession of tragedies was at length arrested by a Sir William Montacute, afterwards Earl of Salisbury, who continued a grateful and zealous adherent of the crown. Salisbury dying without issue, and the attainder of Mortimer being reversed, Denbigh was restored, by marriage, to the house of York, and, consequently, to the crown once more.