report of the lawsuit was published in 1732 by the pseudonymous Crawfurd. In 1740 Weld married secondly Dame Mary Theresa Vaughan of Courtfield in Monmouthshire, with whom he had a daughter and four sons. The eldest of these was Edward Weld, future husband of Maria Fitzherbert; the youngest was Thomas Weld, who with his wife Mary Stanley had fifteen children, a philanthropist and friend of George III, whom he entertained at Lulworth. Their eldest grandson was Cardinal Thomas Weld. Treason trial In 1745 Weld was accused of being associated with the Jacobite rising of 1745, then raging in Scotland and the northern counties of England, due to a letter allegedly found on the road to Poole. He was taken into custody and taken before the magistrates, but they deemed the letter to be a hoax. While the case against him was dismissed, he was ordered to surrender his coach horses, on account of their strength and size, as potentially useful equipment to the rebels. To clear his name, Weld visited the Duke of Newcastle, older brother and minister of the then Prime Minister, Henry Pelham. Upon his death at the age of 56, Weld, by then widowed a second time, received many tributes including eulogies in verse. Legacy As Catholic members of the English gentry in the Age of Enlightenment, Edward and his second wife, Mary, chose to have their three surviving sons educated by English Jesuits on the continent. Accordingly, Edward, John and Thomas were despatched to the College of St Omer, later at Bruges in the Spanish Netherlands, where their relatives, the Simeon Welds had settled, and which aside from providing a good education, prepared them for the Grand Tour with social openings in the power centres of Paris and Rome. These connections would later feature prominently in the life of their son Thomas and his descendants' lives, by enabling the repatriation, after over two hundred years, of the English Jesuits to Stonyhurst College donated to them by Thomas, and the Welds' continuous connections with French religious and surviving members of the French royal family. Thomas' subtle influence may have eased the passage of the Catholic Relief Act 1791, (Thomas was a supporter of bishop John Milner), eventually leading to Catholic emancipation. While their sons were being schooled abroad, first Mary died in 1754 followed by the middle son, John in 1759 and finally by Edward himself late