Robert Dormer, 1st Earl of Carnarvon

At age six, Dormer was left a ward to the King. His father had left him a rich peer at an early age. The King then sold Dormer's wardship to Philip Herbert, then Earl of Montgomery, for £4000. Dormer had been brought up as a Catholic and would become a high-living Catholic courtier, in danger, infuriating to hard-line Parliamentarians. He was educated at Eton College and Exeter College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1624, and was created MA in 1627 and DCL in 1642. He was, according to the seventeenth-century biographer David Lloyd, "extreamly wild in his youth", and addicted to gambling and hunting. He and his wife are recorded as regular performers in masques at court. He was an ardent Royalist and defying his father-in-law he fought for King Charles I in the English Civil War. ==Marriage, career, and later years==

On 27 February 1625, at the age of fifteen, he was married to his guardian's daughter, Lady Anna Sophie Herbert (d. 1643), which secured her future as Dormer was one of the wealthiest men in England at the time. On 2 June 1641, he was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire. In 1642, he joined the king at York and was one of the peers who signed the declaration of 13 June, agreeing to stand by the king, and the further declaration of 15 June, disavowing the king's alleged intention to make war against Parliament. Lady Carnarvon died on 3 June 1643 of smallpox . Anecdotes of her are to be found in the Strafford Papers (ii, 47) and the Sydney Papers (ii, 621) and a poem addressed to her is printed in Choice Drollery, 1656. Her portrait and that of her eldest son, Charles, were part of the exhibition of Anthony van Dyck's works at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1887. The different accounts of the manner of his death are collected in Mr Money's account of the battle (2nd ed. pg. 90). There is also an elegy on his death in Sir Francis Wortley's Characters and Elegies, 1646. Carnarvon was buried firstly at Jesus College Chapel at the University of Oxford, but his body was removed in 1650 to a family burial place in Wing, Buckinghamshire. Dormer was succeeded by his eldest son, Charles, who died in 1709 and with him the earldom of Carnarvon in the family of Dormer became extinct. ==References==