Finch, William

[Mead8.FTW]

In 1666, William Finch, Viscount Maidstone, eldest son and heir of Heneage Finch, second Earl of Winchilsea, was studying at Cambridge. When an outbreak of plague stuck the city, he escaped with his teacher and uncle, the Reverend John Talbot, to Norfolk. They stayed about 250 yards from Felbrigg hall, home of Talbot''s aunt, Elizabeth Mede Windham Chamberlain and Elizabeth Windham, her teenage daughter with her first husband.
When the son and heir of the Earl of Winchilsea moved in next door, mother and daughter saw this as an opprtunity too good to be missed - even though William Finch was only fourteen years old. The girl''s mother actively encouraged the courtship, and the pair were married almost immediately by John Talbot.
William later claimed that he had been tricked into the marriage -and that it had never been consumated. William''s father wrote in a letter, "My son swears that he was made drunk by their putting wine into his beer and that as soon as the gentlewoman''s mother went out of the chamber he took his clothes and ran out of the room . . . nor doth he know whether she be a man or a woman."
Apparently he did find out eventually if his wife was a man or a woman, since they had a daughter, Marianne, born in about 1670, and a son, Charles, born in 1672, about 4 months after his father''s death in the Anglo-Dutch War. This infant was the heir to the title, and eventually he became the third Earl of Winchilsea.
Charles died without issue and the title reverted to Heneage Finch, his uncle.