THE NEW PEERAGES.
[To THS EDITOR OF THS "SPIEITSTOR1 SIR, —In an article in your last impression, on the "New Peer- ages," you say of Mr. Tollemache, of Helmingham, that "scarcely any Peer on the roll has a pedigree to produce like the one claimed, we believe justly, for this gentleman, who is said, in his own neighbourhood, to be the heir in unbroken male descent of a Saxon squire who held Helmingham before the Conquest." Permit me to remind you that the new Lord Tollemache has no such claims as those which you prefer on his behalf. He only bears the name of Tollemache in right of his grandmother, Lady Jane Tollemache, youngest daughter and co-heiress of Lionel, third Earl of Dysart, who married Mrs. Halliday, and whose eldest son (the father of the new Peer) assumed the name and arms of his mother's family. The succession to the family honours fell to Lady Jane's elder sister, Lady Louise Tollemache, who became Countess of Dysart in her own right, and the present Lord Dysart is her lineal descendant, and the head of the Tolle- -mache family. The estates -were divided between -the two sisters, and thus Helmingham, a stately quadrangular mansion, with moat and drawbridge, visited by Queen Elizabeth in 1561, went to the younger, whose grandson is the new Peer ; and Ham Palace—an almost equally stately house on the banks of the Thames, though by no means so well kept up as Helmingham- and Buckminster, in Leicestershire, remained with the title.—
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