On this side it
is all an agreeable corn country as above, adorned with several
seats of gentlemen; but the chief is the noble house, seat, or
mansion of Wimple or Wimple Hall, formerly built at a vast expense
by the late Earl of Radnor, adorned with all the natural beauties
of situation, and to which was added all the most exquisite
contrivances which the best heads could invent to make it
artificially as well as naturally pleasant.
However, the fate of the Radnor family so directing, it was bought
with the whole estate about it by the late Duke of Newcastle, in a
partition of whose immense estate it fell to the Right Honourable
the Lord Harley, son and heir-apparent of the present Earl of
Oxford and Mortimer, in right of the Lady Harriet Cavendish, only
daughter of the said Duke of Newcastle, who is married to his
lordship, and brought him this estate and many other, sufficient to
denominate her the richest heiress in Great Britain.
Here his lordship resides, and has already so recommended himself
to this county as to be by a great majority chosen Knight of the
Shire for the county of Cambridge.
From Cambridge, my design obliging me, and the direct road in part
concurring, I came back through the west part of the county of
Essex, and at Saffron Walden I saw the ruins of the once largest
and most magnificent pile in all this part of England--viz., Audley
End--built by, and decaying with, the noble Dukes and Earls of
Suffolk.
