Evening star., 1923-12-19
Unique Condition Attached
To Sale of the London Post

wife and daughter Viola happened
to be staying with the formers
mother in. Paris.
= x X
When the will was opened ii was
found that he had bequeathed the
bulk of his very large fortune to his
French wife and to his daughter
Viola, now engaged to marry Lord
Apsley. This was resented by his
sisters and certain ether relatives.
who had hoped for a share in his
property, and as they had never
taken kindly TO his second wife. to
whom he had been passionately de-
voted, their unfriendly remarks de-
veloped into a widely circulated story
to the effect that his death had been
due to poison. The result of this was
that after the colonel had been en-
tonbed for over a year in the family
vault at liver Churchyard, near Tx
bridge, the secretary of state for
the home department issued an order
for the exhumation Of the remains
and their submission to scientific ex-
animation with a view to the dis
covery of poison or of any other un-
natural causes of his death. The In
vestigation definitely established, to
the satisfaction of the state, that the
causes of his death had been per-
fectly natural and that the widely
circulated story to the effect that he
had succumbed to poison was merely
a piece of malevolent gossip directed
against his young French widow, the
affair merely serving to recall the
rather numerous sensational scandals
and tragedies with which the name
of Meeking had been associated.
X
With regard to Lord Apsley, he can
show that his family came to Eng
land in the Saxon era, that Is to say.
long before the Norman conquest,
from a place called Batters, in the
German duchy of Luneburg. They
settled near Battle. in Sussex, at a
place which they called Batters-
Hurst, which was eventually con-
tracted to Bathurst. A Sir Lawrence
Bathurst figures in history as having
been attainted by Edward w, who
conflscated to the crown the Bath
urst property In Sussex. DR.. Ralph
Bathurst was chaplain to Charles III,
Society. Sir Benjamin Bathurst was
treasurer of the household of good
Queen Anne, and his son was ele-
waited to the peerage as the Earl Of
Bathurst 1t was In6 tnlrQ earl who
was the minister OF the crown re-
sponsible for the consignment of the
first Napoleon to the island of St.
Helena, after the battle OF Waterloo,
in 1915, and, by a strange coincidence.
his grandson, the present Earl of
Bathurst, married to the Hon. Lillias
Borthwick, only daughter and heiress
of Lord Glcnesk, and owner of the
London Morning Post, was appointed
as colonel of the Gloucestershire
Militia Regiment, to the military
command of the great Boer prison
camp on the island Of st. Helena
during the South African war of q.
quarter of a century ago.
Curiously enough, Lady Bathurst
has always been a very great ad-
mirer OF Napoleon. and during her
two years sojourn with her husband
on tho island she made her head
quarters in a large bungalow erected
for tho accommodation Of her hus-
band and herself on the Longwood
estate, within sight of the house
where the first Napoleon died. Lady
Bathurst was very anxious to pur-
chase Longwood, but found that
Victoria, on the occasion of her first
stay in Paris in 1855, had made a
present of 1t to Napoleon III, while
visiting with him the tomb of the
first emperor, under the dome OF the
Palace OF the Invalides.