16 B I 0 GRAPH I C AL S KET C €I E S.
No. CLXXIV.
THE RIGHT HON. SELINA COUNTESS DOWAGER
OF HUNTINGDON.
LADYH UNTINGDwOaNs born in 1707. She was the second daughter, and one
of the three co-heiresses of Washington Earl of Ferrers. In 1728, at the
age of twenty-one, she was married to Theophilus Earl of Huntingdon, by
whom she had four sons and three daughters, only one of whom (the Countess
of Moira) survived her ladyship.‘ The union was one of great domestic
felicity, but not destined to be of very long continuance, as the Earl died in
1746.
After the death of the Earl, the zeal which the Countess had early displayed
in the service of religion and the cause of humanity, gradually extended over
a wider field, till her example, her writings, and her unbounded charity, at
length placed her at the head of that numerous sect, of which she was at once
the support and the ornament. At her death it was calculated that she had
expended, in acts of public and private charity, more than One Hundred Thousand
Pounds.
Lady Huntingdon died at her house in Spa Fields, near London, on the
17th June 1791, in the eighty-fourth year of her age. By her will it was
directed that her remahs should be deposited beside those of her husband, and
that they should be dressed in the suit of white silk which she wore on the
occasion of opening the chapel in Goodman’s Fields. The coffin was to be
covered with black, and the interment to be conducted in the least ostentatious
manner possible. The officiating clergyman (Mr. Jones of Spa Fields Chapel)
was to receive $10 for his trouble.
A considerable portion of her ladyship’s fortune was bequeathed for the
support of sixty-faur chapels, which she had established in various parts of the
United Kingdom, besides some other legacies, and $4000 yearly to be distributed
in casual charities.’
1 Upon the extinction of this branch of the Earls of Huntingdon, the Baronies of Hastings, etc.,
Her ladyship has been very severely satirised in Johnston’s “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a
fell to the Moira family,
Guinea ”-some say deservedly.