Shrewsbury by Stanley J. Weyman

I have commonly reckoned it among my lord's greatest misfortunes that in a crisis of his affairs which demanded all the assistance that friendship, the closest and most intimate could afford, he had neither wife nor child to whom he could turn, and from whom, without loss of dignity, he might receive comfort and support. He was a solitary man; separated from such near relations as he had, by differences as well religious as political, and from the world at large by the grandeur of a position which imposed burdens as onerous as the privileges it conferred were rare.

To a melancholy habit, which some attributed to the sad circumstances attendant on his father's death, and others to the change of faith, which he had been induced to make on reaching manhood, he added a natural shyness and reserve, qualities which, ordinarily veiled from observation by manners and an address the most charming and easy in the world, were none the less obstacles, where friendship was in question. Not that of friendship there was much among the political men of that day, the perils and uncertainties of the time inculcated a distrust, which was only overcome where blood or marriage cemented the tie -- as in the case of Lords Sunderland, Godolphin, and Marlborough, and again of the Russells and Cavendishes. But, be that as it may, my lord stood outside these bonds, and enjoyed and rued a splendid isolation. As if already selected by fortune for that strange combination of great posts with personal loneliness, which was to be more strikingly exhibited in the death-chamber of her late Majesty Queen Anne, he lived, whether in his grand house in St. James's Square, or at Eyford among the Gloucestershire Wolds, as much apart as any man in London or in England.