George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life | Page 3

Street.
Selwyn's life, though passed in a momentous age, was uneventful, but
the course of it must be traced.
George Augustus Selwyn, second son of Colonel John Selwyn, of
Matson, in Gloucestershire, and of Mary, daughter of General
Farrington, of Kent, was born on the 11th of August, 1719. His father,
aide-de-camp to Marlborough and a friend of Sir Robert Walpole, was
a man of character and ability, well known in the courts of the first and
second Georges. Selwyn, however, probably inherited his wit and his
enjoyment of society from his mother, who was Woman of the
Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte. Horace Walpole writes of her as "Mrs.
Selwyn, mother of the famous George, and herself of much vivacity,
and pretty."

Selwyn's elder brother died in 1751, and grief at his loss seems to have
hastened the death of his father, which occurred in the same year.
His sister Albinia married Thomas Townshend, second son of Charles
Viscount Townshend. By this marriage the families of Selwyn and
Walpole were connected.
The home of the family was at Matson, a village two and a half miles
south-east of Gloucester, on the spurs of the Cotswold hills, looking
over the Severn valley--once called Mattesdone. There is a good deal of
obscurity as to the ownership of the manor in mediaeval times, but it
appears to have been in the possession of what may popularly speaking
be called the family of Mattesdone. The landowner described himself
by the place; "Ego Philippus de Mattesdone" are the words of an
ancient document preserved among the records of the Monastery of St.
Peter at Gloucester.*
* "Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestria," edited
by W. Hart, vol. i. p. 100.
To come to more recent times, the manor house was built in 1594 by
Sir Ambrose Willoughby. From him the estate was purchased in 1597
by Jasper Selwyn, Counsellor at Law, of Stonehouse, who was the
fourth in descent from John Selwyn, one of a Sussex family.
In 1751 the direct entail was broken by Colonel Selwyn, and the
property was re-entailed on the descendants of his daughter, Mrs.
Townshend, though it was left by will to George Selwyn for his life.
On his death it devolved on Thomas, Lord Sydney, and has since
remained in the possession of the Townshend family.** Walpole has
given a description of the place in the days when he used to visit it.
** Bigland, "History of Gloucestershire," vol. ii. p. 200.
"I stayed two days at George Selwyn's house, called Matson, which lies
on Robin Hood's Hill; it is lofty enough for an Alp, yet it is a mountain
of turf to the very top, has wood scattered all over it, springs that long
to be cascades in twenty places of it, and from the summit of it beats

even Sir George Lyttleton's views, by having the city of Gloucester at
its foot, and the Severn widening to the horizon. His house is small, but
neat. King Charles lay here at the siege, and the Duke of York, with
typical fury, hacked and hewed the window-shutters of his chamber, as
a memorandum of his being there. Here is a good picture of Dudley,
Earl of Leicester, in his later age, . . . and here is the very flower pot
and counterfeit association for which Bishop Sprat is taken up, and the
Duke of Marlborough sent to the Tower. The reservoirs on the hill
supply the city. The late Mr. Selwyn governed the borough by them,
and I believe by some wine too. . . .
"A little way from the town are the ruins of Lantony Priory; there
remains a pretty old gateway, which G. Selwyn has begged to erect on
the top of his mountain, and it will have a charming effect."*
* "The Letters of Horace Walpole," vol. ii. p. 354.
Selwyn's schooldays were passed at Eton with Gray and Walpole. In
1739 he became an undergraduate of Hertford College, Oxford, or Hart
Hall as it was called. It was to Hertford also that later Charles Fox went,
"a college which has in our own day been munificently re-endowed as a
training school of principles and ideas very different from those
ordinarily associated with the name of its greatest son." Hertford was in
the middle of the eighteenth century a college where the so-called
students neither toiled at books nor at physical exercise. They passed a
short and merry time at the University, fashioned as nearly as might be
on the mode of life of a man about town. In 1740 he was appointed to
the vague-sounding office of Clerk of the Irons and Surveyor of the
Meltings in the Mint, a sinecure which, after the manner of the time,
required no personal attention from the