GEORGE, LORD
LORD GORING.

SIR George Goring, of Hurst Pierrepont, in Sussex, representative of a junior line of the respectable family of Goring which still maintains its importance in that county, was bred in the court, under the care of his father, one of Elizabeth's gentlemen pensioners, and was placed in the household of Henry Prince of Wales, by James the First, to whom, recommended equally by his sagacity and by a peculiar jocularity of humour, he became a familiar companion, and at length a sort of minor favourite. Buckingham, whose friendship he had gained by his bravery and politeness, prevailed on Charles the First to raise him to the peerage in 1629 he was created Lord Goring of Hurst Pierrepont, and in 1645 was advanced to the title of Earl of Norwich, which had then lately become extinct by the death, without male issue, of his maternal uncle, Edward Denny, the first and last of his name by whom it had been borne. To this nobleman, by his wife Mary, daughter of Edward Nevile, Lord Bergavenny, the subject of the present memoir was heir apparent; and I have given this particular and somewhat lengthened account of the father in order to mark effectually that distinction of him from the son, a want of attention to which has betrayed almost all writers who have mentioned either, into error and confusion. Even Lord Clarendon is by no means free from this blame, and Granger, in the course of a few lines, more than once ascribes the actions of the one to the other. These mistakes were perhaps easy. Both bore the same names and title; flourished at the same time,

and in similar characters: both were courtiers, wits, warriors, and loyalists. It was in morals only that they differed, and the disadvantage lay on the side of the son.

Of the date of his birth, and of the place and mode of his education, no intelligence remains. It is indeed probable enough that his ardent and eccentric spirit broke through all those wholesome trammels by which youth are usually restrained. He married, when very young, Lettice, daughter of Richard Boyle, Earl of Corke; increased certain embarrassments under which he had before laboured; and left her, to fly from his creditors, within a year, as it should seem, after their nuptials. Lord Wentworth, afterwards the great Earl of Strafford, in a letter of the twentieth of May, 1633, to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, says "young Mr. Goring is gone to travel, having run himself out of eight thousand pounds, which he purposes to redeem by his frugality abroad, unless my Lord of Corke can be induced to put to his helping hand, which I have undertaken to solicit for him the best can, and shall do it with all the power and care my credit and wit shall in any wise suggest unto me."

Soon after his arrival on the Continent, he determined to adopt a military life, not as a temporary volunteer, but in the regular profession of a soldier. Wentworth, in another letter to Carlisle, dated on the seventh of October, in the same year, writes"Mr. Goring's business is settled reasonably well I hope, and my opinion is strong I shall be able to persuade the Earl of Cork to quit two thousand pounds my Lord Goring owes him, for so good a purpose as the procuring for his son-in-law my Lord Vere's regiment in the Low Countries; therefore my advice is, that it be put on as much and as speedily as may be." This matter was soon after successfully negotiated, for Mr. Garrard, the lively and incessant correspondent of Lord Wentworth, in a letter to that nobleman, of the sixth of the following December, says "young Mr. Goring hath compounded with my Lord Vere for his colonel's place in the Low Countries. Twenty-two companies he hath under his command, and his troop of horse."