ABSTRACT
Though it would be wrong to suggest that Lord Brudenell's father never expected to become 6th Earl of Cardigan, he was none the less not in the most direct line of descent. He succeeded to the title in 1811, when he was forty-two years old, upon the death of the childless 5th Earl, who had been his uncle. Until the death of the old Earl, Robert Brudenell, 6th Earl of Cardigan, had lived in the style of a country squire at the M anor House of Hambledon, Buckinghamshire. He had always been known there as plain 'M r Brudenell\
His was not a life crowded with incident. Between the slopes of the long wooded range of the Chiltern hills and the willowy banks of the Thames as it wound from Oxfordshire into Buckinghamshire, he lived in the kind of good-tempered genteel tranquillity which was celebrated by Jane Austen's portraits of family life among minor landed gentry. He was known as the friend of the village, and had bought some land close by in order to let plots at peppercorn rents to the industrious poor, so that they might grow their own food. For a few years he did his duty as a M ember of Parliament, voting generally on the Conservative side and stolidly opposing Catholic emancipation with the born suspicion of a Protestant English gentleman.1
