Welsh Journals

in the community. Accordingly, he had a deep and practical interest in agriculture and estate management, was in the Commission of the Peace for the town and county of Haverfordwest, and for some time a member of the Pembrokeshire County Council. Stimulating, always sincere and frank, his mere presence made one feel more alive. During the second World War he served in the Welsh Guards, and saw active service in North Africa and Italy. I met him in Hunts Gap before Beja when his battalion came to re-inforce the brigade in which I was serving, at a very critical moment, and later, on the banks of the Medjerda. Our paths crossed again in Italy when my regiment supported the Welsh Guards in the fighting for Cerasola. I never saw him again. Major the Baron de Rutzen fell in action near Battaglia in the Gothic Line on 11 October 1944. By his wife Sheila Victoria Katrin, daughter of Sir Henry Philipps, Baronet, of Picton Castle, whom he married on 28 July 1932, he had an only child, Victoria Anne Elizabeth Gwynne de Rutzen. She married on 3 May 1957 to Francis Dashwood eldest son of Sir John Lindsay Dashwood, Baronet. The widowed Baroness de Rutzen married on 8 October 1947 Lieut.-Col. the Hon. Randal Plunket who afterwards succeeded as the 19th Lord Dunsany. The pageant of the De Rutzens has ended. They moulder in the vault of the church which had been built mainly at their costs, and the last of the barons lies among Italian hills far from his Pembrokeshire home, but in the land where his ancestor first met the heiress of Slebech. Little did I dream, when I looked at the silhouette in the attic, to what paths my enquiries were to lead me-the sugar plantations of Jamaica, the Scottish highlands, a prison in Philadelphia, Gretna Green, the Peninsula and Waterloo, the plains of Courland, Rome, and Slebech above the waters of Cleddy-they read more like incidents from a novel by Buchan than materials for a factual chronicle devoted to the performances of real men and women. Yet, it is one of the pleasures that comes the historian's way, to find the silver chain that binds what seems no more than a jumble of successive and isolated events into a coherent and significant whole. Carmarthen 1 See Francis Jones, 'Some Slebech Notes' The National Library of Wales Journal, Vol. VII, No. 3, Summer 1952. 2 See an able review of this collection by Dr. B. G. Charles, The National Library of Wales Journal, Vol. V, No. 3, Summer 1948. 3 The German family of Von Rutzen bore or, a boar's head couped sable an annulet gules in its ear. (R. Holme, Academy of Blazon. 1688 II, ix 181: Rietstap PI CCXIV). The FRANCIS JONES Barons de Rutzen of Slebech bore or a double- headed eagle displayed sable, on an inescutcheon argent a boar's head and neck couped sable, an annulet or in the sinister ear: supporters, dexter, a gryphon, sinister, a lion crowned; over the shield a baron's coronet. 4 The love-sick charioteer was Joseph, 4th Earl of Milltown, who in 1828 married Barbara daughter of Lord Castlecoote. Viscount Anson (later Earl of Lichfield) had married Louisa Catherine Phillips in 1819.