"[36] The Comptons ever basked in the smiles of
royalty. Henry Compton, created baron, was the favourite of Queen
Elizabeth, and his son William succeeded in marrying the daughter of
Sir John Spencer, richest of City merchants. All the world knows of
his ingenious craft in carrying off the lady in a baker's basket, of
his wife's disinheritance by the irate father, and of the subsequent
reconciliation through the intervention of Queen Elizabeth at the
baptism of the son of this marriage. The Comptons fought bravely for
the King in the Civil War. Their house was captured by the enemy, and
besieged by James Compton, Earl of Northampton, and the story of the
fighting about the house abounds in interest, but cannot be related
here. The building was much battered by the siege and by Cromwell's
soldiers, who plundered the house, killed the deer in the park,
defaced the monuments in the church, and wrought much mischief. Since
the eighteenth-century disaster to the family it has been restored,
and remains to this day one of the most charming homes in England.
[35] The present Marquis of Northampton in his book contends that
the house was mainly built in the reign of Henry VII by Edmund
Compton, Sir William's father, and that Sir William only enlarged
and added to the house.
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