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The first Viscount's eldest son, also John, began accumulating debts before his father's death and his own succession to the estate and title in 1721. In 1718 the estate owed a total of £ 5,750 to a London barrister, Thomas Jones. In the same year the Vaughan lands in Montgomeryshire and Somerset were sold for £ 26,000.5 The Llidiardau papers in the National Library give details of a few of his later debts; in 1729 he owed £ 600 to Thomas Powell of Nanteos; he owed Martha Hunt of Bewdley, widow, the sum of £ 1 ,525 (due to a mortgage to her late husband); in 1736 one Richard Banks was pursuing a claim against him.6 In 1716 John Vaughan had married a Miss Anne Bennet,7 but she died childless in 1723. Widowhood did not apparently weigh heavily upon him, as we shall see. His brother Wilmot admitted, many years later, that John Vaughan was 'very negligent and careless and indolent in the management of his affairs and in exorting and supporting his right to the family estates'.8 Thanks to the legal case, Lisburne v. Vaughan,9 the second Viscount emerges from the shadows into a fairly lurid light at Christmastide, 1 724-5, amid a host of relatives, neighbours and servants, both his and those of others. He had a number of acquaintances in the Caersws area, with whom he probably remained familiar since his usual road to London was via Llanidloes and Shrewsbury. We must meet some of the characters involved. Apart from John Vaughan, the second Viscount a thirty- year-old widower, owner of a mortgaged estate, heavy drinker, almost certainly a gambler and very certainly involved with a number of mistresses the most important character in the Christmas drama, 21 year-old Dorothy Hill,10 was daughter of Captain Richard Hill, an Irish army officer on half-pay. Hill himself is interesting enough to deserve a brief diversion. He was the son of the Dean of Kilkenny. As a youth he joined Lord Lisburne's Regiment in the war of 1689-91, and distinguished himself at the siege of Londonderry in 1689; for this he was rewarded with a Dublin legal sinecure. He then fought in two campaigns in Flanders, and returned to Britain in 1692, where