Stratford fell into the hands of another family ne’er-do-well, Robert’s half-brother Henry Lee IV, who after the tragic death of his young daughter in a fall down Stratford’s stone front stairs and his wife’s ensuing mental collapse, proceeded to impregnate his wife’s nineteen-year-old sister, and then, as her guardian, embezzle her trust account. To escape scandal and prosecution he fled to France, “persecuted unrelentingly by my enemies,” he moaned, “and still more unrelentingly neglected by my friends.”
