Castle Dangan came to them in the year of our
Lord, 1411, _i.e._ before Agincourt: and, in Castle Dangan did Field-
marshal, the man of Waterloo, draw his first breath, shed his first tears,
and perpetrate his earliest trespasses. That is what one might call a
pretty long spell for one family: four hundred and thirty-five years has
Castle Dangan furnished a nursery for the Wellesley piccaninnies. Amongst
the lordships attached to Castle Dangan was _Mornington_, which more
than three centuries afterwards supplied an earldom for the grandfather of
Waterloo. Any further memorabilia of the Castle Dangan family are not
recorded, except that in 1485 (which sure was the year of Bosworth field?)
they began to omit the _de_ and to write themselves Wellesley _tout
court_. From indolence, I presume: for a certain lady Di. le Fl., whom
once I knew, a Howard by birth, of the house of Suffolk, told me as her
reason for omitting the _Le_, that it caused her too much additional
trouble.
So far the evidence seems in favor of Wellesley and against Wesley. But,
on the other hand, during the last three centuries the Wellesleys wrote
the name Wesley. They, however, were only the _maternal_ ancestors of
the present Wellesleys. Garret Wellesley, the last male heir of the direct
line, in the year 1745, left his whole estate to one of the Cowleys, a
Staffordshire family who had emigrated to Ireland in Queen Elizabeth's
time, but who were, however, descended from the Wellesleys.
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